Guild Wars 2

I was playing around with the build editor today at work and tried to come up with a good skirmishing\ roaming\ scouting build for WvW.

You have a few roles as a skirmisher:
• To get in with your organized group, work together to bring down enemies fast, leave, repeat. Organized groups work much better together than zergs, as they are unorganized. What this means is that even when the odds are not in your favor, a top tier small squad can take out a group many times its own size.
• Making tactical decisions that help your world (capturing camps, towers and such) or your zerg (i.e. Your zerg is trying to take a tower, and the enemy is focused on the front gates because the whole zerg is there, your squad can teleport in and attack from behind, or even go for the lord.)
• Scouting ahead for your zerg, helping decide what routes to take and what camps, towers, or keeps to try and take.
• Taking up tactical positioning (i.e. between an enemy way point and the enemy group.)
What I aimed for:
• Extremely high mobility, both in combat and out of:
This is for roaming, of course. The need to get in and out of tough situations as well as high in combat mobility for survivability (you are wearing full zerkers), as well as a mobility oriented play style. As you can see this has consequence, food for boon duration, traited focus 20% reduced recharge rate, 10% movment for each clone etc. Zerker gear helps with the damage and crit but as you can see, centaur runes and air runes for that perm swiftness you will need in a small manned team. Also Focus skill #4 has a great effect, being able to pull in enemies. Added blink and teleport for quick takedowns and escapes before enemy notices.
• Zerg breaking options:
Let’s face it, even low tier servers have way too many zergs running around, and if you happen to get caught in an enemy zerg while deep in enemy territory you’re going to have to start way back at your way point. For this reason, I added a greatsword to this build as the #5 skill can be very useful for knocking back enemies and fleeing. I also juggled the idea of a staff as a retreat weapon but decided to go with the greatsword because skirmishing is a mobility and burst spec, and greatsword has more of that than the staff.
• Relatively high damage and burst:
This is a must for skirmishing. Unfortunately this build has little of high damage, but with pretty high crit% and crit damage. You wil do much less damage than your typical glass cannon, as mobility comes with a cost. Still, you aren’t the worst off, and will be able to handle yourself pretty well in xvs1 situations as you are very mobile, dodgy, and… well you’re a Mesmer, the point is to trick people.
• Basic defensive survivability:
This is why I put 10 in the chaos line (10% boon duration too). The regen at 75% and chaos on falling dmg are really good traits for wvw.

This build was made to be very mobile while having a decent damage output. This is meant to be good in small teams, usually 5 or 6 at the very most.
This is pretty much my first build, go easy on me.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgEQNAsdRlwzKqHTTrGaNJipCD3JFU3yhSB25dlUwbXIA-j0xAYrAm8KiGbFLs1shoprxUuER1G8ioVLCgZBA-w

It’s not really doing anything for me. It’s not Shatter. It’s not Phantasm. It is glass canon.

Your build doesn’t have a focus unfortunately. It’s got a bunch of random traits that don’t work together well.

You’ve got deceptive evasion, but lack mental torment, illusionary persona, and illusionary invigoration, so this is not a shatter build.

You lack phantasmal fury and both 15% traits, so this is not a phantasm build.

You don’t have glamour traits, clone on death traits, or interrupt traits, so it isn’t either of those.

You’ve just got a bunch of traits with no central idea, glass cannon armor, an odd selection of runes maximizing swiftness uptime without actually using them to provide swiftness…it doesn’t really make sense. You need to figure out what you actually want this build to do, and then build around it.

i like to play this build with group of ~6 as a ranged canon
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgEQJAWRl4zyoHTTlGb9IypCQHpHmWqtalegbXosB-jUzAYrARQQIRBK5psmAFErcFRjVvgpORVuI6XINMgKG2bkVpAeYMA-w
this build is work better with if u partying with thief or another shatter mesmer..
some suggestions, all go zerk items sux! at least change head chest legging to uncritdamage stats
MoR great heal self much more hps than ether feast and sync with more armor and menders pury
MoD optional.. i like it as in gw1 nice spike with halting
*if i change staff to sword & focus i swap some traits
MoC glass canons best friend imo
dueling 30 optional i change to insp 20 harmanous mantras and MoD to MoP with sword focus.
if u hardly to escape staff
items i already have thats why i use them
other food i like might on dodge %40 endurance rate
other optional sigils swap on endurance and endurance on kill
and use duel I blink and swao duel I to another trait and blink again to be more mobile

1k Vit and 1k Toughness. You are NEARLY a glass cannon but don’t do as much damage or have as much survivability as a tankier build. I skrimish all the time actually and love the build I am using so I know what fun you are trying to have but I agree that you are running to middle of the ground here and not really specifying what your build is. Hybrids thus far from what I have seen don’t work super great even when supported by team mates.

None of your Utility skills have CD reduction which is big no no for me. Your phantasmal haste trait. Though you do have two phantasms that are actually speed up by this your zerker is only by .4s and the iWarden doesn’t move unless out of sight range. People worth anything will not stand and fire into a traited iWarden they will switch to melee and kill it. You also don’t take any Phantasmal HP traits or skills. They nerfed the HP of them in WvW and thus they are not going to last long if someone coughs too kitten them. You also don’t take the GS trait so the Zerker will be on full CDs and though he may hit like a truck the first round that is all he is going to get and then he won’t be seen for a good while, while the trait is on CD.

Why DE? More than likely if your phantasms don’t get steam rolled you will replace them on accident when you dodge. I don’t think anyone running a phantasm build takes DE (could be wrong). You also don’t have clone death traits and your shatters are not going to hit that hard and you won’t be able to do them as much as you want I don’t think.

For swiftness if you are running in a team that isn’t all Mesmers (oh the glory days of 15 Glamour Mesmers) your Curtain won’t be worth anything cause other jobs have longer lasting and stackable swiftness that will simply be better than your curtain.

Compounding Celerity also only affects forward movement. I have taken it a few times in various builds but mainly it was just there because nothing else really matched the build at all.

You don’t have condition damage worth mentioning so your bleeds from crits are actually going to reduce your teams condition damage if you have someone else who can stack bleeds and has higher condition damage like a necro or even a condition Thief.

Personally, I would remove all your Dueling traits and put 5 each into Illusions and Inspiration for IC and 15% phantasmal damage and then but 10 into Domination for 15% Illusion Damage trait.