Guild Wars 2

So I thought I had my build figured out but of course do not. I was intrigued by a mantra build someone posted, but it’s for PvP. I tried it out and it was pretty good, very tanky.

And I started thinking that maybe I should go with a tanky build for WvW as well. Because I hate dying. I know, people always die, and the penalty is minor in GW2. I still hate it. I’d rather die half as often even if it means the other guy also dies half as often.

I found some tank builds but comments in the threads suggested they were out of date. So I’m hoping you guys can tell me what’s current in this area.

My requirements for this build:
1. Drive other players crazy by staying alive despite their best efforts.
2. Not rely on gear I don’t have since I’m still kinda new.
3. Be able to convert it to a more aggressive build by swapping gear and traits (the roman numerals, not the trait lines) on the fly.

I’m assuming it will be something along the lines of 0/20/20/30/0 but am not sure what to do for exact traits, gear, weapons, sigils, food etc.

Thanks, this forum is great.

You can check this out, it’s what I currently run.
http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/mesmer/?4.0|6.5c.hm.0.0.0|c.5c.h2.c.5c.hm.0.0.0|1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r|2u.0.2u.0.3u.0.2u.0.3t.0.3u.0|k59.0.u2ac.k24.0|5r.2|31.3b.38.39.0|e

What is is can do.

Solo the story fractal, did it today
if you are roaming i recommend you to have the elite mass invis, and the utilities veil, decoy, and some other good skill, like null field or blink.

With the guard vitality buff (5 stacks), and some WvW buffs,you can get up to 28k health. 3k armor. What else to say. Everything is in the link.

edit: the extra damage against knocked down or stunned (sigil), can be changed to something else.

Sword+Sword/Staff but traited torch?

Thanks for the reply!

You soloed the story fractal? Couldn’t even finish it with a group.

You have low condition damage and precision… but a staff. How do you do most of your damage?

UnknownFreak.2805:

Solo the story fractal, did it today

With nearly full PvT and no crit damage at all, how on earth did you manage that? O.o

Subject 6 is designed as a dps race to reliably bring down the secondary oozes when soloing, especially if they spawn close. My “tanky” Mesmer is a mostly knights/cavalier build and I can still fail to bring the ooze down in time due to poorly coordinated weapon cooldowns, that’s how close I am with the same power, double your precision and 80% crit damage on top. The portal mobs are easy enough though 6-8ish veterans can be… annoying… to fight without a death, but not impossible.

But I never continued past 50% Subject 6 due to no time left and not figuring out how to disable the colliders, lol. I guess you could wear him down over the hours… But hell if it wouldnt be painfull.

Regarding the OP, any 0/X/X/X/0 will do fine as a tank. In terms of gear and swapping between offensive and defensive, you probably want two sets with, one with PvT and one with either knights, berserker or cavalier (or any combo of the three). For the “dps” set I strongly advice something like traveller runes, while the PvT set can run Melandru or the like. Personally I combined the two into fixed knights/some berserker for armor and traveller, then a full PvT and full Cavalier set for the trinkets. Less bag space lol.

Me Games Ma.8426:

Sword+Sword/Staff but traited torch?

Wrong in the build, I use torch, and not offhand sword. Should be fixed now.

http://gw2buildcraft.com/calculator/mesmer/?4.0|6.5c.hm.0.0.0|c.5c.h2.f.5c.hm.0.0.0|1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r.1c.7r|2u.0.2u.0.3u.0.2u.0.3t.0.3u.0|k59.0.u2ac.k24.0|5r.2|31.3b.38.39.0|e

My bad there. Soloing the story was not that hard. It took quite some time, but you can skip most of the mobs with stealth. And in the laser cannon room, you use portal. I may make a vid if the normal fractal is the same, as the story one.

Subject 6 is designed as a dps race to reliably bring down the secondary oozes when soloing, especially if they spawn close.

What subject 6?, I was able to skip that one ^^

I ran straight to the flame room, died waited for the 1750 hp tick to go out, and then used revive orb. Portal in the laser cannon room, and then I used GS on the last boss.
took me like 2hours

Edit: Most of the attacks except the flame legion and dredge, have ranged, can be reflected with feedback and mimic, and the skritt bottle lobbers, they drop some kind of bottle that hits for 2-3.5k (environmental weapon)

You soloed the story fractal? Couldn’t even finish it with a group.

You have low condition damage and precision… but a staff. How do you do most of your damage?

The staff is not a good DPS weapon, but what it is good for is the Chaos armor and clones I used against the flame legion enemies veil, feedback and nullfield, for light and chaos fields. I keep constant chaos armor up, and try get AoE retaliation with blast from torch onto my clones, or AoE chaos armor. That does the damage, since I use PvT armor, I get pretty high retaliation damage 325 something per attack, and the flamethrower flame legion enemies, basically kills themselves, then it is just kiting the blade master or what they where called.

Thanks for the replies.

I’m tinkering with a 0/20/30/20/0 build right now.

Of course I just bought a bunch of pricey (for me) rabid armor for a different build and can’t really afford two more sets especially with traveler’s runes. But maybe I’ll start with yellow gear instead (since it’s cheap and I can break it down for globs if I decide not to use it) with centaur runes.

I could I guess just go PVT on the armor, since my primary intent is defense, and then swap PVT/berserker weapons and trinkets.

Not sure on the weapons yet. I found myself yesterday using GS and scepter/pistol, which seems like a strange combo but I found it works fairly well. I really like scepter #2 these days.. though I guess without boosting condition damage it may not be as good as sword #2.

I wonder about a defensive condition damage build instead.. I guess using dire gear with scepter, torch and staff? I guess that would be a Blackwater variation with more defense than offense — lower crits, less power, more vitality and healing.

Bah, so many choices.

So this experiment is DOA because I never realized you can’t get PVT armor easily (not even yellow stuff). I’d have to blow all my karma or grind dungeons.. yuck.

Back to the old setup I guess.

Edit: Just realized there’s the WvW armor. I could probably get more badges and go for that, though no instant gratification there either.

UnknownFreak.2805:

I ran straight to the flame room, died waited for the 1750 hp tick to go out, and then used revive orb. Portal in the laser cannon room, and then I used GS on the last boss.
took me like 2hours

Edit: Most of the attacks except the flame legion and dredge, have ranged, can be reflected with feedback and mimic, and the skritt bottle lobbers, they drop some kind of bottle that hits for 2-3.5k (environmental weapon)

Ah. Well I tried to walk through the normal way, ie the I-have-idea-what-doing-in-this-new-content-lol way

Anyway, regarding the cost of PvT… Well there’s no way around it. ~300K karma for armor and some trinkets, 10+ AC runs, 1500ish WvW badges or gold, lots and lots of gold. Laurels and guild tokens help with trinkets.

I was going to post the build I use in large group play for WvW here, but there’s a whole writeup that goes with it so I just created a new thread instead.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Build-The-Mighty-Jackpot-WvW-Zergplay/first#post3272802

The build could be tankier, but it would have to sacrifice party support and utility, which I wasn’t willing to do.

Also, for that gear Dawdler mentioned, check out http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Equipment_acquisition_by_stats to see what currencies you can use to buy specific gear. If you’re using karma, use http://gw2state.com/temples.html to see which server has temples open that you can guest to.

Thanks! Does look like a neat idea, though I’m not really looking at zerging all that much.

I could go with dire armor and a condition-based build. Though I was having fun with the mantra build and that’s much more power-based.

Pure condition build with dire doesn’t really work for a mesmer since confusion was nerfed.
The only things that put out conditions in a reasonable way are scepter, torch and sharper images.
So you need rabid armor and 15 in duelling atleast.
Condition works best in hybrid builds though where you can also put out a decent amount of direct damage.

You could try portal in wvw for survival, it can get you away from quite a lot. I find it works well with mantra builds because popping between both ends on the portal while recharging is quite effective.