Guild Wars 2

When I hit 80 I noticed the majority of Mesmers use greatsword over staff. I decided to look into it for a bit and everywhere I looked said it had superior damage to Staff. I leveled ~10ish levels using greatsword and the rest almost all being staff, so I was a bit reluctant. However I decided to do so anyway. I bought a full set of Rare Berserker gear and I’ve used that for about a week or so. I found it boring and I didn’t feel like I was doing as much as I could be with a staff.

I’ve come to ask for help.

I love using staff, and I know it has to be somewhat viable in PvE dungeons. I couldn’t find any PvE Staff guides on the guide list so this is my reason for asking for help in this post.

What I would like is just a general stat guide for how I should gear myself and any help with a build would be fantastic!

Edit: I run dungeons with 4 friends and it’s pretty flexible for builds. I’m open to supporty/tanky type builds, however, I mainly want help on a damage build.

Edit 2: If anyone knows how good condition damage is for staff, I would love to know. I automatically assumed it’s a great stat, but I really dont know how much of my damage comes from it.

Staff using a berzerker set is absolutely fine even if you have no condition damage. The phantasm scales with power. Look at it this way – the staff is your defensive weapon and the other set is your offensive weapon. For solo roaming staff is absolutely our best weapon with it’s damage mitigation and boons. It’s all situational though so don’t be afraid to switch weapons on the fly. A GS is needed sometimes for events like Jormag or Cursed Shore farming.

I’d highly recomend 0/20/20/0/30 for a staff build or 10/20/20/0/20 for a more pve centered build.

Shatter builds really shine with Staff.

Either way shatter more and shatter often. #1 problem for new mesmers is the lack of shattering off of CD.

20-30 points deep in illusions gives you frequent shatters, use them.

personally if it’s just pve I’d go with 10/20/20/0/20 build and use full Rampagers shattering off of CD. Great DPS with plenty of survival once you practice a tad.

PS. Rampagers works great with Runes of the wurm for that extra vitality and damage.

Godmoney.2048:

I’d highly recomend 0/20/20/0/30 for a staff build or 10/20/20/0/20 for a more pve centered build.

Shatter builds really shine with Staff.

Either way shatter more and shatter often. #1 problem for new mesmers is the lack of shattering off of CD.

20-30 points deep in illusions gives you frequent shatters, use them.

personally if it’s just pve I’d go with 10/20/20/0/20 build and use full Rampagers shattering off of CD. Great DPS with plenty of survival once you practice a tad.

PS. Rampagers works great with Runes of the wurm for that extra vitality and damage.

I’ve gotten used to using Shatter on CD so that’s not a problem. I thought about rampagers, but I wasnt sure how well Presicion worked with staff. Thanks for the info!

leng jai.2961:

Staff using a berzerker set is absolutely fine even if you have no condition damage. The phantasm scales with power. Look at it this way – the staff is your defensive weapon and the other set is your offensive weapon. For solo roaming staff is absolutely our best weapon with it’s damage mitigation and boons. It’s all situational though so don’t be afraid to switch weapons on the fly. A GS is needed sometimes for events like Jormag or Cursed Shore farming.

Ah, I assumed building Precision and Crit dmg wouldn’t work as well since staff uses condition damage. Good to know, thanks.

I rock something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQBYExMjgD5QpA7yuyM4tLE

Staff PvE build, with full Rabid (Prec/Tough/Cond Dmg) gear and 6x Superior rune of the Undead (for another 5% of toughness to condition dmg). I use Staff and Sword/Focus offhand. I treat it sort of as a “suicide clone” build, where I want to constantly overwrite my clones so they explode and apply more crap to the target, but I also constantly want 3 clones up to apply Winds of Chaos (or Phantasm to hit hard). I have somewhere around 1500 Condition Damage with my gear. But even just full rares will get you about 1100.

Quite a fun build, and with that gearset I am very hard to kill. I easily solo anywhere from 3-4 veterans all the time. And under the right circumstances I’ve solo’d some Champions with it, depends on their abilities.