Guild Wars 2

I originally put this in the mesmer forum, but I feel it’s getting ignored so I’m going to post it here. Apologies for the double post.

I was thinking about how we could carve out a new niche for mesmers in tournaments and what their role is currently and what it could be. With s/d thieves, spirit rangers and necromancers dominating the meta at the moment the mesmer is no longer the successful duelist it used to be, so I believe it could be anchored in the team fight a lot more, capitalising on its utility, with semi-roamer capabilities and moving the team around with portal. Obviously the issue is the mesmer’s susceptibility to conditions. To counter this, I tried messing around with Shattered Conditions which apparently was ninja patched some time ago. The condi removal is really quite something and it compounds the idea of team utility, but with its placement as a grandmaster trait requires huge sacrifices in other trait lines (in fact when someone told me that it was patched, I actually got annoyed for this very reason!). We need 20 in duelling for clone generation, and we can’t take away from the first trait line because that isn’t enough, so we are forced to completely forsake the illusions line and illusionary persona which completely changes the play style. While I’ve been giving this a try, the huge recharge on shatters and lack of Illusionary Persona, while allowing more sustain in a condi meta, removes a lot of reactionary anti-spike and allows for mesmers to get bursted down easily. That’s why I think if Shattered Conditions was moved to a master trait, we could spec into condi cleanse, whilst maintaining the characteristics of the shatter mesmer. This would bring a lot of semi-passive, party-wide condition removal and utility while bringing relatively high damage to the table.
Rant over — what do you think? Do you mesmers out there think this could work?

P.S. It might be an idea to rework Shattered Conditions so it procs with Illusionary Persona (i.e. shattering yourself to remove a condition) but I’m not sure.

“the mesmer is no longer the successful duelist it used to be, " no reason to read further

XeKc.9310:

“the mesmer is no longer the successful duelist it used to be, " no reason to read further

…why? I’m strictly talking about tournaments here; you’re not going to see mesmers running around with phantasm builds. Shatter mesmers are very often beaten by many of the popular builds around in tournaments at the moment, so I don’t think I’m wrong in saying they’re unreliable duelists.

Perhaps I should’ve rephrased that. My point is that they’re not successful roamers.

Lol the mesmer forum?.. Terrible place, one should never go there..

XeKC is probably one of the hotjoin heroes who thinks because he loses to mesmer on his s/d Thief Spirit-ranger or SUPERDUPER burst Elementalist he thinks mesmers are completely balanced because he doesn’t know how to play his class.

@XeKC; No reason to post further is more like it.

I don’t think speccing inspiration for burst condi clear is a terrible idea, it’s just that there’s no reason to bring such a mesmer into a high end pvp game, why not bring a second Engi Ele or Guardian instead, even necro can do a good job of cleansing with staff 4.

So what is a mesmer even supposed to be anymore?.. Is it a roamer? Well not really thief ele engi and even warrior can do that job better..

Is it a Home Defense Portal master? Hmm not quite since Spirit ranger can fill that role better..

Is it a team fighter? Why bring mesmer to a team fight in this meta?..

@Darnis

I don’t think you’re right at all. Mesmer filled a niche pre patch it is only when necros got turned into a nuke of condis that mesmers became not viable.

Mesmers could provide a lot of team support through stuns/portal plays/illusion res/condi clear however they simply aren’t able to as they are shut down extremely easily by conditions. A mesmer could easily fill the role of a roamer.