Guild Wars 2

I’m a new player and don’t feel comfortable roaming yet, so I’ve just been sticking with the zerg. I’ve mostly been dropping null field and trying to spread boons around with signet of inspiration while trying to throw some damage out here and there but I feel like there’s more I could be doing. As someone who doesn’t really have a lot of gear options at the moment what sort of setup should I be using in zergs?

Tygerbite.8539:

I’m a new player and don’t feel comfortable roaming yet, so I’ve just been sticking with the zerg. I’ve mostly been dropping null field and trying to spread boons around with signet of inspiration while trying to throw some damage out here and there but I feel like there’s more I could be doing. As someone who doesn’t really have a lot of gear options at the moment what sort of setup should I be using in zergs?

Hi

Ok, for just running around and following a whatever color “dorrito” in text chat, play whatever you want. Pick chrono, inspiration, and chaos for trait lines. Make a power build, make sure you have at bare minimum 2800 armor and 22k hp. Use lots of cleansing traits, run blink and whatever else you like for stun breakers. Make it power based to keep it simple and to the point. other then that run whatever you like, that is a good starting point.

For small scale and roaming you have a ton of options for both offensive and defensive styles and can excel at it, but that is a bit more advanced actually to optimize on all that.

For organized groups, you will unfortunately end up being 90% portal / veil, 10% alacrity. That is your role. Period. This is great fun at first, and there are a few people that enjoy it longterm, but most of us hate being pigeonholed like that and when running in organized guild groups end up quitting our mesmers and switching to other classes because of this. Lack of bags on such a utility mes vs what we get on our other toons is just too much to bare.

So you’ve been warned. Mes certainly has its place, but if you’re not one of the players that can enjoy portals + veil or dinky kitten roaming in very long term, I just do not recommend it for WVW.

So I can provide a substantially different perspective on this, but I’m too tired to type it out on my phone. I’ll add it in later.

There are a few things you can do
1. Boon spamming
You can be a boon machine through bountiful disillusionment and signet of inspirtaion.
Important boons are usually covered by other professions. But in less organized groups, filling in boons between gaps can still be useful. SoI is still strong after nerf.

2. Distortion sharing
This is one of mesmer’s specialties. Too bad we lost well of precognition. But you can still do decent amount of distortion sharing through F4, signet/F5 reset, signet trait. It does require a bit more coordination due to it being 300 range only.

3. Ground targeting skills
Ground target skills are always strong in WvW. Null field, wells, time warp are all decent skills to add to your zerg’s kitten nal. But utility bar space is precious to mesmer. So you might need to swap skills from time to time. Especially you might be expected to portal/veil for some group.

I hate playing zergs, but in 15v15 guild format, having a single mesmer(since SOI nerf) is still very beneficial. Gravity well or time warp can swing a battle. Sword 3 immob, shield 5 stun. A little bit over 50% quickness uptime or great resistance share. Distortion sharing for rezing, best blink stomper.

But yea, being in zerg kinda sucks if you’re new or especialy when it starts lagging, since active defense op.

Try commander/wanderer/minstrel equipment. Oh yea, sword+shield/staff.

Ok, so the mesmer role in WvW groups changes drastically depending on how you’re comped.

Uncomped Zerg
Unfortunately, you’re totally worthless as a mesmer in a random zerg. It honestly doesn’t matter what you do, you essentially have zero value to the team. You’re bad at dealing damage, you can’t provide meaningful support without coordination, you don’t have any great trap cc like line of warding or static field, it’s really bad. You can just do whatever, you’ll be equally worthless.

Coordinated Group
So here’s where things get interesting. Mesmer has a ton of great utility to provide to a coordinated group, and you can leverage that to do a lot of interesting things. One of the more common things groups will ask for is veil, but this actually is pretty useless and overrated. The real strengths of mesmer support come from boonshare and distortion share. Using signet of inspiration and clever traiting, you can provide massive amounts of boons to your groups. This lets you take more temporary boons like quickness and resistance and turn them into nearly permanent boosts.

The other key thing you do is sharing distortion. The is accomplished with a minor trait in the inspiration line that causes you to provide 1s of aoe distortion upon gaining distortion yourself. You can obtain distortion in various ways, but the most frequent are with traited signets and the distortion shatter. Distortion is extremely powerful, but the 1 second duration means you need to use it at the appropriate time to avoid damage or cc.

For just following the random zerg, I usually just run full zerk shatter. Dodge the front line and snipe as many low health squishies back liners as possible. Will sometimes switch out to some wells for some aoe damage and buffs/debuffs. Veil when needed and portal when needed (lol does anyone still do portal bombs??)

Even as a puglet in a militia zerg, you can pump out fantastic heals and support your frontline with glamours. Boonshare/distortion is effective up to a certain engagement size, but gets outclassed against groups that are not complete kitten. Works great for small-medium scale groups though, especially after the SoI changes.

Whatever you do, don’t swap your build around to appease some pugmander’s dream of double veiling into an enemy zerg. Have some self-respect for your class.