To Mesmer or not to Mesmer?
Mesmers dont have really strong conditions builds, because we are based on confusion being our main condition. This is especially visible in pve, where monsters attack slowly and infrequently. In PvP its slightly better, since ppl tend to spam abilities.
Confusion being the Mesmer’s main damaging condition is a misconception. The Mesmer’s main damaging condition is Bleeding from Staff (+ Illusionary Elasticity), Staff Clones and Sharper Images. Burning is also significant but in the Mesmer’s case is more burst damage. Confusion, while powerful, cannot be sustained like Bleeding can and is very much a secondary/tertiary source of condition damage.
Yeah, most of a mesmers weapons don’t have confusion, only the scepter does IIRC. It’s true that the f2 shatter is a confuse, but unless you’re a confusion build it’s not all that great outside of PVP.
Staff does some heavy condition damage, as it can cause bleeding, poison, and burning(and it’s clone can cause bleeding and poison), and any weapon can do condition damage with sharper images(sword, greatsword, focus, and pistol use sharper images to the greatest effect).
Well what do you like about your Mesmer??
What do I like about my Mesmer? Well, I play a condition build with all three Clone death traits and some investment in Confusion, and the part I like most is watching my enemies kill themselves; by killing Clones and/or through Confusion.
I also like the fact that I’m very slippery. Finally found me? Stealth or teleport. Acting like a Clone after disappearing from your opponent’s LoS works wonders. Finally caught me without an out? Chaos Storm over both of us, Dazing you and giving me Aegis. And after that I still have multiple uses of Chaos Armour (skill and combos) to reward myself and punish you when you finally get hits on me.
Confusion seems, to me, to be the most powerful condition in pvp GRANTING that you can reach 20 stacks and be able to hold it for a while, which is actually almost impossible to do in practice. I tried condition build before, stack every condition gear, use every condition-related trait, and I could only reach about 10 stacks for most of the time. It’s either that your enemies start attacking back and you need to defend yourself or they decide to run away and wear off your debuff.
Confusion duration is also varied depending on which skill it originates from so you kind of need to prearrange the order of your skills. You could stack your condition for quite some time or lose it all in 3 seconds. Nonetheless, confusion still does a lot of damage and could discourage your enemies from attacking you and grants you the privilege of doing evasive tactics while continuously killing off your opponents. The potential is there, no doubt, but it’s not so reliable and majorly PVP-based, that’s why most mesmers go for direct damage build like power/precision.
Condition or not, if you want a pure damage output then I’m quite certain that mesmer is not for you. The class is more about being, like Ebolism said, “slippery”.
Confusion being our main condition is not misconception. Taking bleed as our main condition is. Just take a look at trait and bonuses we get. To stack bleed with sharper images and iduelist, you have to significantly boost precision. Since you also want conditions damage, you will take illusions – which boosts critical damage, which does not apply to condition damage. In short, if you go full cDmg after that, you are wasting points from traits. Taking those traits you are better of going for phantasm build with supplementary cDmg, which will be much more beneficial in both solo and group play.
Also, stuff is rather poor for condition damage for one simple reason – is not deterministic. You can get vulnerability 100 times in a row (excluding pseudo rng if its implemented), and never get that burning or bleed. Not to mention its slow!
And finally, bleed in itself is poor condition whenever you group up. 1 mesmer with 3xiduelist can apply 24 stacks of bleed consistently. 1mesmer and 1 any other class can apply only 25 stacks, meaning a lot of wasted potential damage.
So to sum up why condition builds are not viable:
1) Condition we can apply most consistently is bleed – which is very common, and gets overwritten often. (And since its one stack its easy to remove).
2) To apply bleed consistently, you have to spend points and traits in a way that would benefit more if you just went phantasm build. Which would eliminate the overwriting problem somewhat.
3) You want to instantly drop full 25 stack of conditions, or multiple conditions on enemy, not slowly build up. That is not possible, due to how slowly you can do that with staff, or cd on iduelist summoning. (Just compare to dual pistol engi with turrets/ d/d thief/ sword/sword warrior – they drop either multiple conditions at once, or high amounts instantly and they do not waste points while specing for cDmg).
4) Many of our traits and skills apply confusion, which is misconceived condition damage in pve, due to slow triggering vs low uptime.
Right now, any condition build done by mesmer, will be subpar to other professions conditions builds.