Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,

I just started playing a few days ago, spending most of my time experimenting with different builds across most of the classes. I’ve settled on Mesmer for my PvE experience, however after a few hours I seem to be encountering the same issues and finding myself questioning whether or not I made the right choice.

Here is a short list of the issues I’m currently having. Please let me know if these are normal and working as intended (I’m still learning after all :] ).

1. Enemies actively engaging something I’m supposed to defend (I.E. a supply mule on its way to a garrison along a route) will not target me in spite of all my abilities being used on them. I’m forced to either simply watch whatever I’m protecting die while I try and go through all the mobs in time, or I clear the area before starting the quest.

2. In melee range (I use the term loosely because I still have yet to find where the game is telling me how far away I am to my target) I am shocked when my illusionary leap actually summons an illusion, using the ability from any distance besides hugging distance fails 99% of the time it feels.

3. None of the illusions/phantasms I summon take aggro, they do not hold aggro from a stealth/decoy summon, they die instantaneously. What is the point of using illusions outside of PvP besides their shatter abilities? I understand the need for phantasms as they do damage.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post, any positive feedback would be greatly appreciated. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all

I’ll take a stab at this:
1) Trying to get the mobs to focus on you is a lost cause. You either need to kill faster or make better use of CC. Feedback, Focus Pull, GS Push, and Magic Bullet are your friends here.
2) Many of our illusion summoning skills tend to glitch out on uneven terrain, and I’ve noticed that iLeap in particular fails more often when I’m not already in combat. There is a range indicator under the skill; if it shows a red bar under the icon then you’re too far away. It definitely helps to use iLeap in conjunction with Into the Void, Magic Bullet, or Signet of Domination if you really need it to go off.
3) Aggro doesn’t quite work the same in this game as other MMOs. To make the mob more likely to target your clones it helps to position yourself so that the clone is between you and the mob. They can also protect you from projectiles this way. Don’t expect the clone to last for more than one or two hits. If they aren’t going after your clones, you can always use Distortion to buy you time to get more up. Shattering is an important part of the class, so practice incorporating it into your play early on.

Thank you so much for your reply. You adressed all of my concerns, I’ll be be adapting my playstyle now with hopefully much better results

Phantasms, which made for a decent pve-oriented build with mob tagging (from Berserker) and aggro grabbing , have been nerfed into the ground with an addition of a series of new bugs (including some of those mentioned by SuburbanLion), so you are mostly left with either shatter bombs or condition builds.
To get a general idea of how playing a shatter looks like, you can watch these https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/guide-WvWvW-Shatter-cat

Mesmers don’t start to shine til after lvl 40.