Guild Wars 2

Mesmer condition build, for PvE and Dungeon.

I am currently leveling 2 mesmer’s and I wanted to ask some experienced players if a condition damage mesmer for PvE/ dungeons is viable.

I have two, as I said before, one is going to be a shatter build. For the other I was hoping to go some kind of condition build, be it hybrid or a full condition build. Anyway is it possible and how effective is it in dungeons?

I am new to being a mesmer and while I like the class I am not used to it yet. That is why I am asking on here.

Thanks for your help.

I used to be full berserker greatsword shatter build and it worked fine. But it was sad to have the Shattered Might trait buffed and then nerfed. So I begun picking a new set of gear for the hell of it.

The idea was to completely change the playstyle, so I went with completely ignoring the phantasm (only summoned kittenter fodder when I need AoE) and only using clones from the staff.

10 from Dom to get the clones-cripple-on-death, a very good thing whether we are soloing PvE or in dungeons.
20 in Duel for the clone on dodge. Since I don’t use phantasms I have the cloak-at-25% even though it lies and it’s 10%.
20 in Chaos for -9% damage and -20% reduction for staff.
20 in Illusions for the +9% damage and extra bounce.

The idea is to summon only clones and let them rip and clone-on-dodge, staff 2 and Mirror Image gives plenty of options for that.

My gear is from the Honor of the Waves gear (condition/precision/toughness), my runes are runes of the undead and my sigil is the greater Earth for extra bleeds. I have around 1500 condition damage and 1800 toughness with about 46% crit, which feeds my sigil, my Sharper Images for the clones and my Vigor-on-Crit minor trait.

The main way to get condi dmg out of a Mesmer is sharper images trait under the dueling tree and the trait that gives fury to illusions. Then, you basically want to summon phantasms that hit a lot thus able to stack more bleeds. If your phantasms are on CD, then cast illusions, as they will also cause bleeding. The duelist, warden and berserker phantasms seem to be the best to stack bleeds with. Although, warden requires a stationary target.

I’m mostly glass cannon with no spec into condi, but when I get 3 duelists set up, I can keep10-15 bleeds on a target, more if they’re timewarped.

wookalar.8952:

The main way to get condi dmg out of a Mesmer is sharper images trait under the dueling tree and the trait that gives fury to illusions.

Fury to Phantasms, who only attack once every seven seconds or so, and are mostly (if not the iMage) working with power. It is still a viable strategy if using Rampager gear (power/prec/condition) but power will not help the clones and is kinda wasted on the staff.

Fury is for sharper image which applies bleeding on crits, works fantastically with the iDuelist and the iWarden because they have a large number of attacks and in turn will apply a large number of bleed stacks. Also not bad when simply using staff clones as they’ll almost always apply a bleed stack along with their normal condition applying attack. Absolutely amazing with the iWhaler, for obvious reasons. It is pretty much a must have as Mesmers don’t have a lot of methods to apply conditions, so we need to use all of what little we do have available.

For a condition build, you’ll want to focus on rabid gear which is Condition Damage, Toughness and precision. High crit chance is needed for a few of our skills (sharper image), Toughness works nice because you can use Runes of the Undead, chaos trait and a master tuning crystal to covert a decent percentage of your total toughness into Condition Damage.

Condition builds aren’t that effective in PvE as most NPC’s don’t hit fast enough for them to be that viable.

Xavi.6591:

Condition builds aren’t that effective in PvE as most NPC’s don’t hit fast enough for them to be that viable.

Staff auto-attacks cause burning and sharper images causes bleeds on crit. Neither of these need the enemy to attack to work.

Crossplay.2067:

Xavi.6591:

Condition builds aren’t that effective in PvE as most NPC’s don’t hit fast enough for them to be that viable.

Staff auto-attacks cause burning and sharper images causes bleeds on crit. Neither of these need the enemy to attack to work.

Yeah and still is far less damage than just autoattacking with a bersker-gs-build. Try to get over 3k-4k damage (autoattack of berserk-mesmer ) with your spells and conditions.

That’s more related to condition damage in general being inferior to direct damage.

The one nicety of Rabid Condition Builds is that the high amount of toughness generally lets you be fairly negligent in regards to taking hits.

Nozdrum.2894:

Yeah and still is far less damage than just autoattacking with a bersker-gs-build. Try to get over 3k-4k damage (autoattack of berserk-mesmer ) with your spells and conditions.

What you’re looking at is burst damage. Condition damage, by nature, is attrition. All those tiny, little numbers add up quickly. If you don’t think so, stand by a poison plant in Twilight Arbor and see how long it takes for one to down you. Plus, while burst damage can be successfully be evaded because of its very short application, (which is one of the popular tactics to use against heartseeker thieves) condition damage is a lot harder to deal with because it’s constantly being reapplied by autoattacks.

The only way to do a fair comparison is damage over time.

Autoattack is not burst-damage.
And yes of course you can dodge physical attacks, but condition can also be removed – there are even some bosses that lose all their condition after less than a second, where you will be completely useless. But I don’t think that I tell you anything by that – you should know that there are ways to deal with every type of attack. So this is not an argument.

And yes the only fair compariso is damage over time. I already gave you mine: about 3k-4k per autoattack, without berserker and switching weapons for phantasmal warden.
So where is your damage over time?

Why level 2 Mesmers when you can just get 2 sets of gear and reset your traits when you want to switch? JW

Nozdrum.2894:

Autoattack is not burst-damage.
And yes of course you can dodge physical attacks, but condition can also be removed – there are even some bosses that lose all their condition after less than a second, where you will be completely useless. But I don’t think that I tell you anything by that – you should know that there are ways to deal with every type of attack. So this is not an argument.

And yes the only fair compariso is damage over time. I already gave you mine: about 3k-4k per autoattack, without berserker and switching weapons for phantasmal warden.
So where is your damage over time?

I call BS on the 3-4k auto-attack, thankyouverymuch. No need to inflate your side of the argument. As someone who played GS with berserker gear for a good while I can safely say I never saw autoattacks go past 2.5k.

My ticks of bleed are doing 126 (self buffed with tuning fork) per second and I can stack to about 8. 8 X 126 is 1008 per second. Now this doesn’t include my auto attack damage (low, because I have no power but around another 300 + bounce which might do another 300) or the fact each bounce from my auto-attack and my clones’ is giving Might and Fury, which easily stacks to 5 – 6 stacks further increasing those 126 ticks I mentioned back, or giving it to a meleer who is wailing on the enemy.

Playing condition damage is simply a different way of playing. As much as you would want us to believe you do ‘4 -5k autoattacks’ the truth ranges more between 1500-2k and it is a more aggressive play style. Done it, liked it, was plenty fine with it, decided to try condition, found it is slower but still gets the job done. In this I include that I leave my clones up so they apply conditions, so my team has less pressure on them as trash and boss goes to kill the clones instead of them, are crippled by their death, and every meleer, or myself since I fish for it, gets the stacks of Might and Fury from being pelted with the bounces, or that each time I need to run and dodge my clones are still happily being a machine gun and the conditions are ticking, whether or not I am there. Do we need to include how Chaos Storm helps when we need buffs or adds a bit more damage on trash?

Where conditions really don’t work is on waves of normal mobs, but for that I have my trustee GS, which even without Power still serves to AoE.

It is viable and ok, but definitely not optimal as far as damage goes. If you run with a tight group that doesn’t need your damage and only wants your support than sure go for it. If you want pve condition damage other professions do that much much better.

well im running a condition build, its not compared to my necro condition, but last night at lvl 54 i did kill a champion cave spider alone and im getting used to fight veterans with other 5-7 mobs together..

i guess dmg is important but if u sacrifice some for survavility it definitly pays

I love how people like to compare glass cannon builds with tanky builds and proclaim damage superiority. Yes, the orange is the better fruit because it’s rounder than the apple…

Dead DPS = no DPS.

P.S. Without addons to measure damage this is futile. Burst has great DPA, big lovely numbers, condition has tons of little numbers. Which does more? You need a five minute sample, at least, and it can’t be napkin math since it does not take in consideration all variables we may or may not be aware of.

I think that we can all agree about burst (GS) being great against lower HP enemies, and if there is a ton of AoE and all illusions die in three seconds then burst gets ahead too, since in three seconds the phantasm and Mirror Blade will have time to do their burst, where condition clones need to be up for a certain time before rolling out all the bleeds and burns.

Finally, this is not a a WoW raid with DPS checks or the fight will fail. If you like condition then go for it, I can assure you if the group fails the fight it was not because you did your damage in condition instead of burst.

Darzinth.7960:

Why level 2 Mesmers when you can just get 2 sets of gear and reset your traits when you want to switch? JW

Well in GW1 I just liked to make characters, and though I often respeced I had a lot of fun making a new character and using a radically different build. I have continued this in GW2 and I am enjoying it.

Also as I do not like to grind, I get a lot of resources this way. As I level properly, and do not power level with crafting.

Another reason is it helps me learn the class better, I found the one character I power leveled I did not know much about it and since then I have not played that character very often.

Thank you all for suggesting condition builds for dungeon, I can now wait till I have leveled the condition mesmer now.

I think I’d put another 10 points into Domination and get Rabid Gear. Get the toughness converter trait.

You do not need recount or skada to conclude that mesmer’s potential condition dps is suboptimal, or that other profession’s condition dps is superior to mesmer’s condition dps.

Yes, but, gut feelings don’t really achieve much. Is it really? By how much? Are you sure? Or are you seeing big numbers from a warrior doing 100b while forgetting how much time it spends out of melee range or dead on the floor.

Or maybe you mean grinding events on Orr VS waves of normal mobs. Sure, mesmers are weak there.

Gut feelings and napkin math don’t really do much. To consider DPS we must consider a whole fight. Not the first thirty seconds of it with the X class imbued with a dozen boons and on full HP dashing headfirst and spunking their CDs all over the boss.

While it’s true that we have no hard numbers, we can at least use a bit of inference that our methods of applying conditions are not as reliable as most other classes with strong condition builds. Winds of chaos, our main condition application method, will 33% of the time apply vulnerability, basically doing no damage at all in a 1v1 type situation. Even shattering is unreliable due to poor pathing, slow movement and low clone health.

Quite true. Vulnerability that does not increase condition damage in a condition weapon. Genius.

But it’s one of those things. We can be busy dodging and rolling and our clones will keep on putt-putting away. So I dunno, and we return to the same quandary.

So there’s a few things about Rampager gear vs Rabid

1. Rampager gear adds Power. Yay. This lets us use things like Shatters to great effect especially because typically a Staff clone generation build (some variation of 0/20/20/0/20) can generate more clones than it knows what to do with. Also because most of the clones are ranged, simply clipping your clones causing them to die will cause none of the “on death” stuff to proc because the clones won’t die in range of the mob. The extra power means those Shatters you will do will be a bit stronger.

2. Rampager’s has the highest crit rating you can have. Just generating 3 clones from Decoy/Mirror with a MH sword on a training dummy in The Mists with 67% crit rating meant I was able to keep 10 bleeds from crits alone on the target. 10 stacks from that alone. That’s before we get into the fact we’re using a staff that already generates a bleed/burn as is (possibly twice with the bounce).

The real math here will be does the loss of condition damage (since rabid is primary condition damage) make up for the extra bleed stacks you’ll get as a result of a crit? I mean losing 10 damage per bleed obviously isn’t worth getting 2 extra stacks ticking for 100 each in most cases.

3. How important is Toughness? I mean I realize that certain number of people like Toughness for things like PvP, that’s a given (I even use Knight gear for my WvW set and Zerker everything else). However for PvE can we get away with using any kind of defensive stat simply by virtue of the fact that we are specing 20 into Toughness as well as the fact that our class offers us a huge number of escape tools? Even with 25 in vit and Knight gear as Power/Prec GS spec I still end up using a Feedback, Null field, decoy or some other defensive cool down to survive most scenarios and not rely on just “taking” the hits.

I’ve been looking at this lately (because I had a lot of fun leveling as staff and kinda sick of the WOO WOO WOOOOOO noises) and gotta say not neccessarily seeing a bad side. I may come up with some sort of hybrid model like I did with the GS spec and use Rabid Armor (dungeon runs) and then use Rampager for Accessories/Staff (which are harder to get for Rabid anyways). Just not a fan of zero vitality in this equation. Wish there was Precision/Vit/Cond gear lol…

Kanto.1659:

Yes, but, gut feelings don’t really achieve much.

Indeed yes, your gut feeling is wrong.

Just to be clear no one is saying condition mesmers are unviable. They are decent but just suboptimal compared to other professions.