Guild Wars 2

@Jackums Not a single person who posted defended anet or is happy with Mesmer in its current state. Some people just still enjoy playing the class despite its current state.

@Azo You’re right. I’m talking more from personal experience than objectively, but I don’t feel that because of the Mesmers current state that all the time spent on it was wasted. I’m pretty sure all of us here has had some awesome/memorable moments with the class. You know how anet works with their rollercoaster balancing though, I doubt we’ll be down forever. (says the guy who only plays like 3 hours a week x.x)

@Blackdevil you know when the ileap nerf hit, you were the first person I thought of. Lord knows how many hundreds of Mesmer also fell off due to that stupidity and I really hope that prompts some quick changes. (Its a small hope, but…) Come join us in PvP? The water here is only 67% kittened in… A vast improvement over WvW and PvE!

Edit: Nerf forum censorship plz. Urine is not a cuss. =/

Not sure if rolecoaster, or just infinite pit of doom.

I find this so called “competitive tournament” we have in Guild Wars 2 to be extremely boring. Capture the Points.. that’s all they can give us after a years time. Obviously not everyone feels the same way, but I feel that CtP is really boring to play, and it’s even more boring to watch. Anyways;

You have a roamer that can bring people with them using Portal. That’s.. pretty much it. The only real benefit of having a Mesmer in the team right there. The disadvantages is that you are taking a profession that does inferior damage to that of a different roamer. The ability for the profession to teleport up on ledges isn’t unique to the class either, and can be done more frequently with a Thief using a Shortbow, which makes that class more reliable for going between points. Also, Thief has superior damage and can escape more easily if needed, to avoid being put out of the match for periods of time. You know what, use a Thief as a roamer. Not a Mesmer, you’re doing your team a favor.

I love the Mesmer. But I ain’t blind to the fact that we are limited in our use. The only reason I stick with the profession is because it’s an active one. I dodge around a lot more, constantly swap back and forth between weapon sets, utilize my blocks and so on forth. It’s a fun profession, but that doesn’t mean we’re not somewhat dead weight in practically all game modes. Whatever we can do, someone else can more or less do, while still performing far better at say.. damage.

The only unique thing we really have, is Portal, which is extremely limited in its use. It’s a 90 seconds to cooldown skill, with a 10 second window once activated.. it’s not that amazing. In PvE, it’s only good for helping people who are terrible at jumping. That’s pretty much it. In WvW, you use it to get people who are slow at getting into a structure that was captured by the enemy. Oh joy, how fun. I get to hide and stand still in a spot/run to get slowpokes, while my friends are fighting, and you know.. have fun. In sPvP you can use it to get between points and also bring allies with you, that’s pretty decent, but not a must in any way or shape. It still relies on not being on cooldown at the right moments, and a minute and thirty seconds is a pretty long time.

Veil.. eh.. it’s alright. Short duration stealth to avoid being targeted right before a clash. People know roughly where you are anyways, it’s not that amazing. Some people utilize it, but it’s rarely that effective. It’s more useful to stealth up your harassers/roamers using some thieves with Shortbows, blasting their own field(s). I guess it’s nice to have if you run Prismatic Understanding, another stealth to get Regen, Aegis and Protection from.

Is the profession broken, no, but is it viable compared to other professions, not really, and that’s the problem. Why take a Mesmer when another profession can perform better in something that people will value highly, damage, when the Mesmer barely bring anything to the table. We used to be a pretty desired profession, but then we got hit by the nerf bat.. over, and over, and over. It wouldn’t have been so bad, if they had at least resolved one or two of the thirty odd bugs our profession has.. but nope, they’ll just go and “fix” things that nobody complains about instead.

Notimik.3589:

Blackdevil/doiid what build type did they buf?

The ones that are still useless/underpowered, aka: mantra builds, dps shatter in raid, boon spammer/share and condition shatter.

@ Chaos
I guess I could always do that. I’ll be on a 1.5month break soon due vacation and boreness of game. Dry Top-ing all the way at the moment lol. Lead the pugs to t5! #epicpve

Azo.5860:

ask every high end tpvp mermers ``If u play another class with same skillfullness, would u be better efficient to your team``

and if it is Yes so there is something wrong with class then..

Played as mesmer with team skills like portal, roamed between our 2 points, shattered boons when neaded, almost didn’t die (but feed thieves ofc) – stabel 97% at solo leaderboards.
Now play with another classes with 2 times less pains and as result – top 200.
So mesmer – high risk, lowest rewad?

Absconditus.6804:

…

I enjoyed reading your feedback, and you’ve summed up all your points well.

And thanks to all the constructive feedbacks in this thread, there are some well thought-out responses to the current state of Mesmers in the meta.

All the known facts and issues brought up here should help contributing with every workable fixes and changes for the better. I don’t know how much harder we need to try to get developers to acknowledge our feedbacks and to address the known issues. When we have taken all the feedbacks about the Mesmer in comparison to other professions on every sub forums of this site, the vast majority of feedbacks given by our player base have shown that the Mesmer is lacking on various different grounds. In order to get Mesmers back to its game, many drastic improvements from the core mechanics (AI and summon Illusions) to our Traits system (more useful traits and synergies) will need to be implemented in a foreseeable near future.

Anyone argues that certain professions fits in the “top tier” category is simply implying that we have a profession imbalance issue. This is the least we want in the game, besides bugs and technical issues. The long term goal for developers to aim for is always making sure that all professions should see equally strong fit for all game modes (Open world PvE, Dungeons, sPvP, and WvW) – This is where the Mesmer is currently falling short at the moment. The general consensus for the top 3 profession in PvX now are the following, and they’re in no particular order: Warriors, Guardians, and arguably the Elementalists in this bracket.

So i count 2 (+1 thief/mesmer)… which is more than 1 ranger… that being said never say mesmer is useless. Ranger is in spvp unless home point. But some fulfill the role better. And they do poorly pve wise and spvp wise.

Never say something mesmer is bad when there is worst…

I always thought a good spirit or trap ranger makes a good bunker. Not as well as guardian/warrior but still does a decent job. Anyone want to enlighten me :O?

Currently mesmer tPvP meta (GS/Staff) is more about boon strip/damage from range. Portal is good for getting around but I find mesmer having hard time in hold points alone. Or we could discard point capture and play PU to harrass people and bring number advantage. Both seems to be very niche roles and limited options.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

I always thought a good spirit or trap ranger makes a good bunker. Not as well as guardian/warrior but still does a decent job. Anyone want to enlighten me :O?

Currently mesmer tPvP meta (GS/Staff) is more about boon strip/damage from range. Portal is good for getting around but I find mesmer having hard time in hold points alone. Or we could discard point capture and play PU to harrass people and bring number advantage. Both seems to be very niche roles and limited options.

Traps ranger is nothing close to a bunker and is not viable at all, hasn’t been for a long time , i think probably a year now.

Spirit ranger is decent at bunkering a point, but it’s more a team role spec than anything and is getting replaced more by warrior and d/d ele with celestial , much tankier and more dmg and more boon support (ele) and team support overall. Besides, the only rsn spirit ranger is brought now is because of the elite which can be interrupted, so there’s really no point anymore because good teams know to interrupt the res except the on death res, which is unreliable because it relies on them killing it after you’ve used your active, which they’ll probably target down the spirit elite first in a team battle anyway so it all becomes irrelevant.

Ranger is just not viable anymore.

Mesmer is almost more viable right now than ranger is, and it’s not THAT viable either but it has a few good roles but i’d say theyre pretty much the same because they both only fill 1 niche role for their team in their own respective way, mainly portal plays with a team that knows good rotation with portal and can play to it and boon stripping to completely annihilate a mid battle with guardian / d/d ele (which is in the meta, so mesmers roles became more essential with this celestial patch). Mesmer is much more viable now because of that, might is what makes d/d ele strong in battles and boon sustain , if it’s constantly getting stripped. It takes them out of the equation. Necros would be able to but they don’t have the escapes/invis sustain that mesmers have (another reason why you see only 1 necro in the voting panel too).

I’d say at this point in the game , simply because celestial d/d ele – warrior and guardian are in the meta pretty heavily , mesmers role became much more useful. Eliminating boons from those very 3 classes destroys them in a group setting.

Also, setting up burst on a target with ~20 vuln is easy to do with mesmer. Helseth does this alot in group encounters with sizer (thief)/rom(warrior). Apply a -20% dmg mitigation and immediately the thief went from a less dmg acro thief to basically a thief with 30 in crit strikes in terms of damage , also rom’s eviscerates hit for a considerable more amount of dmg once this is applied. They do this alot in team plays.

It’s how you play your mesmer’s advantages. They can’t bunk points of course not, but they dominate in team fights if played correctly and they can allow for great portal play rotations if played right.

Pretty much in TOP TIER tPvP the tier goes like this:

Tier 1: Engi, Ele, War
Tier 2: Guard, Necro, Thief
Tier 3: Mesmer, Ranger

Boon strip is great and all – the thing that bothers me is, of you don’t play that exact build, you’re not helping.

Unlike some other classes which can choose from several builds, all of which can be accommodated in team play.

With Mesmer it’s play 4/4/0/0/6, most likely with gs+staff and use portal… or gtfo.

Mesmer is such a neat class, have 2 lvl 80 mesmers >.> quit them though when I started doing dungeons and wvw because they’re really lackluster. The problem it seems is the devs that made the class no longer work for the company and the new devs have zero clue how to make them work so bugs and problems show up all the time. Really it’s a broken class that as time goes on maybe just taken out or just admitted nothing will change for it.

Mesmer is one class that requires a high skill cap to play well. The two Mesmers representing are two of the highest skilled, and best, players in the game.

Benjamin.8237:

Mesmer is one class that requires a high skill cap to play well. The two Mesmers representing are two of the highest skilled, and best, players in the game.

Just a note…supcutie won’t be playing Mesmer. This is common knowledge, he plays thie in tournaments now.

Curunen.8729:

Boon strip is great and all – the thing that bothers me is, of you don’t play that exact build, you’re not helping.

Unlike some other classes which can choose from several builds, all of which can be accommodated in team play.

With Mesmer it’s play 4/4/0/0/6, most likely with gs+staff and use portal… or gtfo.

One thing to note though is that only 2 classes at the moment in pvp that are able to fill multiple roles in top tier is elementalist and warrior and have multiple viable builds for those roles.

Every other class though suffers the same as mesmer. That’s an issue moreso with the pvp conquest system and balance rather the limitation of mesmer.

If you play guardian, engi, necro, ranger, thief, mesmer – you may be able to adjust traits a little bit here and there, but your role will always be the same and for the most part the utilities will usually be the same which is essentially the same as having only one build that works in reality. This is also why only a few builds work for those classes in top tier (with ranger and mesmer being exceptions, they really only have 1 viable build in top tier – spirit and shatter). This is, again an issue with the nature of gw2 pvp that will never be changed.

Idk why thief seems the way to go for far point assaulter. I mean a zerker phantasm mesmer deals as much pressure from a safe distance and is as much deceptive and can brings things thief doesnt provide. Just my tought.

Klonko.8341:

Idk why thief seems the way to go for far point assaulter. I mean a zerker phantasm mesmer deals as much pressure from a safe distance and is as much deceptive and can brings things thief doesnt provide. Just my tought.

Because phantasm mesmers have poor mobility and will crumble instantly when the fight becomes a 1v2.

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

I would argue that Blink is an ooc mobility skill.

Fay.2357:

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

Portal… and for 1vs2 thief or mesmer are enough deceptive to survive that. And in Spvp its rare you are OOC unless you killed your opponent. The map is so small…

frifox.5283:

I would argue that Blink is an ooc mobility skill.

Sorta. It’s important to have it as in-combat, to escape sticky situations. It’s ooc mobility on some maps, like khylo and temple though.

Klonko.8341:

Fay.2357:

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

Portal… and for 1vs2 thief or mesmer are enough deceptive to survive that. And in Spvp its rare you are OOC unless you killed your opponent. The map is so small…

I don’t think you understand what ooc mobility means, despite me having stated what it was -_-.

Portal is once every 90 seconds….ok I guess?

Phantasm mesmer can’t do 1v2. The mechanics cause it to immediately fall apart in anything other than a 1v1. You seem to have this odd perception that ‘mesmers and thieves are much deceptive’…not really sure what you mean by that unless you’re talking about a PU build.

Fay.2357:

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

Agreed, shortbow on thief allows them to assault another point and be back to help a mid fight in a matter of 5-10 seconds with sstep and #5 shortbow if necessary. It also allows them to decap while nobody is there quickly and efficiently and get out quickly and efficiently if in the event one of their players makes it back and gets an edge on you. Thieves are the best point assaulters in the game due to that mobility.

Because initiative system exists and #5 exists on the shortbow for thief, and im not even including the areas where you can blink to spots you would have to go all the way around on a normal class, it will always be the best mobile point assaulter. Yea you have blink on mesmer, but to be honest that’s used more defensively in combat and reserved for that than exploiting it for mobility in terms of point assaulting.

Mesmer needs to actually commit to a specific event whether point assaulting or team fights unless they have portal rdy, which goes on a high cooldown after used so it’s a one time thing and probably better used once you’ve actually gotten a point anyway with a portal alrdy setup at far / home to help defend home or assault far.

Phase retreat, blink and portal are the only true three reliable land mobility skills available, which can all be used in or out of combat.

Out of those, blink is usually 30s for many builds, portal is 3 times that and phase retreat is only available if you use the staff.

As said, distortion is not mobility, stealth is not mobility – at best a method of positional advantage, stun breaks are not mobility, ileap… well we all know how good that is for “mobility”.

In what way can this ever compare to thief mobility?

If you said underwater, then yes I can get behind that – feigned surge and slipstream, especially traited, plus portal can allow you to escape almost anything underwater. Unfortunately that’s not very useful outside of wvw.

blitzkrieg.2451:

Curunen.8729:

Boon strip is great and all – the thing that bothers me is, of you don’t play that exact build, you’re not helping.

Unlike some other classes which can choose from several builds, all of which can be accommodated in team play.

With Mesmer it’s play 4/4/0/0/6, most likely with gs+staff and use portal… or gtfo.

One thing to note though is that only 2 classes at the moment in pvp that are able to fill multiple roles in top tier is elementalist and warrior and have multiple viable builds for those roles.

Every other class though suffers the same as mesmer. That’s an issue moreso with the pvp conquest system and balance rather the limitation of mesmer.

If you play guardian, engi, necro, ranger, thief, mesmer – you may be able to adjust traits a little bit here and there, but your role will always be the same and for the most part the utilities will usually be the same which is essentially the same as having only one build that works in reality. This is also why only a few builds work for those classes in top tier (with ranger and mesmer being exceptions, they really only have 1 viable build in top tier – spirit and shatter). This is, again an issue with the nature of gw2 pvp that will never be changed.

Fair enough, it is a core problem with gw2 pvp structure.

I have not played all the classes to a good skill level, so my judgement on builds available is not through experience but just going by things I’ve read/watched and fought against – in my mind I thought engi, ranger and thief at least had the choice of different weapon sets and build specifics – some obviously better than others but still viable – compared to mesmer with fixed weapon choice, fixed trait choice, fixed gear choice, and largely fixed utility choice.

I don’t know enough about necro to comment on that, being the only class I have not played, although I am aware it is in a bad position in the pvp game state.

Curunen.8729:

blitzkrieg.2451:

Curunen.8729:

Boon strip is great and all – the thing that bothers me is, of you don’t play that exact build, you’re not helping.

Unlike some other classes which can choose from several builds, all of which can be accommodated in team play.

With Mesmer it’s play 4/4/0/0/6, most likely with gs+staff and use portal… or gtfo.

One thing to note though is that only 2 classes at the moment in pvp that are able to fill multiple roles in top tier is elementalist and warrior and have multiple viable builds for those roles.

Every other class though suffers the same as mesmer. That’s an issue moreso with the pvp conquest system and balance rather the limitation of mesmer.

If you play guardian, engi, necro, ranger, thief, mesmer – you may be able to adjust traits a little bit here and there, but your role will always be the same and for the most part the utilities will usually be the same which is essentially the same as having only one build that works in reality. This is also why only a few builds work for those classes in top tier (with ranger and mesmer being exceptions, they really only have 1 viable build in top tier – spirit and shatter). This is, again an issue with the nature of gw2 pvp that will never be changed.

Fair enough, it is a core problem with gw2 pvp structure.

I have not played all the classes to a good skill level, so my judgement on builds available is not through experience but just going by things I’ve read/watched and fought against – in my mind I thought engi, ranger and thief at least had the choice of different weapon sets and build specifics – some obviously better than others but still viable – compared to mesmer with fixed weapon choice, fixed trait choice, fixed gear choice, and largely fixed utility choice.

I don’t know enough about necro to comment on that, being the only class I have not played, although I am aware it is in a bad position in the pvp game state.

Yea true, I think in terms of build mesmer is the only one that literally needs to run the same utilities and same exact traits for tPvP viability, I’d say the closest is ranger but even ranger can switch up their utilities and still be semi-viable including weapon sets (you can run short bow sword dagger or you can run axe/d sword/t , those are really the 2 combinations that work best). Every other class though may have to run the same meta builds around their role, but they atleast have some more flexibility around traits to accomodate a playstyle within that role and diff utilities with some minor exceptions (warrior – zerker stance, necro corrupt boon, etc). Mesmer literally has none atm.

problem with mesmer is its very very weak in the low lvls

it lacks in dps it have very low deff

your clones most of them do zero damage
if 1 of the clones do damage its very high but its very slow in atacking

if it atacks and you need to w8 a long time when it atacks again

in that time the mobs kill you ore kill your clones fast

you can easy see it vs a eng he summon all his turrest

you summon all your clones
who is faster ??

the turrents atack much faster and is with a good trait build its stronger to

i test it my self with a eng first vs a NPC mesmer ad the mist area
i kill him in a few seconds

also in the edge of the mist mesmer was no match for me
my turrents rip him apart and i use duel guns to to do alot of DOT damage
bleeding and poision

the mesmer clones are just to slow
only class that i had trouble was guardian they sure make it a power house now

i think the DEV rely need to start over with the mesmer class its not a good class atm

sorry for my bad english

Jurica.1742:

Then what the hell are you doing on these forums if it’s all in such crap?
I’m sick of all this forum whining!
This class is a lot of fun and it can still work very well, just because you may not like that people like the class because of veil or some other kitten doesn’t mean the class is kitten. Don’t play it if you don’t like and stop posting here.
All this whining is counterproductive. People won’t play mesmer because everyone on forums says the class is kitten, the amount of mesmers will decrease and Anet will just stop caring about mesmer.

Actually, the Mesmer part if the forum used to be positive and solution oriented. Whenever a change was implemented, people would come up with solutions and new ideas.

I do not blame the change of atmosphere on the people posting here. Many of them are the same after all. Many of them have massive experience with the Mesmer class in one or more areas of the game.

I am not one of those people. I am no dungeon expert, I am not dedicated to WvW although I do roam there as a shatter Mesmer occasionally.
I am not on the leaderboards as I am taking a break and even when I was there: I was ranked on my thief as a friend of mines in all honesty is a better Mesmer than I am.

Regardless: I understand the frustration and the change of atmosphere. The class has not been in a good spot for a while now and I have seen no indication of that changing. I do think anet cares, I just don’t think they understand or even see the problems the class is facing.

Personally, I did as you suggest and made thief my main instead. It is not that I never play my Mesmer because I certainly do. On a thief however, the success or failure seems to come down to my own experience with the class or lack thereof.
To me, it does not feel like The Mesmer have that potential atm.

I see a lot of mesmers in hot join. But there’s really no variety among the mesmer builds. Same ole shatter/condition spam.
Even for my mes I have to use a PU variant spec and a disabling spec in pvp.