Guild Wars 2

I would like to know if you guys feel the same.

I started Mesmer almost 2 years ago and since then I switched builds countless of times. The cycle looks like this:

Started with shatter at first attempt. Due to my low experience, it didn’t last much and changed to phantasms.

It started to feel right. After all AI builds are probably the easiest to master.

Than you realize the importance of conditions and moved towards different type of hybrids builds. “Wow” I said… and started wondering how it would be if I’d go all condi. “Great!” I said but after a while you miss the burst.

And went back to shatter. ”That’s what I am talking about!” I thought, but meta already moved. And it all started again…

Throw in a period where I enjoyed various types of lock down and interrupts, team support, FOTM perplexity runes when they first came out, and mix all this with various combinations Mesmer weapons offer, utilities and gear choice and I was easily changing builds every week or so.

The funny thing is that I was changing when it didn’t feel right. But I was changing also when things seemed too easy (aka boring). A video from Osi or a post from Chaos could have inspired me, or a badly lost duel…

So, I am not really sure what I am after. Probably I just want to strive towards perfection in the execution of the Mesmer profession regardless of the build/play style. And like many of you I do not like losing. I have already factored in a L2P issue. I consider myself average or above average, not the best for sure. But the game structure makes it so that you steam roll people for a couple of hours and that you find hard counters (or just better players) and you start questioning what build would have worked in that situation.

However, after all this changes I am still in the same spot: I just recently went back to conditions. I feel it is the most successful way to counter outnumbered fights, thieves, hambows and all that c.r.a.p. you get in pvp. But aside from the lack of burst it falls short in wvw due the lack of mobility.

I am not here to open a discussion on mobility. I just wanted to know what your experience is with the game and the Mesmer profession overall. Do you change play style so often or do you keep your Mesmer specific for a job and change profession altogether if you want let’s say be more tanky, bursty or good at wvw zergs?

But lastly… is there something wrong with me?

I apologize for the rant, but I needed someone to talk to

I’ve just gone in a straight line rather than a cycle.

Wall of text incoming… ;D

Initially as a noob I liked the idea of getting people to kill themselves – however having never played GW1 it took me a long time to understand how boons and conditions worked. For example the difference between reflection and retaliation, and how confusion works.

After messing around with different skills and traits, the first build I was happy with playing was glamour confusion, because as a noob I found it the easiest way of making people kill themselves, and also because the targeting system was completely alien to me – having never played an mmo before, and coming from a history of games with crosshairs, it took me a long time to get used to camera and targeting (and I still don’t like it very much). Really easy to just plonk down glamours and use staff + scepter/torch, than trying to play melee and use the targeting system correctly.

Also I was playing a ton of mass effect 3 multiplayer at the time, taking long breaks from gw2 because tbh that was more enjoyable – however there’s like 3 skills per character over there, so again getting used to the number of different things you need to look at on screen and do in gw2 took me a long time.

Anyway, stayed with glamour confusion for quite some time, slowly learning all the class mechanics – moved on to more melee focused builds – a bit of phantasm (I didn’t like the playstyle, so gave up on that quickly), trying out different weapon sets and skills, clone death builds, then moved on to stealth and using PU (mostly inspired from Seven Mirror’s playstyle).

Really liked the PU playstyle – felt very “mesmery” and deceptive – played around with different weapon sets and traits, although almost always with a power focus – never liked playing it with condition damage.
At first I tried to play with “slow” dps, but the more I played the more I liked the idea of bursting from stealth, or using stealth to confuse together with burst damage.

And then they made that final inane boon buff to PU…

Anyway, I continued with it for a while – drifted away from the game for months for different reasons – came back to it to find every man/woman and their pet is playing some form of PU…

Ok well I had begun to work in shatter traits and damage into the PU build I was using, because I wanted to do damage myself – this has always been the reason why I never liked phantasm builds, because I want to do the damage from my character, not from an AI summon. So the only use of illusions I found that would fulfill that purpose was as fuel for mind wrack.

Eventually I decided to switch from PU to IP, because I found I was relying less and less on the survivability and wanted more burst damage. I had dabbled around in shatter several times in the past, but never found myself enjoying the playstyle much – maybe because at the time it was all about emphasising the size of your… crit.

I wanted to make something elegant but with huge burst damage potential – so moved to using staff + sword/torch shatter. Really loved this playstyle – the stealth and misdirection coupled with heavy burst. However after a while I found that weapon set to be lacking in the ability to chase and control opponents. I love sword+torch too much to give it up, so reluctantly swapped staff for greatsword. I’ll be honest – before this I had never liked using the greatsword in any form of pvp – it just felt too awkward to use. But now I can’t put it down, it’s just so fun to play.

In addition to this, over the months I worked on slowly reducing toughness/vitality for more offensive stats, and have finally reached the comfortable feeling with almost full glass.

I will not put down sword torch for these puny little bugs – I will only relinquish that weapon set if they start deleting entire skills from it! :p

I honestly can’t see myself going backwards at the moment – the only thing that might make me change build is some completely new skills and traits, or making glamour/confusion viable again.

Thanks for sharing your experience Curunen. It seems you tested many builds too but eventually found your niche and it looks like you are a happy shatter menser now.

But don’t you have the feeling that shatter isn’t always viable? How do you deal when facing hard counters? Doesn’t the current condi meta frustrates you at times? Doesn’t it make you wanna change it and give an ‘eye for an eye’ to those pesky builds out there by running cheese builds too?

That’s a bit how I feel. I don’t mind working hard to achieve the result (aka satisfaction, thus fun) but as I said earlier I don’t like losing and sometimes I have the feeling that if I am running shatter and lose a match/duel/a 1v2, the outcome of the fight (regardless of what I could have done) wouldn’t have changed. This feeling is not tight to shatter builds only. The exception is PU conditions and that’s why I am back to it although is not nearly as fun kittenter, unfortunately.

Oh all the time.

Especially because I’m still using sword and torch – it’s like playing with a permanent handicap, nevermind blink bugging out and so on.

The minimal Condi cleanse is also a challenge – one of the reasons I carry a dedicated melandru zerker armour set, for when traveler runes aren’t necessary.

It’s a struggle every time I play – for example one fight in hotjoin with an engi yesterday, first blink failed, then ileap – cue knockdown and immobliise, have to burn MoR charge and decoy to move… total downhill battle from there being several skills down and no opportunity to recover. This actually happened twice in different ways with the same engi – because both blink and ileap failing spectacularly (ie the positioning and timing was crucial), which did cause me to rq because I knew if things had worked properly I had a kitten good chance of beating them both times. :/ I don’t rq often, but on that occasion the skill failures properly kittened me off.

But anyway mostly I take it as a good challenge – knowing I have to put twice as much effort in as the next class/build.
Was in a really masochistic mood last night in hotjoins – several matches in a row I went in with the weaker team which also happened to be 4v5 against us, with several good players stacked on the other side – basically no chance of winning the conquest, so I set myself little side challenges of taking on different opponents, or seeing how long I could troll point bunkers or last when outnumbered on and around point.

Lately I have been struggling with good guardians – ileap clones die instantly, leaving me with prestige, BF and auto attacks on the defensive weapon set. But with any class – relative to what build I’m facing I try to be better than what the expected outcome should be – even if it doesn’t mean killing them.

I’ll content myself with the fact that I’m having to achieve higher skill to be successful on one of our hardest builds with broken weapons – so when the buffs finally come I will be several steps ahead of my opponents.

Edit: The thing about why I continue to play shatter now is – I didn’t do the thing when first playing the game of “oh, lets just copy the build in that video because I want to be cool and faceroll” – I have arrived at this build through personal tweaking and discovery, right from the get go. As new weapons/skills/traits are added and changed, I’ll likely continue to evolve – but I suppose it’s just one of those things with my personality – for me in any form of rpg with class customisation it is about finding my niche, as you say. I have a very particular vision for how I like to play and I am not the sort of person who can play multiple builds at the same time, or who enjoys having many alts. I prefer refining one character into the ideal playstyle that best suits my personality.

Weirdly i went in a spiral with mesmer after i hit 80.

first i tried a phant type of set up

then i realized that their AI is kitten and they die too quickly

So i tried to make a build that didnt have to use/rely as much on … what i now consider.. the crippling and build limit defining class mechanic.

Never really found one that could get me back some kind of old Gw1 mesmer trollishness

still havent..

Later, sighed and tried a Shatter build and found it to be the most effective for the class.

Played around with Interrupt builds before it was cool and Flavor, left them shortly afterwards.

Tried conditions, gave up on that

tried PU condition later, and hated the playstyle

Moved back to Shatter

Stayed at Shatter

Added some condition damage

currently kitten ing around with MtD only for “fun” and still grab a zerk/pure shatter build for sPvP when i feel like giving a kitten and being helpful to my pug/team.

I started the game as a pure PVE player. I tried shatter for a bit, but between lack of skill and traits, it didn’t seem to work well. I saw Pyros post about a phantasm build, so I tried that for a while and it became the base.

Eventually, I started playing WvW and kept evolving the phantasm build around roaming (I played on Kaineng after the downfall from 2nd to last, so roaming was mostly what was available.) For some reason, I’ve never really been interested in PvP, but phantasm is a nice roaming Mesmer build.

I decided to experiment when the new grandmaster traits came out and tried to make a shatter torment build. But it was so slow in moving and in burst damage compared to what I had been using that I just couldn’t take it.

So back to phantasm Mesmer and experimenting with little tweaks (like trying Mirror or trying to make Arcane Thievery work as my main condi removal). It’s still a lot of fun for me in roaming, but I have to say I’m looking forward to whatever comes from the Skill Bar updates to give me a few more things to experiment with.

Started with the condition with staff with MrPrometheus his videos and could kite champions on my own it was really fun. Then after a few months i came back and the build suddenly performed bad (To this day i cannot figure out why). So i went to the standard lazy Kai build and just use it for PvE sometimes. Mostly play berserker ranger now.