Guild Wars 2

I’m leveling a Mesmer, currently level 15, I am wondering if it is viable to level a little bit more tanky. I see build posts about ‘bunker’ and ‘immortal’ and it leads me to believe we can get a little more tanky if we want.

I also went into the chaos traits first.

I am wondering if I start choosing vitality and toughness over power, if I will suffer greatly or if it is viable. Obviously I will do less damage, but will the tankiness net for longer sustained damage?

Please tell me your thoughts.

While my immortal build is most certainly very tanky, I really don’t recommend it for pve or leveling, and here’s why:

You simply don’t need it. My build is designed with withstand massive punishment, and provide damage spikes from proper application of confusion as well as sustained damage from retaliation. This doesn’t work well on mobs. Mobs don’t panic and spam skills to get hit with a lot of confusion. Mobs tend to attack slowly with large attacks, making retaliation less effective. Most importantly, being this tanky just isn’t necessary. It honestly encourages bad habits of not learning to properly dodge attacks in pve and other more mobility oriented skills. If you do use your active defense available as a Mesmer, pve is laughably easy even without being this tanky.

For leveling, I really recommend using phantasm builds. These allow you to stay out of the middle of most fights and let your phantasms do the heavy lifting. This type of build is very effective especially against vets and champions. A shatter build is slightly faster for normal mobs, but more difficult against harder and bigger mobs. You can look for my supporting phantasm build in Fay’s build thread, and I have a leveling guide in that build.

Ultimately, if you really want to build super tanky for pve and leveling, you can. You’ll come to find, however, that it really isn’t necessary to be that tanky, and that you end up sacrificing a lot of potential damage to get that much defense.

Thanks a lot, this was really helpful and I appreciate the time you took to help out a new player. I’ll take a look at your phantasum build and your leveling guide right away.

i have enjoyed staff / GS mostly while lvling
and about tanky mesmer … in PvE u have to learn how to use ur clones for tanking … that way u can be very squishy still not recive any hit
in PvP or WvW its different story players can recognise u over clones
anyway i belive most usefull starting traits are 5 in illusions
and at lvl 40 DE ( deceptive evasion )

gl
cheers Xixsa

I should probably mention as well, the lazy kai pve guide is also fantastic. I haven’t tested it myself, but I’ve heard many good things about it. It really comes down to your personal preference, and at low levels you can really mess around with different builds and playstyles until you find one that you really like.