Guild Wars 2

mesmers are super fun for solo roaming. They can troll the heck out of other players. Can be a nuisance to kill, and can escape a fight if things are going bad.

eles offer quite a bit of zerg support (waterfields, spam them waterfields). But are extremely squishy for solo roaming.

Mesmers offer zerg support too, just in a different way, sometimes with invisibility/portals etc.

I’d pick mesmer if you’re wanting to do both roaming/zerging.

Ele is the best choice if you want to dps and roam

so what now comes is mine experience of 2500 hours of ele and 700 of mesmer..

mesmer:
well as mesmer in a zerg you are the veil bot, if you dont have veil dont you dare run in a zerg ! …no but serious if you want to support your zerg and be usefull you have veil and nullfield with you , and portal if the commander want it, it is fun tu play but let me tell you one thing , you will not get as many bags as an ele , because you obviously dont have so much aoe as an ele, but its still fun to play if you dont care about that

for roaming i use classic shatter build , its very fun and i seldom lose a 1vs1 BUT becase as a mesmer you dont have much mobility if you get caught in a 1vs2 or 1vs3 its very hard to get away….except you want to play the troll cond PU build with being most of the time in stealth , with that you can of course also easily get away from a 1vs3…using one stealth skil after another can save you 90% of the time…but i hate condition builds so i rather die fighting then using PU build…

ele:
ele is my main since beta , 2500 hours of total 4200hours gameplay time i have on him , for zerg of course you play with staff , you are the waterfield bit**, if commander calls for water field , then god kitten give it to him ! and of course with your cc you can sometimes break whole (public)zergs into two, so your zerg can crush the ppl that got stunned by static and so on, depending what gear you use you can deal ALOT of dmg , and positioning yourself is the most important thing for an ele that keeps you alive, always know where your zerg ist , where the enemy zerg ist and where you have to stand and as mentioned before , you get alot of baggies after a zerg fight cause almost all your attacks are aoe so you tag allot of ppl that give you baggies

ele for roaming is upper midel class i wound say , you either run s/d or d/d imo, your panic button is FGS, fgs+armor of earth can get you out of almost every fight but of course fgs has huge CD so after you use it once it will be hard to get away with just RTL+LF+BS(if d/d) since often you will have one or more on CD from the fight when suddenly someone jumps on you and you want to get away
i also like it to roam with ele but tbh i win much more 1vs1 with mesmer, BUT i also die more often with mesmer because i cant get away from a 1vs3 fight

so decide for yourself whats more important, if you most of the time run in zerg i wound get the ele which is great in zerg fights and above avarage in roaming, if roaming is more important and you dont care what build you use , take mesmer PU and troll whole groups of ppl and maybe even kill some noobs while still getting away..

sorry for wall of text lol..

ps: if you take pve into account …every group wants an ele with fgs and icebow

As far as PvE is concerned, ele is the best.

In WvW I’d be more inclined to say mesmer if you aren’t zerging. If you are zerging, eles are always demanded primarily for water fields and stacking swiftness in static fields as well.

Not sure about ele, but I’ve play WvW a lot on my Mes. Mes isn’t in a great place in WvW. A decent solo roaming build is very different from your zerg build, which makes it an awkward mix, as you can’t easily flip between them at will. Also the tagging ability of Mesmers in zergs (for loot) is pretty poor due to limited AoE options (no, staff really isn’t a great zerg weapon). In this respect ele is definitely better.

Vague Memory.2817:

Not sure about ele, but I’ve play WvW a lot on my Mes. Mes isn’t in a great place in WvW. A decent solo roaming build is very different from your zerg build, which makes it an awkward mix, as you can’t easily flip between them at will. Also the tagging ability of Mesmers in zergs (for loot) is pretty poor due to limited AoE options (no, staff really isn’t a great zerg weapon). In this respect ele is definitely better.

well, tbh, if you want loot bags, its guard all the way….