Guild Wars 2

So I’m a brand new player, normally in MMOs I tend to play some sort of tank/healer/support and am mostly a PvE player.

I fancied a change so started levelling a mesmer, currently level 29, I am enjoying it but looking into future abilities I’m not sure how effective I will be in PvE compared to more standard classes assuming GW2 PvE is similar to other games.

So am really asking how good mesmer’s are at PvE endgame or are we more effective at PvP?

Thanks for any replies!

Mesmers are fine in PvE endgame, with the caveat being that if you don’t really know what you’re doing…you’ll be dead weight on the team.

Luckily, there are solutions for that. Ask for help on these forums if you want, but particularly go through and read the stickied ‘how to mesmer in dungeons’ guide. If you learn what that guide has to say, you’ll be a great person to have in a dungeon party.

If we’re looking at end game PvE like fractal…unfortunately no class provide healing/tank/support in endgame. General rule for GW2 is kill mob before they kill you, because you can never outheal damage in end game.

However, mesmer is not the top DPS dealer, this may change with expansion but right now mesmer’s PvE DPS is quite unstable due to our reliance on phantasms. Analogous to climb a mountain, you need time to make your DPS “climb” but your DPS can “fall” when phantasms got destroyed.

But that doesn’t mean mesmer is horrible, you can see we can still do quite well. Just not the top DPS. We do provide useful utilities to speed up team DPS though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCUNUZmxZHU

Our dps is kinda below average because of inconsistent phantasms. But our utility is special and can help a party a lot in many situations. It does take a bit more learning to make an effective dungeon mesmer.

As suggested, read through those PvE mesmer guide and get an idea of what we can and should do to help the team.

The other thing to bear in mind is that alot of mesmer traits are changing and these changes will be coming into effect before the release of heart of thorns.

Thanks for the replies guys,

I’ve read through the dungeon mesmer guide, and was wandering, it seems like our dps comes from auto attacks and phantasms, using sword2 to dodge abilities. Is this boring, or does keeping phantasms up and using utility skills keep it interesting?

Last reply mentioned changes to traits, are the new things coming looking good for mesmers at the moment?

Ultimately the “meta” rotation is simple for most classes, but there are exceptions. Mesmer currently allows you to learn a fairly wide variety of tricks with utilities and how they fit certain fights Even if the weapons are static.

Chronomancer looks like it will be very elaborate and involve multiple shatters to maximise damage. The trait changes look excellent, though not directly focused on pve.

If you really do want something more involved right now, eles (not staff) and engineers both have heaps of buttons to press.

Finally, if you go for harder encounters (fractals etc.) you will find yourself falling back to other strategies and mesmer is lots of fun then anyway!

Edit: I think you asked for an opinion… I generally find mesmer very interesting in pve, but mix it up with other classes now and then. It also helps that I stick to fractals mostly.