Guild Wars 2

Hello mesmer folk. Im at a loss with trying to fight your class.

Well, one specific build of it. PU Condi mesmer. I play all of 3 classes regularly, Warrior, Guardian, and Thief. I face the same problem on each when trying to fight a PU Condi mesmer/chrono. I can clear the conditions and try to keep smacking the mesmer, who’ll generally cycle through defensives to keep me off, but it always seems that no matter how many condi clears I bring, the mesmer always seems to be able to reapply their heavy conditions (confusion/torment) in stupidly quick order. Which generally leads to my quick demise because taking 3.5k condi damage every second sucks absolute balls.

So, more experienced people of the mesmer forums. How exactly can I manage to fight this build more easily? Or at least give myself a fighting chance against someone using it?

Just realized I forgot to put what builds I use in the post ._.

My thief runs a power D/D build, Guardian is Meditrapper, and the warrior hovers back and forth between Berserker Greataxe and Berserker GS/Hammer

Is your Thief using Escapist’s Absolution or Shadow’s Embrace? You really need one of those two as a Thief in the current meta. Pain Response is also a nice pick-up if you’re running Daredevil.

I do generally run Escapists Absolution, but I rely on Crit strikes to get out the damage I need to do as D/D. Might try SA with the build soon though.

Also, acro is terrible for D/D Its only used for S/D or Staff thieves.

I’m not familiar with thief (but I can say that they give me plenty of frustration when I have to fight them :P), so can’t give you thief specific help. I would say though to just disengage and don’t bother fighting them. A well played mesmer is incredibly hard to kill, and condi mesmer almost exclusively deals confusion and torment, which are deadly to other players in competitive play.

If you want to fight them, or are in a position where you can’t run away though:

• Wait for the burst from scepter before you cleanse conditions. This applies the most torment and confusions

• Watch for Staff4, chaos armor. If you hit them when they have it, you gain a condition, one of the ones that can be applied is more confusions (not to mention they will have protection when they have chaos armor anyway). It has a 35 sec CD, and has a faint, purple glow around the mesmer if they have chaos armor

• You have an extremely tiny window after they block with Scepter 2 before the torment is applied. Use it to get out of there. Hard to pull off, I’ve never been able to do it, only heard from others that it is technically possible

• Don’t rely on CC, this build has 3 stunbreaks (one of which stealths the mesmer), one of which is on a 10 sec CD untraited, 8 sec traited.

• Scepter 3 can only hit enemies in front of the mesmer. If you can get behind them while they are casting it, the animation will continue but the damage stops (I need someone else to verify this, but this is how the skill works for me in PvE, so I imagine it works the same in WvW)

• Carry stealth disruptor traps.

I wouldn’t bother attempting to fight a condi PU Mesmer with D/D Thief. Whenever you try to land CnD you’ll just be interrupted or eat a condi burst. D/D Thief isn’t viable against anything these days (outside of bursting squishes down in your first CnD-Backstab rotation) and is just free food for a condi Mesmer. D/P and condi Thief do far better, but I think you probably already knew about that

I generally do not engage a condi PU Mesmer on my own when on my Thief unless I have Trickster and Escapist’s Absolution, but even then you’re fighting one of the best 1v1 builds in the game using a class that doesn’t excel much in 1v1s anymore.

So meditrapper guardian and D/D thief are probably two of the most 1-trick pony burst builds in the game. Naturally, you’ll have huge problems against anything that doesn’t die in the first 5 seconds of the fight. My general advice is that you shouldn’t play 1-trick ponies and be surprised when you get wrecked by a defensive sustain build.

On the thief, your best bet is to just pull a full disengage and try again if your burst doesn’t work. Once the Mesmer knows you’re there, they can destroy their illusions and rotate defensive cooldowns/interrupts to prevent you from regaining stealth with CnD. You have basically zero defense, so there’s no way for you to survive or sustain through that.

On the guard you’re basically in the same boat but without the capability to pull a full disengage. Guard does actually have some interesting mechanics that hurt Mesmer defense, but if you don’t have condie cleanse that won’t matter. Without condie cleanse, you either kill the Mesmer in the first 5 seconds or you lose.

If you have condie cleanse it’s a bit more interesting. F1 spear, deflecting shot traited to knockback, and test of faith traited to daze are all unblockable cc. This means you can hold onto those 3 skills and use them when the Mesmer tries to block for defense. Doing that will let you break through the defense and get solid dps windows.

As for your warrior, just modify your builds to have high uptime on resistance and you’ll be fine. If the other builds you run are any indicator, those warrior builds are also probably pure burst 1-trick ponies, and that’s just not going to cut it.

I guess this whole thing could be summed up as: don’t play 1-trick ponies and expect to kill people aware of you being a 1-trick pony.

Fay.2357:

So meditrapper guardian and D/D thief are probably two of the most 1-trick pony burst builds in the game. Naturally, you’ll have huge problems against anything that doesn’t die in the first 5 seconds of the fight. My general advice is that you shouldn’t play 1-trick ponies and be surprised when you get wrecked by a defensive sustain build.

On the thief, your best bet is to just pull a full disengage and try again if your burst doesn’t work. Once the Mesmer knows you’re there, they can destroy their illusions and rotate defensive cooldowns/interrupts to prevent you from regaining stealth with CnD. You have basically zero defense, so there’s no way for you to survive or sustain through that.

On the guard you’re basically in the same boat but without the capability to pull a full disengage. Guard does actually have some interesting mechanics that hurt Mesmer defense, but if you don’t have condie cleanse that won’t matter. Without condie cleanse, you either kill the Mesmer in the first 5 seconds or you lose.

If you have condie cleanse it’s a bit more interesting. F1 spear, deflecting shot traited to knockback, and test of faith traited to daze are all unblockable cc. This means you can hold onto those 3 skills and use them when the Mesmer tries to block for defense. Doing that will let you break through the defense and get solid dps windows.

As for your warrior, just modify your builds to have high uptime on resistance and you’ll be fine. If the other builds you run are any indicator, those warrior builds are also probably pure burst 1-trick ponies, and that’s just not going to cut it.

I guess this whole thing could be summed up as: don’t play 1-trick ponies and expect to kill people aware of you being a 1-trick pony.

The reason I run D/D isnt to be a one trick pony. Its to try to play as thief used to be, relying on stealth to get things done

Sadly, almost everything about thief stealth has been nerfed.

Also, the warrior builds I run are generally the Greataxe build from metabattle, GS/Hammer build, or S/Sh+GS power.

Nobody likes fighting a PU Mes of any kind. It’s just cheap as kitten. It’s a problem with stealth really. Just throwing an idea out there, even though it’s probably terrible: make each stealth skill during stealth last 1 second less. This CD reduction is removed once you’re been out of stealth for 1 second. This means that you have to at least reveal yourself for 1 second in order to keep using long lasting stealth skills.

As you can see, I kittening HATE stealth spamming.

Invictorum.7643:

Fay.2357:

So meditrapper guardian and D/D thief are probably two of the most 1-trick pony burst builds in the game. Naturally, you’ll have huge problems against anything that doesn’t die in the first 5 seconds of the fight. My general advice is that you shouldn’t play 1-trick ponies and be surprised when you get wrecked by a defensive sustain build.

On the thief, your best bet is to just pull a full disengage and try again if your burst doesn’t work. Once the Mesmer knows you’re there, they can destroy their illusions and rotate defensive cooldowns/interrupts to prevent you from regaining stealth with CnD. You have basically zero defense, so there’s no way for you to survive or sustain through that.

On the guard you’re basically in the same boat but without the capability to pull a full disengage. Guard does actually have some interesting mechanics that hurt Mesmer defense, but if you don’t have condie cleanse that won’t matter. Without condie cleanse, you either kill the Mesmer in the first 5 seconds or you lose.

If you have condie cleanse it’s a bit more interesting. F1 spear, deflecting shot traited to knockback, and test of faith traited to daze are all unblockable cc. This means you can hold onto those 3 skills and use them when the Mesmer tries to block for defense. Doing that will let you break through the defense and get solid dps windows.

As for your warrior, just modify your builds to have high uptime on resistance and you’ll be fine. If the other builds you run are any indicator, those warrior builds are also probably pure burst 1-trick ponies, and that’s just not going to cut it.

I guess this whole thing could be summed up as: don’t play 1-trick ponies and expect to kill people aware of you being a 1-trick pony.

The reason I run D/D isnt to be a one trick pony. Its to try to play as thief used to be, relying on stealth to get things done

Sadly, almost everything about thief stealth has been nerfed.

Also, the warrior builds I run are generally the Greataxe build from metabattle, GS/Hammer build, or S/Sh+GS power.

If you want to use Thief with Stealth you want D/P with the amount of blocks and other defensive skills/passives going around CnD doesn’t cut it anymore, you will want to run Trickery and pick up Trickster with Withdraw as your heal so it provides an extra Condi clear and synergizes well with EA, and run SoA which is yet another that symergizes well with EA.

SA does work really well in WvW if you run Tr/SA/DD it has some potential you lose on on some burst but make up for more survivability and maneuverability.

War the best bet is to run the build that maximizes resistance uptime they have the easiest time against Mesmers.