Guild Wars 2

Hi! I’m returning to GW2 after a long time being away. I don’t have HoT yet and I don’t intend to pick it up until my mesmer hits level 80 (I’m at level 71 right now). I’m catching up on the new meta for the game, and I’m drawn to doing a condition build because I love the staff and the scepter. However, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not an amazing player and my learning curve is pretty steep after my long hiatus.

So my question is— are power builds “easier” to work with than condition builds? For reference I do mainly PvE and I’m not confident enough yet to reenter dungeons or PvP. What sort of build should I focus on that would be best for me? Are condition builds worth going for in PvE/dungeons or is it more of a PvP and WvW thing? Are condition builds tougher to master in general?

Thanks in advance!

Core mesmer is pretty much obsolete in the current game. Everything does more damage than you and apart from saving others time by portaling them to the next objective you will not be any help.

Chronomancer on the other hand is excellent support through high amounts of boons sharing, specifically quickness and alacrity boosting the team. The rest of their kit comes in handy for reflects, blocks, invuln etc but you are support, you do damage but not much at all however you make it easier for everyone else.

I’m sure Xyonon will harp up about the condi build, highest DPS build and it’s core not elite. What he won’t say is it does a lot less than many other “DPS” classes do in the first minute and many still do a lot more damage without the single target only focus which makes it only useful on bosses.

If you’re just running around the open world, pick berserkers, use what you want, shatter burst anything that’s not elite with a few clones and mindwrack.

So firstly, it’s worth noting that HoT introduced a titanic amount of power creep into the game. Every dungeon in the game has been completely trivialized; bosses melt before they can even take any actions, trash mobs get instantly deleted, nothing is even remotely difficult.

With that being noted, condition builds are generally not worth your time. In high level fractals/raids, a specific condition build can be used, at least some of the time. However, condition builds are extremely poor for general open world stuff due to their lack of good aoe. Condition builds are also rarely wanted in normal dungeon/fractal parties simply because they’re objectively worse than a standard buffing build as long as you have another class that actually does good dps there.

Thank you both!

So with condition builds out of the way, I gather that power shatters are the best thing for open world? My head’s sort of spinning trying to figure everything out. I feel like things were a lot simpler when I last played two years ago lol. Most builds I’ve looked at now involve the sword in some way, I assume because of its high DPS. What are the advantages of keeping the sword in the main hand and only swapping out the secondary weapons vs using another weapon?

Sorry for the questions, is there maybe a guide out there that would tell me what weapons are the best for what sort of builds and how to use them?

Open world pve, you’re running chrono anyways. You want that alacrity for yourself and the 25% run speed fromthe minor trait.

The shield is also pretty neat for open world.

Sword is not high DPS, none of the mesmer weapons are. Sword is just the least terrible DPS.

Mesmer is the lowest DPS class in the game by a large margin, make sure you know you are a support class in the fullest sense, even more so than being a druid if you roll mesmer.

Mesmer in GW2 is not GW1 mesmer that was a massive armor ignoring aoe ball of death/interrupt/shutdown/debuff bot. You’re there to feed people alacrity, quickness, and reflects.