It all depends whether you want to go for raw damage or condi damage.
You could even play support though it’s even trickier and with the current state of healing power not rewarding enough (even though it does heal a pretty decent amount still!).
Mesmer has a few specialties. I won’t go into what all other classes can do (such as doing raw damage and spamming autohits).
First mesmer has a lot of synergy with interrupting your foe. Any spell that knock down, daze or stun ennemy works. If you look carefuly you’ll realize that the mesmer can effectively interrupt a LOT his opponent if you time well your interruptions. If you go for raw damage you can get a trait doing damage for each interruption + weakness, if you go for condi you can add aoe confusion on it among other things.
Then you have your clones, it’s all about whether keeping them or not and when shattering them. Overall raw power build tend to shatter clones occasionally (basically when F1 cd is ready and 2-3 clones are up and/or to use specific situation, such as using F3 to interrupt a special attack, or F4 for last minute survivability). Condi build tends to spam more the F1-4 since it can in total applies 2 stacks of confusion, one stack of torment and one stack of blindness for each explosion + the confusion and torment from clones aswell (one stack each). Just be careful not to shatter phantasms too quickly otherwise you’ll waste some potential, on condi build I tend to shatter them right after their first attack, sometimes later but they don’t do enough damage to waste time and not shater them quickly.
As for utilities there is some very odd one (such as the VERY risky revive spell) but a lot can be very useful depending on the situation. The aoe to remove condi and boons is extremly useful in any gamemode, the phantasm doing the same thing bouncing is very useful aswell, the defensive phantasm can be extremly useful in team. I do think that the two utilities you talked about are the less useful because they are extremly selfish and are used solely to cover a mistake you made while the others have some effectiveness you bring on the table. Blinking is really useful only for running scenarios and to save you from a tight spot, which shouldn’t happen if you are careful (in PvP it’s different I agree, but I still think Blink shouldn’t be used that much on most builds).
I can’t give much more informations since you haven’t told us what kind of build you want to go to. My biggest advice is to find one concept you want to do, dealing damage, applying condis, supporting etc. Then you look for the best weapons to suit that playstyle, then you look at the specialisations helping you the most for that purpose etc. Doing everything one by one will make you realize there is a lot of hidden synergies very interesting.
