Guild Wars 2

Hello!

I have been away since the Queen’s jubilee event and the endless Crown Pavilion grind. I would very much like to come back and to finish the personal story and the living world story on my Mesmer. May be do some dungeons to get myself back to the game.

I left my Mesmer as a PU condition shatter build. I used to play a power shatter one but I have been experimenting a lot with Mesmer, including Confusion bomb a while back. I have been out of touch for some time now. So can any one give me some insight as to the merits on each PvE builds?

I understand that Confusion will be buff some time in the future. Is it viable to play a Confusion build? How about shatter, power or condition? I have heard that there will be a “breakbar” adding to the bosses. Would a lockdown build be more useful in PvE? What role is a Mermer comfortable to be in nowadays?

Many thanks!

As it stands currently, Phantasm builds are best for PvE. Confusion is probably the worse choice you can go with since NPCs really don’t attack often enough to make it worthwhile. Condition builds in general are good for soloing dungeons, but really fall off in any kind of group content due to competing conditions from different players overwriting eachother.

Shatter is also considered a DPS loss compared to phantasm, while I’ve seen people make it work, especially in the open world, the general consensus is that a sword/focus – GS build is better for open roaming while sword/sword-sword/focus is the best [DPS] for dungeons.

I’m not much of a PvE guy myself, but I hope that helps!

A condition shatter revolving around the new Maim trait in Illusions is gaining ground. I am seeing it a lot more in pvp and wvw, I can’t really say how well it will hold up in pveland as conditions still don’t really do well. There are a few rare instances where conditions are wanted, but still, don’t do well because of the stacking and overwriting method.

I typically run the traditional shatter build in PvE, sometimes I’ll run CI lockdown or PU, but that depends on the situation I’m facing. Confusion was already buffed in pve, but I wouldn’t count on it to be any good. You still need a long-ish duration on it or multiple stacks for it to work well. We got a 33% increase on damage with confusion, but only in pve. I still find shatter to be the best (for me) in open pve content.

I am hoping that our lockdown builds will be stronger once the new defiance system is implemented. I am looking forward to seeing how that will work. Conditions as well as buffs also look to be getting an overhaul during the expansion. So, advice we may give you now could very well change and become obsolete once HoT is released.

We’re still a utility class. We are wanted for timewarp, the occasional stealth, reflects and boonstrips where they apply. Though Anet has broken Feedback for us. Many instances where reflects or absorptions worked no longer apply (Malrona in TA Up path being case in point – Asura fractal as well). I did the Aetherblade path for the first time since it’s release and my initial run with OMFG members and found instances where a reflect should have worked did not apply. However, most people still forget how good a mesmer is at boonstrip and act like a scrub in other dugneons (CoE with the golem at the turrets). Although, I like being on my mesmer because boss skills seem to be limited to “five targets,” which means that sometimes attacks that would hit a player are absorbed by my clones instead. Very few instances where that is the case though.

I have my doubts about the defiance changes. Our usefulness will depend how the ANet tweaks the “damage” ratio between daze, stun, knocback, pull and whether our CS trait will count as “two” hits or just stun.
They also did not say whether the total “defiance” stack will depend on the number of players or whether it will have a fixed value.