Guild Wars 2

I’ve been playing mesmer for a while but i was just wondering what are the essentials that every mesmer should be running at a high/end-game level? this includes sigils that are must haves (if applicable) traits, weapons, skills

emphasis on “every mesmer should be running” and explain if possible, and thanks in advance!

Blink Decoy Port(Either or/ All) and a cleanse, all others are preference

To clarify, this is for PvP? WvW? PvE?

Calliope.8675:

To clarify, this is for PvP? WvW? PvE?

PvE mainly, but for PvP and WvW would be nice too

In PvE I run blink, feedback, mirror images, and time warp. Everyone one wants TW in a dungeon, which is usually why I have it. However, if you’re running around doing map completion (or Arah/TA) you might want to swap in Mass Invis. It’s a nice little stealth for skipping a horde of nasty mobs (especially useful in Orr). Blink because it’s a teleport, also useful for running away or repositioning if you’re soloing something. Feedback is an optional skill and a bit more situational. I typically have it on hand for dungeons or if I know I’ll be facing mobs with ranged attacks. Decoy, Mantra of Resolve, Nullfield, Mantra of Pain, and Mantra of Distraction are also other utilities I use. As for Mirror Images, my main mesmer is usually running around with a shatter build, so it’s nice for a quick pop and burst, but sometimes serves as a good distraction if I’m trying to run away from something.

Most importantly, for PvE/WvW, have multiple sets of armor and weapons. I have two greatswords, three swords, and four sets of armor (plus one of each other weapon). I think a single set of weapons of one stat type will compliment almost any build you want to run, but I do really recommend more than one set of armor because it allows you versatility. Most often I swap my gears around in WvW than I do in PvE as a mesmer. My two main sets are zerker with mesmer runes, which I wear when I run CI Lockdown, and assassin with precision runes, which is mostly for PvE shatter.

In PvP there is a certain lack of versatility, at least in the way of runes. I’d like to be able to pick how many of each run I want rather than have a whole set applied under the false assumption that I want six runes applied to my armor.

And… every mesmer should take time to learn to fight underwater. Think of how terribly devastating you could be to the hapless passerby in WvW? Not very often, but enough worth mentioning, I have ended up fighting in the old lake. I have a friend who likes to head hunt near the Garrisons. He waits in the water and then ambushes them.

1200 range blink (Far Reaching Manipulations, an Adept Dueling trait) is one of the more subtle and tempting to skip traits in PvP.

Having the extra 300 range allows you to teleport onto certain ledges in sPvP maps that would otherwise not be possible (same goes for WvW as well). Furthermore, the extra range allows you to outrange certain class’s gap closers (most notably thief with their 900 range steal/signet/shadowstep.)

The Cold Nightmare.9476:

I’ve been playing mesmer for a while but i was just wondering what are the essentials that every mesmer should be running at a high/end-game level? this includes sigils that are must haves (if applicable) traits, weapons, skills

emphasis on “every mesmer should be running” and explain if possible, and thanks in advance!

A lot of play-styles are viable, don’t be afraid to test out different things and play around with your playstyle. You can change your traits wherever you are (except in a tpvp match or during combat), and adjust it to your current requirements.

First you should test out the trait ‘Deceptive Evasion’. It is one of these core traits, I’d not want to play without it.

open-world pve / most dungeons / fractals / roaming / spvp / tpvp => berserker
zerg-wvw / world bosses: soldier

I’d recommend you to always take the greatsword with you.

For jumping puzzles take the ‘Portal’ utility with you.

The biggest mistake most players are doing is picking the wrong heal skill:
most of the time you should pick ‘Ether Feast’;
‘Mantra of Recovery’ is viable if you are using the traits ‘Harmonious Mantras’, ‘Restorative Mantras’ and ’Mender’s Purity’;
The other two are not viable, and you should never use them (with very few exceptions).

I’d also recommend you to pick some sort of +Movementspeed. F.e. rune of the centaur or traveler.

Teutos.8620:

I’d also recommend you to pick some sort of +Movementspeed. F.e. rune of the centaur or traveler.

I disagree with that. I think it’s a huge waste. In dungeons others will more than likely give you swiftness. In WvW, if you have a group or run with the zerg, they will give you swiftness. In open world content, it’s highly unnecessary. If you have a focus in your bag it’s more than enough to get you around Tyria.

Calliope.8675:

Teutos.8620:

I’d also recommend you to pick some sort of +Movementspeed. F.e. rune of the centaur or traveler.

I disagree with that. I think it’s a huge waste. In dungeons others will more than likely give you swiftness. In WvW, if you have a group or run with the zerg, they will give you swiftness. In open world content, it’s highly unnecessary. If you have a focus in your bag it’s more than enough to get you around Tyria.

I have way more fun having always +movementspeed and not rely on others.
Are there some times where it is useless? Yes, sure, but there are enough times, where you would otherwise just move around slowly.

Currently I’m using the Centaur runes in wvw/pve, because I’m running a mantra build. Therefore I’m also supporting my group with swiftness. There are not so many professions from which you can get permanent +movementspeed.

Focus is nice, but it will not provide you with full time +movementspeed.

Must have a really lame group to not help you with swiftness in WvW. My driver told me not to worry about it, there were enough guards and wars to make sure I had 2+ min of swiftness, always. I never needed to worry about keeping up.

Calliope.8675:

Must have a really lame group to not help you with swiftness in WvW. My driver told me not to worry about it, there were enough guards and wars to make sure I had 2+ min of swiftness, always. I never needed to worry about keeping up.

Or I’m just not always running around in a big group… kitten , that option also exists

Teutos.8620:

The biggest mistake most players are doing is picking the wrong heal skill:
most of the time you should pick ‘Ether Feast’;
‘Mantra of Recovery’ is viable if you are using the traits ‘Harmonious Mantras’, ‘Restorative Mantras’ and ’Mender’s Purity’;
The other two are not viable, and you should never use them (with very few exceptions).

Depending on the build, Mirror can be a fantastic heal.

Of course, more effective in high toughness/medium-low vitality, with other sources of regen such as from phantasms, stealth, or other skills.

Curunen.8729:

Depending on the build, Mirror can be a fantastic heal.

Of course, more effective in high toughness/medium-low vitality, with other sources of regen such as from phantasms, stealth, or other skills.

What has high toughness / medium-low vitality to do with the healing skill? Because if you can tank more damage, you can play without a good healing skill?

Mirror is for those rare cases, where the reflection duration outweighs the loss of gained health. F.e. for boss fights, where you want to absorb the projectile and can’t dodge it, or when you don’t need the heal, but want to reflect back the projectiles for more damage.

Teutos.8620:

Or I’m just not always running around in a big group… kitten , that option also exists

Still fail to see the need for a bad rune set lol. I don’t worry about getting anywhere in a hurry in wvw. I’d rather not get run over by a zerg and I’m confident in my own fighting skills that I can take out 1-2 players relatively easy.

And to mirror for a heal, there’s only ONE boss I can think of… Arah 1 Jotun boss at the end of the path. Bleeeeeh! Otherwise, I never use it either.

Teutos.8620:

Curunen.8729:

Depending on the build, Mirror can be a fantastic heal.

Of course, more effective in high toughness/medium-low vitality, with other sources of regen such as from phantasms, stealth, or other skills.

What has high toughness / medium-low vitality to do with the healing skill? Because if you can tank more damage, you can play without a good healing skill?

Mirror is for those rare cases, where the reflection duration outweighs the loss of gained health. F.e. for boss fights, where you want to absorb the projectile and can’t dodge it, or when you don’t need the heal, but want to reflect back the projectiles for more damage.

Sorry, I forgot you were talking about pve – I don’t know anything about what is good or not in pve.

Regarding defensive stats, if you have high toughness, then the lower heal of mirror will count for more than if you are full glass. However if you have high vitality pushing your health pool over 20k (I never do this – vitality is a very low priority for me, mainly to absorb falling damage), then Mirror will be less effective as a percentage of your overall health pool – there’s no point in having a high health pool if you’re never able to heal up beyond 75% of it in a fight.

In wvw, mirror is amazing, seriously amazing. In pvp it is situational (depends on enemy team composition) but usually ether feast is better.

Curunen.8729:

Regarding defensive stats, if you have high toughness, then the lower heal of mirror will count for more than if you are full glass. However if you have high vitality pushing your health pool over 20k (I never do this – vitality is a very low priority for me, mainly to absorb falling damage), then Mirror will be less effective as a percentage of your overall health pool – there’s no point in having a high health pool if you’re never able to heal up beyond 75% of it in a fight.

It does not matter how big the % is you can heal up, as long as it is not over not overhealing.
Toughness vs Vitality is another topic.

We are simple talking about the effective health returned through the healing skill. The choice is between about: 270hps or up to 370hps… your choice, ofc you can choose the lower one…

In wvw, mirror is amazing, seriously amazing. In pvp it is situational (depends on enemy team composition) but usually ether feast is better.

Ofc you can pick mirror and hope you will face a profession attacking you with projectiles… but most of the time you are just loosing out on health.
In pvp where you can use line of sight and have to avoid possible interrupts, and players are actually able to stop attacking you, mirror is even less useful.

Teutos.8620:

Curunen.8729:

Regarding defensive stats, if you have high toughness, then the lower heal of mirror will count for more than if you are full glass. However if you have high vitality pushing your health pool over 20k (I never do this – vitality is a very low priority for me, mainly to absorb falling damage), then Mirror will be less effective as a percentage of your overall health pool – there’s no point in having a high health pool if you’re never able to heal up beyond 75% of it in a fight.

It does not matter how big the % is you can heal up, as long as it is not over not overhealing.
Toughness vs Vitality is another topic.

We are simple talking about the effective health returned through the healing skill. The choice is between about: 270hps or up to 370hps… your choice, ofc you can choose the lower one…

In wvw, mirror is amazing, seriously amazing. In pvp it is situational (depends on enemy team composition) but usually ether feast is better.

Ofc you can pick mirror and hope you will face a profession attacking you with projectiles… but most of the time you are just loosing out on health.
In pvp where you can use line of sight and have to avoid possible interrupts, and players are actually able to stop attacking you, mirror is even less useful.

You forget – mender’s purity on 15s instead of 20. Edit: yes I know mantra does that better, but when you’re being hit from range with multiple projectiles (talking wvw here, and there are always enough flying around – only exceptions are if you run 1v1 into a GS shatter mesmer, melee ranger and similar builds) mirror will mitigate what extra damage you will take while using the other heals.

And it does matter regarding total health pool – if I started of at say 25k, but during the course of a fight was never able to heal up again beyond 18k, then either there’s no point in having all that health or I should be using a bigger heal.

Mirror is most efficient with lower health pools and high toughness, it’s as simple as that.

Anyway, I know I won’t change your mind – but I know from using it that mirror is a great heal in the right situation, with the right build. I never use mirror when I’m playing shatter, but I nearly always use it when playing condition CI.

If I see an enemy greatsword mesmer, I’ll swap to ether feast because there’s no point in the reflect. If I’m 1vX and there’s some engis/rangers in the mix, I’ll use mirror.

atm im in the phase of exploring the world
naturally swiftness and movement skills are needed here.

i use sup runes of centaur with the healing mantra skill.

i use blink,decoy and that signet that gives you a random boon every 10 seconds.

i use s/f +gs as weapons.

Depending on the situation, if i end up in a group event or such i switch between time warp and mass invisibility.

i also use veil, and torch to stack some invisibility in cases such as looting a chest guarded by a strong mob.

portal is nice,but also situational . i shout i got a portal ready whenever i finish a jp just to get some people get it as well

If you use Illusions as your main parts, then Signet of the Ether is the best healing skill for you. With 3 Illusions on, and Phantasmal Healing, they give you 500+ HP every second, you almost never need to hit ‘6’.

When you need a lot attack power, it can let you create 3 weapon Phantasms fast (after 3 second, you have 2 Phantasmal Swordsmen + 1 Phantasmal Duelist + your Mesmer’s sword doing 5000+ dps to foe) without CD (1 more Phantasmal Duelist is ready to fill).

For PVE solo, get Superior Rune of the Traveler set. It give you +25% speed, boon and Condition Duration and a lot of All Stats.

Curunen.8729:

You forget – mender’s purity on 15s instead of 20.

That’s why I’m comparing health per seconds (without healing power).

Mirror: 3915 / 15 = 261 hps
Eather Feast: 5560 to 7480 / 20 = 278 to 374 hps (depending on how much clones are active when used)

hps does not look much, but during a one minute battle it means 6700 health more or less.

(Fully traited mantra has an even stronger hps potential, but since it requires a lot of trait points to be spent, I’m not gonna talk further about it)

multiple projectiles (talking wvw here, and there are always enough flying around – only exceptions are if you run 1v1 into a GS shatter mesmer, melee ranger and similar builds) mirror will mitigate what extra damage you will take while using the other heals.

In a zerg vs zerg battle you might be right, but for everything else I’d still recommend Eather Feast. You don’t know which opponents you are going to face, the chance is higher, you are going to need the extra health and not the reflect portion of the skill.

And it does matter regarding total health pool – if I started of at say 25k, but during the course of a fight was never able to heal up again beyond 18k, then either there’s no point in having all that health or I should be using a bigger heal.

The point of health / vitality is to soak the damage once, not multiple times – to not get bursted down so quick.
F.e. your healthpool is 20k, you get damage and drop back to 10k, now you have two options:
Do you want to use healing skill a for 5k or b for 7k? Both will not bring you up to 20k, but one will heal you for 2k more…

It does not matter how long (because of your toughness) it took the opponent to push you down to 10k.

I wouldn’t want to use mirror in a high health, low toughness build (but off the top of my head, I can’t think of any decent mesmer build that uses that kind of stat distribution), because the hps of mirror won’t be sufficient to maintain it. Whatever the case is with toughness, I’d rather have a low health pool (<18-20k) if using mirror.

In any case, since I have started using mirror again for the last few months, I have been constantly surprised by just how many different ranged class attacks are reflectable. It is only really mesmer GS that is the achilles heel for mirror.

Edit: It also allows me the flexibility of not using any condi cleanse like null field in certain situations (so I can take something like MoD, Portal or SoD), because in that particular build I can avoid and mitigate conditions sufficiently in certain situations (of course, if against a condition heavy class I would take an extra cleanse utility).

In any 1v2+ situation I have encountered using mirror, specifically on the condition CI build, there have always been projectiles flying around and as such it has been very useful – I have survived multiple situations where I most likely would have died if using ether feast or the mantra.

On the flipside I would never duel an enemy mesmer and use mirror especially if they were using GS. Tbh, I would never duel a mesmer when using condition CI anyway – I’d rather use shatter and ether feast.

I agree mirror could do with a buff to healing (maybe up to around 4.5k base).

I am also very interested in the ‘essentials’ and hope that the mesmer community can help. I have a zerker set with scholars runes for dungeons. I have almost completed an assasins set as well. What would this be best used for? Open world? Curious as to what you all use for world bosses and wvwvw (total noob). I enjoy~ shatter in open world, but tend to run a more pu build in high damage situations. How many different weapon sets do you have? Thank you so much for letting me jump into this thread. I’ve searched through older posts, but I am not sure how relevant they still are. Thanks again!

A good end game mes needs a zerk and an kitten outfit. Runes for zerk are strength (if boonshare or pug) and / or scholar (for organized). For kitten I prefer ranger for ferocity and precision to maximise reflected damage.

Multiple weapons are also imporant. Yet rather luxus than essential.

Most important for a mesmer though is the knowledge of traits and skills. No other class has to retrait as much as a mesmer to be most efficient. There are great traits who make the mesmer a complete different ally in a party. Every trait line is important and not only meta builds should be taken. There are situations where not only 64040 or 64004 are the best. Most ppl just take a look at metabattle but that’s the biggest flaw of nowdays mesmers. They don’t know what they are able to do – for example molten fractale 2nd boss – medics feedback + longer glamour duration grant you the smoothest final battle you can imagine. Just to mention one example. Also MoP is underated :>

Cheers!

Cameile.2807:

I am also very interested in the ‘essentials’ and hope that the mesmer community can help. I have a zerker set with scholars runes for dungeons. I have almost completed an assasins set as well. What would this be best used for? Open world? Curious as to what you all use for world bosses and wvwvw (total noob). I enjoy~ shatter in open world, but tend to run a more pu build in high damage situations. How many different weapon sets do you have? Thank you so much for letting me jump into this thread. I’ve searched through older posts, but I am not sure how relevant they still are. Thanks again!

To be completely honest, I have a main set of weapons that I pretty much use across all of my builds on both of my mesmers. I’ve been meaning to replace (some of) them with a more uniform set. Some of the weapons I picked up just because, in the days before the wallet system, I had tokens for dungeons I had to get rid of.

I use shatter for open world content; personal story, world bosses, living story, map completion. If you’re planning on a major event where you need to tag for loot (like a temple event) mesmer may not be your best option. However, if mesmer is the class you want to use, I suggest a main hand sword. I had the best luck tagging when I was in with the melee players.

I have three greatswords (the original exotic when I hit 80, the first ascended I made, and my legendary), three swords, and all the rest, but only one of them. I will need to replace some with a better stat combination, for the reason mentioned above. I would say if you wanted to, you could probably get away with one or two main weapons you use being a different stat combination, but keep the others all one way (zerk, knight, soldier, whatever you want to use). Primarily, I think, you will really want different armors.