Guild Wars 2

I have been running this build for a while now, mainly in hotjoin. It still needs further testing and adapting, but so far it is really much fun. So here it is:

Celestrial Defender

How does it work?
This build basically punishes the opponent for her actions. With celestrial amulet and proper rotation with scepter and shatters you can repeatedly stack confusion on your foe and in the same time get retaliation on you. Both do a decent amount of damage next to the phantasm damage and other conditions like torment, bleeding and poison. With 2 blocks, one every 8 the other every 12 seconds, this build offers defense and offense all the same.

Stats
I originally went for rampager amulet. But I had better results with celestrial. It spreads the stats more out offering more defensive capabilities while only losing a small portion of offensive abilities. The power is quite low, but it is enough to get even some initial damage in diamond skin elementalists so the conditions can start their work even on them. Travaler runes fit in this celestrial mentality quite well with additional boon and condition duration and, of course, has the precious speed boost.

Important Abilities and Traits
Illusionary Ripostate and Illusionary Counter are one of the main damage sources. The block together with Retaliatory Shield will grant Retaliation. A typical rotation will summon the iSowrdsman followed by the two blocks along with the summoning of 2 clones. All 3 can be shattered with Cry of Frustration. If pulled off successfully the target has eaten some direct damage and is stacked with torment, confusion, some bleed stacks and the Celestrial Defender will enjoy the retaliation buff. All in all it forces the foe to over think her approach.

Staff on the other hand offers a good sustained damage and is especially effective against targets, who see through the mechanisms of the Celestrial Defender. Chaos Storm grants a chance for Aegis and therefor another potential Retaliation. All in all Retaliation uptime is very high on this build. Then switching back to Scepter/Sword in the right moment will potentially avoid the next burst rotation and punish the attacker for the attempt.

The build has but not much burst abilities. So a fight, mostly depending on the foe’s behavior, might take some time. But if executed right the damage will find its target sooner or later.

Advantages of the Celestrial Defender

• high sustain physical and condition damage
• defense is offense
• can hold on point even without stealthing
• can punish the attacker strongly for her actions
• becomes stronger in more chaotic fights

Disadvantages of the Celestrial Defender

• weak against boon rip/corrupt/steal
• weak against condition transfer
• almost no hard crowd control
• almost no burst capability

What do you guys think of this build and do you have suggestions for improvement?

How well does it hold up against other bunker builds, like defense-built guardians or engineers turreting up a waypoint?

It did actually quite well against engineers of any kind. Also turret engineers. Using the block skills on cool down along with frequent shatters is very effective.

I didn’t have yet the chance to fight bunker guardians with this build. The usual DPS meditation guardians can be defeated easily, when done right. But one can also mess up rotations and get annihilated. This build depends on proper timings.

Yeah, I’m not really seeing it a whole lot. I’ll go through this more in detail, but let me just start with real general.

You’re using a celestial amulet, attempting to do a hybrid build. This does not work on mesmer. Elementalists, warriors, engineers, and thieves to an extent can do this extremely efficiently because they’re able to stack high amounts of might.

The celestial build on its own is a build that has not very good condition damage and not very good power damage, and doesn’t do much of anything. The celestial build with might stacking suddenly becomes a beast that has both moderately high power, moderately high condition damage, and reasonably high defense.

Mesmer can’t stack might like that, and this build obviously has literally 0 might stacking capability. This means that you’ll fall under the first situation: low condition damage, low power damage, and doesn’t do much of anything effectively.

Now specifics:

You have 1300 power and 36% critical chance with actually fairly decent critical damage. Unfortunately, the low critical chance and incredibly low power means that even hard-hitting phantasms like the iSwordsman will barely tickle coming from this build. Additionally, the only skill you have that does any reasonable power damage (non-phantasm) is confusing images, which is slow and easy to avoid. Overall, your power damage is incredibly weak.

You have about 800 condition damage. This also is very low. This results in the conditions you apply being largely ignorable. Confusion won’t hurt much, torment will hardly tickle, and your burns and bleeds really won’t add up to anything truly dangerous.

The overall combat dynamic with this build simply isn’t dangerous. None of your phantasms will do strong damage, and none of your skills will do strong damage either. This means that your potentially damaging conditions (confusion and torment) can simply be countered by standing still and not attacking for a moment or two. Since you have no power pressure and no other condition pressure, this isn’t dangerous or difficult to do. Retaliation isn’t even something to consider in this build either. You have very low power, so retal doesn’t hurt much, and single target retaliation isn’t strong anyway, so it’s not even close to a damage factor.

Will you beat some people with this? Sure, you can always find someone to beat with any build. Will you kill anyone who really knows what they’re doing? No, probably not.

I was running this build this evening again. Yes, all the nubs die quickly to it, no argument there. I had problems (besides being ganged by 3 or 4 players) actually only against Hambow warriors, who I barely tickled. Your arguments are true, on paper at least, but it seems to work at least in hotjoin. I wanted a SoloQ today, but after waiting for 10 mins I decided to let it go for the evening.

I think the build has potential. I will keep refining it, especially after my experience in soloQ.

And I was dueling a friend of mine, playing an S/D Thief. He knows what he is doing and out of 4 duels, I won 3 of them. When I manage to soloq and refine the build, I will load up a video to let u guys see that it works. I didn’t believe it could work in the beginning either (originally I wanted to create a confusion build, but I sidetracked a bit ) but it seems to actually work pretty well so far. The build has quite the uncommon dynamics and I might consider getting rid of Staff completely.

Okay, scratch that idea… I have played, just for comparison, the normal 4/4/0/0/6 shatter and I suddenly felt dimensions stronger. The celestrial defender may be a nice idea… but compared to a the normal shatter it is actually quite weak. I don’t think I’ll follow down the celestial path further…