Guild Wars 2

Wasn’t sure where to post this but yeah….Basically want to roll a new toon but haven’t played in a long time. Don’t care about PvP just want out of the mesmer or elementalist the class that will be able to do high level content, dungeons, not have problem getting into groups and somewhat able to solo. I’ve tried reading a lot of posts but it is hit or miss as far as “this class is trash” or “this class is good”. Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

If you are choosing solely on the basis of what will get you into groups, then go with mesmer. Stealth, portal, and projectile reflects all have a place in PvE. Also, soloing is typically very easy as a mesmer, since you have clones to sponge enemy attacks.

That being said, both classes are very viable for all levels of PvE content. A skilled ele can bring just as much to a party as a skilled mesmer. However, if you’re concerned about easily finding a group, mesmers are always in demand.

If the leveling experience is important to you – go mesmer. I’ve started out as an ele and was being murdered pretty much every five paces at the beginning. The ele can be really powerful but has a very steep learning curve, you’ll need to learn to manage all of your attunements while usually having little to nothing that can protect you. To boot, your armor and hp are the lowest in the game.

The mesmer in contrast has a bit more health and all those nifty illusions that can take the beating for you. Found the leveling experience to be much more fluent and pleasant than with the elementalist.

It might be that I just suck at ele though :/

I see. I’ve just been reading bad things about both classes so I figured I might ask. So it seems either are viable for PvE then? I did hear about Mesmer util being valued in groups but that’s not my main priority. I just don’t want to be worthless and not needed as much ya know? I can see Ele being tough to manage, I just read on their forums about getting nerfed into the dirt so I got worried.

Thanks for the input

Both of them are viable for pve and both are very useful in groups. Mesmers are a little slow till level 40 or so when leveling because there rather trait dependent. Ele starts of squishy but I never had much issue with that once I got arcane shield. I prefer my Mes to my Ele now that I have both at lvl 80. It just feels like there is more you can do with them and they have nifty utility skills (although since a lot of their use comes from this you need to know what you’re doing in dungeons and whats coming up more than other classes IMO) whereas Ele has a lot of mobility with DD which is fun and they use more skills on their normal rotation than any other class but it starts to feel samey after a while.

Don’t pay too much attention to people complaining about nerfs and saying the class is bad. Both are still in a good place and you get this on practically every profession form.

Great, that’s all I needed to know. Seems like both are viable but I know what you mean with Ele starting to feel the same after a while. I just figured a mage class would be safest in any game but it’s good to hear Mesmers aren’t worthless. Thanks guys!

Leveling a mesmer is a bit of a pain according to some, but i had my first (and only) leveling experience as a mesmer, and it was pretty awesome.
I think mesmer and elementalist are boththe same difficulty for leveling actually.

Mesmers are like the jack of all trades, master of whatever they feel like. Really, you can do pretty much anything with a mesmer!

In a group situation you can:

• provide damage and survive (not higher than a berserker warrior, but you dtill have stealth, teleports and evades. while a warrior sacrifices defense for damage, you can keep it)
• provide a whole lot of boons, i believe up to par with guardians if youre specced for it.
• provide alot of healing. You cant do anything else while healing though, unless you only use the perma regeneration.
• alot of projectile reflection that can easily fit in any build. Just equip a utilty, or have 10 or 20 in a single traitline to get acces to 3 cooldown traited reflections.
• alot more!

Elementalists use alot of combo fields and finishers to stack might and healing, all in their normal damage rotation. They seem to be more focussed on damaging the enemy, but if an ally is near to receive boons its more of a “lucky for you” thing.

Mesmers can trait for boon support and focus on doing that, placing skills to support allies instead of damaging enemies (although youll be doing both at the same time usually).

That said, you should choose which one cosmetically pleases you the most!
Would you prefer doing damage and healing with fire, water, earth and wind, or would you prefer confusing enemies and protecting allies at the same time with chaos magic… While your phantasms and clones are killing stuff at the same time?

Bad example, i know.

Yeah, don’t listen to the patch whining. Every tooltip touch up and cooldown tweak is the end of the world as we know it on every board. I like to hang out in the mesmer board because these folks seem a bit more level headed and friendly in that regard, but no board is immune.

You’re in for a learning curve for both of those professions. Both gave me something of an “ah ha” movement when I realized I was completely misinterpreting their potential. Mesmer’s probably took me a bit longer to click, but it was the more satisfying realization. Kind of like that feeling when you make sense of algebra, rather than just going through the motions.

Both are fairly versatile professions in their own way, and I don’t think you can go wrong with either. However, we’d be happy to welcome you here to the purple side of the force.

I mained an ele, and then changed to mesmer as main…..

I mostly only Dungeons/fractals. (any)

Mesmer hads down.
Elementalist is just useful if you are carried trust me….
It excels in really few things mostly at cleanse conditions and when you have to skip stuff.
Nothing more.

Mesmer is the most annoying thing on earth to level btw at least until 40 :/

I could say instead that with months of strong nerfs ele has become quite unfun…..i sheltered it waiting for some unnerfs or new stuff.

Look on the forum what elementalist fan tells you to do in PvE…..swing a hammer autoattack -.-

cool……

This might help: How to level a mesmer

Mesmer is more viable in pug dungeon runs, lightning hammer eles however are used by high-end organised groups, so if you’re more interested in high-end groups then run an ele.

colesy.8490:

Mesmer is more viable in pug dungeon runs, lightning hammer eles however are used by high-end organised groups, so if you’re more interested in high-end groups then run an ele.

If you’re playing ele for lighting hammer only you’re doing it all wrong imho.
Ok back to topic:
I don’t know how hard it is to level ele currently but when I started some months ago it was super hard…but also fun with d/d comboing all the way finishing off vets…that being said it was disheartening to see any warrior as their playstyle is:“herpa kitten imma go kill smth k? press 2…dead.”.
And I was like an artist performing tons of skills and switching attunements all the time. It felt better but I had to give at least 90% all the time. Nowadays we had a balance patch and I haven’t touched my ele ever since as I grew tired of humans at some point way before that.

I just recently reached level 70 with my Mesmer but tried one before(to level 30~) but it was human so…yeah :P .
Here I don’t always have to give at least 90% but I still feel like an artist as my killing looks glamerous. I kill vets, I kill groups, I kill champions/do group events solo…actually I wonder why I haven’t played a Mesmer before. The start is truely a little bit slow but once you’re got like level 30-40 you should have played enough to know the ropes and at for got 20 points in one trait line(I can’t imagine playing my mesmer without Deceptive Evasion).

For group/dungeon play I’d say they’re both equal. Mesmer’s got the support and good damage(although not aoe) and ele’s got good damage and also a little bit support(both actually depending on your build).
I’d say play the one you like the looks of the skills. You’ll be looking at them for a while so better familiarize yourself with their skills. If you’re into WvW both have potention so that’s not an issue.
Also no class is trash unless you count the warrior…I don’t like them as mentioned. Not trash as in no damage, useless but rather the most boring class in the entire game =)

If you’re playing ele for lighting hammer only you’re doing it all wrong imho.
Ok back to topic:

For dungeons, IIRC it’s the strongest DPS in the entire game.

colesy.8490:

If you’re playing ele for lighting hammer only you’re doing it all wrong imho.
Ok back to topic:

For dungeons, IIRC it’s the strongest DPS in the entire game.

I don’t think it’s so much a matter of whether it’s strong DPS or not. It’s more the idea that it may not be the best move to invest hours of your life into a character because one single utility, whether you enjoy it or not, is “the best”. Things that are “the best” usually get nerfed or fixed, and then you get a massive backlash on the forums when people who hinged their entire character on that one thing cry out that their profession is no longer viable and that ArenaNet is ruining the game. And why shouldn’t they be angry? That one thing was their entire character to them, so they essentially had their character taken away.

It’s much better to invest time into a character with mechanics and a style of play that you enjoy overall. That way your character will retain its identity post-patch.

But, that’s not to say people who enjoy Elementalist on the whole can’t enjoy a little Hammer Time if it’s on top.

Go with Mesmer for sure. I just started playing a week ago for the first time, got my ele to level 14, the started a Mesmer and I love it. 100x better IMO

colesy.8490:

If you’re playing ele for lighting hammer only you’re doing it all wrong imho.
Ok back to topic:

For dungeons, IIRC it’s the strongest DPS in the entire game.

Still not the only way to play the Elementalist. I actually hated the hammer build as it felt like a temporary thing. I’d use the hammer up and the group of enemies is still not dead.
Maybe they changed the whole damage of it but I wasn’t impressed in solo PvE. Less so in dungeons as it actually makes me go toe on toe with the enemy and the Ele is squishy enough. One big swoop later and I’m dead.
If it wasn’t so up close and had less cooldown/more charges I could see it being great.

And I got to agree with Clockwork. If you like the whole class mechanic you’re much better off. I for example hate the warrior’s class mechanic and thus don’t play my warrior anymore. Or I didn’t even attempt to level a ranger past level 15 as my pet always dying and being a bother all the time didn’t help me like the class.
Elementalist or Mesmer on the other hand have much more complexity and if you’re the type of person you’ll like those.

To sum my opinion all up: I’d never level an Elemenatlist again. Once you’re 80 you’re done with leveling. The class is great but annoying to level due to being squishy no matter what you try and not dealing good damage due to always dying(not saying I can’t play the class..far from it but I always struggled with harder enemies). Some people might disagree and it might’ve changed (haven’t played Ele for half a year) but my experience wasn’t all too pleasent.

The OP asked between the two classes what will be able to do high level content and be able to solo. Now I don’t know what it is like for elementalists soloing, but I do know that full glass elementalists using conjured weapons are absolutely insane in dungeons with phenomenal DPS and fantastic might stacking. The hammer itself even has its own blast finisher. However it will only work in the hands of a player willing to learn how to use such a glassy class who knows the encounters and when to use their evades. Secondly, LH/fiery GS eles are only meta with organised groups, pugs or the time being will just stick with 3 war/1 guard/1 mes. Making the ele makes you meta-proof whereas the mesmer will give you a lot of opportunities for dungeon groups right now, plus it does have a lot of utility in fractals. Again, with the organised groups thing, mesmers have basically been phased out so if the OP is interested in that kind of thing they would be better off with the elementalist.

Finally, I’m not arguing which class is more fun, I’m saying which would be stronger for what they asked for. Conjured weapons won’t be nerfed either since the build which they’re best used in is so fragile that only a minority of players, those willing to learn it will be able to use it while most players will just be stacking warriors, a guard and a mesmer for their dungeons.

I’m also under the impression you didn’t use LH in a proper group, running it in a full berserker group will make you just obliterate everything.

colesy.8490:

Again, with the organised groups thing, mesmers have basically been phased out so if the OP is interested in that kind of thing they would be better off with the elementalist.

lols

… I feel for my ele cousins after all the past nerfs, but I must say this comment is very inaccurate.

lols

… I feel for my ele cousins after all the past nerfs, but I must say this comment is very inaccurate.

Have you not been paying attention to the dungeon forums at all?

Rather than using mesmers, organised groups prefer now to just stack guards if necessary since you’re not compromising your DPS as much as you would if you use a mesmer unless there is some specific utility needed from them beyond reflects. Even at Lupicus you can use wall of reflection so as opposed to feedback.

Also, look up lightning hammer elementalists on youtube, or more recently you can find Nikaido’s group for COE p3 destroyer which had 2 elementalists, an engineer, a guardian and a class I can’t remember but wasn’t a mesmer. Without time warp, they might stacked with elementalists and then bursted the destroyer before his lava shield even showed up.