Guild Wars 2

I like the Scholar classes more than the others but I have exhausted both the Elementalist and the Necromancer.
I tried the Mesmer a little, but not extensively. So I was wondering if they are more like the necromancer, with more survivability, conditions, and attrition style battles. Or like the Elementalist, with more emphasis on burst, variety, and squishiness?

I know that the Mesmer is its own unique class but I want to know what qualities they naturally possess.

The mesmer can be a fairly survivable class, but not in a face-taking kind of way. Our damage isn’t very effective in fights where enemies die quickly and we don’t have much aoe, but in longer fights against fewer targets we can put out a respectable amount of damage (we’re still on the low end of the spectrum though). Mesmers have a somewhat high skill floor but not an especially high skill cap (if we ever get better control over, or become less reliant upon, our illusions it will probably go up significantly). We also have some very powerful group support and small scale pvp utility.

EDIT: I probably should have asked whether you meant for PvE, PvP or both. A lot of what I said applies to both, though it was written more with PvE in mind. Mesmer PvP tends to exist more in the utilities than PvE, in my opinion, to the extent that you could look up all of their utilities and instantly see if it’s for you or not.

I think it has quite a bit more survivability than ele, though I use Greatsword and Dual Swords mainly. Between the Dual Sword set, your CC breaking passives, clones, defensive phantasms and pretty ace downed state you’re really survivable and shouldn’t be getting hit too much.

As for damage? You can do a lot of AoE damage with greatsword, staff and your clones but it’s definitely a slower setup than most, so for big events where everybody is killing everything you might not get much in fast enough. Though, with the changes to greatsword you can at least hit clusters with your ‘3’.

I’d say they are definitely closer to necro than ele all around, with a few differences here and there. With necro, you’re survivable due to having an interplay between different health pools and some life drain, but with mesmer you’re survivable because you have so many ways to not get hit at all. You stack conditions, but not the same ones as necro tends to and not nearly as high. In return, your main condition is likely to be confusion which is pretty nice for harder fights (it causes the target to receive damage upon skill use). Single target damage isn’t as high as ele all around (if we were to compare all mesmer builds to all ele builds I’d imagine ele would generally have more pure damage), but you should have less trouble lasting long enough on your own to dish what damage you can out. Haven’t played necro too much, but I think mesmer does do more bursty damage even if the condition damage won’t be as constant. I like to think of mesmer as necro/thief hybrid in some ways.

If you want to see what a mesmer can do in PvP check out this video. It’s short but sweet. glass cannon build, wont find higher DPS anywhere.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Mesmer-PVP-video-Mesmer-Mind-Games

We knew in guildwars 1 however the Mesmer has gone through an identity crisis and noone really knows anymore.

Simple question deserves a simple answer…

Mesmer = God

It’s a class with tons of utility and very high DPS requiring a little ramp-up and maintenance.