Guild Wars 2

So, from the moment I heard about the mesmer, I knew I had to play one. The mesmer’s specialization in shutting down foes and doing “indirect” damage (as I knew from GW1) appealed to me. In in PvP, it’s wonderful.

But in PvE, I can’t seem to find an interesting playstyle. For example, I tried the GS. Guess what I do? Basically: 234-234-234-F1-“oh only single target mob”-24-24-24-F1 ….
Then I tried the staff: 523-23-“oh mob has lots of conditions from group mates already”-53-3-“ahh I’m attacked”-4-53-3 ….
Scepter is lackluster because those clones are worthless and Shatters don’t recharge quickly enough to make use of them. Melee sword is out of question because you’ll be evading and jumping too much to actually do damage.

Well, that’s my assessment. Utility skills are great, but I can’t seem to find a weapon(-combination) that isn’t … plainly boring.

Does anyone have the same feeling, or have I missed some complexity that could make those weapons more interesting to play? An idea might be focussing on crit/cond-dmg, and switch between staff chaos storm and off-pistol phantasm to quickly stack bleeding/confusion stacks. That would seem interesting, but I’m worried that the resulting dps/support would be worse than simply spamming GS stuff (thereby stacking might on group).

Any ideas/suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I wouldn’t say melee sword is useless. You could stack confusion with shatter, and then unload at the mob with Sword #2 while invulnerable. While you’re doing that, the mob will swing at you and trigger confusion backlash. Depending on your traits, you would also have protection and retaliation up, which will help. In the offhand, if you have a pistol, follow up Sword #2 with Pistol #5 stun, and you can take a few more swipes.

Sword damage is pretty good, and every 3rd strike strips a boon, which is rather nice against some mobs. You can also go sword/sword or scepter/sword and have 1 or 2 blocks. Which means you can stand still for quite a while if need be, because between 2 blocks, Sword #2 giving invincibility and then Shatter #4 giving another 4 seconds of invincibility, you can just stand there and swing away.

I usually kept a GS as my mainstay weapon, but lately I’ve been using GS+Sword/Pistol and it’s working fine. Different, but fine. Ever since they fixed iWarden, focus has become lackluster. And I agree – Scepter, Focus and some other things could use some looking into.

Overall, to me, Mesmer is a very weak PvE class any way you cut it. Illusions as aggro control and damage mitigation are very unreliable – very often I have 3 illusions up, right in a mob’s face, but it keeps chasing me. Our utilities are nice, but other classes arguably have identical or better ones. iWarden was unique, but now that it’s been fixed our usefulness in dungeons plummeted. We are still stupidly weak in DEs when it comes to tapping mobs to get the loot.

Worst part of it all – I really do not expect it to be fixed. There will be tweaks, sure. But as far as tapping mobs in DEs goes, I don’t think ANet will do a single thing. Which means as a PvE farming char, Mesmer will be grossly inferior to most other classes.

I think you’ve missed some complexity, and are expecting something different from the game than you should. Most of your damage for pretty much any class and spec in this game comes from your “1”, and various side effects from this. Your 2-5 and 6-0 are situational uses… some of those situations ARE for more burst/damage, but still situational.

It seems you are TRYING to find a DPS rotation in a game specifically designed to NOT have these. The fun in the game comes from learning how to best use these abilities while staying alive. If you are looking for a DPS rotation, you are barking up the wrong tree.

Additionally, it also sounds like you just keep one weapon out at all times and try to go to town with that… this is not the way the game was intended to play either. The single biggest mistake I see players make is to sit with one weapon out for MINUTES at a time. NO NO NO NO NO NO. Swap. Often. It will add a layer of depth and complexity to the game you haven’t seen before; you have TWO sets of cooldowns you can use … why limit yourself to one?

I run GS + Sword/Sword with a power/precision/crit dmg shatter build on my mesmer, and it works great, even in dungeons. Sword/Sword actually offers GREAT survivability and solid damage when factoring in shatters.

I will give melee swords another try, though I still have doubts. But please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that mesmers are weak in any way – maybe they are, but that’s not my primary concern. I’m just saying that I feel I can do superior damage/support by just doing a boring rotation than I can while actually paying attention and do “creative” stuff.

Xyrm, I’d agree with 2-5 being situational if … you know, this was the case. The GS for example is exactly the opposite. Except for 5, I could basically just spam every other button on cooldown without thinking and fare very well. One example of what I’d like to see is the staff combo of 5-2 (for chaos armor). It’s just a small example, but here I actually have to align the cooldowns and use the spells exactly when I need to. I can’t just spam them ’cause “why not”.

Weapon swaps are the things that I’m looking into at the moment, but I don’t see that many synergy points. Confusion+Sword2, like Sabbathius said, is one good idea. GS+melee is a bit strange because I feel that I could do more damage just sticking in GS than with swapping to melee, use 3→2, jump out (otherwise death), wait for swap-cooldown(!), then swap back to GS.

Yea, I probably expect an unreasonable amount of “depth”, but if we pool our ideas, maybe someone (even other than me g) might benefit from the inspiration.
Any further suggestions? :-)

The melee sword is my favorite weapon for the Mesmer because of one trait: Illusionary Persona. It’s a 30-point Illusions trait that makes you count as a clone when you shatter. If you shatter in melee range, you can do four-clone shatters. The burst damage from a Mind Wrack + Blurred Frenzy combo (with high Power and Precision of course) is pretty great. Plus, you’re invulnerable while doing it, thanks to Blurred Frenzy. It’s some of our best AoE.

The key to the main-hand sword is knowing that you can be invulnerable basically whenever you want to. I’d argue that Mesmers work better in melee than most professions do because of that. We have Blurred Frenzy and Distortion, and with Illusionary Persona you can get a 1-second Distortion without any clones out at all, or up to four seconds of Distortion with three clones out. Who needs dodges when you can stand still and still not take any damage?

EDIT: In case anyone is curious, this does work well in all the explorable dungeons I’ve done so far. While there are certainly fights that are better done at range (for which I tend to use the greatsword, though I use staff if I want more support skills), I spend a lot of my time with sword + pistol in melee range. I use a lot of interrupts (hence the pistol) and shatters. As long as you have a decent amount of toughness and vitality, you can survive and do solid melee damage.

We’ll never match a Warrior’s damage, sadly, but melee Mesmer is fun and powerful and brings some tricks that Warriors can’t.

I also say don’t write off the sword. It does more damage and once you learn how, you won’t feel squishy. Circle strafing around the mob in melee range will let you avoid most damage while still burning the mob down. And you have defense skills for when you need it.

Most of the time when I’m looking at weapons I’m looking to see how the combo off each other and my utilities. I try to bring a variety of fields if possible. I am Asura so can bring radiation field for poison, we have several ethereal fields, and temporal curtain on focus is light. Then bring phantasms and skills that will combo off them. Warden and berserker whirl, torch skill prestige blasts, and we have several leaps and projectiles. Torch in particular is more useful with combos as its our only blast I think. AoE chaos armor, retaliation, and/or poison can be very fun.

I change up weapons each time I upgrade so I’ve tried it all. Not every combo is as fun, but a couple favorites are:

Scepter/sword with sword/focus – did this with the +50 precision while using sword trait. The scepter/sword gives two blocks with blind and daze, lots of clones and confusion. The sword focus gives our only working light field and a whirl combo. Try stacking confusion, dropping curtain, put warden on it for condition removal, leap through and gain retaliation. If he hits you he gets hit with confusion and retaliation, while you blurred frenzy and shatter in his face.

Staff and sword/torch – if you get the traits for torch skills clearing conditions and reduced cool down on torch skills, this works. The Mage still made me sad though. Drop warlock, chaos storm, leap in, mage, prestige, blurred frenzy, shatter.

Basically all the weapons can be used in combination to give you more options than just using one and mashing the same buttons over and over.

You should try swapping between weapons continuously and/or fighting more interesting mobs. E.g. more / higher level mobs.

I will say sword/sword is fun. I find focus is good at times but the slow down skill is little bit on the waste for skill space. Warden is pretty good I admit.

If you play mesmer like a guardian, then you will be disappointed. Mesmer is a very mobile class, just like thieves. Add another complexity, you really have to react against the enemy. Some skills are dependent on what the enemies does such as off-hand sword block or staff tele dodge. You move and swap skills often so you get the benefits of condition of a staff or the dps of a sword.