Guild Wars 2

I have a mesmer I’ve leveled to 80 but I’ve not touched her since because the class seems really lackluster to me. I’ve always struggled to find ways to deal enough damage and I have trouble dealing with multiple targets. Overall, I feel like there’s a lot of utility and support skills/abilities the mesmer has that don’t come in handy as often as they should. Can I get some help on how to play her? I mostly play PvE and occasionally WvW.

I ran a pure power GS/ S+P shatter build while leveling, using phantasms to deal damage then shattering them for boons + damage and whatnot. And while it was sorta fun, it seemed like a lot of effort and micromanagement for only decent DPS. Then I tried switching to a condi build with the scepter (and even got an entirely new set of exotic armor for it) but again, I felt like I wasn’t doing much damage.

What annoyed me the most about illusions is that I am forced to shatter them when the target nears death since they will disappear anyway when they die. So I feel like every time I fight, I start out weak and have to work to build up my damage, and then once I finally get my DPS going, the target dies and I become weak again and have to start building up all over again. It feels like a lot of effort for not a lot of gain.

Is there something I am missing about the mesmer that makes the class awesome? Should I be using different builds? Help, please.

You should be using this build for dungeons in PvE http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_S/S_/F_/P
You have to get your phantasms up to do damage in PvE, they do disappear after your target dies but they aren’t on a large cooldown and can be popped right back up very quickly (especially if you’re running signet). You don’t really shatter in PvE as it’s a DPS loss, but yeah, you can do it when the enemy is about to die. If you want to play a shatter build, you want to do PvP or WvW because it just does not work in PvE.

Shatter builds have really strong burst from a few combos (like mirror blade + dodge + mindwrack) which if pulled off properly can take most classes/builds 100-0% very quickly. However, shatter is really, really friggin hard to play well and you’ll be sleeping on the ground A LOT for the first month or more (depending on your previous experience with mesmer and PvP in general). Even after you become decent for classes such as thieves, rangers, fresh air elementalist and DPS guardians you will most of the time be easy prey (all 3 can be killed but presuming you’re both at around the same skill level, those 4 will most of the time win, though guardian is becoming very much so doable with staff). As guardian has decent sustain and damage and you’ve got damage, just little to no sustain, thankfully staff breaks through the sustain quite well and wares it off somewhat quickly, ranger is simply going to either load you up with condis by spamming 1 and you’ll drop like a fly or use #2 on his longbow and watch you double dodge then quickly after going to use #2 again and you won’t have much left to survive, unless you learn how to kite/LOS it’s gonna be a loss every time, elementalist burst is just too unpredictable, it counters so many classes just because of that, again, LOS helps a lot against them, thieves have too much evasion and burst for you to be able to kill them. I’m at a point where I can beat a lot of thieves, but decent ones still get me easily. I’m in the progress of making a thief special in my video series.

I’ve made guides for WvW/PvP, both linked in my signature, video one is in progress still.