Guild Wars 2

I probably know deep in my logical brain that such a build like that wouldn’t work in many, if not all, formats. But please! Try your best to make a ceslestial lover’s dreams come true. xD Now to the topic at hand…

As everyone knows, the celestial stat combo isn’t one of the most sought out stat combos in the game. Soldiers stat and berserkers stat win out the popularity contest most of the time.

The only two classes that can benefit from the celestial stat are the elementalists and the guardians. The elementalists have a wide array of attunements and some of their attacks can burn and bleed. The guardians have the natural autoattack burn which doesn’t need more explanation. But what about mesmers?

Any celestial-centered build that anyone can make up? For PvP? PvE? WvW? Dungeons? Or crush my dreams and say that it wouldn’t work…? Well… comment away!

I’m sure theres some info somewhere someone’s already written up about this.

But anyway, Cele stats

Why they work on Guardians and Elementalists:

these two classes are very rounded already, low health pools, access to healing cc conditions and straight dps in fairly equal measures just on weapon skills alone. They can still spec into One type of thing to do and do it very well but it alienates other parts of their skills making them less effective.

Why Cele isnt as good on others.

Other classes arent as rounded and often allow very easily for you to choose between DPS or CC or conditions and not have to worry/be forced not to worry about having skills that your stats dont cater to. Warriors are a poor example but they clearly have a CC set, a Condition set and a DPS set of weapons to choose from (no healing set tho).

Why cele is pretty bad for mesmers.

Mesmers have to, due to mechanics and traits and weapon set up, specialize in one or two things only. Yes you can boost all your stats but ultimately this means you have a lot of much less effective choices some of which you may never use given the situation you end up in. as a mesmer this means needing to be “carried” as our basic (non phantasm and non shatter spike) damage is one of the lowest in the game across many of our weapons.

Cele can look pretty good for PU builds but it ultimately doesnt offer just the raw Condition damage boost you need for your short duration conditions to really hit home.

to use the old saying

“A Jack of all trades, is a Master of None”

as the game currently stands, Mesmers cant really afford to not be a Master at something in their build. Not at the high ends of things.

You can of course, still run Cele in open world PvE and never run into trouble, but you can also do the same thing naked so its your call.

TLDR

Its not the best choice, but if you really want to try it, god speed and have fun experimenting.

It didn’t used to be too bad before the critical damage nerf. Actually, if you had optimal setups, you could probably get away with one or two pieces of armor (namely the ones that give the least amount of stats) to get the bonus critical damage.

Nowadays… I run my Celestial set only because it has my Traveler runes. I just camp Assassin Ascended when I don’t need the 25% movespeed.

I’d love to play a viable celestial mesmer with something like scepter/torch and sowrd/pistol in all honety, lol.

Celestial is not even remotely viable on Mesmer because Mesmer has no reasonable way to stack might.

Celestial on its own is lowish condition damage and power, producing a build with no offensive teeth at all. Celestial when running with 20-25 stacks of might, however, suddenly has highish condition damage and power, producing a build with good offense of all types, along with reasonable defense, a very strong build.

Mesmer can’t stack might, therefor Mesmer can’t use celestial.

Fay.2357:

Celestial is not even remotely viable on Mesmer because Mesmer has no reasonable way to stack might.

Celestial on its own is lowish condition damage and power, producing a build with no offensive teeth at all. Celestial when running with 20-25 stacks of might, however, suddenly has highish condition damage and power, producing a build with good offense of all types, along with reasonable defense, a very strong build.

Mesmer can’t stack might, therefor Mesmer can’t use celestial.

While might stacking is a good reason, it’s not necessarily true.

Example: I run a mean celest staff ele. I can hold 1v2s and sometimes down one of the enemies. Yet I have little to no might stacking. I only get 1 stack from fire attunement, and an occasional 3 stacks from a lone blast in a fire field. I rarely have more than 5-6 stacks of might at a time (unless there’s a bunker guard :P ).

The reason why celest is so effective is because the huge variety of skills and functionalities on ele. The few condis i have are very damaging: burn and 6 stacks of bleeding on churning earth. That kitten hurts with some condi damage. And a lot of of my skills naturally have high flat damage, like meteor shower. Finally, the additional healing power helps with all my water traits, and makes me quite resilient with the added toughness and vitality.

Celest works on ele cuz it can take advantage of all the stats. Warrior and guard are similar in that sense.

Mesmer doesn’t have a huge variety of skills. A lot of them are control effects with low damage or clone summons which are NOT boosted by any stat. Examples are phase retreat, chaos armor, iWave, iLeap, focus curtain, pistol stun, decoy, blink, portal, etc. With so many skills that are unaffected by celest stat boosts, it just isn’t worth it.

When it comes to might-stacking for mesmers, I can only think of 2 ways: Bountiful Interruption and Shattered Strength. Maybe next patch, celestial mesmer can become viable with something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQJARWlknpRt1oxQNcrNCuxYyFaA1BNUSlMgfB-TJxHwADuEAa2fAwTAoYZAA

keenlam.4753:

When it comes to might-stacking for mesmers, I can only think of 2 ways: Bountiful Interruption and Shattered Strength. Maybe next patch, celestial mesmer can become viable with something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQJARWlknpRt1oxQNcrNCuxYyFaA1BNUSlMgfB-TJxHwADuEAa2fAwTAoYZAA

Only 2 ways? You have GS2 and Staff auto in the build you pinged.

Just the sigil of battle alone can maintain 9 before the GS2 adds another 6.
2 interrupts every 16 seconds is enough to cap you at 25.
Alternatively, just using GS2 on CD will maintain around 12 by itself.
So I’m not getting Pyro and his mesmers cant stack might talk. It’s not AOE so it’s not group support but that’s not the point since we’re talking celestial builds utilizing power and condi dmg.

Persionally I’d run IP or MtD instead of ID in that build. Maybe Sc/P instead of staff.

I’m thinking about going celestial after the patch. my build uses both condi and power and healing celestial would be good for it.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

keenlam.4753:

When it comes to might-stacking for mesmers, I can only think of 2 ways: Bountiful Interruption and Shattered Strength. Maybe next patch, celestial mesmer can become viable with something like this?
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQJARWlknpRt1oxQNcrNCuxYyFaA1BNUSlMgfB-TJxHwADuEAa2fAwTAoYZAA

Only 2 ways? You have GS2 and Staff auto in the build you pinged.

Just the sigil of battle alone can maintain 9 before the GS2 adds another 6.
2 interrupts every 16 seconds is enough to cap you at 25.
Alternatively, just using GS2 on CD will maintain around 12 by itself.
So I’m not getting Pyro and his mesmers cant stack might talk. It’s not AOE so it’s not group support but that’s not the point since we’re talking celestial builds utilizing power and condi dmg.

Persionally I’d run IP or MtD instead of ID in that build. Maybe Sc/P instead of staff.

The problem is that there’s a ton of conditionals in there.

Sigils of battle can maintain 9 stacks iff you swap on cooldown every time. Eles/engineers/warriors can do this pretty easily, but mesmers can’t expect to do that. Our weapon swaps are a valuable resource, and swapping on cooldown every time will leave you stuck in bad weaponsets very often. Therefor, you can assume 3-6 from sigils.

GS2 can add another 6 iff you’re close enough to catch the bounces, there’s no other allies (including illusions) much closer than you, and there’s no other enemies closer than you to catch the bounces. Mirror blade will get you a decent amount of might now and then, but it’s absolutely not reliable.

Interrupts are also absolutely not reliable. They depend on so many variables that you can’t count on them. You can count on them as part of some burst rotations, and that allows the might to amplify your burst. However, the point of might in a celestial build is to have a constant offensive increase for sustained damage and condition damage, and might from interrupts simply can’t do that (same thing with shattered strength here).

Basically, you can stack some small amounts of might reliably, but you don’t have the ability to consistently maintain high stacks like an ele/engineer/warrior can with blast finishers and rapid weapon swapping. That’s why it doesn’t work.

Shattering 3 illusions every 16.5 seconds seems like a reasonable lowball for SS so that’s 3 stacks maintained in that build.

With the build posted, swapping weapons every 16.5 seconds still maintains 6 stacks of might with sigil of battle.

GS2 and staff auto, as you mentioned, are not always reliable so you won’t necessarily maintain 12 stacks from GS2 (8 second CD for 16.5 seconds might) but I think it’s reasonable to say 3 stacks between the two weapons.

So what it really comes down to is blasting fire vs interrupts. I simply disagree with interrupts being absolutely not viable. If you are trying to interrupt a specific skill, I can maybe see it not being reliable if you have slow reflexes/bad ping but proccing an interrupting itself is not that difficult. I’m assuming that’s what you mean by you can count on them as part of a burst rotation.

If you can purposefully dodge (aka L2 dodge) then you can press MoD instead. With IP, F3 is also an option. There are of course exceptions like blurred frenzy etc but just dodge those. Anyhow, between IP and MoD, maintaining 1 interrupt every 16.5 seconds for 5 stacks of might seems reasonable to me.

So I would say 17 stacks that are fairly consistent. That alone is decent. With MoD being aoe soon, GS5 aoe, getting F3 on two ppl or getting lucky with staff 5, those are bit more RNG for aoe interrupts/having a cast time so I can somewhat understand your mentality behind those procs but if you can get one of those off every 16.5 seconds, the mesmer is at 22 stacks.

I keep throwing 16.5 out there because it’s the duration might produced by everything except sigil of battle (33 seconds) but realistically, I think a decent mesmer can do more than all that every 16.5 seconds.

I’m also curious about celestial after the patch, simply because the rampager/celestial-type stat spread does gain in relative strength with the buffs to condi appliance, while being on weapons that still benefit from power as well. There is also a fair few ways to gain regeneration.

Will be fun to play around with anyway.

Amethyst Lure.5624:

I’m also curious about celestial after the patch, simply because the rampager/celestial-type stat spread does gain in relative strength with the buffs to condi appliance, while being on weapons that still benefit from power as well. There is also a fair few ways to gain regeneration.

Will be fun to play around with anyway.

Healing Power sucks so much that you’re better off running none of it and still having within 10-20% other than Regeneration.

With Regeneration, you have to invest a lot as a Mesmer to boost it up. Even then, it’s still not a very useful strategy because of all the things you sacrifice. You’re better off just running a boonshare Disruption build or solo carrying a group.

Well thanks for crushing my dreams guys! You’re all getting reported! (kidding)

But in all seriousness, it only reinforces that in order for celestial stats to be viable on a mesmer, they need set skills that are well rounded and can fit with all situations that USE those stats. Examples would be a hypothetical weapon wielded by mesmers that deal condition damage and okay normal damage. And maybe hypothetical utility skills that have similar function like the elementalists. But we don’t have set skills to do that. Much of the investments on mesmer builds and tactics revolve on one thing (ex. shatter, PU, Inspiration, phantasm) and never all around like elemenatlists and guardians.

So Celestial would work on Mesmers once Scepter gets fixed (and I’m not talking about Torment, I’m talking about that length for one auto attack chain…)

I was playing hotjoin with this build before, was able to hold enemies’ base against 2 opponents (I guess hotjoin is the reason why I see 2 zerk players holding base). Even have couple of occasions where I exhaust them and deliver stomps, though I must admit I can probably perform better in shatter build since I’m just starting interruption build lol. Condition pressure from staff auto, cry of frustration and clone death, while power from phantasm + fury, halting strike + diversion and shatter play-style (blurred frenzy + mind wrack + fury from rune of pack). While tanking damages with extra vitality and toughness, but a bit waste on healing power (only 400 more hp healed). This maybe suitable for your taste

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAsaWlknpRt1oxINcrNipxY6biJHSGQDlskxB-TJxHwADOFAq2fAwTAoYZAA