Guild Wars 2

I was thinking of making a mesmer that focused on using sword/sword as main and staff or GS as second set.

I should probably mention that this is mostly for PvE

What are your opinions?

Pretty good! Though I don’t play mine as a pure-melee mesmer; I think it’s pretty tough to do that with our current weapon sets.

I absolutely love a 20/20/0/0/30 build focused on Power/Precision. GS or Staff are both “ok” weapon sets to pair. Sword/Pistol is my preferred main loadout but you could probably do ok with Sword/Sword if you wanted ‘pure melee’ for thematic reasons.

GS provides knockback when you want it, vulnerability/might from Mirror Blade, and a hardy, high damage, multi-hit phantasm. I usually use it to close range then swap to sword/pistol.

Staff is mostly great for two reasons: Chaos Storm and Chaos Armor. Your Leap/Swap will act as a finisher in Chaos Storm for an extra hit of Chaos Armor.

Utility-wise, tons of options. Null Field is another combo field. Phantasmal Defender is a beast, though you’ll be shatter-heavy so he won’t last long. Mirror Images and Decoy both help pump out the clones. Blink is awesome for mobility, though I rarely feel I’m lacking that with staff or GS each having some sort of distance-gaining mechanic and Sword having Leap.

Personally, I’m a fan of Sword/Sword + Staff. I view my staff as my secondary weapon for either situations where melee is not safe, or for when I need to have some additional defense.

I use a Power/Precision build as well, which limits a bit of my damage from the staff. iWarlock is still very good with that build though, and I build up some decent bleed with the staff clones if I need to go that route.

In general though, my focus is getting in, getting a 3 clone shatter, Blurred Frenzy, drop an iSwordsman and swap to staff and Phase Retreat out (assuming the mob is still standing). At that point I usually just play a little defensively until I can Mind Wrack again and then swap back to Sword/Sword.

I used to do Sword/Sword and Greatsword, but I’m liking the staff as my secondary far more.

I’m not quite sure what to do with my build, I know 10/20/0/0/30 is mandatory. It’s those last 10 points I’m not sure about yet. I have been putting it in Inspiration for reduced Glamour cd’s for now.

Dual swords is great!
iswordsmen do great sustained damage and have nice survivability with them jumping in and out of AoE attacks. Leap and switch has a nice side effect as a stun breaker or a makeshift teleport + immobilise for those pesky runaway mobs. Riposte is a great block that you can use to interupt as well, and sword#1 applies vulnerability and rips off boons – I believe your clones apply vulnerability too so you can pull your weight in boss fights.

I used to run around sword/sword with full berserker oriented gear, and had a blast. I read all the complaints about mesmers not doing enough pve damage in forums and thought “huh?” as a ploughed through normal pve content solo without a problem.

…Then I hit orr. And suddenly that staff and greatsword started to look really appealing. With putrifiers pulling you all over the place and abominations/gorillas knocking you down every second, being ranged does have its advantages. Especially for a light armor class. Not to mention you lose a lot of dps dodging and kiting attacks – the main reason I slowly switched to greatsword and staff. The thing is even if you have berserker gear the mobs there have quite high health and the glass cannon approach doesn’t work too well because your target will still be alive after your normal attack rotation.

Personally I found it quite tough. You need to time your dodges/block and blurred frenzy perfectly. Which is fun really, if that’s what you are into. I highly recommend you take Illusionary Persona, the grandmaster skill in Illusions trait so that you can hit f3 and f4 immediately when you need it.

I’ve started using melee a lot. I know i’m not really any good with Mesmer yet but what I do makes sense.

I run
Sword/Pistol
Sword/Focus

The focus is there for the light combo field. With our finishers being leap and projectile, I can put down focus 4 and then either grant myself retaliation or remove a condition with the projectiles. Retaliation on melee. Very good

I’m a fan of Sword/Focus & Staff. 0/20/0/30/20. Create lots of Illusions, kill stuff, reflect ranged attacks. Once you’ve got the Focus trait that reduces their CD by 20% and gives those skills Reflection mobs like Risen Hylek die almost instantly with an Illusionary Warden in front of them.

I guess what this thread is saying is that the Torch needs some work because it’s pretty much the only weapon that people don’t like.

Thanks for all the information all
Im now trying to decide between mesmer or guardian ^^

Seeing how mesmers only wear light armor. would’nt this make them very squishy?
I have played a necromancer and while they do have light armor they have alot of hp to make up for it, what about mesmers?

Mesmers are in the middle tier health wise. Also, mesmers can play very defensively if they want.

Take for example scepter/sword + sword/torch.

scepter sword is two blocking skills, sword has a distortion effect every 10 seconds (8 if you’re traited for it) and the torch is an invisibility with a small aoe blast effect.

add to that instant cast heals (mantra of recovery), mimic which absorbs projectiles to be flung back at random opponents when you please, feedback which reflect projectiles and phantasmal defender which takes half of the damage you would have taken and you have a very durable mesmer right there, and that’s using skills only. Add traits in there and you can have a defensively armed mesmer and offensively geared and traited and you’d be able to survive longer than most mesmers.

of course that’s all without the infinite clones that you can summon to distract enemies. I’ve taken down two champions that were part of group events single handedly through the use of clones and phantasms. If you play it right and are very lucky, you can go in an entire battle and not take any battle.

Melee is where you spend most of your encounters in when it comes to open world PvE.

For PvE Sword + Focus //Staff is the highest damage build. My phantasmal guards are hiting for more than 5k, imagine when i’ve 3 of them out (depends a bit on the boss) cd is low so you can shatter them when their life is low and combine them with the warlock. The sword alone crits for around 1’5k with mediocre gear.

I find it funny to play specially because with the “3” skill you teleport to the boss so you can be operative 100% of time even as a melee.

max armor a gaurdian can get, which can get highest is 3.5k and mez can get up above 3.1k.

Not as tough, but close enough that lupic does under 6k to me, while it does over 10k to must people I party with.

Second sword/focus and gs is my weapons.

I of course trait focus, because it trait is awesome.

The mez can be a very scary tank, with all it skills.

1. If a Mesmer is your first class, expect a bit of a learning curve. Mesmer melee survival with Sword as your primary weapon set requires a lot of familiarity and awareness of mob attack patterns and attack animations to be effective.

2. A Mesmer will never be a pure melee unless you want to be weird and intentionally play much harder than you need to. Weapon swap is there for a reason, and Mesmers only have 1 melee weapon (MH Sword). Effective use of weapon swap is critical for maximum Mesmer gameplay, so you will be at mid-range quite often.

Edit: That said you can do MH Sword as your primary weaponset and therefore be at melee range more than half the time, etc.

my mesmer uses sword/sword i like it mainly because you dont see a lot of other people using it. All you see most of the time are FOTM greatsword guys running around.

With the exception of a greatsword build, i believe that mesmer must be played within a short range (less than 600). This is because at this range u get the most out of your defensive and aggresive capabilities. For example, if u drop chaos storm with ur staff on your enemy u will just deal a good aoe debuff-damage skill, but if you are in melee range u will also get a very good amount of buffs (not to mention the combo field). There are tons of other skills that are best used in melee range like null field, shatter skills (illusionary persona traited). Melee range despite sounding a bit weird for a light armor, medium HP class but the mesmer even when on glass cannon build has a ton of defensive abilities that make up for it.. Clones themselves, the skills that grant you distortion (invunerability), illusionary defender, dazes, blocks, stealths, blinks, portals and the story can go on :p.

Mesmers have clones to distract and plenty of evasion/invulnerability options to keep them safe in melee. Now even with a sword/sword setup you do need to circle strafe/dodge fairly often, but with the sword trait, a staff for CA/CS aegis, and good uses of your block, daze, and distortion abilities, you can survive pretty well in close quarters while keeping up good damage or frustrate other players. Throw a scepter/torch in your rotation instead of GS or staff and forget about it; almost nothing can touch you, tho you do lose some DPS.

The thing with mesmer at just about any range, but especially in melee, is that if you mess up, you have to react quick or you go down fast. If you are on point tho, you can survive just about any foe, even champs and semi-perma-stealth thieves.

Not sure why people call GS a melee weapon. On Mesmer’s it’s a range weapon. The further away you are the more damage it does. Not to mention it has a push back which is intended again to keep the mobs at distance.

We have only 1 melee weapon which is Sword. Everything else on mesmer is range. Mainly mid range with a few longer range thrown in there.