Guild Wars 2

I made reference to this build a few days ago but only received a very tepid reaction but since it is working so well I’ve decided to polish it some more and present it a bit better.

I find this to be a very good fresh-level-80-what-do-I-do-now? build. We are in green gear, our output is nothing fancy, our gold is low, we need dungeons but don’t want to be a burden.

Well then, let us see how to prepare to output the most we can while being an asset to the team

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The bulk of the build:

• 20 in Domination: Clones cripple on death, -20% CD on Greatsword.
• 10 in Dueling: Phantasms have Fury.
• 0 in Chaos.
• 20 in Inspiration: Healing removes a condition, Mantra heals when recharging.
• 20 in Illusion: +3% damage per clone alive, Extra bounce.

Possible changes:

• Picking the 15% more damage to illusions in Domination but keep in mind the iBerserker is missing and anything trait related to phantasms is going to be a wash until (if) it is fixed. Despite that reasoning removing the 10 points in Dueling is a bad idea. We want 5 points there for Critical Infusion (Vigor on Crit) and with only 5 points to spare that seemed the most bang for our buck.
• No clone on dodge? To be honest I can hear that already, and I was of the same mind. Clone on dodge rocks, we get a very acrobatic play-style, very fun. But we are not shattering since our clones are acting as decoys for the enemies, and this is more for dungeons and less for open world roaming, thus churning out clones is not a necessity.
• Having said that, taking 10 points from Illusion and putting them in Dueling works for that purpose if you intend to Shatter. Switch clones cripple on death to +20% Mind Wrack damage in Domination.

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Skills:

• Subject to change according to the fight. Decoy tends to be a good panic button and thus I keep it. Null Field can be good to save team members, though our traits remove a condition every five seconds only works for our class heal. Feedback is always useful. What must always be present is the Mantra of Pain.

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Gear:

• Full Berserker (hence the ‘zerker’ part of the name), but feel free to switch to Knight, Rampager, Rabid. Some of these choices make the Greatsword less useful though. In my testing Knight gear lowered the damage of the Staff Phantasm by 1k (from 3.3k to 2.3k consistently) but staying alive matters, so if you, dear reader, are a fresh level 80? Then I suggest grabbing Knight gear while you get acquainted to the dungeon mechanics. Once satisfied with your survival switch to Berserker.

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Runes:

• Altruism seem the better choice. Currently somewhat cheap at 80s. Every 10 seconds you can give 3 Might for 10 seconds and 5 seconds of Fury, party wide, each time you heal.
• Ruby Orbs if a fresh 80 with not much gold and in greens.

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Sigil:

• Sigil of Fire is how to roll with Berserker gear, but Sigil of Air is much cheaper to begin with.

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Consumables:

• Personal preference for food is the Blackberry Pie with a 40% chance to steal HP on crit and 50 precision. Cheap, hurts the mob, heals us at the same time. I give it a gold star.
• Sharpening Stones as ‘potions’. You can have both at the same time.

How do we play it?

• Pop out the iBerserker, throw Mirror Blade (traited it is up ever 4.8 seconds, with the extra bounce it is an extra 3 Might for the closest team mate and around 1k crits to the enemy. This is your bread and butter attack), immediately spam Mantra of Pain for crits of 1.5k.
• After the Mantra’s two charges are exhausted (they do not hinder your auto-attack so you’re still hitting the mob with it) you charge the Mantra, heal everyone for 2.6k HP (and thus we get to the ‘heal’ in the name), give everyone 3 stacks of Might and 5 seconds of Fury due to the Rune of Altruism. Due to how the CDs coincide as soon as you’ve done this Mirror Blade has recharged letting you use it and once more spam your Mantra.
• Since you are always churning clones your +3% damage trait will be always active for the +9% bonus.
• Since you create clones in melee when ever the enemy kills them they become Crippled, waddling after your team members and providing breathing room for escapes.

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Summary:

• Throw out the most damage you can without relying on easily killed Phantasms (though by all means, do not neglect to use your phantasms on CD) while blanketing your party with 2.6k heals every five seconds and giving Might and Fury every ten.
• Vague tooltips and ‘your answer is correct but not the way I like it’ coding makes it that, despite healing ourselves and our party each time that we recharge a mantra, it is not considered a heal, thus not activating the Runes of Altruism or the trait to remove conditions on heal.

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Notes:

• The GS still gives the best bang for our buck if we are going Berserker gear even with a messed up Phantasm. The Staff Phantasm hits very hard, but our auto-attack is anemic (around 500 crits compared to a Greatsword’s’ 1.2k plus the greatsword’s Mirror Blade every 4.8 seconds) and Chaos Storm has too much of a large CD to tilt the balance.
• Having said that the Staff Phantasms hits as much as 8k in a party so it is a very viable option for those who like the Staff, just be prepared for a slow ramp up.
• Good things are told about the Sword. I urge those who can handle melee to give it a try.
• All the numbers provided are in green gear. In exotics they will only grow.

• If you don’t recommend the staff, better put 10 points from illusions into dueling. Not necessarily for clone on dodge, but you could also choose -20% mantra cooldown. You also get more crit (and crit dmg) for higher vigor uptime. And sharper images.
• If you compare staff’s direct damage to GS’ direct damage you are dead wrong. Their damage is somewhat comparable, but the staff deals half of its damage by conditions. Mathematically speaking the staff’s #1 deals more damage than the GS’ #1 (without bouncing, piercing or condition-immune targets). The choice of weapon is personal preferance.
• If you lack the critChance, phantasmal fury is a good choice. But with full zerker gear another trait there might be better. Since you don’t use blink (for Dueling I), maybe try higher toughness while charging mantras.

There is only one Mantra in the build and it has no CD, so minus CD will not do much.

As for the Staff we cannot take it in a vacuum. I agree that both weapons are pretty close due to the fact the phantasm hitting like a truck compared to the bugged iBerserker, but that extra damage is compensated by the Mirror Blades. Once we reach a party where bleeds are capped the Staff’s extra damage goes further down.

I would still stay to carry both weapons and change according to need.

You mentioned Healing mantra (for condition removal) and mantra of pain (for healing purposes). Sure, MoP doesn’t need -CD, but the healing it pretty nice. Especially if you base of your condition removal on it.

You talk about every weapon (GS, Staff, Sword), yet you trait two different ones (getting +10 into illusions just for mirror blade is not worth). Your build lacks the weapon. If you run around with GS + Staff, say so. Then I’d mention the lack of swiftness of the focus.

Personally, I don’t think you should trait two different weapons.

No, no mention made of Healing Mantra, the only mantra used is of Pain. I just mistook the fact I got healed by recharging mantras but it not being considered a heal.

The extra bounce is for the GS. One extra 1k-1.5k (I remember hitting 2k on my other mesmer with full exotics berserker) and 3 Might every 5 seconds is worth it for me and if I want to use the Staff then I’m ready for it (last boss of path one in HotW for example).

As for the focus I keep it in my inventory. For dungeons I don’t really need swiftness, but when I do I press H, double click (I keep it as my very first item), use swiftness, double click my weapon back. I got plenty of practice in sPvP with this.

P.S. The mantra of healing would fit really well with the Altruism runes and the Condition removal, I’m really interested in the party wide buffing aspect of it, but wasting my heal just for it is a turn off. GW2 is not a game where we can waste heals.

I’ve had the idea of mantra healing since the patch that reduced mantra cast time.
Posted a build on gw2guru, but not got any answers either. It has some similarities to yours but also some differences.

This is the build

Weapons:
Sword/Focus & Greatsword, but other options are availabe, just make sure to always have the Sword and melee as much as you can. The Offhand is less important.
possible Offhands:
Focus: a Phantasm that does some AoE damage and is nice for groups of enemies and also protects from projectiles (even untraited). Temporal curtain is nice for running trash.
Sword: use this for single-target fights, the Phantasm does nice damage and acts as a leap finisher, plus you get a block
Pistol: A ranged Phantasm that will probably survive longer than our other options.

Since we can’t always stay in melee we need a ranged Weapon as “backup”. We have a few options, but they all do low damage.
GS: low damage on autoattck (the numbers may be nice, but hey are added up for the whole 1,5sec cast time) you get a bit AoE, the Phantasm does AoE as well, but might sometimes die before even reaching the enemy.
Scepter: “omg, scepter sucks, gtfo” – No it doesn’t suck, it’s auto attck does more damage then GS, even at max range. It doesn’t have mirror blade or any AoE, but in return you can choose whatever Offhand you want. If you need a ranged Phantasm, Scepter/Pistol works quite well.

The traits: 10/30/0/20/10 – why?
Domination: 10 points are enough, sacrificing GS cooldown is no big deal, since we want to stay in melee anyway
Dueling: Phantasm build doesn’t mean you never shatter at all, just not as much as with a full shatter build, so Deceptive Evasion makes sense imho. Empowering Mantras for a damage boost, since we’re going to use mantras.
Inspiration: Mender’s Purity works nice with the healing mantra, since it removes a condition everytime we use a charge, so it basically removes 2 conditions on every heal. Restorative mantras: the whole idea behind this build revolves around using this trait.
Illusions: lower cooldown for illusions is useful in about every build and +3% damage per illusion is pretty nice since we don’t want to shatter too much.

Gear: Full zerker with ruby orb has always served me well, though Rune of the Scholar also works. Sigil of Force is nice for the straight damage increase, Sigil of Energy, because I hate running out of dodges.

Utility: Utilities depend on the encounter and personal preference. I love Blink, it’s my panic button, so that rarely leaves the bar. Feedback when you need reflection, Null Field, whatever… you know, what utilities a mesmer has. The difference in this build is, that mantra of pain now serves as AoE heal. It has low cooldown but long cast time, so get a strong heal, but you do loose quite some dps.
What’s special about this build is, that when you don’t need a certain utility you can pot a random mantra on your bar for a damage boost. This pretty much means every “free” slot increades your dps. at max you can get +16% from mantras, +9% from illusions and +5% from your sigil. Since afaik modifiers multiply this is would be a 33% damage increase (1.16 * 1,09 * 1,05 = 1,3276). Of course at the cost of ALL of your utility skills

How to play: Don’t forget to charge both your Mantras before the fight starts, pop one charge from Mantra of pain as soo as your enemy is in range, let the second charge sit on your bar, together with the healing skill, so you get +8% damage as long, as you don’t need to heal. If you need some healing pop the second mantra of pain, re-cast it and pop it once. While chanelling you can use your healing mantra if you need and after 10sec you can re-cast it, which heals you again (and your party). Conditions shouldn’t be a problem, since you can remove about 2 conditions every 15sec without using anything but your healing skill.
Thanks to the versatile trait layout you can use Warden’s Feedback insetad of restorative mantras if you need more reflection and have access to the pistol cooldown trait and the reflection on distortion trait. If you need 3 utilities and want to run without mantras you can take Phantasmal fury instead of Empowering Mantras.

Other than that you play this build like every other build. If you run the overused Sword/Focus & GS you can start with Mirror Blade, Berserker, dodge, schatter, switch to melee just like usual, but don’t forget to use one charge of your mantra of pain.

Scepter/pistol was my original choice since I really wanted to use the kitten iDuelist, but the scepter does not have a lot to go for it. The confusion beam is a long channel with little dividends which the Confusion is supposed to pick the slack of, but if the enemy is being kited it never uses skills and thus it is wasted. For a hefty 15 seconds I can’t recommend it.

The auto-attack of the two seem pretty similar while the GS stays at medium range, but going to pieces at close to melee range. It leaves the rest of the weapon skills to decide. The confusion beam relies on Confusion. If the mobs hit twice during the five second span it is a decent 15 second CD, if it does not, no. Mirror Blades is the deal breaker for the GS with a hard hitting attack that grants Might and impinges Vulnerablity. iBerserker and iDuelist have their moments. The iBerserker shines for AoE and does good single damage while spawning in melee makes it liable to get killed fast. The iDuelist hits decently. The fact it spawns at range makes it sometimes possible to have three of them up and running.

The sword is a great choice. Between hard hitting phantasms, boon cleaning clones and AoE auto-attack it is hard to find fault in it, bugged leap or not. But, it’s melee. Melee is a play-style of choice and not mine.

My summary might be: Phantasms are good, but fragile. Building around them has some pretty nice numbers furthermore in those occasions we can have three of them up. But once outside maths that is rare. There is a lot of AoE going on. If they hit once that is perfect already and any more a bonus we should be thankful for but not plan for.

I prefer to keep them as useful attacks while being the real bulk of the damage since I can dodge out of the way.

Of course that going 10 points in Illusions is a waste stats wise. We don’t shatter, so no need to add Shatter recharge. We have zero conditions, so no need for extra conditions, but that extra 3 Might, 3 Vulnerability and 1-1.5k crits every 5 seconds is hard to move away from. It could go to Duelist and grab Sharper Images on the way. If we happen to be so lucky as to not have other Condition heavy specs with us we can have 6-7 bleeds easy. If we do, they become useless (hello dragon events, hello enginer/necro in the party). If we’re hitting objects they become useless, etc.

Or put them in Domination. Another 100 Power and since I lie and we do Shatter (if three illusions are up might as well Shatter them instead of waiting for random AoE to do so for us) we can grab the +20% to Mind Wrack.

To me it all boils down to that middle road: What am I going to do more? Keep my phantasms alive? Shatter? Throw Mirror Blade on CD? And I find that of those throwing Mirror Blade on Cd is what I can be counted to do each time, while Shattering will happen once in a while, or my phantasms will not be alive all that much.

Still a work in progress though, I’m curious about what is the best option.

I don’t say you have to use my build, I just wanted to show you a more melee focused build based on the same basic idea as well as the idea to utilize unused mantras as a damage boost with empowering mantras.

If you’re still learning to survive in melee and use GS a lot, there’s nothing wrong with picking traits that increase GS damage. I was running with 20 points in domination and GS training for a long time until i decided to drop it.

If you’re using scepter, you’re not going to use [ 3 ]. Confusion is useless and the skill does less damage than the auto attack. The auto attack, btw. crits for over 1k on the first two hits and 1,5k on the third, which also creates a clone. Yea, you miss the might and vulnerability, though your party may keep 25 stacks of vulnerability up all the time anyway. Not saying Scepter is the only choice, but don’t listen to everyone telling you it sucks, try it out yourself.

I’ve been running a similar build recently that is akin to Pyro’s PvE Supporting Phantasm Build (which you may want to check out) and thus doesn’t really deserve a write up of its own.

Mine is a 10/20/0/30/10 phantasm build. I generally run sword/x and either GS/Staff depending on the encounter, and I find that the reduced cooldown traits for both the GS and Staff are kind of unnecessary.

The 30 in Inspiration is pretty key b/c so many traits are support orriented (focus reflect, restorative mantra, persisting images, medic’s feedback (awesome for dungeons), etc. — pretty much all the adept and master traits are useful (less so the grandmaster ones)). And the 25 point minor (Phantasmal Strength) is too powerful not to include. Also, with the 20 in Dueling you can run Phantasmal Fury and Blade training, plus you get the bleed on crit, which is powerful in any phantasm build (and you can use pistol cooldown as well, and you have access to deceptive evasion if for some reason you need it, although I rarely ever use it).

Playstyle is similar. Span Mantra of Pain for the heals and try to keep up as many phantasms as possible. I usually run focus and do some warden into leap into blurred frenzys when off cooldown, but let phantasms do most of the work for me.

In my opinion, the 20 in Illusions is unnecessary. Illussionary Elasticity is nice, but doesn’t add that much more to the build. Phantasmal haste too is not really worth it as you can usually resummon phantasms anyway, too.

Also, I only put the final 5 points into Illusions b/c I don’t know where else to put it, and Compounding power doesn’t hurt in a phantasm build either.

Anyway, tldr, try a 10/20/0/30/10 instead. Same effect, but just more powerful and flexible.