Guild Wars 2

tl:dr – Outside of reflects and Time Warp, why bring a mesmer?

My main has been a mesmer since Guild Wars 2 came out and its my favorite profession, I usually can’t max anything else because I enjoy my mesmer so much.

I mostly play PvE and rarely do PvP. So, in PvE, what good is a mesmer?

Most of the classes use the Veteran Risen Giant as a dps test and mesmer seems to have the slowest times. The fastest would be the Elementalist averaging around 4 seconds, then we have classes like the Thief, Warrior, or Guardian who kill it in about 10 seconds.

The mesmer seems to lag behind with the fastest recorded kill being 16 seconds.
So if you have a mesmer in you group and a fight does not require reflects what good does a mesmer have? Elementalists can bring much more might, healing, and damage, are mesmers just slowing the group down?

Sidenote : I may be misinformed and will probably keep playing mesmer regardless.

But any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Reflects (damage + defense) and Time Warp (more damage) are probably the 2 main reasons why people like Mesmers in dungeon groups. Signet of Inspiration is extremely useful and with a decent build the damage is really high as well.

I’m not sure what your asking for tbh since you don’t need anything but damage + reflects (and sometimes stealth which the Mesmer offers too) to run any dungeon in the game.

Mesmer brings strong damage as a baseline.

In addition to that, mesmer brings high reflect uptime, group stability, group condition removal, group boon stacking (SoI) without sacrificing any damage at all.

You also get boon stripping with sword aa, sword clones, and null field and arcane thievery. For some bosses, this is hugely useful.

Mesmer death times on the giant are kept down by the need to spawn your phantasms. For Real Long Fights, you’ll have ~2 up on average and do more consistent damage than at the start, where you are still spooling up.

Mass invis and veil and portal are also situationally very useful in some runs.

Pros:
- Extremely high single-target DPS using phantasms. Even without phantasms, still competitive with most other classes.
- Extremely good defensive support. AOE condition removal, stability, reflects everywhere. Makes guardians look like scrubs.
- Lots of dungeon-specific utility. Portal is like the only way to pugging Arah bearable. Boon removal for boonspamming bosses and on-the-move stealth are also nice.
- Never die. Minions and tons of invul on everything and high HP = lol.

Cons:
- Bad AOE DPS. Only class with worse AOE DPS is the necromancer.
- Limited offensive support options. Signet of Inspiration is great but relies on allies to get the ball rolling; most pugs don’t stack any boons at all making it useless.

And that’s pretty much the gist of it. Mesmers are really good. Way too good even. Will probably get nerfed soon.

Oh, and I can’t believe I forgot: focus 4 is one of the best, most reliable pulls in the game.

When it comes to those kill time videos, we also don’t have that many impractical spike abilities/utilities that other classes use. Basically, if you understand the other class mechanics, most of them are using sub-optimal dungeon builds/tactics/rotations to reduce time. They are also often blowing through multiple utilities with long CDs that aren’t sustainable.

Something to cheer you up. Silliness
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzjNvlbZg04
And also a bit more legit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEC1DO-j5fw

Guardians/warriors are around 5:20 lupi solo kills but I’m pretty sure that mesmers are in a good spot with a 5:40. Ele is at 4:07 with their massive FGS spikes but as you can see, the 4 second kill vs the giant doesn’t translate to 4x faster kills against a real threat. The 4 other classes seem to be around 8-15 minutes.

When pugging I often bring iDefender as well. No one dies. Not even the face mash warriors.

Pulls