Guild Wars 2

I recently started leveling a mesmer in PvE and I’m curious how mesmers can get gold in dynamic events such as against champion mobs because I can never seem to get anything besides bronze/silver.

Do damage. Sometimes the game seems a bit finicky about what medal it gives you (I’ve soloed a boss for the first quarter of it’s health and still gotten silver) but normally being around and dealing damage for a good chunk of the fight will get you gold.

Your weapon choice can often make a big difference in this. If the DE involves a lot of mobs, you will want more aoe abilities, so use staff (or sword and pistol or focus if you feel comfortable in melee). You won’t do as much damage, but you will hit more mobs and give more support to any other players at the DE. It is also a good idea to swap targets often, to be sure you are hitting as many enemies as possible.

If there is one main boss, greatsword is probably your best option to deal damage, and remember you deal more damage farther away with GS.

Mesmers tend to feel weak in the leveling process until probably about level 30/40ish so if you are still little, stick with it and it will get better!

Tarral.5862:

Your weapon choice can often make a big difference in this. If the DE involves a lot of mobs, you will want more aoe abilities, so use staff (or sword and pistol or focus if you feel comfortable in melee). You won’t do as much damage, but you will hit more mobs and give more support to any other players at the DE. It is also a good idea to swap targets often, to be sure you are hitting as many enemies as possible.

If there is one main boss, greatsword is probably your best option to deal damage, and remember you deal more damage farther away with GS.

Mesmers tend to feel weak in the leveling process until probably about level 30/40ish so if you are still little, stick with it and it will get better!

GS can also hit multiple things it passes through so you’ll want to aim in such a way that you can hit multiple things. This may require a lot of movement. Phantasmal Berserker(#4) can also help with tagging blobs of things.

I use a condition damage mesmer, which is great for general PvE and good enough for dungeons (provided there’s no other heavy bleeds character in group), but can be a little lacking large dynamic events, but I still usually manage to get gold most of the times.

My setup is usually scepter/pistol, gear with lots of crit chance and cond. damage, clones apply bleeding when they crit, illusions with fury that provides 20% extra damage (phantasmal duelist from pistol alone usually applies 6 or 7 stacks of bleeding every time it attacks), traits to make it so that when an illusion dies, it cripples and applies random conditions to nearby enemies (which is why I use scepter, autoattack constantly spawns and kills illusions), with the secondary either staff or GS (this one more often because it’s better than staff for enviroment targets).

If the event involves waves of mobs I usually try to use the greatsword, use the phantasmal berserker around the middle of a group of enemies, try to use mind stab (the ground AoE attack) and then swap to scepter where I try to focus on the stronger one available (a veteran or champion if there’s one), swapping weapons from time to time to create a new berserker where it can hit the most mobs. If I’m using a staff, about the same replacing the berserker with a chaos storm, being sure I go into the storn and cast the staff 2 (clone with backwards teleport) for a free chaos armor, just in case I get hit.

If the event involves a single veteran or champion mob, I usually attack as usual unless I notice the bleeding stuck at 25 stacks, when I try with the alternate weapon a bit.

For bosses like tequatl or the shatterer, I usually try to use staff. Bleeding is usually always stuck in the cap, but I try to use phantasmal warlock as soon as it’s out of cooldown, preferably if I can make it to have all three illusions be a warlock. The warlock by itself does decent damage, but it has the advantage of having 10% extra damage for each unique condition the target is suffering from, and bosses usually have all conditions up at a single time, so it’s 120% extra damage from the warlock.

If I don’t have the staff equiped when it comes out, I use the scepter but shatter with F1 a lot, even if I’m not specced for shattering. The scepter, combined with other skills, usually means I’ll have 3 clones back up long before the shattering’s cooldown ends.

And another tip. Sometimes attacking adds works better for participation than attacking the big boss. Claw of Jormag, for example, you can get as much participation by attacking and killing (when they die between phases count) the adds he keeps spawning even if you never touch it, and in my case I prefer it because while claw keeps the bleeding stacks at 25, the adds usually don’t, so I do more damage to them that counts towards participation.

The last post was very informative, thank you. I might give scepter another go.

I also run a condition build with my mesmer, and have experienced similar issues with not getting credit. In dynamic events with lots of mobs I do find it hard to do anything significant if there are other players around. My solution changes per situation. But most of the time it involves switching one of my weapon sets to GS; if nothing else than to get a hit or two in with auto-attack.
On big bosses though, I just keep my staff out and – as was mentioned above – try to get three Phantasmal Warlocks out. I throw Chaos Storm (does pretty good dmg) and Null Field down as needed for group support.