Guild Wars 2

I’ve been planning to start playing my mesmer in WvW more. My main is an elementalist, so I was hoping to get feedback from people who’ve played mesmer for longer than I have. This build is my best attempt to find something that suites my play style.

I’d like to use this build for solo/small group roaming. When I join up with a larger group, I am required to run a glamour+confusion build to support the team, so this build is instead for when I’m out there in smaller scale encounters.

I was hoping to develop a well rounded build that doesn’t invest too heavily in any single strategy. The way I would like to play my mesmer: confuse the enemy as to my true location, wear them down using both conditions and direct damage, and spike those who are low health. I don’t mind being a bit squishy as my first priority is to elude the people attacking me.

Gear-wise, the news that magic find will be removed from the game makes me hopeful that celestial gear will see a slight power bump soon (in my dreams they make MF into CDur). I am aware that the MF and HP is mostly wasted in my proposed build, but if you add up the useful stats (power+precision+conditiondmg+critdmg+vitality+toughness) it still pays off more than any other trinket set. Since the rest of my gear is rampagers, I thought celestial trinkets would be a good way to get some survivability stats to complement my goals.

The assumption I’ve made is that precision is extremely valuable. It pays off in both increased conditions and direct damage. My intent was to maximize precision and then augment both condition and direct damage as cheaply as possible. Bleed duration of 65% was easy to get and should give me 8 ticks from crits, better than stacking condition damage excessively. Similarly, the celestial trinkets net me some critical damage cheaply that helps given my precision. Phantasmal duelist seems to be the best for this build concept as it has rapid attacks=>bleeds and also reasonable direct damage.

Suggestions?

I run a Bleeding condition build, personally i would replace the sword with scepter and staff with GS. Dont waste so many point in illusions, taking Rampager/Rabid gear is enough for conditions.

Replace Dueling IV with II as the Fury will help proc Bleeding alot more. Change the runes to Undead more condition damage as well as some nice toughness along with the 30into Chaos and the Rabid gear 10% of toughness is added as condition damage (5% runes, 5% trait)

Personally my build is:

Domination(20) : V, X
Dueling(20) : II, X
Chaos(30) : IV, V, XII

Running Greatsword and Scepter+Pistol/Focus

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I run a Bleeding condition build, personally i would replace the sword with scepter and staff with GS. Dont waste so many point in illusions, taking Rampager/Rabid gear is enough for conditions.

Yes, that sounds like a good combination as well. However, I think you are going for a slightly different build concept than I am. Using sword #3 + staff #2 is really good for confusing your enemy about your positioning, which is the way I would like to play.

Still, I see how your build is stronger condition-wise. GS clones + izerker definitely do more bleed stacks. BTW, I took illusions for phantasmal haste and illusionist’s celerity, though the condition damage is also very nice. As I understand it, phantasmal haste on iduelist increases his hit rate a lot and celerity+pistol training stack (the tooltip is wrong).

Also, staff #5 lets me put 5x confusion stacks per duelist. Something to consider.

In illusions compounding Power doesnt affect the condition damage as far as i am aware which isnt that great. Phantasmal Haste is the only good one but in my opinion not worth spending 20 points in Illusions to get it. Illusionary Persona is more of a Shatter build item doesnt affect Condition builds that much.

You dont really have anything that makes taking it worthwhile, sure Confusion is nice but its been nerfed to the point its a meh skill that people can and still do continue to damage through it.

You have VERY low toughness which means against pretty much you are an easy target for any burst player and you wont have the power/condition damage to burst anyone down before they can get you down.

You want a “bleeding” + Phantasm build yet your condition damage is going to be pretty low which makes the Bleeds pretty meh. The Crit chance and damage is nice though. I would say this sort of build would be better as a Power/crit build and leave the conditions as a nice little extra, though they wont do alot but then you could move the traits from Illusions into Chaos and pick up some very nice traits and give a nice little buff to Toughness.

Or go for a full Shatter build, there are plenty of guides and builds on the forums for them as well. Because taking traits for Conditions, Phantoms and Shattering just makes you decent at all, master of none in my opinion.

in my opinion u’re going to encounter some difficulties running this 10/30/0/0/30

u will lack toughness / vita, prot and regen buffs which are really strong if u’re planning on solo roaming.

Disenchenter is a really bad idea. U can’t waste Uskill like that. Null field is way better ( considering u’re playing staff/sword )

Playing Spvp with staff/pistol combo is really great because u can’t really benefit from GS range and mono burst damage is beast. It’s slightly different in WvW where u can outrange plenty of ppl / cripple / ae damage.

I see your point about illusions. Ideally, I’d go 10/30/25/0/5 except they moved illusionist’s celerity. It’s just really upsetting how many skills are improved by illusionist’s celerity and now I can’t reach it easily. :-/

As for being decent at all, master of none, … that is actually what I was aiming to do.

Hmm. I can see null field is better except for the long cooldown. I will swap that in. It’s another ethereal field I can use for more confusion as well.

How about this distribution then? I took MoR so I can get 3x conditions removed now that I don’t have phantasmal disenchanter. The 5 domination is for +1s of bleeding tick.

Yeah problem with being decent at everything and master of nothing

- you will be burst down burst specs due to no toughness
- Wont have the damage to kill Bunkers
- Low toughness + Melee = death
- Range + Staff = low damage

I can see this build having ALOT of issues and i think it could struggle in 1 Vs 1 against pretty much any decent spec build. It wouldnt be a bad Zerg build (though not “good” either)