Guild Wars 2

Hey guys, I’m new to GW2 and specially to the Mesmer Class. I’ve taken 2 characters to level 70, of which I ended up erasing one because I didn’t like his place on the current PVE Meta (bye my Ranger), which is what attracts my attention.

I created a Mesmer, and tho it’s fun, I find myself dealing lower DPS and having to wait mpore between battles to deal with ability cooldowns in order to complete maps and leveling up.

Created a Nord Mesmer, started out pretty well, feeling I was slaying every mob I found with my Sword/Pistol and clones; however past level 7 hearts I started having problems killing anything before me and dealing with several enemies at once unless I spammed F1 Clone Explosion and ran away; in fact, battler were becoming more strategical, but longer than anything else I played before.

I really want to dig into the class, but the fact I can’t explore enough and have a rough time leveling has been enough to put me away from it.

The thing about mesmers is that traits are almost essential so the leveling process isn’t as kind as it is for other classes. Your main source of damage should not be shatters (your F1-4) skills but rather through phantasms so try to keep three illusions up and attacking the enemy at all times. A recent update also greatly improved the survivability of phantasms and clones.

Speaking as someone who has both ranger and mesmer as his most-played… you kinda messed yourself up starting off with a ranger, who by and large are the easiest class for beginners. Mesmers are good at teaching you the importance of ability rotations, how EXTREMELY important timing dodges are, and other things that.. come with time, I guess.

I’m not exactly sure what level you unlock weapon swaps, but for mesmers (and really, any class that has access to them) you want your two weapons to have different utility. For instance, my mesmer runs a sword/focus build for close combat and a staff build for mobility, condition application, and area support.

Mesmer really shines when they start getting their utilities and more shatter abilities open. They are, I will concede, a very slow class to start.

EDIT – Going off Mastamaker in front of me – yes, that’s also something important to note. Most of your damage is going to come from Phantasms, no matter what weapon you’re using. Main-hand sword’s second ability is your biggest non-phantasm damage dealer.

tl;dr: They’re slow and frail at early levels, but they have mega damage and some really mean tricks later.

With Chronomancer, you have very little waiting and actually have more to do if you stay in combat. Of course, the leveling process is extremely painful.

^TC is new to GW2 in general, let’s not bring up Elite specs that require level 80 just yet, especially since he’s talking open world

You can buy the Executioner outfit from the Gem store and use the toy bundle that comes with it to speed yourself up quite a lot by spamming 2 and then 6 around 35-40% of the way of the channel time. That pretty much fixes your movement problems.

For normal combat I’d just try and endure the long process with a phantasm or shatter build. It’s definitely worth levelling a Mesmer to 80.

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