Guild Wars 2

They tank WAY MORE ( higher base HP ) , they can do way more damage, they got illusions, they have way more viable builds ( 4-6 , vs 2-3 of elementalists ) , and they have some decent AOE damage.

They outclass elementalists in every aspect of the game. They have stealth, portals, illusions , They have retaliation ( damage goes back to source ), confusions, daze…
WEAPON SWAP… ANSWOME elite skills…. ( Turn ur enemy into MOA, mass invisibility for ur party, 2x fast all actions in a big field for 10 seconds… )

What do elementalists have?

I play both and I don’t get what you cry about. Both class have there strong and there weak sides. The Mesmer can survive a lot more then the ele but the ele has a lot ( and I know what I say) more raw dmg. Also the ele has the biggest arsenal of combo fields and his dodge rolle can be a finisher blast . The Mesmer on the other side can kitten with your brain that much that you don’t know what hit you.

Eles have 20 weapon skills, we trump Mesmer weapon swap. Sorry.

They can pack a lot of utility, but if you kill the phantasms most of their damage is gone for some seconds, allowing you to lay on the pain. With all of the Ele AoE, that’s an easy task. Don’t focus the Mesmer, dodge the phantasm attacks and kill them, THEN focus the Mesmer. If it’s a shatter Mesmer, dodge the shatter, or pop Mist Form. Phantams are unreliable vs. a player with a brain.

Higher base HP, sure, but an ele with 30 Water and Valk’s has 13k worth of healing potential in one CD rotation. It’s situational. In a situation you’re locked down, higher base HP is preferable. Bring stun/immoblize removals and grant yourself higher effective HP. I find I survive better than most Mesmers.

Mass stealth is meh. Ele elites sucks, though, so I’ll give you that one.

They get confusion, blah blah, we get 4 CCs on D/D. Shocking Aura, EQ, Updraft, Magnetic Grasp. D/D can be played for conditions or power, either way with a proper build it can do plenty of damage. It’s less bursty, and more about sustained damage, but it still has spike potential through Churning Earth and Fire Grasp.

We’re still more mobile generally. The only exception is portal. One a minute they can traverse half the map instantly, but it does require setup. We can get permaswiftness, and RTL has a short enough CD that you can use it to travel quickly enough.

Mesmers can send up their phantasms on keep walls. pain the kitten if your up there using sieges

They die in 3-5 hits, and only attack every like 7 seconds or something. Jump off, kill the phantasm. I agree, though, they are a pain. And nothing like running into an army of them. Had 3 Mesmers on the enemy team once – God, so much pain.

You do get that Mass invis only hits up to 5 tagets and that the same goes for time loop?

First, elementalists have 16 good weapon skills, if you exclude all our bad auto-attacks. More so if you trait your attunements to work like skills. A Mesmer has 14, if you include Shatters. The difference is not that big.

Second, almost any professions’ skills do twice as much as the elementalist’s skills. A Mesmer’s blurred Frenzy puts you invulnerable while bursting down your target every 10s. A D/ F elementalist would need to be in earth, activate Obsidian Flesh, switch to fire, and cast Drake’s Breath for a similar effect, and O.F has a high recharge, and this would only work if both attunements were free of their cooldown.

Third, mesmers are stronger than us at spamming auto-attacks. do you see how their GW pink beam hits us for? Imagine that with phantasms and with shatters. Oh sure, you can clow out the recharges to cast your aoe skills, but they’ll just shatter them at that moment, or put new ones out while you’re left out of your big skills and they’re HP is still at max (and while they’re still damaging you with their normal skills).

Forth, mesmers have elite skills. You know, elite-like-I-click-on-them-and-then-I-win skills.

We do have better AoE generally, and our best builds (water traited for countless regeneration + countless condition removal + stronger cantrips + glyph of water regeneration + rune of dwayna for longer and more regeneration, which in turn is more condition removal + high healing + high toughness + high condition damage) can usually make us last so long, that we stand a chance at killing anything that is not overly-defensive overtime.

@Diogo:
1. So, why are the ele autoattacks excluded and the mesmer included? Last I checked, mesmers don;t have any special skills there…
2. You know how the mesmer sword2 kind of…ermmm…doesn;t let you move during the cast, right? If you are getting killed by it, try moving 2 steps to the left next time. It also requires the mesmer to be using a sword to begin with.
3. GW pink beam does less dmg the closer you are to the mesmer wink~wink And the dmg is compearble to air scpeter auotoattack. Also, you do realise that phantasms and clones are skills. That have cooldowns. Right? Especially phantasms.
4. Name one?

Generally, the classes are simply different. The only aspect mesmer is better at is downed state. But people keeping saying ele’s are getting a better one for Christmas(whenever Christmas in Tyria might be). For the rest, they simply play different and excell/fail at different things.

elementalists have 16 good weapon skills, if you exclude all our bad auto-attacks

Stoning is actually quite useful to keep your opponent weakened and the air attack can be nice to hit multiple clones and/or proc on-crit bonusses multiple times. So I disagree there. Also, the glyphs change depending on attunement, meaning each equipped glyph counts as 4 skills. So your estimate is a bit off. 16+1+1+(4*amount of glyphs)=at least 21 skills.

Staff Ele’s are the ultimate counter to Mesmers. There are a ton of great AoE options on staff. Use them. Watch illusions die instantly. Then watch Mesmer die from bleeds and burns.

I have played both… so let me get my 2 cents in.

Right now the only thing mesmers have going for them is the simple fact that the clones/phantasms keep the agro off the mesmer.

thier aoe sux and.. for example…

i went to orr last week. The penitent waypoint events (three total 2 at one end of tunnel one at the other) i could not get a single kill.

one event was camped by a warrior bot, 4 ranger bots and a guardian bot.

the event on the lower hill on the other end of the tunnel was camped by 3 engineer bots with tons of turrets, an elementalist (afk runnning against wall only popping his elemental) and 2 more ranger bots..

The spider event was camped by 2 guardian bots, a warrior bot and 4 more ranger bots.

The point is.. as messer.. it was impossible for me to get any kills. When i would pop berserker, he would appear and because the target died so fast, disappear without hitting anything. Same goes for the rest of my clones etc. The only way i could tag stuff, if i was lucky, was to pop down staff 5 aoe and pray.

My elementalist could at least drop aoes and get a few kills here and there.

Now… with that said… Let me say that i like elementalist, but…. they need more defense. I have tried every “defensive” build including water and earth.. and anything my level or above kills me in 1-2 hits simply because elems are a glass cannon… always will be because of the class design.

This is really the only difference in elem vs mesmer. Mesmer doesnt die ( they are just as squishy if not more squishy than elem) because thier clones, phantasms keep stuff from hittin them. The trade off is that mesmers do horrid damage and have NO aoe skills to speak of other than berserker, and to do ANY good aoe, you have to keep three berserkers up spinning… which is virtually impossible unless its on a world boss like the dragon in sparkfly fin.

if you get killed by them in WvW then its basically your fault for losing track of the real one. They are 1 -2 shot kills in WvW. Elementalists are about the same.. 1-2 shot kills.. but they have better run and evasion skills.

2 fixes they need.. and im sure everyone will agree..

Elem need more toughness so that they arent completely glass cannons, even if this means a slight reduction in aoe skills or dps.. i mean come on.. you can throw down how many aoes? flame aoe, signet aoe, flamesword aoe, earth has two aoes, water aoe, air aoe and if your asura poison aoe… im sure i missed one.. but you get the point.. all of these down at once is a lil OP.

mesmers do great at surviving, but to make them viable at events etc.. they need some serious AOE love.. and it wouldn’t hurt to make thier damage a lil less dependant on having 3 berserkers etc up to be competitive.

1. Elementalist’s auto-attacks are generally weak, with one exception or another. In comparison, a sword mesmer is applying vulnerability and stripping boons while dealing good aoe melee damage, or hitting hard and fast at a distance, or spamming conditions while powering up their phantasms.
2. Sword #2 was a random example. It can be countered? Yes, but so can elementalist’s skills, or any other skill in the game, so it’s a moot point. The fact stands that most elementalist’s skills are simpler and more linear than other professions’ skills, and what usually a normal profession can make with a single skill, an elementalist would require two.
3. There are easy means to reduce the recharge of phantasms.
4. Moa Bird basically makes you an easy kill unless you run/ dodge away forever until it ends. Time Warp gives an overpowered boon to all allies in the field for 10 seconds with no drawback. It literally makes an entire team deal twice the damage while still applying chaos armor and confuse like mad.

If the mesmer is only better than us at downed state, then I wonder why spvp is filled with mesmers and elementalists are rarely seen. The argument that eles are “hard to play” applies to mesmers too, we’re not talking exactly about warriors, but two of the most complex professions of GW2.

Current TPvP Team

Mesmer
Guardian
Necro
2x Thief or Thief / Engi / Warrior

Nuff said.

@Diogo

Mesmer rarely, if ever, use all of their shatters. They use 2 if they are any good. No reason to waste illusions on daze when the 4-5k damage from a quadruple shatter is better. The only other one is the Distortion one. Feel free to apply your own rules to the Mesmer. Sword AA is not why it’s used, and if you’ve ever fought a Mesmer using a Sword, you’ll know they stun, and go for a Blurred Frenzy. Ignore Sword AA, too. Scepter AA is garbage and has been since they removed the confusion on it. Ignore that one.

Of course every other class’ weapon skills can do twice as much – they have half of our weapon skills. This can be a gift, if you choose to see it that way. A Mesmer could blow Blurred Frenzy to stop a spike, but now their offensive skill is on CD. Us having them divided, we have skills to stop or heal over burst, and don’t use up offensive power by utilizing them.

Ele elites sucks. We know. Again, I’ll give you this one.

I CC phantasms/clones and kill them. Bam, no threat from shatters, and now the real Mesmer is easy to spot, oh and no Phantasm damage for a few seconds.

I don’t use Dwayna’s, but I do use Valk’s amulet. It packs plenty of power, and with Zephyr’s Boon you get permafury for crit. I don’t see a problem here. I have plenty of staying power, support, and killing power (minus bunkers, which btw a good bunker doesn’t die to a Mesmer either). Can crit Fire Grabs and Churning Earths for 5k average, which is plenty. The rest is sustained AoE damage.

Elementalists require higher skill caps, but we can easily go toe-to-toe with a Mesmer. Aky, on the Guru forums, has a very nice duel video with Tsunkir – a shatter Mesmer. Just because our classes our different doesn’t mean one is better than the other.

@Razarei

Any of the top teams still left have dropped Thieves from their roster, and many are in fact running Eles and have been for a while. Plenty of streams still showing this.

Eles aren’t fine. We need bug fixes, animation tweaks, and possibly CD tweaks, new elites, reworks on conjures and glyphs, and some traits need to be reworked (like the entire fire line). But, we can still hold our own with a good build and a good player.

I know a good elementalist build can still hold very well, I think our water traits are very powerful (I use dwayna’s rune because it improves the regeneration from healing glyph and traited cantrips, and because it gives extra regeneration, which synergies with water’s grandmaster trait. The amulet I use is the one that gives healing, toughness and condition damage).

In theory, I can understand the bless of having more but simpler skills. When a skill can function in two different ways, you’ll blow off their cooldown for only one of them, sure. But elementalists’ skills have really huge cooldowns, and casting several of them takes twice the time to cast for the whole effect (except for instant-casting spells).

4-6 builds for Mesmer? then I must be playing it wrong O_o

1. Illusions are great…but they are not be all end all. They rarely hold aggro as much as people think they do, but it is a benefit when they do.

2. Weaponswap, I fail to see how having 2 weapons is soooo much better than having a ton of abilities at your disposal…not that weaponswap is bad mind you, just how is Ele’s set up bad?

3. For Elites, Yes, MOA is good…for PvP “mostly”, Time Warp is great, long CD, Mass invis can be very useful, in specific cases…even longer CD. Our Elites are good, but only in very specific situation. (not that I am saying they are bad just not “ZOMG ELE SUCKS, MES IS BETTER”)

4. No matter what, Ele and Mes are two different classes with two different playstyles. Comparing them is pointless.

trueanimus.4085:

I have played both… so let me get my 2 cents in.

Right now the only thing mesmers have going for them is the simple fact that the clones/phantasms keep the agro off the mesmer.

thier aoe sux and.. for example…

i went to orr last week. The penitent waypoint events (three total 2 at one end of tunnel one at the other) i could not get a single kill.

As for Mesmer having bad AOE…I’m sorry but that’s simply not true. I have not gotten anything less than Gold in Orr, even while running the Karma racetrack…our AOE isn’t “quite” as effective, or easy to set-up/use as other classes…but Shatters do more than enough damage when used properly. These events were packed and had Nade spam Engi’s, HB warrior’s, Clusterbomb spam Thieves, Barraging Rangers, ect…..also

Animosity.5231:

@Diogo

Mesmer rarely, if ever, use all of their shatters. They use 2 if they are any good. No reason to waste illusions on daze when the 4-5k damage from a quadruple shatter is better. The only other one is the Distortion one.

Diversion, makes sense it’s not used as much. Having an extra interrupt is always nice though when needed.

Distortion, This one is yet again a specific time when used.

These two aren’t used as much because they are reliant on certain situations, rather than pure DPS or Confusion stacking.

hate topics like this.. it all comes down to the players and their builds not the class.. i have 2 dps ele builds tht i use in tpvp.. one with 4k attack (when in combat stacking and keeping the might stacks too :P) and one with just 3k attack.. first one 1 vs 1 mesmers are hard as they can cc me to death… but seond build can’t lose 1 vs 1.. and dependin on the players 2 vs 1..

This is the sad truth,my mains are ele and mesmer and honestly i prefer the ele but…

With my mesmer in wvw when i see a ele alone i seeing a dolyak with less hp instead.

I just can’t imagine a PRO mesmer loosing to a elementalist on 1×1 i would love to be proven wrong.

I wish people would stop saying ele are glass cannons because frankly they’re not, our glass cannon builds aren’t viable in tPvP and if you really are having trouble surviving try traiting in water/earth. It sounds like Diogo either uses my exact build or something similar. :P

Now I’m not saying I’m pro (by any means I’m not) nor can I vouch for the opponents skill however I did manage on my staff ele to win a 2v1 one being a mesmer the other an ele, I downed the ele twice I didn’t get the finish on him the 1st time but the second time I did and I made the mesmer quit the game after I killed the ele and made the mesmer retreat (then left the game) then the ele left the game. Now yeah our burst damage isn’t great because we have to heavily invest that we can’t really have many defensive options unlike other classes that only have to press one button and they have more burst than us however we do have more sustained damage and a lot more CC.

So please stop comparing Ele to other classes, really, the ele is nothing like the other classes, I guess the Ele is an acquired taste it seems?
Oh and by the by, Mesmers excel in 1v1s, try not to 1v1 them it is not cowardly in fact its a better judgement as if you can’t beat them you will only feed points to them and really you should be playing to win.

Razarei.2809:

Current TPvP Team

Mesmer
Guardian
Necro
2x Thief or Thief / Engi / Warrior

Nuff said.

Yay Razarei! I missed you

Anyway from my PvE experience I found my mesmer to be dying significantly less than my ele which is awesome! I really had little trouble with personal story missions, where my ele would hit the dirt pretty hard. Also becoming downed is much less of an issue with my mesmer. When I down with my ele, I pray that there is a low hp monster lying around, otherwise being downed is just a death sentence. With my mesmer, I managed to kill a full health monster two levels above me and rally… I was pretty impressed by that. I just wish eles had a #2 downed skill that was actually useful.

However, I do think that my ele has a much better time receiving loot and obtaining high medal rewards. Surviving is tougher, but I think in PvE at least, my ele has it slightly better for this reason.

I have both at 80.
Mesmer is much more defensive.
Ele had amazing speed and damage. (Mesmer is simply awful at tagging / getting loot bags.)

lightning whip seems to take out the illusions pretty fast.

Meh I may only play the Ele but I can def say the nerffing of the Ele’s AoE’s to just hit 5 targets really sucks, while the Mezzy gets to keep it’s Mass movable AoE Stealth, added to that the WR which is predominate melee in class out damages the Ele by 3×.
Sadly Arena net have made the Ele almost unplayable and as far as I’m aware is the only class that can not switch weapons mid fight

For those saying "Mesmer AoE is fine because i gets lots of gold medals " you’re misunderstanding the problem a lot of us have.

Our complaints in Dynamic events stem from tagging mobs for loot. For example my necro generally rakes in 5 times as much loot as my mesmer.

Now this is not to say that iBerserker doesn’t hit like a bus, or that shatters don’t hit plenty hard as well, it just isn’t feasible to use these in some events where mobs die within a second of their spawn. Events scaling better would solve this issue however, we don’t need our kit to be stronger.

Again, Mesmer AoE and Dynamic event complaints are not a numbers/ gold medal problem. They are a mob tagging problem. If you want to get a good amount of loot in these events 30 points in illusions is practically mandatory. Even then you won’t be getting as much loot as other professions.