Guild Wars 2

That don’t revolve around shatter. I’ve tried doing phantasms and super gc mantra, but honestly I keep coming back to shatter builds because nothing else can come close… at the same time I find it boring as hell to have all my utilities gear toward my one trick. I guess it’s less a question and more of a complaint that we’ve been pigeonholed like many other classes in this game. Confusion builds are easily countered, and I can’t see myself spamming MoP for mediocre healing.

I’m talking about wvw for the most part, I don’t bother with pve other than daily fotm.

I’m sorry but that’s a bit like asking if there are any decent Elementalist builds that don’t involve switching attunements. But you don’t have to build your entire bar around shatters, with weapon switching and deceptive evasion you should be able to summon clones/phantasms as quickly as you can shatter them while leaving the rest of bar free for whatever utility you want. Many people like feedback for ranged counter, null field for amazing condition/boon removal, and blink or even decoy can buy you precious seconds if you need to escape. I have found that summoning phantasms and letting them do one round of attacks before shattering lets me set off a huge burst and with weapons swapping/traits that reduce cooldown I can resummon just a little bit after they would have attacked again anyways.

I will agree that Mesmers seem to be built more around burst rather than sustained damage (unless you go something like staff with heavy conditions) but that is just the nature of the class. You might think it unfortunate that certain classes only have a couple viable ways to deal damage but the alternative, every class being able to do every kind of damage/support, would essentially result in every class inherently being the same except for their animations, I honestly don’t know which is worse.