Guild Wars 2

We all know that Mesmers do bad DPS, but I wanted to find out just how bad/good it is, and how different setups may affect that. I did a series of tests on the heavy golems on HotM, with no amulet, no trinkets and no runes. This is to prolong the encounter for as much as possible to smoothen out random variations due to critical hits etc. The build I used is the Fractals build, without Phantasmal Haste.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQRAsc8al0npKtFpxVNcrNiqhgqukOQiIluTpBA

Each test was repeated 10 times and the amount of time it took to kill the golem was recorded. The results are presented below as the mean, standard error and standard deviation.

Sword AA Only:
As the title says, this was hitting the golem with only the sword AA. You may see this as a control.
Mean: 38.95 ± 0.57s; St. Dev.: 1.79s

Sword AA + Blurred Frenzy:
Blurred frenzy was used whenever it was off cooldown. This coincided nicely with 3 completed AA chains.
Mean: 36.28 ± 0.24s; St. Dev.: 0.75s
Blurred frenzy increases your DPS by a little, so you’ll want to use it if you don’t plan on dodging any big hits with it.

Sword AA + 1 Phantasmal Swordsman:
The clock was started after the swordsman was summoned, as it is common to summon it before reaching the boss and hitting it.
Mean: 23.37 ± 0.42s; St. Dev.: 1.31s
Unsurprisingly one phantasm hugely increases DPS.

Sword AA + 1 Phantasmal Swordsman + 1 Phantasmal Duelist:
The clock was started after the first phantasm was summoned. The duelist was chosen as it is the 2nd highest DPS phantasm after the swordsman.
Mean: 18.32 ± 0.48; St. Dev.: 1.52s
DPS increased again, but not as much as before, probably because of the extra time needed to summon the second phantasm. The Duelist also does less DPS.

Sword AA + 2 Phantasmal Swordsmen + 1 Phantasmal Duelist:
Mantra of Restoration was swapped out for the Signet, allowing 3 phantasms up. As before the clock was started after the first phantasm was summoned.
Mean: 17.18 ± 0.38s, St. Dev.: 1.20s
DPS hardly changed from 2 phantasms, which is not surprising since it takes an extra 3 seconds to summon the other 2 phantasms. So in short fights, 2 is enough. Comparing mean kill-times without the phantasm summoning time included is 17.32s for 2 phantasms and 14.18s for 3, so quite significant.

Greatsword AA:
This test was done at maximum range of the greatsword, which is our best ranged weapon.
Mean: 51.58 ± 0.48s; St. Dev.: 1.50s
The greatsword is significantly worse than the sword even at maximum range.

Mantra of Pain:
It’s interesting to see how using MoP affects our DPS with these two weapons. The clock was started with no charges on MoP, so the first 2.75s are spent charging it; this is to simulate an extended fight. Note that I am traited for Harmonious Mantras.
Sword AA + MoP Mean: 38.91 ± 0.43s, St. Dev.: 1.35s
Greatsword AA + MoP Mean: 43.14 ± 0.69s, St. Dev.: 2.18s
MoP hasn’t affected the DPS of the sword at all, so don’t bother using it. However it has hugely increased the DPS of the greatsword, so it’s a good idea to bring it for ranged encounters like, say, Tequatl.

To see how we compare to other classes, I also did the same DPS test on a thief. The build used was the D/D dungeon build on metabattle. However I removed the quickness trait as it has a huge impact on such short fight times, and substituted Revealed Training with a +175 Power rune as I didn’t have the trait. All attacks were done from behind, initiating with Cloak and Dagger, Backstab, 1 AA chain and restarting the cycle – ideal conditions for the thief.
Mean: 14.63 ± 0.21s; St. Dev.: 0.68s

The thief seems to do a lot more damage than the mesmer, being on par with having 3 phantasms up on extended fights, while in reality we probably only have 1 phantasm up on average. In this case a thief does about 70% more damage than us. However it’s notable that the 6/6/0/0/2 fractal build has substantially more survivability than the thief and offers excellent group support. Nonetheless it is near the maximum amount of damage we can do. It also isn’t always possible to attack from behind or stay in melee range.

I hope the information is useful and gives people an idea of what kind of damage we realistically do. The test isn’t perfect as removing the amulets would reduce our critical hit chance, hence reducing the effect of on-critical-hit traits. However, these are not very significant to begin with, for a Berserker build. I believe it is one step up from calculations.

Let me know if you have any comments on my methodology or spot any significant flaws. I may update this with other weapons or scenarios in the future, but I have no plans for now.

What do you mean more survivability than a thief. Pistolwhip means relativelyhigh evasion uptime. If they are weaving cloak and dagger with backstab in between autoattacks, they’re constantly shedding aggro. With black powder and smoke screen you bring immense survivability to the group.

You can also stunlock dredge mobs with pistolwhip.

Thief brings utility competitive with that of mesmer. Mesmer has portal and a 6 sec reflect, thief has shadow refuge, smoke screen, black powder for melee stacks, headshot for quick defiance stack removal, blast finishers for days.

Zenith.7301:

What do you mean more survivability than a thief. Pistolwhip means relativelyhigh evasion uptime. If they are weaving cloak and dagger with backstab in between autoattacks, they’re constantly shedding aggro. With black powder and smoke screen you bring immense survivability to the group.

You can also stunlock dredge mobs with pistolwhip.

Thief brings utility competitive with that of mesmer. Mesmer has portal and a 6 sec reflect, thief has shadow refuge, smoke screen, black powder for melee stacks, headshot for quick defiance stack removal, blast finishers for days.

A thief using Pistolwhip will do much less damage, of course not as low as a mesmer does in a practical setting, but below what a mesmer does at full potential. And tell that stealthing dropping agro thing to Lupi when he’s all over my kitten .

Now that’s not to say thief doesn’t have plenty of tools at their disposal or that thief won’t still outdps a mesmer when using a much more defensive build like feline grace, but, just saying, a maxed out DPS thief doesn’t have the tools a maxed out mesmer does. And blasting for days will bring them down to practical mesmer dps.

I have no issues dying on my thief, I don’t know what else to say. Pistol Whip is a Blurred Frenzy on steroids, and it’s a cleave to boot unlike phantasms outside iwarden who are single target (and the dps from iwarden is pretty crappy for being a cleave phantasm, oftentimes it won’t even finish its low dps channel with any melee mobs around to quickly kill it).

The argument that mesmer DPS is low due to utility is just dumb. Thief utility is just as potent in its own way, and elementalists are the mother lode of utility while being the highest overall DPS class in the game. Hell, even warriors boast indispensable utility and yet they still outdamage a mesmer.

The fact is a mesmer only competes single target with 3 phantasms, but the class will never compete in cleave capacity.

The only times you really stack mesmers is for portal tricks to set records. In the average run the last classes you want to see more than 1 of in your group are mesmer, ranger, and ESPECIALLY necromancer (which most people don’t even want to see 1 of).

You’re a little confused Zenith. Let me remind you that this is the 6/6/0/0/2 build. This build is NOT meant to compete with thieves, it’s meant to be a guardian substitute and provide group condition cleanses, stability and portal/reflect/whatever else is needed. I used thief as a comparison because it is known to be one of the highest single-target classes in the game, and so gives an idea of where we stand.

It inherently has better survivability because of the slightly higher HP, the mantras mentioned above and Mantra of Recovery, which when traited is by far the most efficient heal in the game. I’m not saying you’ll die as a thief; yes sure you can evade if you’re good but you’re more likely to die because you have less tools to recover from being hit.

Thief DPS is also only that good if you use D/D and run the rotation perfectly. In case you’re wondering an S/P pistol whip thief takes about 19 seconds to make the same kill, which is longer than the 2-phantasm mesmer even including the summoning time.

Now if you were to use the 6/4/0/0/4 build with phantasmal haste, you would do more damage but the mantra utilities would come down. IIRC when I did some tests a while back it took about 13 seconds for a 3-phantasm kill including the summoning time, but that was with a rune. I’d argue it no longer competes with a guardian at this point, and unless you can keep 3 phantasms up doesn’t compete with the DPS classes either.

Regarding cleave; remember that the berserker also cleaves, although you lose damage while on the GS. Also, the warden’s channel is absolutely not low DPS. In fact during the channel itself it’s by far the highest DPS phantasm we have. The problem is that it’s rooted and the time between channels is very long.

Just did a guardian test; for some reason I can’t add it to the first post. I’ll leave it here until I can.

Guardian
The build used is the S/T + GS build on metabattle, not traited for maximum damage. Guardian DPS is a little trouble some of tests as they gain 20% damage from conditions that I can’t apply solo. On the other hand unscathed contender is not likely to be up most of the time. To counter this, I removed the 2 on-condition traits and used unscathed contender as they balance out.
Mean: 16.33 ± 0.30s; St. Dev.: 0.93s

The guardian does more damage than a 2-phantasm mesmer and is nearly on par with the 3-phantasm one. If unscathed contender were to be maintained, which it probably will be in any situation where you can maintain 3 phantasms, the guardian will pull ahead. Binding blade has a significant impact on the DPS, reducing kill-times by about 2-3 seconds due to the short duration of the fight. So the DPS advantage is also partially due to the higher burst damage of the guardian. At this point there doesn’t seem to be any reason to bring a mesmer aside from portal or time warp.

Courtesy of frifox:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LRyeoRFtcqZqvZh2nobsCkKmyB3FvRoX1-OjY26Gc6E/edit

I used to do that kind of tests too., but in the indestructible golem tho (iirc it has 80K hp). So it allowed to calculate timekills for longer timeframes. I used to do 240K, that is 3 “kills”.

Unfortunately I didn’t have a good computer back then, so I used a chronometer… So quite inaccurate. Anyway, it was fun and the results quite interesting.

I’ve been using MoP since patch all the time to replace none sword AA’s. It makes scepter + single target phantasm or greatsword really good weapons against specific enemies in fotm. Staff in open world with MoP aa and most broken zerging phantasm makes it superior in bossfights like they happen in silverwastes.

Though, I thought it decreases your dps on sword a bit, but it seems to be the same, wich means better due the fact of hitting 2 additional targets. It has been a long time since I’ve tested it, I probably just broke the aa chain with channeling MoP wich is completly stupid.

I really don’t care much about all the other stuff since I know Mes deals low damage. But I’m surprised and happy about MoP. I’ve always said it’s very underrated. In short encounters of trash mobs, it actually makes us average damage dealers.

Zenith.7301:

I have no issues dying on my thief, I don’t know what else to say. Pistol Whip is a Blurred Frenzy on steroids, and it’s a cleave to boot unlike phantasms outside iwarden who are single target (and the dps from iwarden is pretty crappy for being a cleave phantasm, oftentimes it won’t even finish its low dps channel with any melee mobs around to quickly kill it).

The argument that mesmer DPS is low due to utility is just dumb. Thief utility is just as potent in its own way, and elementalists are the mother lode of utility while being the highest overall DPS class in the game. Hell, even warriors boast indispensable utility and yet they still outdamage a mesmer.

The fact is a mesmer only competes single target with 3 phantasms, but the class will never compete in cleave capacity.

The only times you really stack mesmers is for portal tricks to set records. In the average run the last classes you want to see more than 1 of in your group are mesmer, ranger, and ESPECIALLY necromancer (which most people don’t even want to see 1 of).

Not trying to make any kind of excuses for mesmer dps, it sucks because the mechanics are simply terrible for the way PVE is designed in this game, leading to pitiful dps even if their max potential is fine.

And still not sure why you keep comparing pistol whip, I mean if you want to go with a mroe defensive setup, yeah sword/pistol + Invigorating precision, maybe even tack in feline grace, and well, you should be a bit ashamed if you go down easy, you can literally face tank many bosses while in zerk gear

SPNKr.6208:

Just did a guardian test; for some reason I can’t add it to the first post. I’ll leave it here until I can.

Guardian
The build used is the S/T + GS build on metabattle, not traited for maximum damage. Guardian DPS is a little trouble some of tests as they gain 20% damage from conditions that I can’t apply solo. On the other hand unscathed contender is not likely to be up most of the time. To counter this, I removed the 2 on-condition traits and used unscathed contender as they balance out.
Mean: 16.33 ± 0.30s; St. Dev.: 0.93s

The guardian does more damage than a 2-phantasm mesmer and is nearly on par with the 3-phantasm one. If unscathed contender were to be maintained, which it probably will be in any situation where you can maintain 3 phantasms, the guardian will pull ahead. Binding blade has a significant impact on the DPS, reducing kill-times by about 2-3 seconds due to the short duration of the fight. So the DPS advantage is also partially due to the higher burst damage of the guardian. At this point there doesn’t seem to be any reason to bring a mesmer aside from portal or time warp.

What everybody knows, really. The only reason mesmer substitutes guardian in setting records for speed runs is the portal and time warp for sensitive burns.

Mesmer damage is bottom tier damage. Justs start bringing more mesmers into your group, I even wince at having 2 mesmers in fractal 50 because I know the damage for the party is going to take a nosedive.

It’s similar to ranger and necromancer, really. Classes with pretty crappy coefficients and base numbers on their autoattacks and their 2-5 skills barely increase their DPS if not at all. And ranger has the handicap of its only competitive weapon, the mainhand sword, handicapping their dodge times (even if you turn autoattack off, the animation lock can screw you big time against fast attack bosses like archdiviner and mossman).

Hell, look at ele or engineer. So much utility…water fields, aoe CC, blast finishers and fire fields, condi clear, aoe chill, all in a single build without accounting for traits, whereas if a mesmer wants to have any significant utility, heavy trait investment is required, especially to make mantras worthwhile. And ele and engi DPS is significantly higher.

I still don’t understand how wall of reflection can have longer duration than feedback despite achieving a shorter cooldown and having the luxury of its placement not tied to the enemy but rather tied to the player. It’s like warrior banners vs. ranger spirits.