Types of Mesmer's
Shatter is using the profession skill, you produce and use clones/phantasms (together considered illusions) as bombs. Four diff types of shatters, mind wrack does damage, cry of frustration does confusion, there’s one that dazes and one that grants distortion (invulnerability/evade for the mesmer). With traits, they are even stronger, like all shatter doing confusion or distortion doing reflect and less shatter recharge etc. It has tremendous burst damage in player vs player situations.
Phantasm mesmers generally doesn’t shatter or shatters less, and keeps throwing out phantasms which actually do heavy steady (possibly kinda burst) damage with their “weapons” (clones don’t really except for condi damage when traited). This is what you use for PvE as well, as it is the highest straightforward direct dps. There’s different types of phantasms produced from different weapons which has some effects like iWarden being stationary when attacking but huge aoe cleaving all around and projectile defense, and iDuelist using thief unload? skill with the dual pistols which hits for a lot of ranged damage.
Clone Death mesmers focus on producing mass amounts of clones and just rewriting them, (we can have max three illusions up), and/or letting them die from damage. You would use melee clones like sword clones to stack on top of enemy. These clones on death will be like an explosion and trigger an effect like aoe cripple and conditions.
Those are the three basic foundations of mesmer strategy however, you will find a lot of modifications, all of which probably use some of the above three fundamental mesmer mechanics mentioned:
Condition mesmers may use any of the above three, often the clone death and shatter, and focus on stacking conditions. A popular build like the Blackwater build, and runes of perplexity and so on often are tanky and achieves tons of condition damage.
Mantra mesmers are rarely seen, but Dec 10th patch had tried to fix them up a bit more. These aren’t illusion related skills, but provide utility/boons etc.
Shutdown/interrupt mesmers have a high skill cap but are great fun and focus on stuff that happens on interrupts, daze and does a lot of CC and so on.
There might be more. But mesmer does have a lot of viable builds and variations. Excluding PvE where its just dps phantasm pretty much. In addition, mesmers have a ton of active defense skills, evades, blocks, position displacement, stun breaks, stealth etc. The concept of mesmer is mobility and constant rhythms of melee, ranged, repositioning, denial of targetting, which keeps the mesmer alive and the enemy disoriented or annoyed. On the other hand, if you trait up or gear up with some defensive stats, the mesmer becomes even more powerful. 1vX battles are usually no problem for a seasoned WvW player and build.
(edited by takatsu.9416)