Guild Wars 2

So, I have always liked Mesmer, and have played one since Guild Wars 1. However, I really struggled to find my place as a mesmer in this game, and almost scrapped it. After extensive research and finally just playing around on my own, it finally dawned on me: Mesmer might choose HOW to play, but they can always change WHAT role they want to play.
Let me give an example: Minion Necromancers have all their skills laid out for them. Their healing, utility, and elite skills are all going to be minions. Their weapon will probably be staff to support the minions, and all their traits will be slotted to increase their minion’s abilities. They are a tank/DPS type build, for being a Minion Necromancer locks you in to both how you play and what role you take. A burning Guardian will take the torch weapon, burning skills as utilities, and trait themselves for burning. They will therefore be a DPS build.
Mesmers are very different. Mesmers set up a basic way to play- the “how” of what they will be doing, but they can fill different roles with that “how.”
For example, if you are a Pantasm-focused mesmer, you will take all the Phantasm traits, but it doesn’t limit you in the role you will take in the game. You can AOE DPS by summoning the Greatsword and Focus Phantasms and taking damaging utilities. Or, you can support a team by tanking with the Phantasmal Defender and clearing boons and conditions with the Phantasmal Disenchanter. Or, you can do single target DPS with the Phantasmal Duelist, etc.
Ultimately, I feel like the Mesmer is a lot less specialized than other classes. On the one hand, that hinders us. Our AOE DPS abilities, for example, are spread across different weapons, as opposed to other classes who have almost all AOE abilities on single weapons (Greatsword and Staff, I am looking at you). In a sense, it hurts us not to have a way to get all we want on a single weapon/build set up. On the other hand, it allows us to swap abilities, even in the middle of dungeons, and cover whatever role is needed.
Do you think we have this capability? What do you think the concept behind mesmer was?

My ele would have to disagree with you on Mesmer being the only jack of all trades, ele can do all of that and more (healing).

Mesmer is very versatile though.

I would say Elementalists and Guardians would be better jacks of all trades. Mesmer has good utilities for the most part, but we lack the party buffing and healing that other profs may get while maintaining decent damage. Poor Engineer, sposed to be number one on this list, yet they just aren’t.

With the same traits? You can switch skills and not traits as an elementalist and fill another role? The thing that fascinates me about Mesmer is that they have several skills that basically do the same thing, just in different ways. Chaos Storm, Phantasmal Disenchanter, And Null Field all support, but they are each different types of skills from different sources. Theoretically, this means a Staff-focused, Phantasm-focused, OR glamour-focused Mesmer could support, they would just be doing it in a different way.

We’re really versatile but we have no group healing unless we roll a (lol)mantra build and not a strong ability to grant boons.

Ramiah.5648:

With the same traits? You can switch skills and not traits as an elementalist and fill another role? The thing that fascinates me about Mesmer is that they have several skills that basically do the same thing, just in different ways. Chaos Storm, Phantasmal Disenchanter, And Null Field all support, but they are each different types of skills from different sources. Theoretically, this means a Staff-focused, Phantasm-focused, OR glamour-focused Mesmer could support, they would just be doing it in a different way.

Well the thing with elementalist is that they can switch attunements, and each attunement can offer individual or combinatorial roles. E.g. for a D/D elementalist, fire field + earth = AoE buff + AoE Damage. Water attunement = healing. They can be fully viable in damage, support, and mobility even when speced heavily into water and arcana traits (defensive and utility traits).

engineers are supposed to be jack of all trades, but they are usually just jack kitten

Engineer’s Flamethrower melts thieves though. I’ll give them that.

The only things that Mesmer has that is truly amazingly unique to the class is portal and Timewarp. Portal however is useless in dungeons and Time Warp’s cooldown could be a bit shorter