Guild Wars 2

I’m doing my permadeath challenge with a Mesmer, and I was wondering- what are a good defensive weapon set, as well as a good offensive one, primarily heavy application of blinds, and evades.
I also wanna know what does good damage as a swap weapon
Thanks for your help

Staff is the best defensive weapon. If you aren’t at level 80, it is probably best to stick with greatsword for the offensive weapon, because of the lack of traits.

If you want to go defensive, go with Sword/Sword and /Torch. The low cooldowns on Blur from Sword #2, Block from Sword #4, and the Blind/Stealth from Torch #4 pretty much guarantee you a way to avoid any damage. Sword/Sword also does very good DPS.

PvP, WvW or PvE?

When you say permadeath, are we talking a dead is dead type thing? If so, that means defense is priorities 1 through 5, and everything else comes after.

You’re going to want a condie build. This has the advantage of dealing damage while also remaining very tanky and evasive. I’d recommend staff+sword/torch. Sword isn’t a condie weapon compared to scepter, but blurred frenzy is one of the best defensive skills in the game. Torch has stealth along with burning. Staff has a very low cooldown blink that allows you to kite easily, good access to chaos armor for defense (and protection when traited) and chaos storm has great defensive benefits.

You’ll want to use rabid armor probably with undead runes, since those give a good amount of toughness. Dire would be best for survivability, but you need the crits from rabid for various things.

You’ll want to trait dueling, chaos, and illusions or inspiration. Dueling gives you bleed on crit, and clone on dodge, as well as vigor on crit. Chaos gives you cooldown reduction on staff, defense from illusions, and PU for increased stealth duration and defensive boons while in stealth.

Illusions decreases your cooldowns further and can give you a boost to condition damage. Inspiration is a utility and defensive traitline that can give condition removal, projectile defense, or situational utility traiting.

If you’ve got any more questions, I’d be happy to answer them.

Note that the condi build won’t function until you get some specific traits unlocked.
You’ll need Sharper Images in dueling and the first tier of illusions at least. So, level 45? Sounds about right.

Pyro’s got the rest of the build pretty much perfect. It’s a great build in case you get in over your head, but it can get overwhelmed if you run alone into a fort in the Silverwastes to try to revive the commander.
I love doing it because sometimes I can single-handedly save the fort from 12+ mordrem, but I die about 30% of the time I try it.

I would note that there’s no Rabid jewel, so you’ll need to pick something else for your exotic Rabid trinkets. You might be tempted to get Rabid crests, but even with Chaos and Undead runes you’ll actually get more condi damage out of exotic Carrion jewels. That has the nice side effect of giving you a little hp to go along with all your toughness, and a little more damage to hit targets immune to condis (like structures).

What exactly does the challenge entail? Are you gonna do any pvp? Every dungeon path?