Guild Wars 2

Sorry for the abbreviated title, Anet’s stupid 45 character limit makes it very hard sometimes!

I ask because every Mesmer I come across is just GS/X, Shatter or Lock down/stun/ayyylmaoyoudead build, or the very rare like myself condi Mesmer who runs a combo of scept., torch, staff, pistol. I’ve thought about trying to come up with some trolly (PU), iZerker spamming, cripple build but I haven’t fleshed it out yet.

I personally don’t see the distinction between these build anymore.

If you’ve got high power and crit (running glassy), then you may as well use mind wracks as well as phantasms and weapon skills to add up the damage. There’s no sense in ignoring other damage sources.

Then it’s just the varying level of “control” the build has – from minimal control (ie, sword/torch, no control traits) to full control (MoD, GS, Pistol/Focus, Staff, and assosciated traits).

Probably won’t be too great until Chronomancer comes out. Then you’ll have great synergy with the trait that reduces the cd on phantasms for every phantasm shattered and the extra phantasm whenever you shatter one. It’ll also get better once the duelist trait is fixed since duelist is probably the safest phant to keep alive against other players. Until then, I don’t think pure phantasm would be a great idea, would be best to mix it with something else to give it that extra finishing power.

Well the main problem with phantasm build in my opinion is that they are a 1v1 focused build, like most AI (or condition) based builds. Sure they’ll be able to win most 1v1s, but when it comes to teamfights, their damage will be very low because AoE and cleave will kill all of the phantasms, so they’ll probably only get off 1 attack at the max.

Before the patch, I was a pretty die-hard phantasm mesmer for sPVP; over 6000 games and 99.9% of the time I was using some type of phantasm build. After the patch, my build is similar to what I was using before but I no longer hold off from shattering as the damage is sweet and your illusions seem to die quicker now anyways with dps going up across the board.

Curunen.8729:

I personally don’t see the distinction between these build anymore.

If you’ve got high power and crit (running glassy), then you may as well use mind wracks as well as phantasms and weapon skills to add up the damage. There’s no sense in ignoring other damage sources.

Then it’s just the varying level of “control” the build has – from minimal control (ie, sword/torch, no control traits) to full control (MoD, GS, Pistol/Focus, Staff, and assosciated traits).

This is the most accurate post I have seen in the forums (first part of your post) while spending my time scouting.

I can never really tell a build now, Everything looks like a mashup of shatter/lockdown/PU of some sort. It’s sad that the uniqueness of builds are gone.