Guild Wars 2

I’m really trying to enjoy Mesmer, but so far it hasn’t been easy, and I’m looking for some tips on how to survive better in normal PvE.

I’m at 20, using two swords and wearing the level 20 “embroidered” green set of armor. My skills are…
Ether Feast for healing.
Decoy
Portal
Phantasmal Defender

I can take one mob generally alright, unless they get me with a condition and then normally one will take me to half HP. (Thinking of burning here.)

If there is more than one mob, I’m pretty much screwed, since my only real hope is to kill everything before I use all of my skills. The part of the fight that involves me just standing around with my Blurred Frenzy and counter on cool down I just get torn into and the mobs can kill me in a few seconds. Honestly, Decoy doesn’t seem to help much because it’s not enough time to get away and the illusion doesn’t last long enough to really keep the mobs attention.

I know I should be switching to another weapon, but what? I don’t see much of anything else that’s defensive. Is Mesmer PvE really a glass cannon race to kill the other guy first or am I doing something seriously wrong?

I really hope I’m doing something very wrong.

Mesmer doesn’t get particularly great until about level 40 when you can pick up Deceptive Evasion.

It’s not the be-all-end-all trait, but it is a huge boon to inexperienced Mesmers and should help you a lot.

Kite all the time,
If you find yourself standing still in fights you better be in PvP/WvW trying to blend into your clones, or you’re doing something wrong.

I usually use GS/Sword+X in PvE.
Start learning to use Blurred Frenzy defensively instead of just for DPS,
The F4 Shatter will save your life a lot as soon as you learn to time it and learn what you really need to save yourself from.

Mesmers can survive really well in PvE with just glass cannon gear, it’s certainly not a race, but you have to get good at learning which of your skills will mitigate damage and using that to your advantage.

But lower level mesmers are quite notorious for being difficult to get a handle on.

I’d recommend using GS and sword+pistol. The iZerker applies cripple making the mob slower (and if it’s a group it’s pretty much an aoe phantasm), the knockback on 5 gives you a breather too. Magic bullet stuns the target, dazes the next and blinds the next enemy it bounces off which can give you a breather, and the iDuelist gives you great ranged dps and normally gets left alone so it can burst a mob down for you while you kite it.

I haven’t done so much PvE mesmering (lvl 31 at the moment), but I just imported my pvp skill set of blink/arcane thievery/decoy, the first and third giving me a breather and the second is more interchangeable, so if against say bandits with rifles then I can swap in feedback.

Not really sure how good phantasmal defender is, and i’m not sure what portal’s use is but so far i’ve gotten along fine – it just involves a lot of kiting.

-Sword/Sword is actually a bit difficult early on. Sword/Pistol or Sword/Focus may serve you better. Staff is our best defensive weapon, and a very good one at that.

- If you do decide to go with staff, remember that Staff 3 (iWarlock) is the only truly damaging attack. Staff 2, 4, and 5 are better used defensively. ESPECIALLY Chaos Storm (Staff 5). Chaos Storm is also a combo field, which means you can use Staff 2 while inside the ring to gain Chaos Armor. (Or get fancy and switch to Sword in the middle of the storm and use either Sword 3 or Sword 5)

-At lower levels, mobility and creativity are key. Blink, Phase Retreat (Staff 2), Illusionary Leap (Sword 3) will be your best friends.

-Learn your shatters early (most people avoid shattering till later on, which is BAD.) Your F3 (Daze) and F4(Distortion) shatters are defensive lifesavers, ESPECIALLY F4.

- Illusionary Defender is really good at mitigating damage, especially with Signet of Illusions.

- Take them down one at a time, cripple the rest. Start a fight with a Phantasm summon, and try to Mind Wrack (F1) when the target is at around 1/4th HP since the clones will die anyways.

Mesmer are notoriously difficult at lower levels, and require so much mobility. But you can definitely handle multiple mobs at once with a bit of clever thinking and awareness.
Sword/Sword is a powerful set, try and summon your phantasms on different mobs while maneuvering around. The sword phantasm is one of our strongest, and the counter attack (sword 4) also doubles as a multi-target daze if you activate it again in the middle of the block.

Whatever you do, just never get up! Its an uphill climb, but we promise things will get better and better.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Staff is our best defensive weapon, and a very one at that.

This.

The staff gives so much mobility and is what allowed me to take on multiple enemies as I was leveling. Sword/focus would be a good swap set (I used GS, but that was before I knew better). While you kill somewhat slowly, the staff will allow you to easily solo multiple mobs, veterans, and even some melee-only champions). Swap to it when you need to kite normal enemies while re-healing, then go back to sword/x.

Then it sounds like I was doing stuff horribly wrong in trying to use skills to be an evasion tank rather than just getting out of the way.

I’m going to give it a shot with GS/Staff combo, because right now I just want these enemies to stay the hell away from me.

Thanks for the tips.

Qosin.2078:

Then it sounds like I was doing stuff horribly wrong in trying to use skills to be an evasion tank rather than just getting out of the way.

I’m going to give it a shot with GS/Staff combo, because right now I just want these enemies to stay the hell away from me.

Thanks for the tips.

A very strong combo for fighting multiple enemies is gs+ sword/focus. The focus temporal curtain pull allows you to group enemies tightly. Try placing it on a wall or in a corner, and pulling all the enemies into one compact group. You can then drop a warden on them, do leap+swap+blurred frenzy into them, and then if any are still alive, back up and use the phantasmal zerker on the remainder. It’s a very efficient method of cleaning up a big group.

As we are talking about PvE I would recommend to get rid of Blink. You can live without it.

Most of the time you do not have to worry about stun and you can always swap it in if you want to use it for running.

I’m currently level 16 and found that using GS/Staff works great. I’ll normally start with the staff skills (chaos storm/armor), then I normally create clones to shatter followed by Phantasms, switching between two weapons. Works pretty good against single targets. Groups dodge allot and stay away.