Simplicity.7208
My only problem with shatter based mesmers is that they are squishy, although you can counteract that by planning out all your moves in advance. I know what a mesmer is capable of doing at its full potential, and I haven’t really had any trouble taking one down. Taking a tanky elementalist on the other hand just doesn’t sit well and neither side wins.
My point here is that a shatter mesmer is prone to dying much more readily than what I run on my elementalist against highly skilled opponents. At the same time, a mesmer can deliver a much higher burst. So there is a trade off between survivability and DPS, which is not really a suprise.
Although my DPS is lower than bursting mesmers, there are many ways you can enhance your bursting DPS as an elementalist. These could include pre-emptive might stacking, swapping weapons before combat starts, using underwater CC’s on land, FGS fire trail bursting with walls or teleports, exiting and swapping to arcane blast/wave.My biggest peeve is to be able to handle any situation I come across, or at least survive from it. Mesmers don’t offer as much flexibility as the elementalist when it comes to this vs. very high skilled opponents. Most of the time mesmers win due to a combination of skill, and a lack thereof skill from the opponent (you’ll see this when enemies wander around whacking clones when the real mesmer goes invisible). People just don’t know how to predict a mesmer’s location upon stealthing/unstealthing, or re-targeting to the real one.
My last peeve is being useful in a team fight. A D/D elementalist does a great job drawing aggro in large fights, can dish out incredibly large amounts of DPS using the fiery great sword, and can actually harass an escaping zerg army / cut it in half through cripples on the FGS 3rd ability. A mesmer can do similar feats using Glamour mass confusion on an army, but again doesn’t have the survivability that I like to handle any situation.
When a situation gets too tough, I leave the battle with ride the lightning. For a mesmer, when the battle gets too tough, you pray that someone doesn’t know how to recognize stealth/unstealthing right off the bat, or go all out and hope that someone doesn’t know how to dodge a spike.
I’d rather have squishy with an ability to burst than tanky with no ability to burst. Tankier builds tend to be kinder to newer players, then the better you get, the more glass cannon you can build (this is due to numerous things like understanding how to use your skills for defense instead of relying on your armor, understanding how enemies play, understanding other class skills, etc). With an Elementalist, there is no glass cannon build that isn’t total failure, so this progression doesn’t exist. You’re stuck with a tank and as your skill increases, you rely on turtling less and less without gaining the damage you’d normally gain from going more and more glass cannon. This creates a disparity between your skill and your damage output that causes you to get walled by certain classes.
As for using might to make your attacks hit harder, that only goes so far. My ele with a berserker amulet and 20 stacks of might on a burning enemy critting a fire grab will only deal a max of around 8k~12k. My mesmer with her shatter combo will deal 12k~20k+. If you find a glass cannon elementalist build that is actually playable, I’ll definitely hear you out, but this bunker nonsense is a big no-no for me. It lowers the skill cap which is never good.
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