Guild Wars 2

For a DPS Mesmer what stat should you focus on? I found old articles stating:

Power > Precision = Critical Damage > Condition Duration > Condition Damage

I don’t know if this still applies. Should I stack power and precision equally or should I go all power?

it still applies

we do not reliably stack conditions outside of sharper images. no, staff is not reliable. you can solo attack a mob with elasticity using only staff auto attack and get a 10 stack of vulnerability before yo uget a 3rd bleed or a burn – gogo rng!! any other source of applying conditions from the player are on long cooldowns/require you to take damage.

unlike ranger and necro pets, our phantasms scale with our gear and stats. they all benefit more from power than condition damage. on the flip side you don’t want to have low crit

the above “formula” is still correct until something is done with condition damage coefficients, damage to objects and zone event mobs and bleed stacking.

berserker’s armor.

Power and Crit..emphasis on power…but the crit is nice.

Can also swap out with Valkyrie armor as well. Power vit and crit damage.

Point is, phantasms, traited, bleed on crits. 2 duelists and 1 warden can get stacks of bleeds up to near 25 all on their own.

My duelists crit for upwards of 2.5-3k while my wardens crit for upwards of 4k (saw close to 5k once).

Conditions are a bonus for mesmers, not our life blood. However, we can stack for conditions with staff and clone kills, but its more reliable to stack offensively.

I like Precis, Power, and Crit damage, so going to second the call for Beserker’s armor. It’s a glass cannon build, but surprisingly survivable if you’re quick on your distortion and evasion skills. The staff is fantastic if you’re up against a mob with lots of conditions, I’ve easily and often hit with phantasmal warlock for over 6000 damage. It’s also a nice PVP build, and mind-wrack with illusionary persona can hit for a total 9000+ damage if they crit (I always bring deceptive evasion as a way to pump extra clones). I’m sure there are viable builds for +condition, but it’s not the route I chose.

Highest DPS in a vaccum is mathematically Rampager’s armor, which is why I suggest it for PvE. I’m guessing the people arguing for Beserker’s are either focusing on PvP or haven’t checked the numbers much.

Yes, Mesmers can do reliable condition damage because bleed is the heavy hitter for condition damage and mesmers can pile it on.

If you are using a fast attack weapon such as GS or one handed sword, precision (Ie. rampager’s set) is the better choice.

People seem to miss the vital point that at any given time, we are more likely to have a clone out or two than a full set of phantasms. When you are using rampager set, 1 bleed stack does around 450 damage (before might stacks come into play, more after), and roughly 65% crit chance (you can get higher), you are averaging 1000 damage for a clone per GS volley. This becomes powerful when you have the clone on dodge trait or use mirror images.

Thus a focus for this build is to be sure you have all 3 illusions out at any given time, phantasms of course are still a priority.

So, when you se how this starts to multiply up:
450 damage x 2 (probability of bleeds) x 3 illusions = about 3000 additional damage per volley… berserker gear/power based do minimal bleed damage at best.
And I’m only talking about the bleeds here.

Rampager’s also has a healthy dose of power, so considering the increased chance to crit — direct and phantasmal damage is also quite good. Divinity runes are great to use.

The fun part about this build is also that you can be effective with any weapon since you have solid condition damage boosts. The reason for this is that mesmer weapons are all either fast multi-hit or condition based weapons.

But all bleeds above 25 on a boss are wasted.

We’re talking about dungeons and soloing, your build doesn’t matter at all during DEs and large bosses. Just run full magic find.

Only time bleeds are being wasted are on world bosses in which case you don’t need to worry about getting gold anyway.

for s/t PvP Bleeds aren’t so important due to the fact that enemies die too quickly for them to be fully staked up, and crit damage tends to do more bonus damage in an offensive build than Condition Damage.

In PvE this changes, as fights can wind up being longer and the bleed advantage stacks up, especially with so much time spent in evasion.

However, unlike in s/tPvP, you can actually achieve a balance between them as well, and the optimal overall build is actually splicing it.

Of course, this is all assuming we take an offsensive role in our usage. We have some pretty powerful support builds as well.