Guild Wars 2

So I just started a Mesmer one week ago, and I’m level 80 almost by eotm, and I was thinking getting all my gear through the badges of honor. I dunno if either get soldier or ’zerker armor for what I want (roaming). I am going to run PU power build on my Mesmer, so I decided to ask here for help. Thanks much.

Edit: Also, should I use sword/pistol or sword/torch?

You will not be able to kill quickly enough in Invader’s (PVT). Mesmer also has a medium base health pool so Valk armor is not necessarily ideal, you will have 20k very squishy HP. If you want some added surviveability, consider Knights or going hybrid with Rabid.
When considering Valk, Cav or PVT remember that precision is a very important stat for Mesmers. You get both Vigor and bleed procs from critical hits if you are 4 points into Dueling. If you want to take on more than 1 person and have a chance of killing them before all your cd’s are up you are going to need to go mostly Zerker or Assassin’s. If you go PVT, you are going to have a hard time pressuring even 1 moderately tanky warrior.
I also vote firmly for sw/pistol for a power build with either GS or scepter/sword as the off set. GS will give you more utility with the (marginal) boon strip, knock back and might stacking. Scepter/sword gives great block up time and and is much better in 1v1 situations. Like other’s have said, dropping torch is a personal choice, but if you do you can take 2 points out of Domination and pick up Mender’s Purity in Illusions. That will give you very good condi clear and 100 extra Vit if you feel your HP needs a bit of buffing.

Zerk. 15character

Zerk armor set. Zerk, or cav, or a mix of zerk and cav trinkets.

Oh, unless you’re wanting to maximize bleeds on crit from clones, then you can consider assassins.

I highly recommend not getting gear from badges of honor.

Badges of honor gear can not be salvaged. This means that any runes you put into them are effectively lost forever.

Fay.2357:

I highly recommend not getting gear from badges of honor.

Badges of honor gear can not be salvaged. This means that any runes you put into them are effectively lost forever.

This.

I learned that the hard way with perplexity runes on my thief, which are sitting there useless since my thief is now just a mule..

I have 2 sigils of bloodlust sitting useless in weapons in my bank. It’s enough money that I don’t want to throw away the weapons, but it’s not enough to make it cost effective to buy an upgrade splitter.

It is pretty hard for mesmer to deal damage without precision (for both condition and power builds), so I think zerker works better than soldier. PU provides excellent active defense (stealth) and passive defense (aegis/protection/regen for survival) so you could invest more on power than toughness. Just need to be more aware of condition metas (particularly full of condition thieves roaming nowadays), so a bit of vitality could be helpful.

Zerk is the way to go.

Full zerk or zerk / knight mix. If you go with the mix, trinkets are the easiest piece of gear to tweak stats with. If you do the math on cavalier vs. knight, knight wins in raw dps post-crit nerf, plus you’ll also get slightly more bleeds from sharper images.

And yeah, don’t use the WvW gear because of the ridiculous salvage oversight.

Assassins gear + zerk trinkets

Thank you all for your answers. I was thinking either full soldier or ’zerker set with soldier trinkets. I forgot to mention (forgive me for this) that it was for wvwvw if I did not specify it What do you guys think ?

With a power PU build you can even go full zerker. You’ll be a little bit squishy, but it still has way more survivability than a glkittenter build.

As you’re new to the game, I would recommended zerker weapons and armor, soldier trinkets with ruby jewels. Talking about runes, Centaur Runes are very cheap and help with one of the main weakness of the mesmer, the out of combat speed.

I like Knight more than Soldier for mesmers. Because our base health isn’t bad, but our armor is pretty low and we don’t have, like, a ton of healing so a bit of damage mitigation goes a long way. Don’t go too hard into Knight’s gear or you’ll start to see a precipitous DPS drop, though.

Right now, in WvW, I’m running full Zerk weapons and trinkets (well, Cav back piece because I’m cheap) and 5/6 Knight armor with a Soldier chestpiece. I’m pretty happy with it so far.

Just curious, how well do you guys feel about vitality vs toughness in PU? With standard PU builds you can usually maintain amazingly long duration of protection (lol) but with 2 utilities in stealth you have one slot left for condition cleansing. Thus require certain amount of hp to tank through conditions.

About the weapon choices, torch is great for continuous stealth but pistol certainly deal better damage/cc. Why not both though?

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Just curious, how well do you guys feel about vitality vs toughness in PU? With standard PU builds you can usually maintain amazingly long duration of protection (lol) but with 2 utilities in stealth you have one slot left for condition cleansing. Thus require certain amount of hp to tank through conditions.

About the weapon choices, torch is great for continuous stealth but pistol certainly deal better damage/cc. Why not both though?

Well, if you’re running torch, you don’t need to fill up your utilities with stealth. I run torch and I never take both Veil and Decoy. (I run Decoy for small-group stuff and Veil for big-group stuff.)

Also, the best personal condition clear is Mantra of Recovery with Mender’s Purity, which will also free up a utility slot for other stuff. (Null Field is arguably a better skill overall, on account of its group utility and multi-purpose nature.)

Torch 5 is total garbage and I can understand why people want to run Pistol (or Focus, or OH Sword) instead, but I feel like trading The Prestige for Veil is a bad idea. You can do cool stuff with Veil but its cooldown is three times as long, so it’s not a meaningful substitute.

Which isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ditch Torch if you think Torch sucks, but I think mesmer utility skill slots are more valuable than weapon skill slots, so I’d rather just cut one of my stealth skills entirely than sacrifice a utility slot just to run a phantasm, especially one that’s semi-traited at best.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Just curious, how well do you guys feel about vitality vs toughness in PU? With standard PU builds you can usually maintain amazingly long duration of protection (lol) but with 2 utilities in stealth you have one slot left for condition cleansing. Thus require certain amount of hp to tank through conditions.

About the weapon choices, torch is great for continuous stealth but pistol certainly deal better damage/cc. Why not both though?

Don’t waste a utility on veil. That’s just foolish.

Take blink, decoy, and a condition cleanse. Either phantasmal disenchanter or the mantra will take care of any reasonable amount of conditions.

Thank you all for your answers again! I’ve been reading ‘em all and taking notes, but I still can wrap my head over the kind of gear that I want for wvwvw roaming. I am thinking in the afternoon of getting a full set of invader’s to try it out see if I like it. I’m all in pre 80 gear and I just tried roaming (just to see how it is) and failed miserably lol.

I got my 4/4/6 build, and I was thinking maybe I should try invader’s since it is like “anet’s recommended set for wvwvw”, but now with the new sets and all I’m kind of lost on what to do.

People been recommending me maybe Valkyrie’s (power, ferocity, vitality) but I need your feedback BIG time guys.

I’m just a mindless Mesmer! I got Blink, Decoy and Arcane Exchange, Mass Invisibility for utilities and planning to use Traveler runes for the movement speed.

PS: I want to be able to kill fast enough, but in the same time be able to survive so really, any help you guys can give me will be a lot of help for me and curious people too!

Kairnabel.1542:

Thank you all for your answers again! I’ve been reading ‘em all and taking notes, but I still can wrap my head over the kind of gear that I want for wvwvw roaming. I am thinking in the afternoon of getting a full set of invader’s to try it out see if I like it. I’m all in pre 80 gear and I just tried roaming (just to see how it is) and failed miserably lol.

I got my 4/4/6 build, and I was thinking maybe I should try invader’s since it is like “anet’s recommended set for wvwvw”, but now with the new sets and all I’m kind of lost on what to do.

People been recommending me maybe Valkyrie’s (power, ferocity, vitality) but I need your feedback BIG time guys.

I’m just a mindless Mesmer! I got Blink, Decoy and Arcane Exchange, Mass Invisibility for utilities and planning to use Traveler runes for the movement speed.

PS: I want to be able to kill fast enough, but in the same time be able to survive so really, any help you guys can give me will be a lot of help for me and curious people too!

Ok, why don’t you look at builds and gameplay vids.

For example I used to run this for the longest time
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/The-Holy-Hell-Build-2-0/first

It’s a highly mobile hybrid build (direct and condi damage) that allows for very aggressive gameplay while roaming.

The thing about armor vs HP’s is that armor mitigates the direct damage you’d otherwise take, meaning fewer hp’s lost. Where’as more hp’s over armor doesnt go as far (and you’ll lose them faster as you tip armor into vit). HP’s mitigates condition dot, but condi’s can be cleansed to stop them in their tracks. That’s why a traited torch works well in a PU build because you can drop into stealth with torch dropping a condi and opening breathing room. You can then cast iMage to cleanse another, and cleanse a third on iMage bolt bounce. You can also cast condi cleanse from stealth without interrupt (great with arcane thievery), and in the meantime you’re proccing protection in the event of being spammed by melee while you do all this.

To feel really safe in a PU build, 2800 armor will see you weather even the most violent assaults. But, for every point of armor you can drop and put into damage, the more dangerous you’ll become.

Oh and P.S. I run pack runes over a boon duration setup these days. Boon duration was great before the rune changes, but only “meh” now vs other rune options. Pack boosts swiftness duration (which you want with a focus for roaming) while providing the might and fury aswell.