Guild Wars 2

Hello and good day or evening.

Today I want to share with you with you my personal way of playing my mesmer, after having shown i on reddit before and the influx of comments and suggestions stopped, I want to show it off here as well and hope for some more ways to impoove it.

People have two oppinions of the mesmer… They are either “zomfg OP!” in every PvP enviroment, or Time Warp bots in dungeons. Well, for the later category, you might be the people who have the most of a blast with this build I want to present today.

I don’t know if it is new, I don’t know if it is inovative in any form whatsoever, but I want to share my little piece of joy with you.

I call it, BOON-BOOZE... yeah yeah, I know, name pending.
[Edit] Ugh, why does it give me a bad link, it’s working just fine otherwise…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fgEQNArdWlw1CoXVThGa9IhpHBH5+G1jrndrTqgrB;T0AgyyuEcJ5S1liLKvMdJ6y51SkhIzFA

So, what is this about?

Firstly, details of gearing.

You will need: Carrion equipment. Conditions will be something of a sideeffect of what you will do.

2 Superior Runes of Water – +25 Healing, +15% Boon Duration
2 Superior Runes of the Monk – +25 healing, + 15% Boon Duration
2 “MAJOR” Runes of the Sanctuary or Water – +15 Vitality or Healing + 10% Boon Duration
2 Superior Sigils of Battle – Gain 3 Might when switching to this weapon in combat.
1 Superior Sigil of Corruption – Gain condition damage upon slaying an enemy.
A scepter.
A staff.
A focus.

Everything together? Brilliant, then let us have a closer look at the traits.

10 Domination

VI: Signet Mastery – Signets recharge 20% faster.
You will need your one signet a lot. This one will be your best friend.

Chaos 30

V: Debilitating Dissipation – Clones apply a random condition when they are killed.
Your clones will die, fast and hard and not always reach their target, they might just as well make some use for them.

X: Chaotic Dampening – +50 toughness while holding a staff, 20% reduced staff cooldown.
Your staff skills will be your bread and butter. Hands down.

XI: Bountiful Interruption – Gain a random boon when interrupting an enemy.
For that sweet little twist later.

Illusions 30

V: Master of Misdirection – Confusion you inflict lasts 33% longer.
Conditions, hooo!

VII: Illusionary Elasticity – Bouncing attacks gain an additional bounce.
For your bounding staff goodyness.

VIII: Dazzling Glamours – Glamour-Skills blind enemies in their radius.
Because Feedback, Null-Field and all the others are cool.

Now, where does all this take us?

With your runes, your traits and an active Signet of Midnight, you stand at 80% Boon Duration. Now pop a Omnomberry Chocolate Cream and you have +100% Boon duration.

Execution

Now, after combat against a group of enemies has been initated, a good pattern of actions could look like this:

1. Run up to the enemy, drop Chaos Storm so it does affect you, the enemies and every character in melee range.

2. Let the random boons stack on you while you summon your Phantasmal Warlock.

3. Use Phase Retreat to summon up another clone.

4. Shatter the clones to trigger Shattered Strength.

5. Swap to your scepter holding a sigil of battle, and the focus while the clones shatter.

6. Drop down Temporal Curtain.

7. Trigger it again to pull enemies towards the rupture.

8. Gain random boons by, hopefully, interrupting as many of them as possible.

9. Steal some boons via Arcane Thievery if available.

10. Hit your Signet of Inspiration.

11. Squeel in joy when seeing your array of boons pop up in the entire group, putting your stacks of Might on top of theirs.

You might not be a tremendous DPS-Beast, but with this, you should be able to easily uphold ~10 Might in the group and let the rest of your companions show the enemies who is boss around the dungeon.

Sadly, your boon duration won’t affect the boons you share with the group you got from other party members, but you still cause a wide varriety of boons to be present, with a nice guardian nearby, you can keep up nearly every boon available on he team indefinately.

Me, as a person who has a genuine blast from playing suppot-heavy characters in my games and MMO’s specifically, I can say, that this build is likely the best thing that could have ever happened to me… Well, as long as my group doesn’t consist of 5-Signet style egoists who think boons are something exclusively for themselfes..

If someone of you wants to give this a swirl, too, please drop me a line with experiences, suggestions or other comments.

Have a nice day, and happy buffing! .. Or.. booning?

I like the idea behind this, but I would actually make a variation of this build for more support than what you have. I also don’t really like the choices of your Illusion-Tree Traits, but there really aren’t that many useful choices there.

The only problem I have with this build is when I want to do dps, I would not be able to swap back.

And suddenly I see you use a Scepter. I will run this build (with my variations, of course).

to fix the URL: write it in the post,instead of the link,so we can copy/paste it.

p.s. cool build: actually,pairing this build with 2-3 guardians and 1 aura elementalist is OP

Shortened link for you:
http://tinyurl.com/boon-booze

I would suggest traiting for Illusionary Persona instead of Dazzling Glamours so you get an extra stack of Might every time you shatter.

Quee.2389:

I would suggest traiting for Illusionary Persona instead of Dazzling Glamours so you get an extra stack of Might every time you shatter.

First off, Illusionary Persona doesn’t work with Shattered Strength since the nerf patch, iirc.

Actually, it might be better to go for Imbued Diversion, as it chains with Bountiful Interruption. If you don’t like Imbued Diversion, you can just drop Shattered Strength altogether and go 10 in Inspiration, grabbing Vigorous Revelations which provides 100% uptime to melee party members. You can then use that to play melee instead of range as the Scepter provides next to nothing for this build. It has 1 line daze which is relatively useless, so other than a clonefactory (which is ridiculously slow, I’ll just stick with Staff) it’s just a mainhand for the Focus. Sword actually gives you some offense and mitigation, along with a fast clone-creation that can be used with Focus to get more retaliation.

I also suggest swapping out Master of Misdirection with Confusing Cry (Cry of Frustration grants retaliation).

Overall, I enjoy the build, but I’m going to go 10/0/30/10/20 instead of your 10/0/30/0/30. I also will be running Sword/Focus + Staff instead of Scepter, since the Scepter doesn’t add much to the build for the way I play it, in fact it tends to gimp me since I sit in Scepter building for a shatter instead of going back to Staff to get more boons.

Quee.2389:

I would suggest traiting for Illusionary Persona instead of Dazzling Glamours so you get an extra stack of Might every time you shatter.

And also since only running 1 glamour VIII: Dazzling Glamours is kinda wasted. Whole trait slot to blind 5 people imo not worth trade off.

Esplen.3940:

Overall, I enjoy the build, but I’m going to go 10/0/30/10/20 instead of your 10/0/30/0/30. I also will be running Sword/Focus + Staff instead of Scepter, since the Scepter doesn’t add much to the build for the way I play it, in fact it tends to gimp me since I sit in Scepter building for a shatter instead of going back to Staff to get more boons.

I would also use a sword. You can Illusionary Leap from Temporal Curtain to get Retaliation. You could also use Precision/Toughness/Condition gear instead of Carrior gear and put Sigil of Strength on the sword for more Might.

Quee.2389:

Esplen.3940:

Overall, I enjoy the build, but I’m going to go 10/0/30/10/20 instead of your 10/0/30/0/30. I also will be running Sword/Focus + Staff instead of Scepter, since the Scepter doesn’t add much to the build for the way I play it, in fact it tends to gimp me since I sit in Scepter building for a shatter instead of going back to Staff to get more boons.

I would also use a sword. You can Illusionary Leap from Temporal Curtain to get Retaliation. You could also use Precision/Toughness/Condition gear instead of Carrior gear and put Sigil of Strength on the sword for more Might.

I don’t even use Condition gear. This is a support build, so I built support. I just ran dungeons today and we went ridiculously fast even with low levels and inexperienced players simply because I was constantly giving people 40-80% uptime on pretty much every boon that a Mesmer can get.

I don’t know what people’s thoughts are about Giver’s armor and giver’s accessories, but it should be possible using things like Giver’s Orichalcum rings, earrings, and amulet to give another 10% boon duration on top of what has been discussed. Also another 6% is possible with the Giver’s exotic armor. Its total defensive set, but this is a support build and I like to see how absolute defense pans out in a fight. Also, I personally wish the pistol had a main-hand variant…I don’t think its quite fair to force mesmer’s to choose between a melee weapon and a slow-firing clone scepter when I may not want to run that way….would be nice to go pistol/focus or even pistol/pistol like the promo video’s promised us :P

Freedan.1769:

I don’t know what people’s thoughts are about Giver’s armor and giver’s accessories, but it should be possible using things like Giver’s Orichalcum rings, earrings, and amulet to give another 10% boon duration on top of what has been discussed. Also another 6% is possible with the Giver’s exotic armor. Its total defensive set, but this is a support build and I like to see how absolute defense pans out in a fight. Also, I personally wish the pistol had a main-hand variant…I don’t think its quite fair to force mesmer’s to choose between a melee weapon and a slow-firing clone scepter when I may not want to run that way….would be nice to go pistol/focus or even pistol/pistol like the promo video’s promised us :P

Giver’s gear is bugged. It doesn’t add the Boon Duration and so it only gives you 2 stats instead of the normal 3.

Your right, the Giver’s is bugged. However, I am sure there will come a point soon where they fix it, and I personally think they will buff the boon duration to 2% as I think an exotic armor buff should offer more than a tiny 1% for the large stat buffs your giving up otherwise for it. Then it should be worth it. I like to think with the end result in mind, not some bugs that are temporary we can still plan for that extra 16% anyways. Btw, if you compare the Masterworks version of the jewel you create for upgrading your accessories against the Exotic variant, its only a difference of about +6 in healing power. Anyone think its worth an additional ecto and orichalcum ingots for such a small increase!?

Freedan.1769:

Your right, the Giver’s is bugged. However, I am sure there will come a point soon where they fix it, and I personally think they will buff the boon duration to 2% as I think an exotic armor buff should offer more than a tiny 1% for the large stat buffs your giving up otherwise for it. Then it should be worth it. I like to think with the end result in mind, not some bugs that are temporary we can still plan for that extra 16% anyways. Btw, if you compare the Masterworks version of the jewel you create for upgrading your accessories against the Exotic variant, its only a difference of about +6 in healing power. Anyone think its worth an additional ecto and orichalcum ingots for such a small increase!?

You also get armor.

Regardless, I have a set of exotic givers with all the appropriate boon duration runes sitting in my inventory.

I would also like to know why the 2nd buff for the Superior Rune of Sanctuary is incorrect, showing a 20% extended frozen duration instead of the 15% boon duration buff that would match the minor and major runes out of the set? It would be nice to just go 15/15/15 and be good that way, instead of settling for the two major runes at 10% accepting lesser buffs because of an incorrect setting in the superior rune. Anyone else think this is intended, or just a glitch as I do?

It looks like both Giver’s armor and Snowflake equipment is now usable to increase boon duration. So what does that push our maximum up to now without using cooking consumables? I see at least 90% boon duration increase, so say signet of domination +10, 30 from chaos, 40 from runes, and another 6 for giver’s armor, plus a good 8-10 more from the snowflake jewelry, so about 94-96% possible? Add a consumable for 20% more with omnomberry, and you get a possible 116% boon duration. For skills, I have been toying with different idea’s, like using signet of inspiration, illusion, and domination together with the trait IX instead of bountiful interruption for a powerful condition removal, while using II from illusions to give retaliation every time you hit F2. That could give close to a minute of retaliation, combo that with chaos storm and then signet of inspiration and give your whole party a minutes worth of retaliation. Also with the might on shatter for 3 stacks, combo this with Sigil of Battle and you could give yourself incredibly long-duration might stacks, maybe up to the max of 25 and then hand this off to the team for major damage buffing. Just some thoughts there, trying to take advantage of how the boons can help you deal damage in battle. Its likely a slower killing build that way, but I think the buffs in a drawn out fight would add up quickly for the whole team. Another possibility is near-perma stability: use the trait to give an extra mantra and then activate mantra of concentration with power break 3 times consecutively to give something like 16-18 seconds of stability and pass it to the team.