Guild Wars 2

I have power, toughness, vitality armor (power main). They have sup runes of mesmer, because char is mesmer. Now people say it does not work even for mesmer. What?

Weapons I have power, prec, fer — and everyone is happy.

I also have staff, scepter and focus with pow, vit, cond damage (cond dmg main). People say it does not work. I remember reading that cond dmg is better for mesmer.

Lets change every item to PPF zerg if nothing else works.

superior rune of mesmer does benefit mesmer. more mesmer skills are benefitted from it than any other profession (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Daze). it increases the daze duration of chaos storm, counter blade, magic bullet, power lock, diversion (shatter). but don’t just use it because it’s the rune of your profession – use the runes if these are the skills you want to use.
I would say this rune set is more useful in pvp than wvw. daze would be a better 1v1 ability, but wvw is usually zerg vs. zerg. in 1v1, it’s very powerful to prevent the opponent from doing anything for a few seconds. effectively becomes 1v0. in a zerg battle, it would become 50v49. not exactly a large difference.

non-berserker builds DO work well. berserker is just the simplest. If you want to run in there and just mash all the keys (faceplant), berserker is the best. If you want to live long enough to pick up loot, I recommend something more tanky. Also, conditions do VERY well against other players, just not so good against a zerg. but, again, you need to spec your entire build around conditions if that’s the route you want to go. You will be most effective if you pick 1 thing to be great at rather than 2 or 3 things to be ok at. (berserker is good at pure direct damage, but horrible at conditions and surviving)

PVE is entirely different than PVP, WvW, and open world PVE. Stick to berserker when doing dungeons and switch to the other sets for PVP and soloing.

The way PVE is set up makes condition damage utterly worthless for group content. PVT gear is also useless as it scales poorly and the damage output is atrocious. Once you know the fights you’ll be able to survive just fine in full berserker.

I wouldn’t run PTV on a mesmer under any circumstances. The extra durability isn’t going to make a huge difference on a light armour class, it just means you hit like a wet noodle.

What works best depends on what you’re doing. If you’re playing dungeons, world bosses, champ trains… condition damage is no good on any class for those because there’s a per-target cap in the open world, and in dungeons it just doesn’t kill fast enough. Berserker is the gear of choice for all of those simply because it does the most damage, and damage is the only thing that matters.

For PvP, though, conditions are extremely effective, and berserker gear gets you killed fast if you’re not careful.

Any (non-condition gear) works fine as long as you’re not doing dungeons. PVT is great against world bosses such as teq that can’t be crit anyways.

By the way, I use PTV for armor and PPF for weapon because I thought that the features are separate: armor protects and weapons kills. It is odd that armor can increase the damage (when not ramming into enemy). I originally wanted armor with TVH to keep me alive.

I completely missed that mesmers wear light armor. That explains.

I think I disagree with this discussion more on a broad perspective. Remember guys, the beauty of the mesmer profession is the pure versatility of our class. We CAN tank / kite because of our distracting, invisibility, and in-combat movement speed (especially with a staff equipped). We can also deal massive amounts of damage when traited properly with pure dps / phantasmal attacks. We can also deal massive amounts of confusion, burning, poison, daze, torment damage ( I encourage everyone to view osicat’s napalm cat 2.0 build ). Most importantly, to our guild mates we supply an endless array of options for group invisibility and portals. If you like to play the many options that the game provides, I’d suggest running with at least 3 armor sets in your inventory and switch your traits to the appropriate one for the situation at hand. While some classes tend to be more flexible with one armor set, we certainly are not. I tend to run with one PVT set so that I continue to supply veil, mass invis, portals for my zerg and survive long fights. I also run valkyrie for gvg, zerker for dungeons, and rabid with balthazar runes for roaming. PVT is not bad when your main function is support. Just my two cents

Mesmers are a class that gets maximum effects off crits due to the way the burst and phantasm attacks function. If you must add survivability use TPP instead of PTV. Vitality also doesn’t affect your clones and phantasms (there is a trait that adds phantasm health though), while toughness actually does. Reflected projectiles from Feedback don’t factor your Power, but do factor your critrate. Etc etc. PTV on mesmers doesn’t make much sense even though it does do well on warriors.

Getting really badly suited gear still only really reduces effectiveness by 30-40% or so though. It’s not a number I’d like to get saddled with, but it won’t change the outcome of any PvE encounter, only how long the encounter takes. Not knowing how to play the class is far worse. Clone mesmers who don’t shatter, phantasm mesmers who shatter unnecessarily, people who don’t know when to deploy the limited ethereal fields, opening portals beyond maximum range, throwing time warps off their optimal locations, using Greatsword autoattacks at melee range… the penalty for these is far more harsh.