Guild Wars 2

Whilst Guardians are the safe favourite as commanders, I’ve been wondering why Mesmers aren’t more popular as commanders.

Mesmers can match Guardians in terms of close range DPS, and at long range have more DPS. Survivability, the real important bit of commanding is pretty good on a Mesmer with a combination of clones, illusions, blinds, stealths and evades helping out a lot. But, the real bonus of a Mesmer commander is is the unrivaled group abilities. Portals into enemy keeps, null field, time warp, veil stealths.

So why aren’t there more Mesmer commanders? Would being a Mesmer commander make much sense?

Not sure on all the stuff, but i’ve seen mesmer commanders before and when commanding pugs they’ll drop a portal for portal bomb but then the pugs will follow the dorrito so the portal bomb is ruined lol. It seems like mesmers would be better for the commanders assistants or something, like same party, same voice comms, etc.

UrMom is right. When commanding pick-ups, there are certain things I just can’t do. Portal and Veil tricks are difficult if I don’t have a lot of people in VoIP. Running with a guilded group is much easier though as we’re all in VoIP and attentive.

At any rate, I’m not a terribly proficient commander, so sometimes I become overwhelmed by trying to juggle strategizing, combat, and communication. Most Mesmer builds require very active gameplay, and in trying to coordinate some of these stunts, I often lose out on watching the map and anticipating enemy movement.

For guild raids, we often assign an Ele and a Mesmer to the commander so s/he knows that certain tools are available at all times. (When you need a water field or a veil, you often need it on a moment’s notice.)

Very interesting input, thanks guys.

You’ve found that pug groups generally can’t pull of portal bombs and similar mesmer tricks very well then? I think I’ve been quite lucky with that, our pugs seem to get what to do in those cases pretty well.

In terms of Mesmer commanders, I’ve commanded as a mesmer and seen mesmer commanders. Mesmers do have the survivability needed, i.e. toughness armor, PU stealth to be like a semi-guardian with all those boons, blinks, stunbreaks. However, illusions die super fast in zergs, and will not help survivability at all. On the other hand, most mesmer commanders might not have access to swiftness if not running appropriate runes or whatnot. Nor stability unless running that mantra which doesn’t give much anyway. It would be relying on the zerg.

And the other replies were absolutely right, mesmers have tools for good guild coordinated groups, veils, portals, so forth. A mesmer commander could also blink far into the backline of an enemy zerg so that the rest of the group will follow them as a target in front. The mesmer commanders I’ve seen are indeed with guild groups.

But basically, a class like guardian would probably be better in general, because easier melee driving dps, stability, CC, boons, support etc while assigned mesmers can act as support tools

Those are my two cents!

Yeah, I’ll just add a little bit here. Mesmers absolutely can command well, but they do far better as commanders of organized groups than with pugs. Pugs can have trouble following blinks or other movements like that. Pugs will blindly follow the blue dorito, making it impossible to do something like a portal bomb with your own portal.

Overall, a mes can command quite effectively, you just need to be careful with your movement if you’re commanding pugs.