I have been playing since beta and seen the game go through various evolutions.
I actually started as a main mesmer then moved to other classes, now being a ranger main within the last 8 months.
From my personal experience, I can’t say that the mesmer is “weak” because when its mechanics are executed perfectly you can absolutely dominate people. However, I found it to be a class of extremes.
It’s “balanced” in a sense that you can spec for certain aspects to be incredibly strong and unmatchable, but at the cost of giving up everything else.
A shatter mesmer can you let you spec for far more burst damage than a warrior or guardian (killing just about anyone in one perfect shatter spike), but you give up all your survival, all your condition removal, and all your mobility.
PU lets you spec for massive condition damage and sustain, but you have very little CC and no mobility to entrap targets.
To make up for weaknesses in extremes, you have to play extremely well. On shatter, if you mess up one active defense or distortion, your instantly dead.
On PU, targets can just run if you don’t engage them in an area that is hard to escape or bring teammates to force them into a fight.
Because what you give up when you spec on mesmer is so important, you can’t make player mistakes. Especially against anti-build like condi or backstab thieves.
But when you play perfectly, you are untouchable and either kill your enemy in less than 3 seconds, or never get hit while dancing around 4-7 targets in stealth while your clones kill them.
There is no inbetween. It feels like this is a master’s class. If you don’t bring you A game and make mistakes, your gonna lose and your gonna lose hard. If you play perfect, you absolutely destroy people. The line between a perfect match and a complete disaster on a mesmer is as thin as one misplaced skill.
So why do people vacate mesmer?
I think mesmer is very strong, but requires perfect play. To sit there and play mesmer perfectly everyday is hard. After a few hours you might get tunnel vision and miss clinch distortions in a fight -leading to frustrating nights of respawning at the rez point.
Or maybe you might play PU and be fighting 3-4 people just to have them fight reset on you because you missed the 1 window to kill them that you worked 10minutes just to open.
Mesmer is not easy at all. I think people vacate the class and play it less because there is no real middle ground. Played perfectly, a mesmer can outmatch any class. When a mistake happens, even a bad player can captilize and kill you (it only takes 8 stacks of bleed to kill a mesmer).
While its a fun class, I found myself playing other classes and choosing ranger over mesmer because this class just takes too much effort to be effective (when compared to other classes). After long play sessions with a mesmer it gets draining if your not “in the zone.”
It’s nice to have perfect games where you just crush people with no retaliation because you executed your shatter burst at the right moment. But I feel that it takes too much effort when compared to another class.
(edited by lordhelmos.7623)