Guild Wars 2

Anyone have any good front line Mesmer builds? I want something that lets me at the front of a zerg or in the middle of a large group fight. This would be mainly for WvW. I would prefer to use a staff and probably some combination of zerker and soldier gear.

honestly, we’re a rough class for frontline combat. Condition removal is lacking and stability isn’t our strong point. Our main immunity skills, F4 shatter and Sword 2, either require clones (which die easily in melee) or lock us in place.

you could maybe try some kind of Sword/Sword+Staff combo paired with healing, condi removal, and stability mantras. It would be rough though.

I’d much more recommend front-line to guards/wars and focus on being a kick-kitten midline player.

Theoretically as long as you have ~3k armour and 20k+ HP you should be fine in the frontline as long as you have a good party set up allowing proper access to stability and protection and you know how to avoid bombs. Why is another question, a mesmer’s job in a raid is to drop Null Field, Time Warp and Veil, all these can be done at range, so you should be looking more to Necromancers for your go to stats. Ok you can’t tag as much as a Wellmancer but isn’t the point to help your guild win fights not to get as much loot as possible…?

Being the frontlines depend more on your guild group than anything else. You can be near berserker if the group (and you) are really, really good. When I’ve done organized raids with a really good commander/group I’ve been able to run on the commander in the middle of 30v30 battles without even getting below 90% HP.

The “easiest” frontliner build IMO is 0/20/20/30/0. Its a hybrid. Access to DE, mantra healing and can put some traits into both manipulation and glamour if you want. PvT goes well with it.

Its not the most fun though. 20/30/20/0/0 is a much more fun damage oriented variant but offer very little support things (aside from shatter boonremoval). You need the equipment to back this one up. I like it because I can trait full ranged twohanders. You basicly swap the last 10 points around to either get a 3 use mantra build or direct damage PU.

A variant I have yet to try in zergs is the 30/20/0/20/0 mantra fury. Tons of heals, stability and condition removals. I’m very used to mantras, but even I havent dared venture into this extreme, lol.

Take a look at Pyro’s Zergmower build or Ross Biddle’s Holy Hell (Burn the Zerg) build (check the builds list sticky). I’m not sure I would call it front line “fighting” per se, but they basically involve walking through the middle of the zerg with 4s of invulnerability and burning everything that touches you.