I used to play shatter mesmer….. but I REALLY liked using a sword. that was my favorite play style. if its not viable any longer, I guess will just go back to elementalist (my first character)
woah woah woah, I never said sword wasn’t viable with shatter, I just said it wasn’t my preference compared to staff. Sword is typically better in shorter fights for doing cool offensive and defensive things with the 2 skill. Staff on the other hand lets you kite around the map and phase retreat up cliffs and out of harms way. The main reason I don’t personally use sword most of the time is that the 3 skill isn’t as fun or fluid or easy to use anymore. It still works for what it does, but I don’t really like it. The other reason is that torch kind of bores me as an off-hand, I get that stealth is very useful and all, but its phantasm is just shatter fodder and you will probably never be able to trait it for condi cleanse as power shatter.
That wouldn’t be as much of an issue if the other offhands weren’t so niche. Focus used to be pretty nice, especially for halting strike, then temporal curtain’s pull got nerfed with the second delay that lets everyone anticipate the pull more easily, and the warden just sucks. Pistol is okay, but its phantasm takes too long to do its damage compared to the others, so its less than ideal when you need to shatter things quickly, and the OH sword just never really found an audience in pvp. I mean we’ll be getting shield for chronmancy in the expansion, but I don’t think it’d be that useful of an offhand for pvp compared to WvW. It could have great teamfight utility, but its cooldowns are a bit steep and its phantasm doesn’t seem to be a damage dealer type, and it doesn’t seem to significantly contriubute to burst or survivability. To me the mesmer suffers from the problem of having too many offhands, that are all very diverse in what they do, to the point where it may be even too diverse. By contrast the mainhand weapons, a melee power sword and a midrange condition oriented scepter are simpler in their roles and the niche that they fill is quite broad. For the offhands, the niche each one fills has become so specific that 90% of builds that aren’t lockdown or phantasm will just go with torch, the visibility of the other offhands is so small because their niches are too specific, when the shatter meta cares more about shattering phantasms than keeping them around. The niches are so specific that its not possible for one offhand to be perfectly ideal in every situation, so torch is chosen because the stealth is handy on any build and lends itself more to various situations than the more niche offhands do.The problem of offhand overcentralization is a part of why I prefer GS/staff. I don’t have to concern myself with having the right offhand because I have the power of phase retreating away from danger, laying down powerful chaos storms, and having clone condition pressure. I know that sword/x is very useful in many circumstances, but taking staff instead gives me all the utility I need to feel like my choice is broadly useful in every streamlined situation.
That may have gotten off-topic, but its essentially my critical view of offhands and their place in pvp, important to anyone doing traditional shatter with sword.
