Guild Wars 2

This is only PvP related, as stated in the title.

TL;DR: I am lost at having a sustained damage or survivability using a condition/confusion based shatter build 20-20-0-0-30. Please help with other builds / tips / stuff.

I have few questions regarding builds and effective usage of said builds.

These questions mainly come from the fact that few days ago, I had tried to play a D/D ele, and despite its high learning curve, I was astonished by its ridicoulous sustain plus the fact that it nearly has no downtime.

Coming back to my mesmer, my heart skipped a bit as I have noticed how many flaws my build/playstyle had compared to those of a D/D ele.

I had tried many builds in the past, some copied from others, some of my own invention, a mix of those etc. I was a big fan of the phantasm based builds before the huge nerf, but I liked the sustain on those and the fact that I didn’t have to worry much about downtimes or being out of cooldowns.

I currently run a 20-20-0-0-30 Staff/S-P build, with adventure runes on armor and energy sigils on weapons, condition damage based, granting me a huge boost to clone spammage and loads of damage coming from confusion.

It quite is a one-trick build tho, as my usual “rotation” goes: shatter 3, which grants me to have 25 stacks of vulnerability on the opponent, shatter 2, which grants about 10 stacks of confusion (that ticks from about 1k to 2,5k max), swap weapon, create 3 clones, mind wrack.

At this point, an average enemy is usually very dead or about to die. If this doesn’t happen, I find myself out of cooldowns, basically running around, stealthing and blinking waiting for my shatters to come back. Which, in a 1v1 situation, I can deal with, I have enough escape and kiting tools to survive. It’s a totally different situation in a battle with more than 3-4 people. When that happens I find my self quite helpless.

First, I find it hard to focus on something due to the extreme amount of shoopdawoops going around there, let alone all the classes that clone, blink, stealth, push, pull etc, but I guess that’s just a matter of getting used to it.

Altho, regarding dmg output or even survivability, when I’m out of CDs, I find myself almost useless: I don’t have a good damage output from staff1, and going melee to swing with sword1 doesn’t seem such a good idea. If I get focused, I have 2 choices. Either run away and be of no help for my teammates, or try to resist as much as possible, but I will die eventually.

So, basically… wat do? Should I focus more on direct damage output rather than condition / confusion? Or use a different kind of build? Or different weapons? What gives a good sustain, either in damage or survivability?

I had all this with phantasm, but I can’t seem to find an alternative now.

Halp!

Honestly, I think you’re trying to do too much of everything. Do you want a bunker build? A condition build? Or a power build? What role do you want to play in sPVP? Choose the build that will be allow you to perform your role effectively.

You can’t really be too effective in sPVP with a jack of all trades build.

I currently run

30/20/20/0/0 with s/p + s/f as a bunker build focused mainly on defending capture points. Can usually hold my own against 3 enemies =D.

I guess you’re right, duh.

As for your bunker build, can you enlighten me a little bit on how does it work?

I cant remember exactly which runes, but I’ve stacked Toughness primary and Power/Vit secondary. Reason I use s/p + s/f compared to others is because of the close quarters fighting when defending a capture point.

The point is to hold them off as long as possible while your team can come and rescue you.

For traits I get :
Rending Shatter, Crippling Dissipation and Mental Torment
Blade Training, Deceptive Evasion
Debilitating Dissipation, Illusionary Defense

I run weapon swap sigils on my Swords and Sigil of Might on my OH weapons.

Basically when someone is trying to cap, they’ll charge into the circle. You can trap them with illusionary leap, drop your pistolier/warden, weapon swap and set up the other phantasm.

You’ll be able to spam clones non stop while BF will prevent a good deal of damage they try to do you. With utilies, the must have skill for me is Arcane Thievery. This is god and by far my favorite utility in sPVP.

If there’s more than one, they’ll most likely be killing clones as well which will apply conditions and cripple them as well. It’s a very CC build so I take blink to close the gap between any ranged characters.

With all of this + shatters, you can last quite a while against 2-3 people. By the time they kill you, your team should have arrived and mopped them up. Focus wall pull is also good for stopping them from ressing. I take 2 stun breaker utilities as well (Mirror Image and Blink).

Against up to 3 players, if you drop a time warp, you can usually kill 2 of them and well on the way to killing the third one.

Thanks a lot for those tips, very helpful