Guild Wars 2

Ok guys this is pretty much my first attempt at a full comprehensive guide so feedback is appreciated.

Why should you play this build?

I’ve always liked builds that were “jack of all trades”, or in other words, could do just about everything at a competent level, but must be played with a high amount of skill to achieve the same results as a specialist build. This particular build is centralised around dealing high direct damage whilst maintaining very good survivability in the form of stealth and great defensive boon up-time. It focuses on summoning phantasms and locking down your enemy with confusion, the new ‘torment’ condition as well as a relatively steady flow of interrupts. It also feature’s high control and great “countering” abilities that aid in the defeat of many of the so-called “PvP” professions. The versatility of this build is also one of the best as well, since we take such a generalised trait set-up it is very easy to just switch up a few trait selections and easily switch weapons according to your playstyle. While having access to all this may sound great it does have its downsides. The chasing down ability is great, but once your opponent is out of range of your Greatsword, you might aswell forget about them. Mobility is lacking also, seeing as both the ‘teleporting’ weapons (sword and staff) are not used in this build, though could be very easily with some minor tweaking.

Just for further notice, this build has 3 interrupts. The sword 4, greatsword 5 and f3 diversion shatter.

Skills and Trait set-up

Traits are as follows: 20/20/30/0/0

20 in domination to take: (II) and (X)
20 in dueling to take: (II) and (X)
30 in chaos to take: (III), (VIII) and (XII)

For utilities take: Blink, Decoy and Veil

The gear

This part is a little bit tricky and I’m not even sure if its the right way to optimise damage and survivability but it works so I’m not complaining.

Armour:
- Knights headpiece
- Berserker shoulders
- Knights body
- Knights leggings
- Valkyrie gloves
- Valkyrie boots

All of the aformentioned armour pieces have the Superior runes of Melandru (-25% condition/stun duration on self and toughness) slotted into them.

Food Buffs
- Bowl of lemon grass poultry (-40% condition duration on self)
- Your choice between the Superior sharpening stone, or Master maintenance oil.

Trinkets and kitten
- Celestial ascended amulet
- Berserker ascended rings
- Cavalier ascended accessories
- Berserkers ascended backpiece

*Note that all of these can be replaced with their exotic counterparts and if so with berserker/valkyrie jewels in all of them. For infusions I reccomend vital, but they are costly so do what ever you want lol this doesn’t matter.

Weapons
- Beserker/valkyrie greatsword with Superior sigil of energy
- Valkyrie scepter with Superior sigil of energy
- Valkyrie sword with Superior sigil of accuracy (5% extra critical chance)

General information that you need to know about the build
By going so far into chaos we can make up for not having the protection of a staff by taking Prismatic Understanding. This grants us major survivability and insane protection and to a lesser extent, regeneration up-time. The reduced cooldown on blink gives us additional survivability and helps make up for the lack of a staff and phase retreat.

The choices in dueling were obvious and don’t need explaining as they are pretty much cookie cutter for most builds, however in this build this focus is on illusions so we take Phantasmal Fury and Deceptive Evasion.

For domination this is where the build gets interesting, instead of straight up going for illusion damage, I chose to take Halting Interruptions (which deals ~2k damage on interrupt) as well as Greatsword Training. The reason I took the latter trait is because the minor trait Illusionists Celerity has been moves up to 25 points in illusions, deeming it unable to be used in this build. Instead I compensate by granting additional recharge reduction to the greatsword so I can maintain high DPS and pressure, it also synergises well with the Halting Interruptions trait because you can interrupt more often with the Greatsword 5 ability. Additionally, Halting interruptions synergises well with the master chaos trait Bountiful Interruptions, which grants a random boon for 5 seconds as well as 10 seconds of 5 stacks of might. Please note that it applies a new boon for each person you interrupt even if its with the same ability, seeing as nearly all of the mesmers interrupts are AoE or at least semi-AoE this is a very strong trait, granting up to 5 boons per interrupt (if you can manage to hit that many people). I should also note that it doesn’t apply a new 5 stack of might for interrupting many people at the same time. I believe this is intended, because otherwise it would be very easy to stack 25 stacks lol.

Playstyle

Since this build and trait/gear set-up is so versatile feel free to mend it to your own playstyle, however I will explain the way I play.

I like to start in scepter/sword and I engage by producing 3 regular clones (whether through blocking or dodging or 1 spamming it doesn’t matter). Then I proceed to shatter them with Diversion. This applies a 15 stack of vulnerability on my opponent (which is the reason I don’t take the 15% increase in illusion damage) and then quickly summon my sword phantasm. I follow that up with a scepter 3 and then quickly swap weapons and dodge roll followed by a greatsword 4. By now you should have a sword phantasm, a greatsword phantasm and a regular greatsword clone out. Greatsword clones are superior to scepter ones as they proc damage 3 times meaning they have 3 chances to crit and apply bleeding. From here on out its do what ever you can to survive and deal as much damage as possible. I can’t really teach you how to play against every class as I don’t believe I am qualified anyway. Sword 4 is your other interrupt and use it wisely against heals and kitten.

However there are a few things you should consider:

1. When fighting a thief, save your GS 5 pushback for when he shadow refuges, most thieves save this as a last resort and if you can push him out of it he immediately gets the revealed debuff. This applies immense pressure and pretty much wins the fight.

2. Additionally when fighting thieves, save your blocks for when they stealth. After a theif stealths, they have 3-4 seconds to hit you with a back stab. The block durations on scepter and sword are both 2 seconds long, meaning if you wait 1-2 seconds then block while they are in stealth they have no option but to hit you and get nuked or simply unstealth

3. Conditions are pretty much meaningless to this build as we run -65% duration on them, but don’t ever underestimate them, if you are piled with conditions, retreat in the same way you would if you got bursted down to low HP.

4. When versing d/d elementalists, dodge their burning speeds every time (since I played elementalist for so long I can just tell when they are coming), but a good indicator that an ele will burning speed is if he attunes to fire. Try to time your burst (phantasms and confusion/torment) AFTER they come out of water attunement, as it is when they are most vulnerable and will sometimes force them to blow long cantrip cooldowns which is what you want. For s/d ele, i’d imagine the way to counter is the same but watch out for when he gets close or if you get updrafted. Break the stun immediately and keep your distance. For staff ele, well even warrior can beat staff ele so just focus on dealing damage and simply WALK out of the AoE and you will win.

5. Warrior – worst class in the game by far, you shouldn’t have any trouble here unless he’s like a kill shot warrior and you didn’t see him cast the ridiculously obvious killshot.

6. Necro – try to stay in stealth most of the time as this is the best way to avoid conditions, make sure you summon your phantasms up first though. If its a power necro then keep your kitten distance and blink out of his wells IMMEDIATELY, if you can’t then greatsword 5 him when he comes in to dagger spam you (while your immobilised with dagger 3) inside the well.

7. Other mesmers – same tactic with necros, only you need to play a lot more conservatively and try to pay attention to when they dodge so that you don’t blow your scepter 3 on a dodge roll and see “evade evade evade” instead of constant 500-1.2k hits. If its a shatter mesmer, well your kinda kittened if he gets an immobilise on you since we don’t run mainhand sword to counter it. The best way is simply to use f4 and try to dodge his illusionary leaps, if you can do that he won’t do much damage. As a last resort you can blink out (but only if your quick enough) or even decoy and hope for a protection proc.

8. Rangers – depending on what type of ranger it is, the main tactic is still summon phantasms and hide in stealth. Have good knowledge at what their pets can do we be mindful of their animations (which are relatively long and very obvious) and dodge them. The two most common are the wolf which has a fear (2 seconds) and the terrier dog which has a 2 seconds immobilise. Note that most ranger’s DPS is severely hampered if their pet dies, so if you see the pet on low hp for some reason, kill it.

9. Guardians – kite, kite, kite, kite, kite, kite, invis and then more kiting. With range, guardian is easy to fend off, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you will win (depends how defensive the guardian is). If you get ringed, blink out immediately (save blink for this). Additionally if you get pulled in by the greatsword5 on guardian blink away immediately (however you shouldn’t ever get pulled in since it is super easy to dodge as you can simply hide behind your illusions). Worst case scenario, spam dodge roll after the greatsword kittens you. This way his pull won’t pull you in as far (yes this works trust me). Again, don’t be discouraged if a guardian kills you (I believe they are the best class in the game), so ABSOLUTE worst case scenario just mass invis and run lol.

10. Engineer – if he is rifle, dodge the kitten out of his toolkit pull or your kittened. If its pistol/shield or pistol/pistol then its same tactic as ranger, only this time you must focus your attention on his CC and when he uses it. If he switches to flamethrower, expect a pushback. If he is using p/s and he comes close, expect a shield 4 into a shield 5 chain cc. Be mindful of these and try to dodge them, a GOOD engineer can kill you a lot of the time, but be mindful of the emphasis on the word “good”.

Idk if I have missed a class but the absolute best advice anyone can give you is to LEARN the other classes and actually play PvP/WvWvW a lot. I’ve spent about ~500 hours in sPvP trying out all the other classes and learning their abilities, and still today I am surprised by kitten that happens. One thing is for sure though, you can never stop learning.

Oh and carry every single weapon with you (all valkyrie) just in case you wanna switch it up. (i commonly do this).

This is very close to the build I use. I specifically picked 20/20/30/0/0 because I can use it ~stealth-focused in WvW, while switching to an interrupt based PvE setup when I feel like dungeons.

Reaping 4 interrupts at the ~same moment on a boss in PvE, then sharing the 20 Might + other boons to other players is amazing.

Glad to see that other mesmers are thinking the same way I do, and not complaining about sword 2 nerfs and kitten lol.

Thats a good idea with the boon sharing :o another cool one is stealing the 25 stacks of might from the underwater fractal boss and sharing that xD

Curiously this was the first lvl80 build I made, and I played it for quite a while (same basic idea to it). I only dropped it because the interrupt-traits felt too weak to justify it in PvE.

And yeah, ripping boons is always fun. The sheer versatility of the trail layout is so awesome. Can pick up -20% Manipulation CD, can run -fallingdamage for WvW trickery, can swap to reflect-CC for free roaming in PvP… it has everything. It’s not truly a weak jack of all trades either, it specializes in it’s two areas and then has a lot of room to adapt to specific situations.

Also, had a really interesting fight against 2 Rangers near a tower yesterday. Turns out that the Phantasm HP buff helps a lot if you’re not Inspiration specced, I could pressure one into leaving before the other showed up, and by the time the first came back I had my stealth back up and was able to escape. Really nice with the patch changes.