Feedback:User/Mcscamper/Rethinking Phantasms
Rethinking Phantasms | |
|---|---|
| User | Mcscamper |
| Categories | Mechanics |
What should a Phantasm be?[edit]
What are Phantasms in Guild Wars 2? At their core, your typical Phantasm is simply a clone with more specialized and powered-up abilities as opposed to a regular auto-attack. To that effect, they are useful as fuel for the current Shatter mechanic (which is still very imperfect). Yet most people who play Mesmer will often complain that they are accidentally shattering their Phantasms because it's very difficult to plan a Shatter as battles drag on. A player sees an opportunity and reacts accordingly with a particular F-key, and as a result, his or her pink allies are caught up in the churning war-tide.
So right now Phantasms are technically treated as if they were clones, but the specialized names, abilities and the general feeling that players have towards them (especially the regret when shattering them prematurely) dictate that they be something more. The primary solution to doing this would be to make it so that a Mesmer could not Shatter his or her Phantasms. However, nobody wants to see a Mesmer summon out four Phantasms that don't disappear until either the battle ends or something kills them, so we can't just leave it at "Mesmers can't Shatter Phantasms."
My proposal for a solution would be to make the Phantasm a much more active weapon as opposed to its current role that resembles how Spirits affect a battlefield in Guild Wars 1. To do this, instead of summoning out a Phantasm into battle, the Phantasm could be incorporated into the aspect of one of the player's clones, chosen at random, and triggered by the activation of a Phantasm skill. The end effect would be that no new Phantasms are summoned out, but rather one of the player's clones transforms into a Phantasm just long enough to fire off a skill and then revert back to a clone. This change would serve a multi-fold purpose: Phantasms would no longer things that you could accidentally destroy as an effect of Shatter, Phantasm effects become something more on-command and within player control as opposed to something that triggers itself once every few seconds without thought, Phantasms still remain powerful skills that can be balanced through recharge times, and clones actually become useful (now catalysts for Phantasm skills) beyond simply being pets that fuel the Shatter mechanic.
An example: What was once Phantasmal Swordsman (off-hand sword skill #2) could become--
Phantasmal Leap
- Damage: 672
- Combo Finisher: Leap
- Range: 1,200
Phantasmal Leap
- 5
One of your active illusions assumes Phantasmal Form and leaps at your foe.
- Damage: 672
- Combo Finisher: Leap
- Range: 1,200
Notes[edit]
- Its worth noting that each attack of the phantasm counts as a "leap finisher" and after attacking the phantasm leaps back. This allows it to trigger multiple finishers by leaping in and out as well as avoid some close damage versus melee opponents.
Concluding Thoughts[edit]
The goal of this idea is to preserve what Phantasms bring to each battle (their specific skills and damage output) while simply giving more control to the player over how Phantasms take part in a battle. To that effect, none of the core effects of any current Phantasm skill would be changed outright, only in that those effects would be delivered by an active clone instead of a newly generated Phantasm. I guess it's also worth nothing that I have no idea how the designers could implement this mechanic, but it's an idea; one of I'm sure many possible, hypothetical solutions to a complicated game-play problem regarding the Guild Wars 2 Mesmer.
