Guild Wars 2

I’m a really big fan of reflection. It’s really fun and offers a different playstyle from what I’m used to with my Mesmer. The mechanic serves a defensive and offensive role by negating enemy damage and returning it to them. Mesmers are King/Queen when it comes to reflection, and even though it’s not a specified Mesmer style (such as glamours, illusions, mantras, etc), there’s enough around that suggests otherwise. This WvW build makes use of all (well, most) of the reflective tools on a Mesmer’s belt. With so many sources of reflection, I wanted to see if all of them could be combined to produce a useful and competitive build, after all, Mesmers are the class for reflection. I came up with this:

Ominous Reflections

Damage

Since this is a reflection build, our two most important stats for damage are Precision and Critical Damage. There is a really good build thread Ansau created about reflection damage and general reflection mechanics. It was extremely helpful in creating this build, and if you want to know more about the mechanic, I strongly recommend checking that out. Suffice is to say that reflected projectiles use the source’s power and scale with your Crit Damage on a successful critical hit. While wielding sword/focus and with nourishment buffs, the Precision of the build is 60% and 71% with 25 stacks from the perception sigil. With all this plus Fury, the max Crit Chance of the build sits at 91%. You should be having Fury for 65% ~ 75% of the time while fighting, since it lasts 45ish seconds with a 60 second CD and procs fairly quickly in a zerg fight. You will occasionally get it from teammates and the staff, though the latter won’t give too much of it, and there is always the risk of getting the boon stripped from you. Still, you’ll be getting plenty of tags, so reaching 71% crit chance will happen rather quickly.

Since a reflected projectile scales up with our Crit Damage, it’s important to have a decent amount of it. Crit Damage naturally increases the base damage by 150% on critical hits, and anything extra from your stats is added up to that. This means that with 66% you’ll be doing 216% extra damage from each critical hit, and even though the power in this build is lowish, it won’t matter on reflected projectiles. Here’s some relevant info on Crit Chance and Damage I thought I’d throw here from the wiki.

Gear

Since reflection benefits from Precision and Crit Damage, and this is a WvW build, I chose Knight armor and a mix of Cavalier and Knight trinkets with a Celestial amulet. Originally, all weapons were Knight, but I decided to add Assassin’s sword and focus since that’s the build’s offensive set, and for defensive needs there’s the Knight’s staff with energy sigil, boosting armor to 2912.

For the Runes I chose 4 Rage Runes for Fury and 2 Traveler Runes for boon duration and extra stat boost. If you can’t get your hands on those, Water or Monk would be good.

Manipulations

I really like Mimic, but there seems to be better utilities to be used for most people, so I wanted to boost the skill as much as I could by choosing both manipulation traits. In case you’re not familiar with the skill, Mimic’s casting time lasts 4.5 seconds. During this time, if a projectile hits you it will get absorbed and for the duration of the cast time you will block all attacks and reflect all projectiles. Mimic will then become Echo and you will be able to shoot the absorbed projectile. This skill’s tanking capabilities excel when engaging a zerg, in the middle of a zerg, getting through choke points, regrouping with the commander and when running away. You can also combine it with Mirror to get up to six seconds of mobile reflection. Something to keep in mind about this skill is that the blocking and reflection won’t apply until a projectile is absorbed, so be careful when tanking with the skill since you don’t want to be taking a lot of damage from melee thinking the skill is blocking. A good trick is to absorb the staff’s auto attack to proc the abilities of the skill, though this can only be done in a handful of scenarios where staff’s 1 will bounce towards you. Something else about this skill is that once the projectile is absorbed, Mimic’s CD runs its course in the background while the projectile is stored. This means that if you happen to keep the projectile for 20+ seconds, Mimic will be off its CD after you use Echo.

Blink doesn’t really need much explanation since it’s generally a WvW thing for Mesmers. I will say this though, in most builds it tends to be the only manipulation skill used, so those builds probably choose 0~1 manipulation traits, whereas this build has both far-reaching and reduced CD traits, which I really like for Blink.

(See what I did there, Blink “blinked” from beginning to end, hehe)

While not explicitly a manipulation skill, I like to think that our heal Mirror is one of them. I recently made an Engineer as a secondary character, and I noticed that all of their healing skills have an associated, engineer specific typing (turret, kit, elixir and now gadget). If we were to associate Mirror with a mesmer skill type, manipulations seems the most appropriate, since it is definitely not a glamour, it doesn’t synergize with, nor creates illusions (Ether Feast perhaps?), and mantras and signets are already covered. So Anet, please type it as a manipulation so it synergizes with at least one of our traits, because at the moment this heal is kind of abandoned.

Core Traits

Medic’s Feedback

After the duration of the trait was fixed, it has become a lot more viable, and this build takes great advantage of it. There will be a lot of downed/dead allies in the battlefield, and this build uses that to our advantage by constantly procing feedback, and we know how strong that skill is. Glamour Mastery does not affect this trait, but Temporal Enchanter does, allowing its Feedback to last 8 seconds, and with a 10 second cooldown, you are going to want to see allies get downed.

Cooldown Reducing Traits

All weapon and utility skills in this build have a 20% reduced CD and a relevant bonus for the build (reflection, precision, toughness). The exception is Feedback since it is better to have Temporal Enchanter for Medic’s Feedback, however if you rather have the 20% CD reduction you can easily switch to Glamour Mastery. You should definitely switch to GM when in need of other glamours (veil, portal).

The Case Against Masterful Reflections

Since this is a reflection build, it would make a lot of sense to include the Masterful Reflections trait, but after a long internal debate, I decided against it. For starters, distortion has a 60 second cooldown, and the only way to reduce that is by spending points on the illusions tree. With 20 points (the maximum I could spend without breaking the build) the cooldown would be 50 seconds, and that is still steep. I could add Illusionary invigoration to that, and have distortion more often, maybe statistically it would be like having it every 25 ~ 30 seconds. Even then though, I would need a decent amount of clones (2~3) to make the most of it, and we normally use distortion as an emergency aid for tough situations, so there may not be clones out when needed, unless we increase the odds by having Deceptive Evasion or Mirror Images, and DE would push out blade training or far-reaching manipulations, and MI would take out Mimic. This is not a shatter build, so using one trait and/or one utility for the sake of a reflective shatter that wouldn’t last long didn’t seem like a good idea to me. It would also be risky to use it offensively to get a few projectiles reflected since it is a crucial defensive skill that should generally be reserved for emergencies. 20 points in Chaos gives me reduced staff skills, reduced manipulations, toughness and much appreciated boon duration for Fury, so I went with that instead.

Drawbacks

The main drawback of the build is that it lacks direct condition removal, and Mimic does not protect against conditions. The only condimoval this build has is the Phantasmal Warden and Temporal Curtain light combo. You will mostly depend on your allies to remove conditions, however this build has passive ways to mitigate the damage. Since the best defenses to counter the armor-ignoring damage from conditions are condimoval, a high health pool, and/or healing, I decided to go with Omnomberry Ghost (hence the name of the build) as the food choice and Superior Sigil of Blood. Ghost grants you 325 health on crit with a 1 second cooldown, and blood grants around 490 every 2~5 seconds. Let’s say that in 10 seconds you land 6 attacks, and 5 of them crit, you’ll be healing for 2605 health, or 1790 if sigil of blood procs only once and one of the 5 crits doesn’t proc the ghost. However, due to all of the reflected projectiles and your own attacks, you will probably be healing more than this. These two healing elements also complement Mirror since it’s such a lackluster heal. Here’s a video I found of a downed guardian recovering a lot of health with these two things combined.

If you are struggling a lot with conditions you can switch Feedback for Arcane Thievery or some other condimoval since you’ll be procing it with Medic’s feedback. You could also switch out Blink or Mimic for AT, but I personally feel crippled without Blink.

Feedback (not the skill)

I want to first say that any feedback is greatly appreciated, and that I thank you for reading and contributing. Having said that, the most noticeable weakness I see in the build lie on the condition mitigation and in fighting a 1v 1/small group, so any advice/suggestions on those areas would be great.

I’ll reserve this one for the future

Let me reserve this one too, for videos and stuff