Guild Wars 2

Has anyone played around with any Mesmer builds using the Runes of the Defender?

• 1: +25 Healing Power
• 2: When you block a foe’s attack, gain 1 second of regen
• 3: +50 Healing Power
• 4: When you use a heal skill, you gain aegis for 5 second. (10s ICD)
• 5: +100 Healing Power
• 6: When you block a foe’s attack, heal yourself. (30s ICD)

Given our decent access to blocks, I was curious about this.

I use to see more about tanky Mesmer builds (heck, Pyro pioneered one), but don’t seem to see them that much any more, so I’m always curious about things that might allow for “more tanky” Mesmer builds.

You might want to check out this thread.

The access to blocks isn’t the most important thing with those Runes, really. A heal with a short cooldown is what you want to look at (e.g. MoR or Mirror) to get as many Aegis as possible. #6 will work at a 100% efficiency as long as you heal once every 30s and Mesmers get Regeneration from many other sources. So you don’t have to build for #2 and #6.

I think it looks like a good rune for dueling, since getting Aegis on MoR gives you a great relatively low-cost/low-cooldown way to hinder bursts.

Buuut… Runes of the Defender don’t seem to be available in SPvP. And movement is so important in WvW that I’d be hard-pressed to dump Traveler for anything else.

@Xaylin
Good point about the Aegis being enough to trigger the #6. However, if that is all you rely on, you could make a mistake and have to wait for another 10s minimum to be able to trigger that heal. For that reason, my personal preference would be to have at least one other on-demand block.

@ASP:
I hear you. Maybe that will somehow get changed in the expansion. I will say that another set I used to play around with was Melandru. Melandru w/ some Lemongrass and you have -65% condition duration. I don’t know a Mesmer that wouldn’t appreciate that ;-)

On paper, I like these runes. They provide more active defense to a class that relies most often on active defenses. I’ll be curious to try them out when I get a chance … and very curious to see how others (if any) do with them.

The main issue with runesets like this is that they’re inherently a bit unreliable and/or redundant. Additionally, any runes like these need to be compared to melandru runes, which are the go-to best in slot for maximum defense in all ways.

The 2 bonus is completely redundant for a mesmer. You’ll have massive uptime on regeneration almost completely independent of what build you run. If you’re running a defensive build, this means one of a couple things. You’ll either have PU (high regen uptime), lots of points in chaos (high regen uptime from chaos armor and passives), points in inspiration (phantasms fart regen), using a staff in general (high regen uptime without anything modifying it from chaos armor combos).

The 4 bonus is nice, don’t get me wrong. That being said…it’s not that good. Aegis every 10s is solid but it doesn’t justify the rune choice in and of itself.

The 6 bonus is…interesting. It’s also highly unreliable. The amount it heals (taking scalings into account) is roughly half of what ether feast provides. The cooldown is 30 seconds, which is fairly large. Now, the big problem here is that you can’t necessarily control when you proc this heal. Sometimes it’ll be great, and sometimes it’ll do nothing. Ultimately, I’d estimate that you’ll get full effectiveness from this maybe once every 2 procs, putting you around 5kish hp every 60 seconds from it.

The very last consideration is (similar to a build that Keenlam posted recently) where are you going to use this? The obvious choice is a point bunker in PvP, but these runes don’t exist in PvP. This would be pointless to use for roaming (since you can’t do damage as a full bunker build post-immortal). These would also be pretty pointless to use in a group. You’d be taking the already abysmal mesmer damage and making it even worse without any significant gain in utility for your party.

Overall, these runes fall into the same category with so many of the other niche runes that Anet has released: Interesting, but not actually useful.

Fay.2357:

The very last consideration is (similar to a build that Keenlam posted recently) where are you going to use this? The obvious choice is a point bunker in PvP, but these runes don’t exist in PvP. This would be pointless to use for roaming (since you can’t do damage as a full bunker build post-immortal). These would also be pretty pointless to use in a group. You’d be taking the already abysmal mesmer damage and making it even worse without any significant gain in utility for your party.

I think I’d much rather have this for a mostly-glassy build, since you can do a lot to avoid bursts — without having to burn clones for Distortion, use up dodges, or interrupting your casts — by insta-popping Aegis off a Power Return.

these runes work best on a zerker guardian who wants survivability when solo roaming, still the are good runes and they can give you nice big heals on block ( soem people estimate over 3k ( i have seen evidence that the heals are 3.5-3.9k ) which doubles a lot of heal skill effectiveness )

What do you think about solo roaming with mantra lockdown + Defender runes?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8dl0npMtNqxGNcrNyqxY6WO5lTtUpHJ7AA-TlCEABE8AASU9ntUCykyLDuAASpEh89HaT3AAHBgHOIABAQAu5NzmtZwQH6QH6QHa38m38m38mlCIitWA-w

I only got one set yet for my ranger, but it looks interesting for mesmer as well.

Schattenlied.4873:

What do you think about solo roaming with mantra lockdown + Defender runes?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8dl0npMtNqxGNcrNyqxY6WO5lTtUpHJ7AA-TlCEABE8AASU9ntUCykyLDuAASpEh89HaT3AAHBgHOIABAQAu5NzmtZwQH6QH6QHa38m38m38mlCIitWA-w

I only got one set yet for my ranger, but it looks interesting for mesmer as well.

Seems to me like you’re lacking any source of damage whatsoever. You don’t have halting strike, you don’t have standard shatter boosting traits, you don’t have phantasm boosting traits, you don’t have…anything really. All of your damage will be at the meh-baseline level that mesmer starts at without traiting for it.

is Fay Pyroatheist ?

also, you do lack damage in your build you are even replacing runes, a big source of damage, with tanky runes @Schattenlied

Mirrorblade → Blurred Frenzy → MindWrack should still deal nice damage, especially if you add Air/Fire sigils. Using CS instead of CI could be another option to get at least Halting Strike and vuln stacking. I will give it a try this weekend…

Schattenlied.4873:

What do you think about solo roaming with mantra lockdown + Defender runes?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8dl0npMtNqxGNcrNyqxY6WO5lTtUpHJ7AA-TlCEABE8AASU9ntUCykyLDuAASpEh89HaT3AAHBgHOIABAQAu5NzmtZwQH6QH6QHa38m38m38mlCIitWA-w

I only got one set yet for my ranger, but it looks interesting for mesmer as well.

I would probably switch up the build a bit, as I think you’d benefit from having at least one on-demand Block, such as the Illusionary Riposte with /Sword. I find the Sword to be a obvious choice when running Blade Training. You can also benefit from at least a tiny bit of Boon stripping, so I put that into the weapon, and when considering it’s a lockdown build, Null Field can do the job to a degree as well, if used right. That also grants the build a source of Chaos Armor when combined with Illusionary Leap/Phantasmal Swordsman, besides it acting as a source of additional Condition cleansing, on top of what is found on the weapons.

Personally, I can’t stand recharging more than one Mantra at a time, and since it’s only to be expected that it uses Mantra of Distraction when focused on lockdown, I swapped the healing skill over to our staple Ether Feast one. The Dazzling minor trait under Domination is too good not to take, with every interrupt not only granting you 5 stacks of Might + random Boon, and Immobilize + random control condition from the CI and BI traits, but also 5 stacks of Vulnerability (with the added side bonus being that it does that even if you fail to interrupt, meaning you (and other sources) will do 5% more damage to the target). I’m also a huge fan of Halting Strike, which when triggered with high Might and Vulnerability involved, can reward you with numbers that’s in the 5000 – 6000 damage range—quite respectable when you are denying skill usage and causing other havoc at the same time.

I threw in a few random traits too (and to be honest, I only popped in the Greatsword Training because it made the stats between the sets to balanced.. so I would probably switch that to be potentially more useful, with say.. a more reliable source of Boon stripping through Shattered Concentration), and swapped in a tiny bit more Healing Power (Regen) + Condition Damage (Bleeds) by switching over to Celestial armor. It has no stealth, but that’s because I don’t like playing with it. Swap Moa to Mass Invisibility if you feel like you need the stealth I guess. You don’t, but some players think they need it for a while before they realize this. I prefer Moa to have a counter against a Necromancer’s Elite skills, Warrior and/or Elementalist healing sustain, as well as for a few other uses (e.g., extremely easy interrupts). A Sigil of Doom may be of interest too. And yes, the Superior Sigil of Generosity is expensive, so obviously, if you don’t have a few of those stored up from our first Wintersday event, you may want to use something else. A relatively similar one would be Superior Sigil of Purity which is also On Hit, not On Critical Hit. There’s a myriad of choices to be had in Sigils.

Altered build: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8clknpGtlqxMNMrNipxY6biJHSGwBlslxB-T1yHABKfQAK4CAsmOExeAAJq+DTKB7R5X17PMwBUwLNHAckCCAgAczbmNbz28m38mH6QH6QH6Q7628m38m3sUAmr1C-w

General idea together with the Runes will be to use Illusionary Riposte for its high damage (or dodge baiting should your opponent dodge on seeing the Blocked message, both being win-win situations), while at the same time using it as a source of healing to top yourself back up. Other times, when really low on health, you can probably use Ether Feast to gain the Aegis and have it blocked, meaning it’s a very potent heal. If you can’t use Illusionary Riposte to top yourself off because of ICD on the Rune, then there’s always the optional use of throwing the Counter Blade bolt, to interrupt one or more targets.

The use of this Rune set is a interesting one, but I think I’ll just stick with Traveler’s myself, considering I pretty much always play as a mobile roamer in all game modes, and movement speed is somewhat king in that case (plus the added Boon- and Condition Duration isn’t necessarily a bad thing either). Swapping to /Focus without even getting permanent Swiftness is just a no-go for me, unless I already plan on running a build with it. It’s just too much of a hassle in my book, which also takes away from my focus on what is going on around me, having to constantly switch back and forth between weapons, ultimately increasing the risk of getting caught off guard with the “wrong” weapon on at that. I can’t exactly do that in Structured either, as I rarely play Practice, so there’s that too. Anyways, interesting Rune to play around with, but I think I’ll pass for now.

Wow, that´s a long post! O.o

Basically, you made a normal CI lockdown build with Defender runes. Although this provides a very strong heal with Ether Feast, it doesn´t use Aegis on heal that well. I mean, the 6th rune bonus is quite nice, but not the reason for using those runes on mesmer (at least for me). It´s the on-demand Aegis to block strong hits and secure important skills like Mass Invis or mantras.
A few weeks ago I had a lockdown vs. lockdown duel where my opponent used Defender runes. The other mesmer´s timing with MoR was really good so I was unable to interrupt e.g. his Mass Invis due to his use of Aegis mid-cast. This was my inspiration to suggest a somewhat similar build.

My prefered offhand weapons are torch/focus at the moment (in contrast to you, I love stealth ^^). I used to play with offhand sword for a few hundred hours and it´s solid, but my preferences shifted towards more utility (focus) or defense (torch). I still use Blade Training for iLeap´s immobilize and of course Blurred Frenzy, though.

So I think we got a rather different playstyle, but I will definitly use your build as well to see what works best. Thanks for your feedback!

Absconditus.6804:

Personally, I can’t stand recharging more than one Mantra at a time, and since it’s only to be expected that it uses Mantra of Distraction when focused on lockdown, I swapped the healing skill over to our staple Ether Feast one.

You’re taking Aegis available every 10 seconds (on an insta-cast non-interrupting skill, to boot) and replacing it with Aegis available every 20 seconds.

I don’t think Aegis once every 20 seconds is worth the rune slot.

Some notes from the wiki on Superior Runes of the Defender

• The bonus 2 regeneration is 2 seconds instead of 1. There is no internal cooldown.
• The bonus 4 triggers after the heal from bonus 6.
• The bonus 6 heals for 3920 + 0.6 * Healing Power at level 80.

I agree with the most recent posters. The Aegis has more synergy with Mantra of Recovery than with Ether Feast. We’re talking about a 100% increase in time between possible uses of Aegis-on-heal. I assume it also works on-heal like Centaur and others in that both casting Power Return as well as charging Mantra of Recovery will activate it as both are technically “heals” … just one is charging the heal :-p

Another thing to note that I noticed in the conversation … don’t forget that casting Phantasmal Swordsman with OH Sword is also considered a leap finisher.

@Pyro’s original post about Melandru being the best-in-slot for defensive runes:
I’m going to have to disagree. There is no doubt that Melandru is awesome. However, not all builds make use of stuns which nullifies one bonus. Some builds also make little to no use of conditions which largely nullifies the other great bonus from Melandru’s. Additionally, I always found Melandru’s to truly shine due to being combined with lemongrass for the total of -65% condition duration.

On the other hand, Aegis blocking an attack nullifies the attack whether it was simply direct damage or a condition application. I think Defender is more versatile as far as what builds it is effective against.

What about taking the [Retaliatory Shield] trait with this to gain [Retaliation] every time you block? Possibly more synergy with blocks. Doesn’t seem to have an ICD. I think you’d just need to be tanky enough to actually take some hits, else it’d be less than useful for you to do some retaliation damage to them only to be dropped because you’re squishy.