Guild Wars 2

Hi! I’m new to GW2 (but not mmo’s) and I rolled a mesmer, and I would love if two particular questions could be answered:

1. What’s the best weapon combo? I’m currently using greatsword and pulling then switching to sword/pistol up close, though I heard gsword’s phantasm is bugged. Is it still relatively viable?

2. What’s an easy way to make ten silver? I can’t get past 4 and I was my skill book

Thank you!

1. There is no “best” weapon combo, but most of the mesmer’s weapons are certainly good. The mainhand sword is a really good choice though. Pistol is good too, but its really up to you whether you prefer to have a ranged phantasm or the offhand sword’s melee phantasm. Personal choice really, there won’t be much difference in damage before you hit 80.

Try experimenting with the staff though (by dropping the GS for now, at least until the phantasm gets fixed). The staff is a wonderful weapon, its sooooo good for survival. You might end up getting slower kills because you don’t have as much dps as the GS, but you won’t die nearly as often, which brings us to point two…

2. Don’t die. Seriously, armor repairs is the silliest thing to spend your money on. Avoid death at all costs until you have disposable income.

Don’t waypoint everywhere. When you can, teleport to either WvW or the Heart of the Mists. Both of these places contain a portal to Lions Arch, which has Asuran gates to nearly everywhere in the world. Use LA as your traveling “hub” as much as possible to cut down on traveling costs.

Do the dailies- each daily gives you 5s.

Sell all the junk items you get as loot to the merchant.

Doing heart “quests” will give you some money. The higher level the area, the more it gives.

Do dynamic events when you stumble on them. Even bronze participation will give you a cash reward.

If you’re a high enough level, do the world boss meta events. The chests can give decent loot, and you’re guaranteed a rare the first time you complete it each day. That alone could get you the 10s you need. http://guildwarstemple.com/dragontimer/ that will let you know if any events will be happening soon, and where they are.

Sell unidentified dyes and “_ bags” (they contain crafting mats). Those are for gamblers, not someone who wants a steady income. They unopened items generally sell for more than what you are likely to get out of them.

Lastly, don’t use the Mystic Forge (loving nicknamed the Mystic Toilet). Just don’t. You have no chance of getting something to make it worthwhile yet, so just leave it alone until you hit a higher level, or know exactly what you’re doing.

That should give you a head start

First, don’t use a Level 80 build to level to 80. That may work for some classes, but not for mesmers. Many Mesmer level 80 builds (particularly Shatter builds) depend largely on Grandmaster traits you can’t get till level 60 at the earliest, which defeats the point of a leveling build. What you want is a leveling build that is effective with Adept and Master traits only.

The first, Clone Cripple Bomb, is based on ramping the damage of the bouncing Staff autoattack with boon stacking, and AoE CC and condition application when clones are killed or overwritten. It is strong for solo’ing lots of trash mobs, handling accidental overpulls (especially useful in caves and enclosed areas with fast-spawning mobs and nowhere to run if you accidentally pull too many at once). It is also very good at solo’ing Champion mobs (if you have the patience for epic 20-30m battles of attrition).

Clone Cripple Bomb

15: 0/0/0/0/5
25: 10/0/0/0/5
35: 10/0/10/0/5
40: 10/0/10/0/10
50: 10/0/10/0/20
60: 10/0/20/0/20
70: 10/10/20/0/20
80: 10/20/20/0/20

Use Sigil of Bloodlust in 2H weapons and Sigil of Bloodlust + Sigil of Force in 1H weapons as you level. (Staff #1 does strong direct damage once you’ve built up Fury and a few stacks of Might).

Playstyle: Keep as many clones up as possible, fill in the gaps with phantasms. When clones are are killed by mobs or overwritten by other clones/phantasms, they explode and apply Cripple and another random condition to all nearby mobs. Keep Cripple on the mobs as much as possible, and kite them while Staff #1 and the other conditions kill them.

Stack conditions and boons with bouncing Staff #1 autoattack, #4 Chaos Armor, and #5 Chaos Storm. Casting #2 Phase Retreat inside Chaos Storm is a combo finisher that gives you a second Chaos Armor.

Don’t Shatter – Shatter does not apply Cripple or the random condition. Only shatter if you’re about to die and need Distortion (F4) or Diversion (F3) to escape.

Primary Weapon: Staff. Most importantly, your Staff #1 autoattack will stack Fury and Might on you, and Chaos Armor and Chaos Storm will stack other random boons on you, increasing the damage of everything else you’re doing. Damage starts low, but ramps up quickly as boons stack on you.

Counterintuitively, despite its 1200 range, Staff is a close-quarters weapon. The closer you are to your target/s the faster the Staff #1 attack will bounce, so the faster the boons and conditions build on you and the target. Between Staff #1, #4 Chaos Armor, and #5 Chaos Storm the range of defensive boons and conditions that go up make you nearly invincible – Aegis, Blind, Protection, Weakness, Regeneration, Confusion, Swiftness, Cripple, Poison, Chilled, Daze.

Secondary Weapon: Secondary and any healing/utility/elite skills I didn’t specify are up to you. I usually went with Greatsword (GS) b/c its Phantasm does Cripple + more AoE damage, but Sword/Sword (lowest illusion cd of all options), Scepter (with its clone factory autoattack), Focus (runspeed), Pistol (strong ranged dps phantasm) are all interesting as well. Torch gives you an instant stealth to get out of trouble, but its phantasm is a little weak prior to 80 with full condition damage gear.

You can singlehandedly take out groups of mobs, handle accidental overpulls, and even solo non-ranged Champion mobs by Cripple-kiting them.

Gear: Focus on Power. Prior to 60, any combination of Power/Prec, Power/Toughness, Power/Vitality 2-stat gear. At 60, upgrade to 3-stat gear: Power/Vitality/Toughness, Power/Prec/Toughness. Despite all the conditions, much of the damage comes from Staff #1’s’ direct damage component, so Power gear works well for this.

Weaknesses: The one thing this build is weak at, at any level, is in zergs. Like big DE’s or WvW zergs. Things either die before you can ramp up your boons and damage, or the boss will quickly reach the condition stack cap.

When someone applies a 26th stack of that condition, the oldest stack is removed to make way for the new one. This happens so fast and frequently in a zerg that your conditions sometimes don’t run their full duration before being replaced, hurting your dps.

So just keep in mind if you want to level via big DE’s with zergs, and have a hard time tagging mobs and getting drops with this build, you may need a more direct-damage oriented build, similar to the next one below. However, given that most players are now 80 and the lower pre-80 leveling zones are sparsely populated, a strong solo build is optimal.

The second, Illusion Army, is based on buffing your illusions and letting them fight for you. It is strong in Dynamic Event leveling where the zerg tends to kill mobs faster than the Clone Bomb build can ramp up its damage. It also has strong single-target direct damage so you don’t have to worry about about the condition stack cap on DE boss fights.

Illusion Army

This leveling build is more direct-damage oriented and is based on taking all traits (and signet) that buff illusions and letting them fight for you. The idea is similar to the level 80 Phantasm PvE builds, but also viable from low levels since it depends only on Adept and Master traits.

In a nutshell, select Adept and Master traits that either 1) reduce illusion spawn cooldown, 2) buff illusion survivability (health), or 3) buff illusion damage.

Cooldown reduction and survivability traits take precedence over damage, b/c at lower levels your illusions tend to be squishy, and dead illusions do zero damage no matter how buffed their dmg may be. But otherwise feel free to play with the order of trait acquisition, this is just one suggestion:

Greatsword + Sword/Sword Version

15: 0/0/0/0/5
25: 0/10/0/0/5*
35: 0/10/0/10/5
40: 0/10/0/10/10**
50: 0/20/0/10/10
60: 10/20/0/10/10
70: 20/20/0/10/10
80: 20/20/0/10/20

Alternate Staff + Sword/Sword Version

60: 0/20/10/10/10
70: 0/20/20/10/10
80: 10/20/20/10/10

• At low levels it’s generally better to focus on reducing illusion spawning cooldowns than increasing illusion damage, at least prior to getting Deceptive Evasion, but feel free to experiment with using Phantasmal Fury here instead of Blade Training.

• 3% more damage per illusion applies to both player damage and illusion damage.

• Again, Sigil of Bloodlust in 2H weapons and Sigil of Bloodlust + Sigil of Force in 1H weapons as you level.

• If your illusions are dying faster than your weapon cooldowns can produce them, add one or both Phantasm utility skills. If not, feel free to use those two utility slots for something else you prefer, like condition removal and teleport.

Playstyle: The name of the game is to reduce cd on Illusion spawning from Greatsword (GS) or Staff and Sword/Sword (S/S) weapon sets as much as possible, as well as getting Clone-on-Dodge, then buffing the health and damage of the Illusions, particuarly the Phantasms, as much as possible.

Weapons: Initiate fights at range with GS or Staff, try to keep multiple Phantasms up, let them fight the mob while you kite and dps it from range. If it gets close, swap to S/S for melee range, burn it down with Blurred Frenzy (Sword #2), avoid damage with Illusionary Ripost (Sword #4).

Keep as many phantasms and clones up as possible, let them do all the fighting for you, and don’t Shatter them unless you’re about to die and they’re close enough to give you Diversion or Distortion and let you get away.

Alternately, use Sword/Focus. A fun trick with S/F is to start casting Focus’s Phantasmal Warden (#5), and while casting it, also cast Sword’s Clone (#3), which leaps out and cripples the target and holds it in place till the Focus Phantasm finishes casting.

Then use the #3 secondary cast to swap places with the clone and Blurred Frenzy while the Phantasmal Warden does Blurred Frenzy at the same time. Can do a lot of damage to single or packs of mobs with that combo.

This build is more offensive, less defensive than the one above, and may not be able to solo Champions and tough Veterans as well as the condition build, but is better at Dynamic Event farming and dungeon leveling.

For 10 silver, add me in game, I’ll toss that to you tonight.

I like GSword and Sword/Sword. Simple reason at lvl 25 you can take Blade Training trait and reduce the cooldown of Sword abilities. At 15 you take the all-powerful Illusionists Celerity trait, this stacks with weapon cooldown reduction traits that produce any Illusions IIRC. Takes iSwordsman down to 12 sec recast from 20 sec.

Even if the GSword iZerker is bugged it’s still pretty useful for AoE. I see some big hits come from it. If you really don’t like GSword then run staff, this works more off of conditions though where Sword/Sword is better with Power. I’m not a fan of Scepter, don’t use Torch much and Focus is good when traited. I opt for /Sword over /Pistol simply because of the Blade Training trait.

GL

try to always keep a focus, it doesn’t matter if its a random white. over the entire time span of leveling to 80, having the focus 4 for swiftness is alot of travel time.

Faster travel from A to B = more time saved leveling. It adds up quickly

Best leveling tip:

Play with a friend!

Trust me it is way more fun and makes leveling really easy. If you don’t have any friends who play GW2 join a guild and ask them if they want to level with you!

Use the weapon you like the most since the game is about fun. Gold for your skill book won’t be a problem once you reach higher levels.

Blackhat.4016:

Best leveling tip:

Play with a friend!

Trust me it is way more fun and makes leveling really easy. If you don’t have any friends who play GW2 join a guild and ask them if they want to level with you!

Use the weapon you like the most since the game is about fun. Gold for your skill book won’t be a problem once you reach higher levels.

^^^^ This!!! Playing with a friend makes this game so much more fun and easier. I leveled with my best friend who is a ranger and when you get a mesmer + ranger together you can not be killed. Roll with a Staff/sword,focus. With a staff you can take on 2 vets and 5 regular nps. With the sword, focus you have a leap/lockdown, invulnerability for two seconds (saves your kitten a lot), swiftness every 20 seconds for 12 seconds, and the iwarden. Which has the highest damage of all phantasms. For money, LOOT EVERYTHING AND SELL IT! Turn on auto loot and mash that “f” key! Most people think that junk is junk and its worthless, but a little copper here and there will add up. Also gather every node you see. You get exp for it and the mats sell well. Don’t waste you money on anything but the skill books. Save it for crafting. Get to 70 then instantly go from 70-80 within mins by crafting.

Thank you all! Though my money problems are alleviated due to me realizing those letters I kept getting came with money…

The best advice I’ve ever found for leveling is to consider buying level appropriate gear and weapons from the TP more like renting because you’ll sell back to vendors for nearly the same price. I usually buy gear at the 1s and 6s (e.g., levels 16, 21, 26, 31, etc). It’s slightly cheaper than buying at the 0s and 5s because that’s when the gear becomes available and you pay a premium for not waiting that extra level.

Look here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Lazy-Kai-s-Guide-to-PvE-Leveling-Guide/first#post850721

Might have some advice you could use…