First, disclaimer: I have never played frontline in WvW because I mostly play mesmer and necro and I felt my place was in the backline. So I may be missing some important points.
However, with the elite specialization of necromancer, the reaper, I started to feel like there was more frontline material and we had a nice discussion in the necro subforum about how to do just that and I will try it this week-end.
This + the discussion with Fay about the WvW mesmer-only zerg lead me to wonder if actually mesmer couldn’t fit also in the frontline. The idea with Fay was to use the distorsion-sharing which because of its 5s ICD you can in principle chain properly with a mesmer-only frontline party for permanent invuln/evade.
But even without going full-mesmer, I feel like one mesmer in a guard/warr party has something to offer:
- currently, the frontline is suffering a lot from the stability changes. They rarely have enough stability to cover the whole push (about 10-12s). The problem is not so much the length but the number of stacks of stability. The main source of stab is a guardian with 5 AOE stab for 5s on a 24s CD. Mantra of concentration gives 3×3 stacks of 2s (so 3 stacks during 6s) on a 30-ish CD and with signet of inspiration, we can also multiply by 2 the stab from the guardian (so 5 more stacks for 5s) on a 24s CD.
- condition cleanse: 6 AOE if you use mantra heal with the CD corresponding approximately to one push. 4 more with shatters if we take “Restorative Illusions” over “protected phantasm”
- 1s AOE invuln every 5s with signets (24s CD if you take inspiration and midnight) + shatter. You also have your personal rather long invuln with blurred frenzy.
- AOE heal with “Healing Prism” (only first mantra charge though) + with shatter if we take “Restorative Illusions”.
So those 3 points seems to be potent enough to at least start this discussion. For sake of fairness, the downside:
- the damage probably much lower than guardian and warrior. If we take “Protected Phantasms” we will allow the first phantasm burst, but we don’t have that much AOE phantasms except GS and focus, but focus takes too long to do its damage. So most of our damage will come from sword mh and IP shatter.
- We are locked into domination (signet)+ dueling (mantra)+ inspiration (support). In particular no chronomancer here, which is sad because the shield would have been an interesting choice.
- I don’t know how long we can actually last in the frontline.
Opinions?