Guild Wars 2

People often say that mesmer is one of the lowest DPS professions. Besides getting all berserker gear, what is the best way to alleviate this problem?

Use 10/10/0/25/0 traits for phantasm damage and fury.

Dont focus completely on damage though! While the inspiration has the phantasm damage trait on 25, it also has exteremly powerfull support traits, such as glamour cooldowns and vigor on shatter (although you dont want to shatter in phantasm builds). These support options can be taken In full berserker gear and doesnt remove personal damage, but are still a huge help to the team!

I personally like 10/10/0/25/25 the most. In illusions ill take phantasmal speed, which is very important to keep 100% reflection uptime with wardens and feedback.

If youre looking for damage, you should probably get a greatsword :P.

Mesmers actually deal the highest dps if they can maintain 3 iduelists/swordsman. Unfortunately in pretty much every situation that is impossible so their dps suffers.

10/30/0/0/30 is apparently the best for dps. But the build people generally use is 10/30/0/30/0 because its very similar damage and it has loads of support/utility which is why you take a mesmer in dungeons. Use sword mainhand and focus for the utility it provides. Pistol and/or offhand sword are the other offhands you should use for dps purposes.

Basically mesmer damage is terrible but phantasm damage is very good.

spoj.9672:

Mesmers actually deal the highest dps if they can maintain 3 iduelists/swordsman. Unfortunately in pretty much every situation that is impossible so their dps suffers.
Basically mesmer damage is terrible but phantasm damage is very good.

Also keep in mind that the duelist and swordsman are single target. Most of the time in dungeons youll want as much aoe damage as pssobible! The swordsman and warlock are still very good for things like boss fights though.
If you have 15 duelling, you want to stay away from the duelist, as it will stack bleeds like crazy. It will take up bleed slots, so if you have condition damage people in your party, their dps will suffer. (Hit the 25 bleed cap)

The focus and greatsword are very good choices for multi-target phantasms.

I’ve done a fair amount of testing and I’ve found one build that can come real close to some other builds and classes but haven’t found any that top the DPS pole, assuming that you have 3x phantasms and my testing is somewhat accurate. I‘ve found a few that work quite well and are competitive. 10/30/0/5/25 is strong on single targets. It uses Sw/Sw and Sw/P for weapons. 10/30/0/0/30 with Empowering Mantras can push some serious damage as well. Prolly other builds that can do more also. Sword has the best AA and Blurred Frenzy hits pretty hard. Goal is to simply get 3x Duelists out, they’ll hit decently well and maintain an average of 15 stacks of bleeding and are ranged. Stay on the target with auto attacks, use Blurred Frenzy on cooldown and Illusionary Repost if you can quickly reset a phantasm. iDuelists with their bleeds comprise around 60% of your damage so keep them going.

This is strictly for pushing DPS and there’s not a lot of utility. This is probably not an optimal dungeon build, its simply the highest damage output I’ve found.

Blood~

20/20/0/0/30, shatter, a mix of zerker/cavalier/knight gear with GS/X (i prefer staff personally)

My mesmer’s not very high level so you can correct me if I’m wrong, but Illusionary Warlock seems like it’d work wonders on bosses.

TimIsOnTheInternet.5946:

My mesmer’s not very high level so you can correct me if I’m wrong, but Illusionary Warlock seems like it’d work wonders on bosses.

In a party that has a lot of varied conditions, the warlocks can crit for like 10K :P. Thats the same as a full spin of the warden, but the warlock has a much higher attack rate.

I think its safe to say, having 3 warlocks out in a boss fight is our best dps. They also dont interfere with bleed caps like the duelist can do.

If all you care about is the treasures of the deeps:

30/30/0/0/10 all mantras.

You can poop damage, of course, if something so much as farts in your general direction, expect your Mesmer to keel over right then and there.

@OP

People often say that mesmer is one of the lowest DPS professions. Besides getting all berserker gear, what is the best way to alleviate this problem?

I normally use 10/30/0/30/0 (III/II-IV-IX/II-VIII-XI) but I tried out 0/20/0/25/25 in Crucible of Eternity and tried soloing a champion risen giant in malchor’s leap (die every time because some risen raptor would walk in and daze me just before a stomp, got me killed three times in a row after getting it down to like 25%), and in both cases, the faster recharge and cooldown on phantasms seems to be extremely strong in boss situations when you’re constantly needing to replace them. Illusionist’s Celerity lets you maintain greater reflect uptime, Phantasmal Haste makes your wardens and duelists recharge faster (plus 12s duelist cooldowns and 16s warden cooldowns is pretty amazing) plus you still have 15%+ phantasm damage from inspiration.

Main-hand sword with pistol and sword in your off-hands will give you best DPS, bring in focus for utility situations where pulls are needed or reflects – though swap the off-hand sword for the focus since duelist I think has higher DPS, especially with phantasmal haste.

@Alissah

If youre looking for damage, you should probably get a greatsword :P.

No.

Most of the time in dungeons youll want as much aoe damage as pssobible! The swordsman and warlock are still very good for things like boss fights though.

No. Most of the time you will be skipping trash and fighting bosses. If you have to fight trash, you swap in your focus for cleave from phantasmal warden and run in with MH sword to cleave some more. Mesmers are pretty poor with AOE anyway. Warlock is on a bad weapon too, I have no idea how much damage the warlock itself does, I’m guessing it’s like the phantasmal berserker where you have a good phantasm on a bad weapon.

If you have 15 duelling, you want to stay away from the duelist, as it will stack bleeds like crazy. It will take up bleed slots, so if you have condition damage people in your party, their dps will suffer. (Hit the 25 bleed cap)

Why should you compromise your own build because someone in your party is using a weak build? Having three duelists up, 20+ stacks of might and bringing on 24 bleed stacks is insane, to hell with the condi user.

I think its safe to say, having 3 warlocks out in a boss fight is our best dps. They also dont interfere with bleed caps like the duelist can do.

Except the staff itself has poor DPS, so even if the warlocks hit harder than duelists (and I have no idea if they do, if someone has statistics that would be great), the sword auto makes up for it.

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20/20/0/0/30, shatter, a mix of zerker/cavalier/knight gear with GS/X (i prefer staff personally)

Cavalier, knight gear and GS/staff doesn’t sound like maximised DPS to me.

My mesmer’s not very high level so you can correct me if I’m wrong, but Illusionary Warlock seems like it’d work wonders on bosses.

Warlock is on a weak weapon, so not worth it.

Basically what colesy said.

Haha yeah guys! I actually naturally discovered the 0/20/0/25/25 build yesterday and seems like it would get the best results.

Greatsword is just a clunky sniper weapon that I don’t really like at all, kind of like the rangers slow longbow. Izerker is good, but the other skills aren’t very useful and the DPS suffers whenver youre not max range. I don’t know why people run GS in pvp or wvw when in those modes staff gives way better utility, survivability, and mobility, and decent burst in shatter specs.

Instead of using one main hand sword for both sets I might just use a scepter with the other set so I can have a ranged attack when I need one and a powerful phantasms, although the auttoatack would mean I could only keep 2 duelists up at a time.

Just run main hand sword on both sets and then carry a greatsword around in your inventory if you have to range, between scepter and GS, GS is the lesser of two evils. Also it means you can have three phantasms up.

That is what I’m doing now, but since I run condition for WvW typically, I’m gonna eventually get meterologicus lol, and after that much time and effort I’m going to have a hard time not using it in pve. Hahaha if only I didn’t hate bolts skin so much.

@colesy: In a party with an engineer or necromancer, so where most bosses will continually have a least 7+ conditions, the iWarlock does enough damage to blow everything else out of the water. It scales 10% damage per unique condition on the target. On a boss with 7 conditions, it will normally be doing over 10k each hit. More conditions simply means more damage. So for single target damage, the iWarlock rules everything, no contest.

That being said, sometimes I find that greatsword is a better choice because of the cripple on the zerker. This is particularly helpful in mobile boss fights.

In non-mobile boss fights where your team doesn’t have good condition pressure, I’d go with pistol or sword, tending towards sword because the swordsmen will usually stay alive better.

Edit: One thing to note with iWarlock vs iDuelist, they have the same recharge time on their abilities (both are affected by phantasmal haste in the same way) but the duelist attack is a channeled unload, so the warlock ends up with an overall higher rate of attacks.

@colesy: In a party with an engineer or necromancer, so where most bosses will continually have a least 7+ conditions, the iWarlock does enough damage to blow everything else out of the water. It scales 10% damage per unique condition on the target. On a boss with 7 conditions, it will normally be doing over 10k each hit. More conditions simply means more damage. So for single target damage, the iWarlock rules everything, no contest.

With high might stacks and vulnerability stacking, iDuelist and iSwordsman hit for around 10k too. Might makes the bleed stacks from the duelist more potent too. iWarden does about a 15k hit, but as we know has a slow attack and slow recharge. Again though, staff has a weak autoattack, plus you can’t attack through an enemy burst like you can with blurred frenzy which reduces your overall DPS in a fight.

That being said, sometimes I find that greatsword is a better choice because of the cripple on the zerker. This is particularly helpful in mobile boss fights.

An example of a mobile boss fight?

(From phone. bare with the typos and shortness plz) But that would mean that the Warlock would also hit considerably harder with might/vuln stacking.

Hard enough, perhaps, to justify starting the fight with staff and swapping to sword.

Well pyroatheist mentions necros and engineers which can maintain 25 stacks of vulnerability and engineers are good at might stacking too, so that’s the conditions I assumed (the two classes stacking conditions, including vulnerability along with might stacking).

@colesy: I’m talking about no vuln or might stacking. The highest hits I’ve seen from the warlock was 14k on Grenth, in a 10/10/0/30/20 trait set, not full zerker armor, and no might (25 vuln probably). Extrapolate from that as you wish.

I’ll have to give staff a go and see for myself. Would you prefer I use your build or can I just stick to my current build? I’d run risen giant tests but that would skew the results because of the lack of conditions I can apply, so I’ll have to use it in the dungeon group I usually run with, but I doubt they’ll mind, they’ve never had a problem with me trying out battle sigils, sword off-hand or traiting differently.

Also, could you describe your basic combat rotation?

I would just try it on your current build tbh. Doesnt change the fact being locked into staff is a bad idea. And the iWarlock is most likely gonna die after 1 attack anyway. So pointless having a staff in most situations.

I won’t use staff in all fights, generally ill use it in fights where I can reasonably place the warlocks where they’ll survive for a little (no idea if you use sig of illusions, but use it for this).

Usually I’ll spawn a warlock to start, then swap out to whatever other set I have. Once the weapon swap cooldown is up, swap back to staff, and summon your second warlock as soon as possible, then get back to your normal set. The objective is to stay out of staff for as much as possible, so take the time to carefully position where you spawn the warlocks to make sure they survive.

Signet of illusions is a waste of a utility slot. And like weve already said getting stuck in staff is a really bad idea.

Pyroatheist.9031:

I won’t use staff in all fights, generally ill use it in fights where I can reasonably place the warlocks where they’ll survive for a little (no idea if you use sig of illusions, but use it for this).

Usually I’ll spawn a warlock to start, then swap out to whatever other set I have. Once the weapon swap cooldown is up, swap back to staff, and summon your second warlock as soon as possible, then get back to your normal set. The objective is to stay out of staff for as much as possible, so take the time to carefully position where you spawn the warlocks to make sure they survive.

The problem I have is having to stay in staff for 10 seconds. It’s the exact reason why I dislike greatsword, it’s a lot like staff in the sense of it coming with three weak abilities, a weak autoattack and a strong phantasm. I’ll still test it out though.

Right, I did some dirty testing on the staff (I’m really strapped for time so couldn’t be bothered to get everything set out perfectly balanced, but the results aren’t too bad).

Staff: Exotic, berserker, inquest sigil (10%+ damage vs. inquest), bought with dungeon tokens

vs.

Sword: Exotic, berserker, bloodlust sigil (10+ power per kill, goes up to 25 stacks for a maximum of 250 damage, ends on down)
Pistol: Exotic, berserker, sigil of battle (3 stacks of might on weapon swap for 20 seconds, 10 second ICD)

Tested it out in two COE paths, tried to drop a chaos storm before using iWarlocks to maximise their damage.

Now like I said, it was a pretty rough test, but generally what tended to happen was the duelist and the warlock would either do similar damage (not factoring in duelist bleeds), or the warlock would exceed the duelist by one or even two thousand damage. I wasn’t constantly paying attention to vulnerability applied to the boss or might stacking by the party, but this was a pretty consistent trend from the very brief testing I did (p1 and p2).

Staff auto would do about 1k damage. Sword auto would do about 1.9k for the first two hits and then 2.5k on the final hit.

Skill two on staff to proc chaos armour and the chaos armour skill itself were generally useless because I wasn’t getting hit, chaos storm itself was purely to set up conditions for warlocks.

Blurred frenzy on sword did its usual part in making me not be required to dodge so could sustain my own personal damage through alpha’s attacks every time I used it instead of a dodge, three as usual was a blank that I never used. I didn’t use iRiposte because I was too worried it would only block one AOE and I would eat damage from the others (though not using it in p1 when it would have been best is probably just laziness on my part), but also I found it surprisingly easy to maintain three phantasms so I wouldn’t want to override one either.

So far I’d say staff is a lot like greatsword with junk skills and auto, and a strong phantasm cursed to being on a weaker weapon. What drags the staff auto down is how slow it is, in addition to being weak. Using staff or greatsword also means giving up use of sword/sword, sword/pistol or sword/focus which all have strong phantasms themselves, but a stronger auto and actually have a relevant skill on the mainhand and offhand sets.

tl;dr sword and offhands that aren’t torch are better than staff.

@colesy: Out of curiosity, how many conditions were you usually loading on the bosses. The warlock really really needs those conditions to make ends meet, as it were. Just as a little example of how it scales, it was doing 11k damage hits on some champion nightmare things when I was downleveled to 66.

The number of conditions makes an incredibly massive difference in dps, and if your party can’t sustain at least bleed/burn/chill/vuln/poison/cripple/weakness, the warlock definitely will not be higher damage.

The warriors were stacking vuln with axe/mace, guard was too from auto (via blinds, another condition obviously), duelist would inflict bleeds, and then I believe I got burn, chill, poison and weakness from chaos storm. Like I said, I tried to actually apply different conditions before dropping the warlock so that the results weren’t purposely ret*rded and skewed in my favour.

Might have been a good to idea to have asked for an engi since they can spam conditions better than anything else (plus without compromising their actual DPS by using some weak condi build) rather than having to inflict most of them myself but I’m not sure whether the guys I ran with had an engi or not … plus again I was in a hurry.

I’ll ask for an engi next time I get on my good computer, but feel free to conduct some tests yourself, it’s definitely worth figuring out how high the warlock can go.

Im just gonna ask this question here instead of making a new thread since its somewhat related. If i wanted to level up as condition based sword MH with Pistol/focus offhand what order should i take my traits? Also what slot skills should i grab?

I got a level 20 scroll for the 1 year anniversary and im finally gonna level a Mesmer but i have no idea what to focus on.

Sword, pistol and focus are power weapons.