Guild Wars 2

I’ve got an 80 Thief and am now trying to decide whether to level an Ele or a Msm.
I primarily WvW and the Ele has the long range AoE nukes and a dmg stacked Ele can be the deciding factor in some fights with meteor shower.

On the other hand Elementalists arent very good in smaller fights or 1v1 while a Mesmer is arguably the best class for smaller fights with the confusion factor of phantasms/clones and they also have good group utility with portals and such.

Which would you prefer to have in WvW and why?

Need some help here!

I play a staff Elementalist and it’s a lot of fun. Mesmers have certain key abilities (portal, timewarp) that makes them very important in WvW.

Small fights don’t really happen in WvW. Not in my experience, anyway.

If you love small fights, Scepter MH/Dagger OH for Ele is king. Build your ele right, along with complementary utility skills (immobilised, chill etc) and with just fire attunement alone, you can do 10-18k spike damage. Attunement dancing between fire, lightning and earth gives you some pretty brutal CC as well.

If you want 1vs1 in WvW avoid the ele, sure you could win with D/D or S/D, but since ele lacks weapon swap you will either suck at 1vs1 or vs groups (where you badly need the staff). Basically you will often feel like you have the wrong weapons equipped and unable to swap since you are in combat. Btw staff ele is lot of fun, but don’t even try to 1vs1.

I play mesmer as my main and its great fun in WvW. There are things that a mesmer can do for the group that no other class can do (or do as well). I run with a Greatsword for dps and a Scepter and Focus for utility.

The main things that a mesmer brings to WvW are:

Portals – You can get your whole team in and out of trouble in an instant, also useful for getting reinforcements in to a fight, moving golems around quicker and hiding in a keep just before it falls and then portaling your whole team back in to ninja the keep back is an artform and extremely satisfying.

Temporal Curtain – This is your group speed buff (obviously you can get this with Ele as well) the more people that have this sort of skill in a group the better.

Into the Void – This skill lets you pull enemies off of cliffs (or walls if they get on the edge) this is a very handy skill (also doesn’t require line of sight, or even a target!).

Phantasmal Berserker – High DPS attack that requires no line of sight, great for taking down players and siege on top of walls.

Elementalists are underpowered and require too much effort for pay-off.

They are fun IMO, but only when fighting content or players lower level than you, when you can actually do a decent amount of damage.

Mesmers can 4v1 players without the use of the Elementalist’s ridiculously hard combos and spells that barely hit.

I’ll put it like this, I had an 80 thief and got bored as well and I rolled an Ele.

I find it much, much, much more fun because of the different skills and tons of combinations of different weapons and skills compared to the pigeonholded thief.

I find Ele has a higher skill ceiling so the more skilled you are the better the class.

Hope that helps. (IMO you should go to the mists with an Ele and see how you like it)

Lol, ur a thief? Play an ele. See what its like to bend over repeatedly.

Nah, seriously, I love the ele. It takes skill to play. You’re often fighting uphill battles. Every fight gets your pulse moving. And while there is some controversy, they are rather versatile.

If you want another easy mode class, play a mesmer. I’ve never been able to solo a champion. But I watched a mesmer do it quite easily.

I have a Mesmer and an Ele but only my Ele is 80 and it’s a lot of fun. Don’t listen to the haters. Sure we could use some love from the Devs but the class is still fun and it’s versatility and complexity is what keeps it interesting. I do like my Mesmer as well and do plan on leveling that to 80 eventually, but since you have a Thief I’m going to recommend going Ele first because Mesmer is just as easy as your Thief to play so Ele’s going to be a fun change I think (but do play Mesmer as well at some point because they are fun and very unique). Keep in mind though that a damage stacked Ele is going to be more squishy than other classes stacking damage, so you’ll either need to be very quick with dodges/cc/immunity skills/etc., or stack some Vit/Toughness somewhere at the cost of a bit of dps.