Guild Wars 2

I main Ele, as such, I’m usually stuck on Cele D/D. Today I went to just go duel a few of my friends and I was using the same build as always, just with Lightning Rod as an added bonus. Decided to play against my Mesmer friend and holy crap.

He started off with the same old Mesmer stuff, throwing his GS or summoning the GS spin guy or whatever Mesmers do(I know the key skills to watch out for, but I don’t really know the names) and I dodged. Suddenly he either Stealths or Blinks over(I couldn’t tell at the moment) and I lost nearly all my health in an instant. In a panic, I switch to Earth as soon as I saw myself taking damage and then switched to Water to heal up a bit.

At that point I decided that I needed to pressure back so I switched to Air and tried to do something, but after a few hits, he stealthed away. I switched over to Fire to maybe spread some Burns and maybe Might stack a little with Ring of Fire. Instead I was instantly bursted from stealth for the rest of my health. I saw my friend with less than half of his health, but wow.

I’ve never had this much trouble with Mesmer and I’m wondering what I could do differently. Should I be more aggressive or more defensive? The latter doesn’t seem to work very well since he just bursts more often than I can Heal and switch to Earth for Protection. I tried being aggressive, but he had a healthy amount of Stealth.

I’m wondering if it’s my lack of practice against Mesmer(I did come back from a long hiatus) or it’s me just committing some silly mistakes. Any ideas on what to do against this type of Mesmer?

nice try to hide this as a advice seeking post, we all know you are trying bring more attention to nerf Mesmers (which we already received while other classes got none).

Just remember what comes around goes around, Ele is doing tons of damages too. I hope your class get nerfs as well.

Umm, I guess some people are pretty paranoid.
I’m legitimately asking for advice since I’m not very “in-the-know” for Mesmer traits and such. I know about PU and stuff, but yea.

rchu.8945:

nice try to hide this as a advice seeking post, we all know you are trying bring more attention to nerf Mesmers (which we already received while other classes got none).

Just remember what comes around goes around, Ele is doing tons of damages too. I hope your class get nerfs as well.

OP must secretly play Necro because the fear in this post is real. Shame to see that people that genuinely want to L2P by asking for advice are getting shut down. Maybe you can help prevent nerfs by stating some form of counterplay that the OP can use? That way you can actually prove that any nerf suggestions would be unwarranted?

That being said, I would just straight up ask your mesmer friend what it was that he did, and if there are any holes in his strategy that can be exploited.

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Real answer: Have a build that can lock them down or burst them before they can stealth away. I’ve been running 100 mines on engineer and its pretty good against them. Really any burst killer can take them on, it’s just the stealth burst that can be rough. Medi Guard, D/P Thief, SD Engi…they all have a pretty good chance against it once you learn the build.

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

If you’re talking about power shatter with the power block trait:

1)Trait changes actually didn’t affect shatter damage much; however, the amulet changes certainly did (this system definitely needs a rework. Amulet+ chosen gem seems like a better idea than the status quo). What changed is that, like other classes, mesmer now has access to tools that were previously unattainable in a shatter build, like confounding suggestions.

2) You are probably going to kill him using burning, unless he is using the cleansing mantra and/or specs into the inspiration tree. If he’s using the cleansing mantra, he’s giving up either mantra of distraction, blink or decoy. The loss of the distraction mantra reduces his ability to interrupt you at range and stun you with confounding suggestions. The loss of any of the other two drastically lowers his survivability. Most mesmers atm don’t run the cleansing mantra, so make sure your burning skills hit. Burning is pretty ridiculous atm anyway; a few stacks should kill him quickly if he can’t cleanse it. For the mesmer burst to really hurt, he has to be in melee range, and that’s where your PBAOE condi spam comes in handy.

3) The key to surviving is avoiding the shatter. Three ways the mesmer can set this up (4 if he’s using sword).
a) Blink +mirror blade. If he has blink off cd and you see him start the mirror blade animation from range, either dodge or just walk forward with swiftness at the last second before he blinks (needs some practice and luck on where the mesmer actually blinked to).

b) Confounding suggestions stun+ mind wrack. Honestly pretty hard to avoid, if he has mantra of distraction. All about reflexes here; either teleport away or make sure you get protection when this hits. You need to survive the 2 charges of the distraction mantra and punish the mesmer when he tries to recharge it.

c) Stealth+ mirror blade. Yea yea, stealth in gw2 is pretty screwed up. When he stealths, try to run around in an unpredictable manner, doing frequent direction changes, preferably while running around something that allows you to get out of los. Or you can judge the distance he has to run to you and dodge at the last moment.

d) Sword 3+ leap. Obvious animation. Dodge/kill the clone. Note that the clone leaps twice, so you may want to wait till the second leap to dodge.

His interrupts hurt, though power block damage has been nerfed already (so much for waiting for the scene to settle a bit). Watch out when you are casting channeled skills in particular. Don’t use ether feast against a mesmer if you are doing so.

Hope this helped.

TheDuck.4526:

OP must secretly play Necro because the fear in this post is real.

I think this is the best line of words I have ever read in the context of gw2.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

Rylock, you say this as one of the top mesmers looking down upon all those your fight in tpvp or randoms in wvw who are comparatively bad and have decided that there is no counterplay to mesmers because of your experience of wrecking everyone even harder than you did before.

PU shatter burst mesmers are very strong right now, so are CI interrupt mesmers.
Due to the nature of zerk PU shatter mesmer it is nearly impossible to fight if you have no invulnerabilities or burst damage, Its like fighting thieves, they now have high stealth uptime, extremely high burst, lots of immobilize, boon rip, an instant cc, and tons of blinds. At this point a good mesmer can likely beat anything other than a good mediguard / thief the majority of the time.

How to counter play PU shatter. Mesmers have to leave stealth sometime, they will become revealed when they burst from stealth, or leave stealth shortly before the brust to avoid revealed. Use earth attunement and stone heart to counter almost 50% of a mesmers burst damage by staying in earth attuenment, upon the mesmer beign revealed use skill and skill 2 in earth. then swap to air an updraft and proceed with ride the lightning and stun aura. Lightning rod is incredibly potent against mesmers because of their near utter lack of cleanse and landing the updraft and earthquake are very important. Then proceed to dps the mesmer until they stealth and hop back into earth attunement to await the mesmers next burst.

Ithilwen.1529:

@warlordofchaos

Yeah you’ve been all over the Mesmer forum advocating every kind of nerf. I strongly suspect you’re a ranger main or something trolling.

Look again and you will see I am only asking for 4 very specific nerfs

Ithilwen.1529:

@warlordofchaos

Yeah you’ve been all over the Mesmer forum advocating every kind of nerf. I strongly suspect you’re a ranger main or something trolling.

He is one of the top mesmers in the game. Im pretty sure he is just looking at the fact his opponents are way worse than him and judging it off of that.

Dodge shatter and win? Idk I think losing to the first Mesmer burst is largely a skill issue (or your build loses to burst) now if they chained stealth to get to you unseen well they blew a lot of cds for that surprise burst, realistically you should see them coming and be prepared to dodge/evade/interrupt/soak(prot/blocks)/healafter/teleport as soon as the first tick of damage hits. You have options if your being 100-0ed your prob not wearing an amulet with tough/vit (sorry your an ele you don’t have a kittening choice welcome to no stock defense mechanics and the lowest hp/armor in the game). Just adjust to the new high burst meta, get better at dodges(your vigor got nerfed and hits going to hurt you, you cant just dodge for EA anymore) and you’ll still be winning fights just like we always have, the ceiling just moved up a bit, just don’t expect to win 2v1s anymore

Sadrien.3470:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

Rylock, you say this as one of the top mesmers looking down upon all those your fight in tpvp or randoms in wvw who are comparatively bad and have decided that there is no counterplay to mesmers because of your experience of wrecking everyone even harder than you did before.

PU shatter burst mesmers are very strong right now, so are CI interrupt mesmers.
Due to the nature of zerk PU shatter mesmer it is nearly impossible to fight if you have no invulnerabilities or burst damage, Its like fighting thieves, they now have high stealth uptime, extremely high burst, lots of immobilize, boon rip, an instant cc, and tons of blinds. At this point a good mesmer can likely beat anything other than a good mediguard / thief the majority of the time.

How to counter play PU shatter. Mesmers have to leave stealth sometime, they will become revealed when they burst from stealth, or leave stealth shortly before the brust to avoid revealed. Use earth attunement and stone heart to counter almost 50% of a mesmers burst damage by staying in earth attuenment, upon the mesmer beign revealed use skill and skill 2 in earth. then swap to air an updraft and proceed with ride the lightning and stun aura. Lightning rod is incredibly potent against mesmers because of their near utter lack of cleanse and landing the updraft and earthquake are very important. Then proceed to dps the mesmer until they stealth and hop back into earth attunement to await the mesmers next burst.

There is only one problem. While this is a great way to counter PU mes (I actually didn’t think of stone heart), what happens if you aren’t an ele or you don’t have stone heart on

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

Sadrien.3470:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

Rylock, you say this as one of the top mesmers looking down upon all those your fight in tpvp or randoms in wvw who are comparatively bad and have decided that there is no counterplay to mesmers because of your experience of wrecking everyone even harder than you did before.

PU shatter burst mesmers are very strong right now, so are CI interrupt mesmers.
Due to the nature of zerk PU shatter mesmer it is nearly impossible to fight if you have no invulnerabilities or burst damage, Its like fighting thieves, they now have high stealth uptime, extremely high burst, lots of immobilize, boon rip, an instant cc, and tons of blinds. At this point a good mesmer can likely beat anything other than a good mediguard / thief the majority of the time.

How to counter play PU shatter. Mesmers have to leave stealth sometime, they will become revealed when they burst from stealth, or leave stealth shortly before the brust to avoid revealed. Use earth attunement and stone heart to counter almost 50% of a mesmers burst damage by staying in earth attuenment, upon the mesmer beign revealed use skill and skill 2 in earth. then swap to air an updraft and proceed with ride the lightning and stun aura. Lightning rod is incredibly potent against mesmers because of their near utter lack of cleanse and landing the updraft and earthquake are very important. Then proceed to dps the mesmer until they stealth and hop back into earth attunement to await the mesmers next burst.

There is only one problem. While this is a great way to counter PU mes (I actually didn’t think of stone heart), what happens if you aren’t an ele or you don’t have stone heart on

Use stoneheart, because it counters anything that crits and this is a crit burst meta, if your not your running a build that is not viable in this temporary meta.
If you are a thief, wait in stealth too, its an whoever gets hit first instantly dies thing here. Bunker Shout cele hammer lb ( the build I would recommend using over shoutbow now) hit fear me. Watch your hp bar and as soon as it begins to go down hit that skill. you have 24k hp, and 2.7k toughness so the first hits will not down you.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

Sadrien.3470:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

Rylock, you say this as one of the top mesmers looking down upon all those your fight in tpvp or randoms in wvw who are comparatively bad and have decided that there is no counterplay to mesmers because of your experience of wrecking everyone even harder than you did before.

PU shatter burst mesmers are very strong right now, so are CI interrupt mesmers.
Due to the nature of zerk PU shatter mesmer it is nearly impossible to fight if you have no invulnerabilities or burst damage, Its like fighting thieves, they now have high stealth uptime, extremely high burst, lots of immobilize, boon rip, an instant cc, and tons of blinds. At this point a good mesmer can likely beat anything other than a good mediguard / thief the majority of the time.

How to counter play PU shatter. Mesmers have to leave stealth sometime, they will become revealed when they burst from stealth, or leave stealth shortly before the brust to avoid revealed. Use earth attunement and stone heart to counter almost 50% of a mesmers burst damage by staying in earth attuenment, upon the mesmer beign revealed use skill and skill 2 in earth. then swap to air an updraft and proceed with ride the lightning and stun aura. Lightning rod is incredibly potent against mesmers because of their near utter lack of cleanse and landing the updraft and earthquake are very important. Then proceed to dps the mesmer until they stealth and hop back into earth attunement to await the mesmers next burst.

There is only one problem. While this is a great way to counter PU mes (I actually didn’t think of stone heart), what happens if you aren’t an ele or you don’t have stone heart on

But PU is not only condi. A Zerk PB PU phant mesmer is also… ahhhhhh….

If it’s an interupt mesmer run to your team they are weaker in teamfights. If it’s a shatter mesmer dodge clones or you loose each f1 shatter is now about 1/4 of a medium health pool and eles have low health pools.

Malchior.5732:

I main Ele, as such, I’m usually stuck on Cele D/D. Today I went to just go duel a few of my friends and I was using the same build as always, just with Lightning Rod as an added bonus. Decided to play against my Mesmer friend and holy crap.

He started off with the same old Mesmer stuff, throwing his GS or summoning the GS spin guy or whatever Mesmers do(I know the key skills to watch out for, but I don’t really know the names) and I dodged. Suddenly he either Stealths or Blinks over(I couldn’t tell at the moment) and I lost nearly all my health in an instant. In a panic, I switch to Earth as soon as I saw myself taking damage and then switched to Water to heal up a bit.

At that point I decided that I needed to pressure back so I switched to Air and tried to do something, but after a few hits, he stealthed away. I switched over to Fire to maybe spread some Burns and maybe Might stack a little with Ring of Fire. Instead I was instantly bursted from stealth for the rest of my health. I saw my friend with less than half of his health, but wow.

I’ve never had this much trouble with Mesmer and I’m wondering what I could do differently. Should I be more aggressive or more defensive? The latter doesn’t seem to work very well since he just bursts more often than I can Heal and switch to Earth for Protection. I tried being aggressive, but he had a healthy amount of Stealth.

I’m wondering if it’s my lack of practice against Mesmer(I did come back from a long hiatus) or it’s me just committing some silly mistakes. Any ideas on what to do against this type of Mesmer?

safely range them and avoid clones, why go in shatter range?

Ithilwen.1529:

I’ll tell you what people have told me on forum for years now; LEARN TO PLAY.

Mesmer finally got boosted to a class with some real damage? Have to deal with condi now instead of just ignoring it and slamming the Mesmer?

LEARN TO PLAY and stop relying on zerk style to save you.

He/She’s trying to learn…if you would just answer the OP’s question. -_-

rchu.8945:

nice try to hide this as a advice seeking post, we all know you are trying bring more attention to nerf Mesmers (which we already received while other classes got none).

Just remember what comes around goes around, Ele is doing tons of damages too. I hope your class get nerfs as well.

If you’re SO SENSITIVE about this, it means you’re the one who’s hiding something. We all know your intention of hiding the broken stuffs anyway. If you’re worrying nothing, you wouldn’t be so aggressive in the first place. Actually you KNEW what is wrong, you just pretend that you don’t and hope everyone will overlook it.

Mesmer is my main, though I also love a bit of bunker guard and S/D thief.

Inspiration adds a lot more durability to Mesmer since the changes. But frankly I am not finding any more or less difficulty with any classes though there are a lot more conditions around.

Haven’t touched the PU build myself and in fact have switched from sword / torch to sword / sword to get my head around one less stealth and blocks instead for the chrono build I will surely be using.

Those mesmers I have come across die just as easy as before – even the stealthy ones.

I agree with WoC’s proposed changes. The rest is just QQ in both directions.

So, as a PU mesmer (both before patch and currently), roots are what typically ruin my day. Albiet, I’m not a power build.

First off, Mesmers are the best duelers in the game bar thieves. This game isn’t balanced around duels. I would say practice some more duels and then get into some organized team play. The burst on Mesmers is significant, but there’s a dramatic decrease in overall dps after their initial burst. Learn the rotation.

Second, maybe you just need more practice. As an experienced Mesmer player, I must say after this patch, I have the most difficulty putting the nail in the coffin of eles/guardians. This is more so the case now that we have more defensive measures against thieves.

So why on earth is warlord – a mesmer main – asking for mesmer nerfs?

The mesmer community is the most apologetic bunch of people i’ve seen. Who is going to speak for mesmers if even they ask for nerfs to themselves. And i don’t care about “balance” or whatever simply because the balance will come if the non-mesmers point out what they feel too strong and mesmers point out what certain nerfs would do.

But if everybody is crying for nerfs, even the mesmers themselves then anet will happily use the nerfbat and you can’t even complain afterwards because you asked for it. Smart.

Any advice for a terrormancer to beat a mesmer?

I can’t seem to get out of the stun lock. I found I have ~1s to go from full health to dead, and i’m usually stunned for all of it. Once I managed to hit DS the instant I started taking damage, but I was downed in the 1/4s delay it takes to switch over.

serenke.4806:

So why on earth is warlord – a mesmer main – asking for mesmer nerfs?

The mesmer community is the most apologetic bunch of people i’ve seen. Who is going to speak for mesmers if even they ask for nerfs to themselves. And i don’t care about “balance” or whatever simply because the balance will come if the non-mesmers point out what they feel too strong and mesmers point out what certain nerfs would do.

But if everybody is crying for nerfs, even the mesmers themselves then anet will happily use the nerfbat and you can’t even complain afterwards because you asked for it. Smart.

There’s nothing wrong with me and other Mesmer mains asking for nerfs on our own class when we find it appropriate. The difference between Mesmers and other professions is that for the most part we strive to have balance among all classes. As the class that’s constantly getting the short end of the stick, we’re not asking to be OP for years to come. Balance should always be the focus. Not favoritism and bias.

Every single player should multiclass, so that favoritism is not a part of GW anymore.

Balance

I play DD Ele and definitely still find Mesmers manageable. As usual you trait for Earth, Water, and Arcane. Stone Heart is what I use. If I think I’m about to get shattered and I’m immobed or have no dodge, I just hop into Earth and they can’t crit me. Maybe the issue is just that eating the shatters is more punishing, so it’s too much stronger at low tier, but I really don’t see them as brokenly strong right now. They’re strong for sure, but not broken.

They are indeed very broken.

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

I will lay out some things:
Inspiration tree: Way too much heals support condi remove. A decent inspiration mesmer is at the moment fairly unbeatable in duels. (Except with some cheese builds). I good way to nerf it for shatter builds without breaking it for support/healer mesmer (which isnt op) could be to make the shatter heal scale more from healing power. At the moment it heals 1,5k or something from shatters on zerk build.
Confounding suggesions Instant hard CC is incredibly strong and very probably OP. In combination with daze mantra it is way too strong. Its hard to say if it is the trait or the mantra that needs a nerf.
PU Boring and cheesy to play against, similar to shadow arts thief. Stealth and oneshot with little to no counterplay. Will probably need to be nerfed to at least 50% or something. Personally i would replace it with a more fun trait.

Also, at the moment sword mes seems stronger than staff mesmer. This is because of blurred frenzy countering oneshots and the prestige allowing more stealth oneshots.

This is coming from someone who plays mesmer exclusively. Mesmer is absolutely broken at the moment.

I think like always condi is the best way to deal with mesmers. If they are in inspiration they have some counter to it but i doubt most mesmers are currently doing that.

Jordy.1436:

I think like always condi is the best way to deal with mesmers. If they are in inspiration they have some counter to it but i doubt most mesmers are currently doing that.

They should be. It is very very strong.

Mesmer DPS builds have no sustain.
You need to counter their initial burst attacks,
and you need to put pressure on them asap.
CC them and use some short of burst on them.
They can’t stand a lot of pressure.You need to make them
go defensive.Since you play a Ele,you can freeze them with
your Frostbow 5 and finish them with 2 and 4.
Just make sure to anticipate them using Blink and make you
waste that burst.

I made an unkillable ele to deal with the new spikes in damage. literally unkillable as long as it’s not 4 or 5 v1. You can even end up killing people with it if the fight last long enough and your opponents don’t disengage. It only had 11k health but it’s completely broken.

You won’t beat the mesmer, but he won’t be able to cc you or kill you.

Aenaos.8160:

Mesmer DPS builds have no sustain.
You need to counter their initial burst attacks,
and you need to put pressure on them asap.
CC them and use some short of burst on them.
They can’t stand a lot of pressure.You need to make them
go defensive.Since you play a Ele,you can freeze them with
your Frostbow 5 and finish them with 2 and 4.
Just make sure to anticipate them using Blink and make you
waste that burst.

I would agree, but inspiration med has more heals than a guard does.

Jordy.1436:

I think like always condi is the best way to deal with mesmers. If they are in inspiration they have some counter to it but i doubt most mesmers are currently doing that.

Ehh not really, currently mesmers well most defintly blow up any almost any condi spec b4 that have a chance to stack condis. Mesmers with interrupts, stealth, ports and insane burst are kinda God mode atm.

mesmer is way better off than before but I would caution people calling mesmers OP. The damage buff gets noticed first which is mostly what mesmer got. But people also got A LOT of defensive buffs give it a week or 2 and see people will learn to counter the DPS.

Quadox.7834:

Warlord of Chaos.7845:

The Gates Assassin.9827:

I stealthed from the gate of foefire all the way to the point at mine. There was an ele at the point. I decided to simply stand there. Breathing down its neck. I then went for the burst and wiped out 75% of its HP with just mirror blade spike. Then I went back into stealth for about 15 seconds. The ele got bored of being there and left the point. When he did, I capped the point and he had to come back. I then got back into stealth, went mid and blew up some thief.

Long story short: You don’t.

Mesmer is completely broken now. There is absolutely 0 counterplay with blind on shatter going through evade, a guaranteed stun whenever you want to burst (which 100-0’s almost anything), PU making mesmers godmode, and a whole bunch of other things I can go on about. Pretty much this tells the story lol.

I will lay out some things:
Inspiration tree: Way too much heals support condi remove. A decent inspiration mesmer is at the moment fairly unbeatable in duels. (Except with some cheese builds). I good way to nerf it for shatter builds without breaking it for support/healer mesmer (which isnt op) could be to make the shatter heal scale more from healing power. At the moment it heals 1,5k or something from shatters on zerk build.
Confounding suggesions Instant hard CC is incredibly strong and very probably OP. In combination with daze mantra it is way too strong. Its hard to say if it is the trait or the mantra that needs a nerf.
PU Boring and cheesy to play against, similar to shadow arts thief. Stealth and oneshot with little to no counterplay. Will probably need to be nerfed to at least 50% or something. Personally i would replace it with a more fun trait.

Also, at the moment sword mes seems stronger than staff mesmer. This is because of blurred frenzy countering oneshots and the prestige allowing more stealth oneshots.

This is coming from someone who plays mesmer exclusively. Mesmer is absolutely broken at the moment.

Finally some solid arguments.

Wish these panic Mesmer folks address this post with solid counter-arguments instead of “you xx class troll, go back to your forum!” or “stop asking for nerf! Weh~~~~”
If you can’t form any decent argument backing up by facts and opinions, then your argument is very weak and has no merit whatsoever.

Last note, I multi-class all classes for a long long time. Really doesn’t matter which one get nerfed or buffed the most. Just stating what’s broken right now.

Made a mesmer build yesterday that had quickness every 10 seconds lol

You either get the drop on them or die.

OP – Please don’t mind some of the rather.. Paranoid Mesmers in this thread. There is a justifiable fear of being over-nerfed in the Mesmer forums since they’ve already hit us with several heavy somewhat-irrational nerfs only two days out from the patch.

As it stands now, its hard to give you advice since the meta is rapidly redeveloping and the build your running may not even be optimal anymore. Your best bet right now is to keep dueling and try to discover patterns in your opponent’s play. Stealth bursts are rough, but Mesmer is so squishy that you may be able to counter-burst with some proper timing and finish the job off with conditions.

I wish I could give more specific advice but it is too soon to tell what builds work and what doesn’t. Right now shatter Mesmer have quite a bit of variety to play with build-wise, so I’m not even certain exactly what your friend is running.

First off still to early to tell with very little in terms of the fully fleshed out meta.

Balance isn’t based around 1v1. Normally I’d gripe but a lot of the changes make it so many builds (including Mesmers who used to struggle) can pressure, lock down, and finish a target. Very much more akin to certain brawlers, shooters, and in some cases mobas where initiating an attack is less likely getting stuck in a drawn out 1v1 because of passive defenses. (Although it it’s possible to spec for crazy survivability but so far I’ve seen major drawbacks for doing such and imo that is healthy for game.) However in almost all scenarios there is more than enough room to outplay most opponents.

For team fights you have to pressure the mes and not let them free cast. You know like every other ranged harass? Yes mes no longer hits like a wet noodle outside of shatters. And yes shatters are now actually strong enough to not be made redundant by passive defenses which promoted the previous meta. But this just makes the class viable as opposed to being a hindrance and something to be baby sat. Keep in mind shatters as they always were are still very easy to read and play around.

As for head to head or just general play against mesmers specifically they are still shut down by heavy condi and they probably will always be. Shatter is still a glass cannon and can be easily killed if you play around their default blink and choice flavor of stealth. (Sometimes mass invis As well)

Thief is still a counter even if the imbalance gap is closer.
Medi guard can still chase with preloaded burst.

Everything will still push mes off point but the returned fire from the kiting/LoSing mesmer is no longer a wet noodle.

If you for some reason don’t think any of this is fair because you have to play around things more, this is exactly how mesmer has felt against every meta spec since December of the first year after launch. Difference is everything else gets to keep its damage if not already buffed.

If they surprise you, you can not counter them. First let me say I want to see Mesmers stay in a good place. I do not want them ground under like necros were in PvP. I consider the plights of the mesmers some of my own.

If you see them coming I would advise getting super aggressive, for example the minute I see one I go into deathshroud, tp 2 to them and start just dropping as much area damage on top of them.

Even if they stealth or move away the area damage ussually gets them. Their first reaction is to Moa me, this is fine as a Moa I do not let up I leap at them and disrupt. Disrupt disrupt as much as you can.

Mesmers are actually not good at combatting the Moa if you know how to use Moa against them.

Dodge roll towards clones, Don’t stand in them, if they follow you leap, or dodgeroll into them.

If you have a trait you can use that helps with daze or immobilize use it. For example traiting up that fear on daze/knockback/stun ect is really helpful.

I’m trying to understand these topics on mesmer. When I first saw the new stuff I thought mesmers would be super strong against slower classes. Then after I saw thief I thought, “kitten anet really wants to keep thief a hard counter for mes”. Has anyone tried using acro on thief? The main mesmer build being complained about and nerfed uses daze to gain stun and immobilize. Did no one else notice the acrobatics thief line is literally built to counter this?

Quadox.7834:

I will lay out some things:
Inspiration tree: Way too much heals support condi remove. A decent inspiration mesmer is at the moment fairly unbeatable in duels. (Except with some cheese builds). I good way to nerf it for shatter builds without breaking it for support/healer mesmer (which isnt op) could be to make the shatter heal scale more from healing power. At the moment it heals 1,5k or something from shatters on zerk build.
Confounding suggesions Instant hard CC is incredibly strong and very probably OP. In combination with daze mantra it is way too strong. Its hard to say if it is the trait or the mantra that needs a nerf.
PU Boring and cheesy to play against, similar to shadow arts thief. Stealth and oneshot with little to no counterplay. Will probably need to be nerfed to at least 50% or something. Personally i would replace it with a more fun trait.

I swear Restorative Illusions is bugged right now. I tried it out yesterday and it seems to give more than 1.5K heal with a full shatter. If it were just 1.5K it would be absolutely fine – that’s the equivalent to mitigating one Double-strike from a zerk Thief. I swear it’s doing more though which is wrong.

Confounding Suggestions could probably do with an ICD of 10 seconds to mitigate Power Lock spam. Otherwise, I’d prefer the meta to shift to take into account the strength of interrupt Mesmers before we start seeing interrupt traits nerfed.

Prismatic Understanding is just horrible. I don’t understand how +100% stealth duration was ever considered a good thing for the game. Like you, I’d happily see it removed in favour of something else that is healthier for the game.

This thread is hilarious
OP: how do i deal with mesmers
Mesmers: flaming + L2P

You guys are so helpful~

@OP: the way to deal with mesmer is same old, dodge into shatter and not away from it, that way it won’t land. Use LoS. Kill illusions/clones etc.

Can’t say much about other stuff anymore as mesmers camp stealth so much nowdays and don’t get revealed, that you can’t really tell what they are casting at you before it lands.

Mesmer got better at actually LANDING shatters because we can survive long enough to do it.

Your counters are what they always were; stances, shield skills, dodge, stun break, condi cleanse. and probably more.

You really do need to learn to play. Think about defense, not just popping off your rotation as quickly as possible.

WarlordOfChaos is indeed advocating nerfs… but I think he is dead wrong and very much in the minority.

Already couldnt deal with them, now they dont even have to be near to burst you down anymore.

Lot more replies than expected, some helpful, some not, but thanks anyway.

Well guys, my issue wasn’t necessarily dodging the burst(outside of ones started from Stealth). I could do that just fine; my issue was rather the fact that after that initial burst, I had some trouble applying back pressure since his Stealth lasted for so long. I would lose track of him and just eat a burst from Stealth and well, that’s more difficult to predict.

Admittedly I was being too wasteful with my dodges as I’m still accustomed to being able to use Evasive Arcana to Might Stack and Heal whenever I needed and right now that’s a bit wasteful with the Vigor change. I’m gonna try to duel him again(yea, I know it isn’t balanced around 1v1s) with the same build with a few tweaks and try to be more aggressive and smart about my dodges. If that doesn’t work, then I’ll keep trying :P

I wont even bother to use Stone Heart. Not because I think it’s ineffective, on the contrary, it’s pretty good, especially now, but I really don’t want to be that Elementalist we used to be: trait entirely into survivability and never kill anything or trait entirely into damage and blow up instantly. Remember before the Celestial change and when the nerfs were reverted(at least a few of them…some day RTL…)? Those were kinda sad days
You’re not the only ones, Mesmers! I know how it feels to be subpar regardless of what you do and suddenly be useful again.

Basically, I made this thread because I knew the basic burst combos for Mesmers and general tactics, but was not entirely sure what exactly the new patch did for them. I now understand that much better. This meta, at least for now, seems incredibly punishing towards mistakes and wastefulness.

Thanks for the responses, everyone.

ITT: People that don’t know mesmers go inspiration for overpowered sustain via mantra passive heals and condi removals.
They aren’t the squishy zerkers that they used to be.

If they go into Inspiration, they don’t have enough damage to kill a Cele DD Ele. It’s a close match up even if they go full offensive.