Guild Wars 2

(Mine is a PvP perspective, however this thread is intended for all Mesmer opinions across all formats)

• Evasive Mirror – With Blinding Dissipation stealing the Dueling show, it’s easy to forget that we have another strong and interesting option in the Master tier. Evasive Mirror synergizes wonderfully with Master of Manipulation and/or Warden’s feedback to make you a ranger/engineer’s worst nightmare. (Shoutouts to Kentigem -Daniel Handler- for putting me on to this awesome trait)

• Persistence of Memory – 2 seconds doesn’t mean much right? Well when you take Mental Defense and/or trait your weapons, you start to see that it isn’t too difficult to get 4-6s cooldowns on phantasms every 10 seconds or so.

• Bountiful Disillusionment – The Chaos line really hit the jackpot when it comes to grandmaster traits. All three are wonderful, but Disillusionment tends to get overlooked in favor of PU or CI. BD is a powerful trait for many reasons, especially combined with the other BD: Blinding dissipation. On-demand stability should not be overlooked.

• Restorative Illusions – Here is one of the staples of sustain in the Inspiration line. Restorative Illusions heals you per-clone-shattered and even 0-clone shatters can offer a decent chunk of life. But on-demand instant condition removal ONTOP of the heal? This is hands down one of the best traits for adding survivability to your Mesmer ontop of the passive benefits you gain just from traiting into Inspiration?

What say you? What other less popular traits do you think deserve some more spotlight?

I think persistence of memory gets ‘overlooked’ because of the impossibility of making an effective pvp phantasm build now. Traits across 4 lines (Dom/duel/insp/Ill) are all extremely important. You’ve got dps and cooldowns for gs in domination, phant fury/sword CDs/pistol CDs in dueling, all the phantasm defense boosters including mental defense in inspiration, and then persistence of memory and phantasmal haste in illusions.

The traits being this spread out effectively makes phantasm builds the polar opposite of shatter and lockdown builds now. Shatter and lockdown have multiple options to take very strong variants of the core build that is always available. Phantasm builds have to decide which part of their core build they want to sacrifice in order to play. It’s a lose/lose situation that really sucks for anyone that enjoyed that playstyle pre-patch.

You’re missing the “PvP only” disclaimer…

Then again for PvE the only options are Persistence of Memory and whatever part of Inspiration you might consider “less popular”, and that only in non-speedrun settings. Medic’s Feedback, Restorative Mantras and all 3 GMs can be useful for casual runs/open world/SW, as can Blurred Inscriptions+Inspiring Distortion.

There is just really good choice’s in the “adept” Illusion slot. All three offer something different depending on the build your running.

Compounding Power if your a “phantasm” player and don’t shatter much.

The Pledge, for torch users. aka PU/stealth dependent builds. And another “condition removal” option.

And “Persistence of Memory” for a builds that shatter often. (See Illusion GM – Master of Fragmentation )

So I wouldn’t say its an ‘underestimated" trait. Its a good fit if your build can take advantage of it. (It’s in mine!!! )

Photoloss.4817:

You’re missing the “PvP only” disclaimer…
.

True, but while my perspective comes from PvP, I’m curious to know all perspectives from all part of the game.

Well, from a PvE perspective…all of those traits are varying degrees of bad.

Evasive mirror conflicts with the sword trait, and you don’t really need more personal reflects in PvE, you need aoe reflects.

BD means you’re taking the chaos line and you’re shattering your phantasms just for some weak boons, it’s awful.

Restorative illusions means you’re again shattering your phantasms just for a bit of unnecessary healing and condition removal. It also conflicts with the focus trait.

If persistence of memory procced whenever a phantasm died, it might be awesome in PvE. As it is though, it’s useless since you’ll almost never shatter your phantasms.

I love, love, LOVE Ineptitude. I don’t think it’s overlooked, but I do think it’s misunderstood.

A lot of mesmers are only thinking of this as a way of stacking more confusion. However, it’s the survivability it provides that is key. Successfully dodging, evading or blocking an attack causes blind. 10-second ICD for each individual enemy. It’s just so great.

Temporal Enchanter is another stellar trait that I haven’t seen to a whole lot of love. Some. But not too much.

Fay.2357:

If persistence of memory procced whenever a phantasm died

Anet plz.

I’d throw in Harmonious Mantras. This too has become a powerful GM, especially coupled with Insp. allowing you to easily reach the 20% damage bonus just by popping your MoR 3 times. Between that and the extra charge, you really can pop out a lot of healing, AE condie removal, AE Dazes or even AE Damage.

I actually feel that DE is not nearly as much of a “must have” as it was before the patch. I’ve played a lot of builds without it lately, and still shattered plenty and rarely missing it.

I think it’s also the fact that dodging just for Clone creation really is often not a very smart idea anymore. We have all around less dodges, so you have to use them a little more sparingly. Maybe that’s why DE just doesn’t seem quite as powerful as before anymore.

Sadly, I don’t feel that Mistrust is living up to it’s cool name. An interrupt event simply should be more punishing, not matter what the ludicrously rarely reached maximum potential may be. Most of the time it’s rather lackluster as a Dueling GM, and not even remotely competitive to something like Power Block is for a Power Interrupt build.

@Fay
With chronophantasm, we’ll have to see if shattering may start to make sense. It really depends how they finally implement it since in the stream they mentioned they were skeptic about it.
Pop up 3 phantasms, shatter for big damage + resynchronize them, shatter again after their burst and bring them all back from reduced CD + signet.

Fay.2357:

Well, from a PvE perspective…all of those traits are varying degrees of bad.

Evasive mirror conflicts with the sword trait, and you don’t really need more personal reflects in PvE, you need aoe reflects.

BD means you’re taking the chaos line and you’re shattering your phantasms just for some weak boons, it’s awful.

Restorative illusions means you’re again shattering your phantasms just for a bit of unnecessary healing and condition removal. It also conflicts with the focus trait.

If persistence of memory procced whenever a phantasm died, it might be awesome in PvE. As it is though, it’s useless since you’ll almost never shatter your phantasms.

I meant which traits are good in PvE but are underestimated you jerk!

tobascodagama.2961:

Fay.2357:

If persistence of memory procced whenever a phantasm died

Anet plz.

Yes! Plz!!

I think conditions are underestimated in PvE while they are really effective.

Silverkey.2078:

@Fay
With chronophantasm, we’ll have to see if shattering may start to make sense. It really depends how they finally implement it since in the stream they mentioned they were skeptic about it.
Pop up 3 phantasms, shatter for big damage + resynchronize them, shatter again after their burst and bring them all back from reduced CD + signet.

How much would you really gain, though? Even if the trait works well you’ll have to drop a line for Chrono, meaing either damage modifiers (Dom), more damage modifiers and trololol evade (Duel) or phantasm CDR (Illu), none of which sounds like a good trade unless we get crazy Alacrity uptime.
You also lose all group support options from Inspiration.

Tbh I’d like to see Domination reworked into a “PvP-only” trait line (interrupt+power shatter mostly) and the +%dmg traits folded into somewhere else, since that’s all we really use in PvE.

Right now I feel there are no really “underestimated” traits in PvE, we’re down to 2 cookie-cutter builds (reflect or no reflect), plus maybe cycling MoP+RM when carrying guildies. A ton of wasted potential everywhere, nothing actually worth using.

Silverkey.2078:

I think conditions are underestimated in PvE while they are really effective.

Somewhat effective, also bugged. (Sc+P…) Buff staff pls!

I’d throw in Mirror of Anguish. Doing something once every 60 seconds seem rather weak, but there are lots of times it can save you from a burst by interrupting stunning someone right after their opener.

Evasive Mirror and Restorative Illusions were day 1 picks man, where have you BEEN!

Blinds on shatter, pshhh, so easy to cleanse amidst a phant summon. I laugh at mesmers running this silly trait.

;D

@Photoloss
Well I am actually very curious about alacrity in PvE. Since mesmer does not play very much with cooldowns (except time warp), we don’t gain much from alacrity. On the other hand other profs do. Hundred blades is one which comes into my mind. And maybe some weapons with average AA but high burst can also benefit from it.
If the increased DPS in other professions exceeds our loss, chronomancer can be very interesting.
As for our DPS, illusion is usually the line which we give up (for reflects for example), we then loose 9% damage and 20% CD reduction and 20% phantasm haste. If we use shatters, the haste does not matter as much and alacrity + Persistence of Memory should be more than enough to have shorter phantasm CD.
Also for record run, 25% faster speed on a portal mesmer can be nice.

So we will need to look at numbers: how much alacrity we apply (maybe warhorn ele can add 2s to it), how much of damage boost it will be for a party, how good a phantasm shatter rotation we can do…
+ chronophantasm currently competes with lost time. With the recent time warp buff, we know how good “slow” can be in PvE.

Silverkey.2078:

As for our DPS, illusion is usually the line which we give up (for reflects for example), we then loose 9% damage and 20% CD reduction and 20% phantasm haste. If we use shatters, the haste does not matter as much and alacrity + Persistence of Memory should be more than enough to have shorter phantasm CD.

PoM+IC would have the most synergy with the “phant-shatter-phant” spam style though.

And group Alacrity builds would fall off really quickly as groups get “slightly worse”. How many eles outside of world record speedruns will pay attention to your Alacrity+Quickness spike? How well can you rely on the rest of your group to not only use proper non-auto dps rotations, but also adjust them on the fly based on alacrity uptime?
Oh, and Necros would suffer even more because they don’t have cool dps weapon skills either…

What @Fay said. Phantasm builds are pretty tough for me to build now for the following reasons:

1. I want Domination for the 15% damage increase. Unfortunately this means I’m pretty much forced to take GS. GS is a very offensive weapon, and I prefer focus for defence. The domination line is very heavily focused on interrupts/dazing and shatter.

Needless to say, phantasm builds don’t (hardly ever) shatter

2. Chaos contains the very important “Illusionary Membrane” which synergizes with “Illusionary Inspiration” in Inspiration. Unfortunately, the Chaos GM traits are again focused around shatter, interruption and stealth – not conducive to phantasms.

3. Illusions has very useful traits for phantasm, but now I can’t take 4 trait lines! So I’m pretty much forced to give up my either Chaos or Illusions – both of which absolutely kill a phatasm build.

Pre-patch, I would take no GM trait. I could get almost everything I wanted. The only trade off was whether I would take the 15% inc. damage in Dom, or the 10% toughness to condi.

The next problem is that shatters have been tremendously boosted with lower CDs, and more effects. A build’s viability also depends on the opportunity cost. By taking phantasms, I’m getting a worse build that I had pre-patch but to make matters worse, the shatter builds are now far, far better than they were.

This is another reason why phantasm builds are dead.

Finally when Chrono hits and I want the trait where shattered phantasms respawn, what on earth am I going to give up? Can I give up dueling? Can I give up the defence from Chaos? Can I give up warden reflects from inspiration?

I honestly think that phantasm builds with Chrono will have zero viability. As it is, most of my move valuable traits are scattered around all the trees. Chrono will just dilute the pool further.

The entirety of the problems stem from the fact that we are now forced to invest 100% in a tree. We can’t pick and choose. If I go chaos, I have to take chaotic dissipation. If I go Inspiration, I have to use ineptitude. Previously I could save the points and take something more valuable even if it wasn’t a GM trait.

So much for build diversity. The patch effectively killed phantasm only builds and made shatter/lockdown (with stealth) the sole viable means of play.

Though I see the boonsharing mesmer is doing quite well. Not my playstyle, but it’s unique at least.

Fragility: It’s massively boosting our burst when combined with vuln on daze (Dazzling) and mirror blade. Fotm mesmers don’t even understand why they hit so hard /cry.

Master fencer: Pretty much if you take pack runes and marauder amulet you’re gonna be at 80-90% crit chance and hit like a truck with burst. It’s way too good and has such a ridiculously low requirement.

Fencers Finesse: Great trait for PvE mesmer, can often simply be overlooked as “the sword trait again” but is much improved.

Blurred Inscriptions: Not just a cool down reduction but distortion AND removing a condition for signets? There’s also a stun break, instant cast, blind nearby enemies signet? Whoa, next you’ll be telling me I can share the distortion…

Inspiring Distortion: Yeah when this is paired with some signets it’s very nice. Often looked at as a nice freebie but it combos very nicely in PvE and PvP.

With the exception of the last one (I think most mesmers know how strong distortion sharing is) I think a lot of those are underestimated. Certainly the first 2 and I’d add Dazzling to the list but I covered it in fragility.

Silverkey.2078:

I think conditions are underestimated in PvE while they are really effective.

Eh, maybe, but not by much. We can’t really apply that many stacks of anything worth applying to PvE enemies.

I think parts of the discussion deviate from the original intent, but no, conditions are perfectly viable thanks to bleeds. The theoretical DPS is near-identical to the meta assassin build, and the build-up is decent. And if you manage to get additional burning by iDuelist through fire fields, or put an ethereal field yourself, your DPS is actually higher than assassin.

For PvP, I’d say “Bountiful Disillusionment” is one of my favorite, especially for the stability.

I’m going to have to throw Duelists Discipline in there. I’ve been playing Sw/Sw for a bit and I do love the look of it, but that darn Phant is just semi-kittened. He seems to miss a lot for various reasons, and of course dies a lot too.

So I thought “what the heck, let’s try Pistol with DD again” and yeah I wish the bleed wasn’t broken, but in a CS build with 3x MoD to boot, this trait just adds up to a lot of hard CC. In team fights on a point it’s fairly easy to reduce the CD of the Pistol #5 by 50% or more. With CS traited it’s a pretty “impactful” ability, and having it up twice as often means just that much more 2.5s Stuns & Dazes.

The Phantasm is reliable, strong, and doesn’t die so much.

The Sword block/counter combo is still infuriatingly clunky and telegraphed, the projectile option is OK but also slow & unreliable.

Due to the nature of the CD reduction trait for Pistol, I think the lower CDs for Sword and the relatively bad CD reduction trait, I now favor the Pistol again. For clustered group fights using a heavy AE interrupt build, Magic Bullet & DD is just plain nasty.

I played around with Pistol + DD, and it does very well against Husks as well. Combined with GS + Imagined Burden, you have good tools for dealing with all of the different Mordrem types while keeping high DPS and mobility from MH Sword.

From a PvP Perspective:

Temporal Enchantment Maybe I’m biased, because my main build revolves around glamours, but I must say the support this give your team is very impactful. This goes very well with Medic’s Feedback, which gives you a very powerful rez and a 8s Feedback bubble. That’s a long time for AOE reflects on top of a point… It also makes NullField pretty punishing for those standing inside. And a 12s Time Warp usually means death to your enemies. The Superspeed is just icing on an already sweet cake.

Ineptitude is another trait that I use a lot, but I don’t see a lot of praise for it. In any condi build, yes this does help to keep confusion spread around, but the highlight of this trait is the blind every 10s. When you combine this with Blinding Dissipation (which is a highly rated trait for good reason), you have alot of survivability via blinds. Dare I say, this trait is more useful in dps shatter builds over MoF’s Diversion & Distortion buffs?!?! I’d really only take MoF if I were using a signet build.

Restorative Illusions This is a very strong trait even without taking any amount of healing stats. I can see now why they nerfed its AOE capabilities before being released. The on-demand condition clearing is the single biggest reason why I haven’t been negatively impacted by Ele/Guard’s OP burning capabilities. This trait combined with Blinding Dissipation makes battling in Melee range not such a terrifying thing!!

Mender’s Purity I’m not exactly sure if this is underrated or not. You don’t hear much about it, because it’s a minor trait now, but oh is this wonderful! The fact that it AOE cleanses means you are supporting your team. Taking this along with Restorative Illusions solves a huge issue of Mesmer’s being so kitten weak against conditions.

TL:DR -
The Chaos, Domination and Dueling lines are obviously great in pvp right now, but I think the hidden gem is truly in the Inspiration line. Unicorns rule!

Furious Interruption

Unfortunately competes with Shattered Concentration for PvP/WvW, but with the lowered ICD it’s not too bad now in PvE (have to go into domination to get the +phantasm damage). It’s not exactly difficult to interrupt mobs with say, sword/sword, so it’s a relatively reliable source of quickness to top up your sources from Feel my Wrath and Time Warp.

Power Block

With all the anger focusing on CS, the potency of power block seems to have gone under the radar a bit. The merged damage of halting strike is cool, but that increased 15 second penalty is so meaty and then the weakness. Oh the weakness! I usually end up choosing this for PvE over the other two Domination grandmasters as, well, it’s extra damage from a piercing counter blade on a stack of mobs. Being able to top up weakness sources on a mob stack is also useful I suppose.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

(Mine is a PvP perspective, however this thread is intended for all Mesmer opinions across all formats)

• Evasive Mirror – With Blinding Dissipation stealing the Dueling show, it’s easy to forget that we have another strong and interesting option in the Master tier. Evasive Mirror synergizes wonderfully with Master of Manipulation and/or Warden’s feedback to make you a ranger/engineer’s worst nightmare. (Shoutouts to Kentigem -Daniel Handler- for putting me on to this awesome trait)

• Persistence of Memory – 2 seconds doesn’t mean much right? Well when you take Mental Defense and/or trait your weapons, you start to see that it isn’t too difficult to get 4-6s cooldowns on phantasms every 10 seconds or so.

• Bountiful Disillusionment – The Chaos line really hit the jackpot when it comes to grandmaster traits. All three are wonderful, but Disillusionment tends to get overlooked in favor of PU or CI. BD is a powerful trait for many reasons, especially combined with the other BD: Blinding dissipation. On-demand stability should not be overlooked.

• Restorative Illusions – Here is one of the staples of sustain in the Inspiration line. Restorative Illusions heals you per-clone-shattered and even 0-clone shatters can offer a decent chunk of life. But on-demand instant condition removal ONTOP of the heal? This is hands down one of the best traits for adding survivability to your Mesmer ontop of the passive benefits you gain just from traiting into Inspiration?

---

What say you? What other less popular traits do you think deserve some more spotlight?

blushes senpai noticed me.

bhagwad.4281:

What @Fay said. Phantasm builds are pretty tough for me to build now for the following reasons:

A similar argument could be made for shatter builds:

You want Domination, for Rending Shatter, Shattered Concentration, and Mental Anguish.
You want Duelling, for Blinding Dissipation and Deceptive Evasion
You might want Chaos, for Bountiful Disillusionment
You might want Inspiration, for Restorative Illusions and Mental Defence
You definitely want Illusions, for a lot of reasons.

Can’t have’em all, so which do you choose? Particularly since, even for a shatter build, you may well make some decisions based on reasons other than what gives you the best bonuses when shattering (keeping yourself alive, for instance).

I think this is where the current system arguably helps build diversity. Instead of having one build that cherry-picks all the phantasm traits, you have to make decisions about which ones are more important to you. It’s actually possibly easier to make the decisions with phantasm builds, because IMO you don’t really need Chaos (the combo of Illusionary Membrane and Illusionary Inspiration is actually, IMO, antisynergetic due to Membrane having a 3s duration versus a 15s cooldown: I’d rather have the protection when I actually need it, such as when Metaphysical Rejuvenation triggers, than being triggered by a phantasm when I’m not under attack at all). So where before you might have one optimum phantasm build, now you need to make decisions of which traits you really want.

It’s possible that the end result is genuinely that phantasms have been made weaker than they should be, and the phantasm traits should be improved to account for the fact that you can’t have all of them now. But that’s a separate issue: having to make choices between the traits seems to be the system working as intended. The mesmer isn’t the only profession that’s having to make difficult choices: a shroud-focused necromancer really does have good traits for shroud-oriented builds spread throughout their specialisations, and it’s going to get even more complicated for necromancers that want to go Reaper.

Actually phantasms have been made stronger. In particular, there used to be 2 traits giving 15% more damage to phantasm, one of them was not usually reached in power builds and has now been made baseline. Phantasms are stronger than ever!

draxynnic.3719:

bhagwad.4281:

What @Fay said. Phantasm builds are pretty tough for me to build now for the following reasons:

A similar argument could be made for shatter builds:

You want Domination, for Rending Shatter, Shattered Concentration, and Mental Anguish.
You want Duelling, for Blinding Dissipation and Deceptive Evasion
You might want Chaos, for Bountiful Disillusionment
You might want Inspiration, for Restorative Illusions and Mental Defence
You definitely want Illusions, for a lot of reasons.

Can’t have’em all, so which do you choose? Particularly since, even for a shatter build, you may well make some decisions based on reasons other than what gives you the best bonuses when shattering (keeping yourself alive, for instance).

I think this is where the current system arguably helps build diversity. Instead of having one build that cherry-picks all the phantasm traits, you have to make decisions about which ones are more important to you. It’s actually possibly easier to make the decisions with phantasm builds, because IMO you don’t really need Chaos (the combo of Illusionary Membrane and Illusionary Inspiration is actually, IMO, antisynergetic due to Membrane having a 3s duration versus a 15s cooldown: I’d rather have the protection when I actually need it, such as when Metaphysical Rejuvenation triggers, than being triggered by a phantasm when I’m not under attack at all). So where before you might have one optimum phantasm build, now you need to make decisions of which traits you really want.

It’s possible that the end result is genuinely that phantasms have been made weaker than they should be, and the phantasm traits should be improved to account for the fact that you can’t have all of them now. But that’s a separate issue: having to make choices between the traits seems to be the system working as intended. The mesmer isn’t the only profession that’s having to make difficult choices: a shroud-focused necromancer really does have good traits for shroud-oriented builds spread throughout their specialisations, and it’s going to get even more complicated for necromancers that want to go Reaper.

Honestly I’ve never played shatter in 3 years of mesmering, so what you’re saying about having to give up some traits for others might well be true. I’m not contesting that.

However, I feel that the patch treated phantasms and shatters unequally. Shatters got a lot of tasty additional functionality with the patch like blind, stability, shatter recharge reduction, IP etc. I don’t think anyone on this forum can deny that a shatter mesmer today is very much more powerful than it was. There are just so many new benefits that having to choose between them is rational.

With phantasms, apart from the base 15% increase, Santa Claus hasn’t been good to us. We still have to deal with pretty much the same few traits – and they’re spread out between trait lines that we can’t access unlike pre-patch.

Now here’s the thing – this patch has increased damage across the board significantly. So we have a worse build in an environment where everyone else is hitting a lot harder.

It’s not that I mind having to choose between phantasm traits. It’s that there aren’t that many to begin with compared to shatter, and we haven’t gotten any new ones unlike shatter.