Guild Wars 2 Mesmer Interview
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What are some of the strengths and weaknesses in the original mesmer that helped you build the Guild Wars 2 Mesmer?
The fact that the original Guild Wars mesmer relied heavily on several concepts that we were removing from Guild Wars 2 made it difficult to develop. Things like energy denial and hexing weren't going to make it into the game, so we needed to find ways of replicating the style of play Mesmer players were used to in the original game. Fortunately for us, the answer to most of the missing elements came from things that were supposed to be part of the Guild Wars Mesmer but never quite had the emphasis that we wanted. Illusion magic was one of the Guild Wars Mesmers' attribute lines, but we were never able to fully realize the Mesmer as an illusionist in the first game.
Our skills are so visual in Guild Wars 2 that we knew we had a chance to play around with some illusion mechanics, and that's where the concept of illusions filling some of the void left by the removal of hexes came into being. For example, we use the Phantasm mechanic to simulate a skill like Backfire by having the Phantasm constantly applying the Confused condition. Because of this, the player has a choice to deal with the Phantasm or the Mesmer directly and can't just rely on simple condition removal to deal with the threat. The Mesmer at its core is all about setting up these kinds of situations.
Another aspect of the Mesmer that we were never able to fully develop was the duelist aspect. If you remember, the classic Guild Wars Mesmer was often pictured with a sword, but there were very few skills that actually supported this style of play. In Guild Wars 2, we base half of the player's skill bar on which weapons he's wielding, so we had a fantastic opportunity to allow the Mesmer to support a more melee-centric style of play. Of course, the Mesmer needs to rely even more on trickery when he is right in the thick of things, so the main-hand sword features more illusion creation than the other main-hand weapons with two of the three skills creating Clones.
