Guild Wars 2

I focus on power and have a greatsword for ranged and then a sword/pistol for when they get close.

I’ve been working on making my phantasms better as I thought they were a neat idea. (Fury, bleed on crits, more health, things like that).

Well….after the last couple patches, my mesmer is once again not very fun to try to level with. At the beginning the mesmer was the most brutally unfun and incapable class I’ve levelled yet. My guardian could handle vets from the beginning. My necromancer can mass condition infinite enemies. My thief can take out vets without even being touched. My warrior is just laughably faceroll with 100blades. And my mesmer just felt terrible by comparison.

I really liked getting him to a higher level (40) and actually getting some good traits and utility skills so that things are no longer quite as SLOW on the mesmer as on other classes. I had to use all my bag of tricks and swap weapons and dodge all over and still generally do 4x the work my guardian and warrior do, but it was tolerable.

But now…my phantasms aren’t summoning half the time and the skill STILL goes on cooldown. When they do summon, they sit around for an hour before attacking. When they do attack, particularly in the case of iberzerker, the damage they do is waaaaay less than before. Like, 1/2 to 1/3 the damage.

All last night I could barely get the iberzerker to function. When I’d summon him fighting some monsters, they’d just casually turn and one shot him while he stood their dumbly, then go back to attacking me. The very few times he got to attack he only hit once or twice instead of the four or five times he used to. The least little bump in the ground makes my phantasms not summon at all but still go on cooldown!

What happened?

iBerserker is bugged therefore Greatsword is bugged. Phantasms won’t summon if there are LOS issues among other reasons. Switch to staff + sword/focus or pistol imo.

You’ll have to stop using a GS until they fix it. They’ve promised to address the GS problem in the 12/14 patch, but considering all the recent bugs and ill-considered changes to mesmer, GS may or may not be an effective weapon any time soon.

It’s effecting WvW, too. With GS & Scepter/Focus, I could pull folks off walls, stop them from running back in, and (sometimes) kill them. Now, GS can’t stop them from running and can’t DPS. Staff moves me around OOR, is slow to start DPS (delay + projectile time), and can’t slow a runner anyway. Scepter/pistol can pause them long enough for a zerg smack, but then I can’t pull them down.

IMHO, Staff is OK for PvE, but only good for PvP where there are no walls and thus you can equip pistol to slow down runners. It’s far worse than old GS, though. Cripple really helped a lot when your target realized he was in over his head when he decided to pick on you and your clone army.