Guild Wars 2

I am new as mesmers and I do have a feeling of being a bit underpowered atm (I am lv 40). I have a similar level elementalist and the ele can dish out heavy damage and have much more survivability. Also, I don’t see many mesmers on dungeons and most people kick me out from dungeons as soon as they see me as mesmer. I am not complaining but I am just willing to know whether mesmers are underpowered or am I doing something wrong….

Also, is it a bug that sometime mobs don’t attack my clones and instead targets me directly?

P.S. Mesmer are undoubtedly a super fun class to play though.

People are likely kicking you because you’re level 40, not because you’re a mesmer. Mesmer is good.

Mesmer isn’t an intuitive class at first and their strengths aren’t readily apparent, but they are there and once you master them they become borderline overpowered. The most important thing is not to think of your clones as tanks, they almost never pull aggro and they have no health anyway. Rather, it’s phantasms specifically that are extremely powerful, and if you use your weapon swap to get 3 up and running your DPS goes through the roof. Basically no other class with the exception of elementalist can compete. Think of them as extremely high-DPS single-target turrets rather than as minions or pets, if it helps. Even clones can be thought of as bleed-inflicting turrets once you get the master-level trait in the Dueling line.

For high-level endgame dungeon running, the “mesmer hate” primarily comes from two camps:

1) “I have no idea how to play mesmer but I heard they were bad DPS so I’m just going to go with that.”
2) “My minmaxed group of hardcore dungeon runners has a perfectly choreographed routine for every dungeon so we can burst everything down without needing the mesmer’s support buffs or sustained DPS.”

Things don’t always go that well even for group #2 though. Mesmers are like guardians insofar as they make things go much more smoothly, albeit they are more balanced betwen offense and defense than the guardian, which is pretty much pure defensive.

Mesmer potential greatly relies on the traits. This means that you will always be underpowered and underused until you get to 80.

Yes, they are underpowered.

As frifox said, Mesmers are harder to level than other classes, they heavily depend on their traits. Just get trought to higher levels and you’ll see =)

“Underpowered” may not be as accurate as “underused.” We are certainly less useful that other classes (Guardian, Warrior, and Elementalist primarily), but I do think we are good enough to progress through the end-game PvE content.

That’s all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that, more often than not, you will not be allowed into anything but “casual” (read: slow, dies a lot) PvE groups, mostly made up of other crapped on classes.

In summary, it is my opinion that mesmers are capable of progressing through PvE content with a few select builds. Do people normally want to fill up a party space with you? No.

A few things in PVE are not really mesmer-friendly. Leveling is one of them.
However your mesmer experience will enhance with each level you’ll progress. As said above, mesmers are quite depending on getting their points for traits.

And yes, in my opinion mesmers are underpowered in pve, compared to each other profession. (I play them all ^^)
Especially with their heaps of bugs.

When I was leveling up my Mes – and this was before the trait system update – I found that it was fairly difficult until I hit 60 and had access to Grandmaster traits. That’s when it suddenly got a lot easier, and kept getting better as my level went up. So there’s that: you don’t have access to all the traits yet to really create a build that suits you.

Also, I’d imagine that at level 40 when you enter a dungeon you do so on whatever build you roam around with doing hearts and getting vistas. Your usefulness in dungeons is directly related to your build. We’re not Warriors; we can’t just go from one type of content to another without a re-spec. You have a dungeon build, open world PvE build, PVP build, WvW build, fraggles, etc. Case in point: I’ve a full condi spec for WvW with Ascended dire armor and trinkets, which have cost me a lot of gold. It’s all great in WvW, and utterly useless in a dungeon. Them’s the breaks.

Also, the clones aren’t really meant to hold hate while you zzzzzap foes from a distance with your gs. You can do damage with them through shatter, or deliver conditions with on-kill traits, but they don’t nor will ever really confuse opponents.