Guild Wars 2

Hello GW2 Community! I’m a new player who is feeling his way around different professions atm to see what suits me best.

I like a lot of things about Mesmer, and have been leaning more on it than other professions at this time of writing, but I have unlocked some skills that make me worry about the role I will play as a Mesmer. Mesmers seem to have access to a lot of stealth skills and teleports, including one that can carry other players through a warp.

My question is: Is it common for Mesmers to be called upon to utilize these abilities in dungeons rather than fight?

I suppose it’s a bit of a dumbfounded question, as someone whose played MMO’s for years, I understand players wanting to get things done quickly. I’m just not sure if I am personally comfortable with the responsibility of doing something that looks so easy to mess up.

Mesmer isn’t my main class I do play one now and then. While not one of the highly “requested” classes, they are solid and a decent choice.

Mesmers are used alot for their utility. Portal is helpful for helping allies past tricking sections. Or though long skips if you do join a speed run guild.

Mostly reflects/projectile blocks are the mesmers bread and butter. Feed back and focus.

They can provide Party wide evasion through distortion to help their party avoid heavy hitting attacks.

Stealth can be useful for skips.

I will let someone with more skill with mesmer go into more detail, but if you enjoy the class keep with it.

Having fun is the most important thing.

Good day,

When I play Mesmer during dungeons I would mostly be doing the:

- Reflects;
- Condition cleanses;
- providing stability;
- (aditional) stealthing, if needed;
- providing quickness during boss-fights;

Somethings I use portal for the somewhat diffucult skips.

This is just my playstyle as a mesmer, hope it helps.

I only play my mesmer in fractals. One thing to note, if you want fast runs then you got to really utilise the full skill set with it.

It is rare for me to go through any single fractal without multiple changes to my utilities as we move. But one the main thing you bring on alot of them is the reflects, as it one of the things you can do best.

I admit that it was my first, and remains my fave class that is underestimated by a lot of people. I seriously enjoy running it through the Cliffside fractal. I use a lot of utilities but in the end the thing that catches most peoples attention is the use of mimic/blink/portal to fly through the run portions (and also the arm seals).

Normally when divine is down on 3% I am already on route to the gate leaving phantisms behind for damage. Once it open I am through with a portal down before they even retrieved hammer. mimic blink up the top and quickly drop the portal for them to be straight up.

Given I run pugs only, most the time they not very quick on first seal as they kill all the enemies instead of leaving enough to do it without needing a respawn… this means all cooldowns are back.. so next run is another portal/mimic/blink routine. .. run rest way up, portal between the arm seals using mimic for more uptime. Then once seals are broke portal/blink through the floor straight into boss room withotu needing to run at all

There is no other class that can have that sort of fun, and the time saved doing these sorts of things are massive. Just most people do not learn of the little tricks a mesmer can do to speed up runs and help them out. The amount of times people have complained about Cliffside being too long at start, then when I portal them past half the stuff they turn around and say “Ok that was actually fast” – is astounding. And I love it when get grawl fractal where when everyone whines, im cheering because i love fighting that boss due to the fact I get so many reflects available it actually easy and fast.

Thanks all for the responses! I’m going to continue on with Mesmer some more and utilize that Mesmer link Lux posted. I think I’m gonna be doing a little bouncing between Mesmer and Elementalist for the time being, but will most certainly take them both up.

Mesmer like guard is a carry profession. You do a lot of stuff to make the lives of your team easier. You have a lot of tools to make it so they really don’t have to do anything but DPS a boss, yes that means even running you can do stuff so they don’t have to.

It’s been my profession of choice lately for Arah for that reason, team can’t make a skip, no worries, “go here for a portal.”

To play at the highest level of course every profession is tough. That said, if you’re looking for easy, Warrior is probably the best pick, I find necro easier but it has a stigma due to it’s lack of potential even if at a novice level of play I think it’d likely actually be on par if not a little higher due to how easy it is to run their stuff decently.

But, for Mesmer, It’s not too bad, it’s a matter of learning the tricks of the trade.

Want Reflect, well here’s my rotation for say Alphard in Arah (probably not there yet if you’re new but ehh best example), As she turns the corner to the stack spot I toss a temporal curtain down, then I’ll cast a traited warden, cast my signet of ether, do one full auto chain and warden again, this will have full reflect up time as it’s about the time a warden will keep his reflect going. Then I’ll do another full auto chain and cast Mimic, when the 2nd warden stops I hit feedback, still at 100% reflect up time, when feedback drops the first warden has already started spinning again, then the 2nd will follow, and then here’s the little bit where it’s not always spot on, I can either feedback again for full up time or cast a warden to start with a small gap it seems between the 3 of them. But either way that rotation can lead to 100% up time on reflect, something that’s HUGE defensively, not terrible damage.

Now, the kicker is that wardens do die, and that screws things up and you have to improvise, but you’ll learn with time.

For skips, you have Torch4, Veil, Blink, Decoy, and Mass Invis as well as Mimic to double cast the utility options. This makes stuff easy.

When using Torch4/blink/decoy, I generally cast the wait half a second and mass invis to keep the stealth going. If I’m trying to stealth my team I’ll do something like Mimic → Veil → Mass Invis → Veil a couple seconds later, and we’re usually through the trouble spots or at least far enough we’ll be fine… if not I portal them later

Decoy vs Veil is basically a self vs team option for me. I always opt for blink as the third utility as it lets me get through safely, again, if my team can’t hang, I can portal after I’m safe. Torch4 can be dangerous as there’s a damage component as it drops, something you need to be aware of, don’t use it when you’re running into a crowd, use it when you’re running out of them.

Lots of little things to learn to be a good mesmer, even more to be a great one (sandy is my hero), but don’t let that deter you if you’re interested in that style of play. Personally I’ve always loved the support style of play so Guard was my first char, Mesmer my second, Thief my third, all 3 play huge parts in a group to make things go smoothly and easily. Of course now I feel in love with Engi and my fingers are getting a workout

Hope that helps.

To end, Ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, there are TONS of pro mesmer’s in these forums, and most if not all of them are great people, I learned most of what I know from people here, if you ask, people will give advice. Nothing gives us in this community more pleasure than helping someone who’s actually interested in playing better, who knows maybe in the near future you’re the mesmer portaling us through content and making us swoon

Mesmer is in a spot where they have the tools and strengths to replace assassin or engineer in the skipping role. Especially portal is probably the strongest skill in game.

Mesmers problem is that you and your party need to put more effort in (compared to kitten or engi) to play those strengths, which pretty much nobody in this game wants to do outside of record runs.

If you dont put that effort in or try to emulate guard or any other role you end up being a straight downgrade compared to other classes. Not completely useless, but bad enough to argue that you’re doing your group a disservice by not rolling a better class

as main dungeon mesmer i’d say, at the moment what you want to play, all classes are ok, as long you dont want to “do things fast” and(please!) dont joint parties who want, it’s fine.
if you wanna push the limits a bit, you realy get yourself in a position where you place as many portals as possible, pre-running a lot of stuff and supporting qour team up to a point they barely survive by giving you the max of possible free utility skills for speeding up running paths.
Therefor if you want to do this kind of play, you need a guild. Running with pugs, you always need to take max support skills, due to you just dont know them and (sad but true) a lot of them “can’t play”. Also they wont use your portals anyway^^. This may get rly frustriting.
For fights, your dps is just too low apart from reflects, so noone rly notices if you leave fight for preparing some of the cool stuff ;-p

To answer your question about stealth:
Yes, it is possible and sometimes usefull to go for that skills, but your stealth need more timing and sticky movement than thief’s stealth, which can be stacked to infinity with some blast stops. (e.g. your vail stealth dont stack, so if someone run ahead he gets it 1 sec to early and is revealed for the next part…) Anyway, all current stealth “skips” are doable with mesmer.

If you like to take more fights, but support your team, guard would be the class you should take a closer look at, if you want to do some awsome, gready, risky stuff, go for mesmer ;-)