Guild Wars 2

Attached is a picture of my spreadsheet showing the different Mesmer heals “heal per second” value if you were spamming them as fast as possible … with different applicable traits as well as different levels of healing power.

I’ve also attached a .txt file that you need to simply rename to a .csv for your spreadsheet to automatically identify it.

What I see here is:

• Mantra of Recovery will always give you the most healing per second in this scenario … and only gets better the more traits you apply to it
• Ether Feast will always give you more healing per second than Mirror
• Mantra of Recover with traits easily blows the other heals out of the water … even moreso with more healing power.

As I would expect.

MoR, of course, has the huge drawback of needing to channel it, but you also get three triggers of all on-heal abilities, which can be quite nice with, say, Runes of Altruism or Mender’s Purity.

Fuschia.6573:

As I would expect.

MoR, of course, has the huge drawback of needing to channel it, but you also get three triggers of all on-heal abilities, which can be quite nice with, say, Runes of Altruism or Mender’s Purity.

Not true. I tested that out, thinking it was the case. The only time you get the benefit from rune with “on heal” procs, is when you first channel the mantra. The individual uses do not.

Kusa.6438:

Fuschia.6573:

As I would expect.

MoR, of course, has the huge drawback of needing to channel it, but you also get three triggers of all on-heal abilities, which can be quite nice with, say, Runes of Altruism or Mender’s Purity.

Not true. I tested that out, thinking it was the case. The only time you get the benefit from rune with “on heal” procs, is when you first channel the mantra. The individual uses do not.

Both a bit incorrect.

There is a 15s internal cooldown on all on-heal rune bonuses/effects. You have to keep track of this when using the mantra. That is, channel it, gain the bonus, wait 15 seconds, use power return, gain the bonus, wait 15 seconds, use power return, gain the bonus, wait 15 seconds, channel it, gain the bonus, repeat.

Mirror makes managing such bonuses trivial since it has a 15s cd with a 1s cast.

Check again….altruism has a cooldown, so the first time it procs after you channel it. if you hold off on the insta-heals until the cooldown is over, they trigger it. they do niot trigger aoe heals from the mantra trait though…that’s why mantra of pain works better for group healing.

If you want to know how to get the most out of Restorative Mantras, check out Fay’s guides/site. You can get their from the sticky’d list of Mesmer builds which features a few of Fay’s mantra builds.

Fay is also a very nice person to chat with.

I’m not surprised by this at all. With the traits Restorative Mantras and Mender’s Purity, Mantra of Recovery becomes one of the best healing skills in the game. Not only because you are able to remove two conditions separately, or heal three times, but also because mantras can be activated on top of other skills. You can even use Mantra of Recovery while you’re reviving an ally. And with Harmonious Mantras, you can heal one more time, and remove one more condition. It’s brilliant.

Best part is, there is no drawback while your opponent is trying to kill one of your clones. Especially now that the channel time got reduced!

I’ve found that when I’m using Mantras, I like them best when I’m using a Staff. I think this has to do with several reasons:

• Phase Retreat and Chaos Armor are instant casts so can be used without interrupting you if you’re channeling a mantra
• Staff clones (and phantasms) are good damage in the right builds, so not attacking for 2.75 seconds isn’t too damaging to your dps
• Phase Retreat makes it trivial to gain space needed to channel a mantra against a good opponent that would otherwise try to interrupt your channel

Honestly, I have yet to see a heal from any other class in the game that gives as much healing per second as Mantra of Recovery with the various Mantra Traits. It’s pretty beastly.

Doesn’t it say a lot about how wrongly the whole Mantra-concept has been implemented (especially after switching to multi-charge Mantras) when we are using an ability type designed around the idea of frontloaded pre-cast abilities as steady-output abilities?

Am I the only one who’d love to just rip this out and re-do them from the ground up? Mantras should give me superior frontloaded power, and the longer the fight drags on the more I suffer compared to other abilities. That’s how I understand their basic idea, at least, with the long cast time which can be pre-cast and the instant use.

Wait… Is it even possible to obtain 2k healing power?

I’d agree theoretically, but considering the amount of builds that can take a really, really long time take them down, the concept wouldn’t work out well and nobody would use mantras again.

Sebrent.3625:

I’ve found that when I’m using Mantras, I like them best when I’m using a Staff. I think this has to do with several reasons:

• Phase Retreat and Chaos Armor are instant casts so can be used without interrupting you if you’re channeling a mantra
• Staff clones (and phantasms) are good damage in the right builds, so not attacking for 2.75 seconds isn’t too damaging to your dps
• Phase Retreat makes it trivial to gain space needed to channel a mantra against a good opponent that would otherwise try to interrupt your channel

Honestly, I have yet to see a heal from any other class in the game that gives as much healing per second as Mantra of Recovery with the various Mantra Traits. It’s pretty beastly.

Did you already post a concrete build for that somewhere?

I think people get too stuck on the idea of mantras being only frontloaded.

Many people in a fight stay in range of their foe so they can keep hitting them with auto-attacks. However, there are people that do more of a “jousting” style. Osicat is a great example of this. He will run in, burst, run out, repeat. It’s during those run in/out periods that you can charge your mantras. They are points in which you and your opponent are not in range of each other so are ideal for this.

Additionally, there are mantra traits that make it not such a bad idea to take the 2.75 seconds to rechannel a mantra as they give you more toughness and heal you at the end.

I think Mantras are just a harder type of skill to grasp and as such the Mesmer community has not devoted as much of our awesome brainpower to figuring out all the best ways to use them.

Players like Fay and ChaosMaestro have made some progress, but I think there is still potentially more that could be done.

@Iruwen
I have not posted a concrete build for this recently.

I did have a mantra, shatter, support build I posted a while back that you could leverage those points in though … and people were having success with it before the mantra buff.

I like this sort of data, nice post! Now I’m off to search for some mantra builds… guess I settled on my former build and never looked into how they really work =)

When it comes to mantras, I can see them fitting easily into that new phantasm dueling build I’m seeing a good bit of. Most phantasm builds have 25 points in Inspiration. This is more than enough points for Restorative Mantras.

I’m currently playing around with the idea of a 30/20/0/20/0 build … the first build I’ve ever considered that had 20 points in Dueling without Deceptive Evasion and without at least 5 points in Illusions. I know I want a Staff as one of my two weapons (for many reasons including those already mentioned), but I’m not sure about the other weapon set. Staff / Greatsword could be nice and allow you to leverage range to help with channeling, Staff / X+Torch for an escape if needed, Staff / Sword + X for burst … so many options.

Also, when it comes to Mantra of Distraction, I know some people think of it as you not casting for 2.75 seconds so that your opponent isn’t casting for 2 (3 traited) seconds. However, another way to think of it is this:

It’s 2.75 seconds while out of range/sight that you’re not casting so that your opponent isn’t casting for 2 or 3 seconds while you are in range and in sight. It’s also interrupts on key abilities (particularly heals), causing them to go on interrupt cooldown.

how much armor do you gain while charging a mantra?

Sebrent.3625:

I think people get too stuck on the idea of mantras being only frontloaded.

Many people in a fight stay in range of their foe so they can keep hitting them with auto-attacks. However, there are people that do more of a “jousting” style. Osicat is a great example of this. He will run in, burst, run out, repeat. It’s during those run in/out periods that you can charge your mantras. They are points in which you and your opponent are not in range of each other so are ideal for this.

Additionally, there are mantra traits that make it not such a bad idea to take the 2.75 seconds to rechannel a mantra as they give you more toughness and heal you at the end.

I think Mantras are just a harder type of skill to grasp and as such the Mesmer community has not devoted as much of our awesome brainpower to figuring out all the best ways to use them.

Players like Fay and ChaosMaestro have made some progress, but I think there is still potentially more that could be done.

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I think you are right there is HUGE potential with this and I wish people would give it a chance. One mesmer running a mantra build like this is just a smudge on the screen but a whole group of mesmers running this in a wvw zerg situation could be amazing.

zaxon.6819:

how much armor do you gain while charging a mantra?

Protected Mantras: Increases armor while casting mantras.

• Notes: Grants 250 toughness.

If you go to gw2buildcraft.com, you can see that 250 toughness is almost 12% damage reduction.

See +247 toughness from armor is 11.86% damage reduction