Prismatic Understanding
target the real mesmer
watch your confusion stacks
pu builds are pretty slow. spam grenades if they go invis. being slow also means they’ll never catch you if you decide to disengage.
mesmers have limited condi removal. burst them down when null field ends or if they use arcane thievery.
shield offhand may be better. you already have rocket boots for burning.
I don’t play an engi in wvw, but even playing a thief, I have some trouble despite being able to chain Cloak and Dagger. PU mesmers are incredibly difficult to beat 1v1, since the phantasms do all the heavy lifting. That’s where their vulnerable, though. Phantasm skills are skills like any others. They will miss if the mesmer is blinded, and they will fail if the target is blocking. If you can learn to read your opponent, and learn the flow of a PU mesmer, you can use static shot, flash grenade and gear shield at the right times to turn the fight.
Also, stealth does not make you invulnerable, so if your opponent is invisible, swap to grenades and lay down some aoe. Or drop a glue shot right on top of the mesmer’s veil as soon as you see it, and follow with more soft CC and aoe. If you miss the veil initially, don’t worry, just wait about 2 seconds after the mesmer initially ran through the veil, and drop glue shot on the veil then. Lots of players will stick by the veil to run through a second time. If you can catch them immobilized before they reach it again, they’ll be forced to blow more cooldowns in order to survive.
Winning a fight with a PU mesmer is an endurance test. Your best chance is to start off strong, and pile on conditions before the stealthing spree begins. Conditions still hit for full damage during stealth, so let them work as hard for you as the phantams work for the mesmer.
Best way to deal with mesmers in general is to take advantage of phantasm AI. If you run away the clones/phantasms will clump up more easily so you can kill them, same if you can LOS around a structure or object of some kind.
But as with thieves mesmers can generally disengage if they choose to, especially if running PU. If they decide they can’t take you they’ll usually just get out of there until they get a better opportunity.
You may be interested in my thread.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/How-to-counter-Prismatic-Understanding
Please feel free to write your opinions as engineers.
Asuran Lys La
I mainly roam on my engy or mesmer. Often I’ll run a hybrid PU build when I roam on my mesmer. There is a lot of good advice in this thread on how to counter. The tip on veil is spot on. Veil is on a 90s timer, so anytime I drop it, I’m never more than a couple of feet away from it because I want to get 2 uses out of it before it goes on cooldown. Longer in stealth = more boons and more time for my phantasms/gs clones to put in work. Also, someone said PU mesmers are slow. However, I run centaur runes in my PU build so I have 100% swiftness uptime. The majority of PU builds these days are the condi ones that most likely will be slow though. So, kite all you can. I typically try to kite all mesmers and drop nades/bombs right behind, so the illusions die while chasing me. Also remember that illusions can’t jump off cliffs, so use the terrain to your advantage. Like all pets in the game, the pathing can be horrible at times. There’s nothing worse on my mesmer than when I finally get 3 phantasms out, and someone jumps off a 2ft ledge. Then I get to watch them try to run around half the map to get down to where ever the person ran off to.