Guild Wars 2

I’m a main Guardian, retaliation and symbol healing, and I run FOTM often. It’s been a nice relationship. I enjoy supporting my team and converting damage.

I started Mesmer and was blown away by the potential. Healtanking can get boring, and Mesmers are anything but a fire and forget. What a blast.

Having a hard time finding a good FOTM or dungeon build for my mesmer. I leveled up with a power crit build using GS and dual swords. The higher levels I’ve been using staff and scepter / focus. I’ve dabbled a little bit in the traits, but it’s all just a little confusing (no pun intended).

Whats your experience with Mesmer builds that have served you well, specifically in PvE dungeon or fractals content? Do you go all out beserker and rely on dodge mechanics? Do you tank and vit up and try to outlast? What works the most reliably? Any help would be appreciated!

My fractal setup is different from my dungeon ones. In fractals i run 0/20/30/15/5 or 0/15/30/20/5 since I wont be shattering often the 15 in inspiration gives me and everyone regen near my phantasms plus in chaos i get protection everytime i gain regen (10s cd) and the staff cd trait is great. I always run staff and depending on the encounter i switch between sword/focus (especially traiting in inspiration for focus to reflect projectiles) or gs when it’s some place that I know I’ll be doing a lot more ranged fighting like the ice elemental fractal. I also use blink null field and signet of inspiration along with tw, and occasionally switch out null field for portal if it’ll be useful.

The reason I do that is that I have 80% boon duration so i usually jump right in to a mob or boss fight drop chaos storm under me with chaos armor take a few hits to proc a lot of regen (30s+) protection retal etc and then pop signet of inspiration to give it to everyone else. In less than 10s I have every boon in the game (except stability) with 80% boon duration passed on to everyone. The cd is not that bad – the staff skills come back quickly (a few seconds before your signet) and you can choose to rinse and repeat or just drop the chaos storm on top of your team and usually there will be a blast finisher by someone else to proc chaos storm for everyone.

Also I use arcane thievery if I know it’s a boss that’ll have buffs like the jellyfish underwater. He stacks 25 might i’ll rip it and then pop signet of inspiration and now 5 ppl have 25 stacks of might! lol it’s pretty useful. Especially against the dredge who proc boons, give them a few seconds to stack their boon duration on might protection and regen (usually 10s+) and do the same thing there.

Equipment is all zerker but chest piece is knight’s. Trinkets are mix of zerker and knights just because conditions (particularly confusion) I don’t find does too much as a mesmer in dungeons and should be reserved for necros more. Dps tends to hurt bosses more than confusion since they dont attack very frequently.

Overall I think one of the very best if not the best class in a dungeon is a mesmer because they can buff and tank as well as a guardian, dps almost as good as a warrior, and remove conditions pretty well.

Thanks for the reply.

As far as traits go, looking at the options I’m not sure which staff CD trait you are referring to.
For Inspiration I’m assuming you are using increased illusion health and warden’s feedback when you trait to 20 in that line, right?
In chaos the extra toughness trait with the staff is a no-brainer, but what else are you using? I don’t see the grandmaster trait options really viable here, since you aren’t cloaking or regularly interrupting.
Do you use the desperate decoy in the Dueling trait line? I don’t see the extra criticals as useful overall with a power increase instead. If you go 10 into Domination you can get the signet recharge reduction trait, which seems like it’d go well with boon copying in this set up. That way you can throw the extra 5 into Inspiration and have your long lasting phantasms doing more damage.

Thoughts?

Also: How are you getting your boon duration so high?

I run 20/20/0/25/5 right now and it’s working out great. Used to run 20/20/0/10/20 to run a hybrid shatter build. The focus reflect greatly increases damage and survivability in fractal. Weapons are GS and Sword/Focus. I keep a staff on hand for certain fights and in case we’re stacking conditions (for warlock). Also, for hard hitting mob trash.

Just like guard, reflect, reflect, reflect. I’ve had my highest numbers with warden phantasm, it just takes practice knowing when/how to use it.

Constantly switching skills, but TW, reflect, null field are up 90% of the time. Also signet of inspiration at times (with arcane thief) and blink and of course portal in swamp.

Full zerker on fotm 40+ with few issues.

roachsrealm.9284:

Thanks for the reply.

As far as traits go, looking at the options I’m not sure which staff CD trait you are referring to.
For Inspiration I’m assuming you are using increased illusion health and warden’s feedback when you trait to 20 in that line, right?
In chaos the extra toughness trait with the staff is a no-brainer, but what else are you using? I don’t see the grandmaster trait options really viable here, since you aren’t cloaking or regularly interrupting.
Do you use the desperate decoy in the Dueling trait line? I don’t see the extra criticals as useful overall with a power increase instead. If you go 10 into Domination you can get the signet recharge reduction trait, which seems like it’d go well with boon copying in this set up. That way you can throw the extra 5 into Inspiration and have your long lasting phantasms doing more damage.

Thoughts?

Also: How are you getting your boon duration so high?

Trait X in chaos which gives extra toughness also reduces the cd on staff skills. As for grandmaster trait, just pick whatever you want. I usually take the extra cloaking if i need to heal or mass invis group to get them through a specific part of a dungeon (such as arah, there’s a lot of running past annoying mobs). And if they dont make the run (such as arah) then you can repeatedly pop invis in this order so that reveal debuff doesnt hit you Mass invis→decoy→prestige (which is a torch skill). Decoy is different from mass invis and prestige so the reveal bs wont proc as long as you dont attack. The point here is so you can make it to a safe point and drop a portal, take the nearest wp back and portal everyone through (though you have to keep in mind portal range so placement is everything).

30 in chaos gives you 30% boon duration plus runes for an extra 40% giving you a total of 70%. You could use signet of midnight for another 10%. But i rarely use signet of midnight.

As for inspiration i use mender’s purity and warden’s feedback. sometimes I don’t trait the full 20 and only do 15 cuz I don’t need the focus skills.

Do you use the desperate decoy in the Dueling trait line? I don’t see the extra criticals as useful overall with a power increase instead. If you go 10 into Domination you can get the signet recharge reduction trait, which seems like it’d go well with boon copying in this set up. That way you can throw the extra 5 into Inspiration and have your long lasting phantasms doing more damage.

as far as this goes it depends on your build. My build has 97% crit dmg bonus with 70% crit chance – so at 3000 attack, I technically have almost 6k attack 70% of the time which is very important in taking down adds in FOTM and other dungeons because you practically get one shotted most of the time. However, if you don’t run the extra crit dmg then i would skip the signet recharge and use illusions do 15% more dmg and then drop that extra 5 in inspiration so now phantasms are doing an extra 30% overall. That would be a very very strong support build since phantams are giving regen and protection, plus you get more boons and share them with everyone at 70%+ boon duration, and you have a fairly reasonable amount of dps. I can see iWarden (staff 3 attack) doing around 3-4k consistently with a build like this.

Of course your trinkets play a big role as well so don’t completely disregard them. they’re just as important as your armor