Guild Wars 2

Tonight my mesmer friend and I will battle for supremacy. I need tips, tricks, potential builds, help, or even a word of encouragement from my brother elementalists.
Help me roast him alive!

he will probably come at you with a zerker mesmer with shatter build. so get mistform or off-hand focus earth 5 and use it when needed, I prefer using Scepter-focus because it has alot of survivability and blocks and such. Its great against ranged attackers. Mesmers are mostly ranged so… also try and use fire aura when he uses the sword 2 of the mesmer.

Use D/D, keep constant movement (Burning Speed, Ride the Lightning) to avoid some phantasm’s attacks, save dodges when you notice illusions walking towards you, circle him to keep pressure and spam PbAoE to keep destroying whatever appears until he drops a bag of loot.

Pick up badges, repeat.

If he stealths and run, /chicken and yell “COWARD!”

Depends on what build he’s going. If he’s condition / confusion stack then you better find some good excuses to not show up.
If he’s some shatter / power build then just make sure you avoid the shatters, when the clones all run towards you.
If he’s a phantasm build just kill the phantasms.
If he’s tanky / retaliation or whatever build you can slowly drain his life and win by attrition.

Ray.2640:

Depends on what build he’s going. If he’s condition / confusion stack then you better find some good excuses to not show up.

Hahah, QFT – holy hell, is that build broken. I am very confident in my dueling ability, but I fought a Mesmer from my guild with that spec today before transferring and it was just plain stupid.

I am very envious of how Mesmers have so many viable builds (you list shatter, phantasm and the retaliation thing).

What? Confusion mesmer just do badly against elems with 30 in water (aka 90% of elems), pay attention to your confusion stack and cleanse it with one of your 5 (D/D) /6 (S/D) condition removal abilities (or just don’t attack if everything is on cd but honestly this never happens).

The F1 shatter or 2 sword will do no dmg, the other conditions (burning/bleed) will be negated easily by your healing and get cleansed each time you go into water, use phoenix, 5 dagger water or any cantrip for attack/defense purposes.
It might take some time since he will probably play a lot with staff 2, stealth, tp, F3, F4 to dodge everything you throw at him but his dmg in a condition build he should never ever be able to kill you so you will eventually survive him…

Berseker shatter mesmer, that’s another story…. But basically, duel him a lot until you can dodge 100% his sword 3 root when he is visible When you can do that, duel him until you can break stun + dodge his sword 3 root when he launches it from stealth at 100%. At this point you should win most fights.

I don’t think you’ve fought a truly competent Confusion Mesmer. I can drag the fight out indefinitely, but winning it is quite another matter.

get lightning flash for those ow kitten moments.

I don’t mean to be offensive or anything but you don’t bring much to the conversation just stating that confusion mesmers are broken in 1v1 and that i only fought bad mesmers.

Confusion is a mechanism that works great as AOE on zergs where people don’t analyse what’s happening and just try to make some dmg or maybe in 1v1 against a bad player that will spam all his skills during the 2-3s that confusion lasts. The dmg potential of 12 stacks of confusion is 1 cleanse away from 0.

The best amulet choice for a confusion/condition mesmer if the rabid amulet as the precision will allow him to stack more bleeding through fantasms, dodging the pistol phantasms is quite important as it will be the one that stacks the most bleeding. If you didn’t dodge then just cleanse it, the fantasm should be killed quite soon with your AOE so it’s very unlikely he will hit you twice (or he will just be shattered).

Anyway… Even with precision the direct damage part will be laughable because he will sit at around 1k2 power. I don’t play with the EA trait but with that, it takes you to 6 / 7 cleanses on your elem build so once again i don’t see how you couldn’t cleanse the condusion away. Moreover, when fighting against a mesmer, it’s really easy to tell when he stacks confusion on you (when all the clones dissapear :o) so even if you are not paying attention to your conditions bar you know when to cleanse it.

So OP, how is your friend playing?

Confusion in wvw IS broken. No good confusion mesmer hits you with all the stacks at once. They keep high uptime on ~4 stacks and can reapply it very quickly if you cleanse it. And it lasts a hell of a lot longer than 2-3 seconds. I don’t know why people say that like condition duration and rare veggie pizza don’t exist. A good confusion mesmer will not die to an ele. The fight will either stalemate, or the mesmer will win.

This topic is about spvp in the mist not wvw which is a lot less balanced.

As you can read in my post, i agree that confusion mesmers are good against brainless zergs that you can find in wvw. Rare veggie pizza do exist, so does Bowl of Lemongrass Poultry Soup. The confusion mesmer will never win vs an elem in WvW, because he has no burst to take down a low life elem (if he somehow manages to get him low hp) before he just leaves the fight and regen full hp.