Guild Wars 2

My main is having a HORRIBLE time i mean am having zero fun in this expansion, Am not even talking about events, Story missions, trying to get around the map am getting destroyed.
I had been using great-swords cause I like it, but I felt my DPS has been low, so I decided to try s/s and well..I cant tell if am doing much more dps but am getting owned just as fast.

I have no idea how to do this, I mean the difficulty level is way too high for story missions.

so any suggestions? tips? what am I missing? should not be this hard…

Am full exotic (except accessories) stacking mostly power/toughness or vitality

It doesn’t matter what character you are using when you first begin HoT, you will get wrecked. It is designed to be extremely hard until you gain mastery. I would go to Dulfy and look up their guide to gaining insights so that you can start to enjoy the game. Mesmers are a bit on the squishy side, you might try leveling up a necromancer. They are made of more sturdy stuff

well I’ll press through it, It just felt way too hard. Like I was doing something wrong kind of hard…but I am starting to read that a lot of people found it hard..
Hope I didn’t waste resources on these swords..

Hi, fellow mesmer here. The jungle can be a bit unforgiving for first timers, especially if you got to Verdant Brink at night. Don’t be discouraged, though. From personal experience, my mesmer actually does better than some of my other classes as we have so many survival tools.

The thing that you need to get used to is that you can’t really run through mobs like in Core Tyria. In a pinch, you can do it with a combination of blink, decoy and sword 4, but you need to be careful about it.

For actual battles, try to isolate enemies and start each battle with GS 4 and/or Sword 5. This lets your phantasms absorb damage that’s going towards you. The HoT enemies mostly have hard hitting attacks, but somewhat squishy. Don’t try to tank the damage. Instead try to dodge/block their big attacks while your phantasms are killing them.

Use Blurred Frenzy (Sword 2) and Riposte (Sword 4) to block highly damaging attacks. These two, combined with dodge rolls, signet of midnight (with Blurred Inscriptions trait), and F4 means you have a lot of blocks to avoid damage.

Exotics are fine at HoT. Soldier’s (Pow/Vit/Tou) are good for survivability, but if you think you need mroe damage, you can start using some Berserker (Pow/Prec/Fero) stat equips and mix it up. I personally use a mix of Berserker and Knight (Tough/Pow/Prec) equips and survive just fine.

thanks for the tips! I’ll keep at it !

I actually use a full condition build when doing HoT content. Full Rabid exotics with staff/scepter/shield(or pistol if not chrono) gives me decent condition damage and high toughness. Just kite while using staff auto and let illusions/shatters/condis kill stuff for you.

Since the staff 1 attack bounces and staff 5 is an AOE it also provides decent damage when you get rushed by a few mobs at once. Staff 2 gives you an extra blink so you can teleport out of AOEs.

You also need to learn the HoT mob attacks – mordem snipers hurt and need to die asap, stoneheads have a high damage charged knockdown, frog bladedancers do nasty burst damage with their ranged and melee attacks so don’t engage too many, kill pocket raptors at range if possible or if they get too close a 3 illusion F1 should be enough to kill them before they kill you. You can probably expect to die a few more times just learning the different mob attack patterns.

Now a full zerk ele…first time I went into HoT, wheeeew, not fun.

For Mesmer the biggest advantage is to use your stuns. When I powered through HoT on my mesmer I ran a hyrbid Stun/Mantra healing build.

Sword/Sword
Greatsword

Trait up so when you stun you gain Boons and so that your stuns do damage. Then take the healing line so you can heal from your Mantra’s and cleanse Condi.

On your SW/SW I suggest using Bloodlust and the +15% stun duration, since that will be the main thing you use for sword 4 (very low cool down, and has a inline stun)

You can use staff instead of GS but the stun has a much longer CD and requires mobs to stand in the AOE circle.

And then I suggest taking 560~ healing so that when you pop mantras (power break recharge) you heal for 2,000 health or so, and so that when you get regen from the Boon share on stun you regen more per tick.

I ran the rest of my stats as Berserker so I could actually kill things in a timely manner, but you could run PVT if you needed for extra padding.