Guild Wars 2

Heya, been a while since I posted in here. I recently joined up with a WvW guild and we run about 12-20 people a night. First thing’s first, I am very squishy in these runs. I am always dying very early on in fights even though I believe I am timing my dodging correctly and I am sticking to the driver without necessarily being the front line. Obviously, there is room to improve on that account, but I want to take a serious look at my build. I’ve tested a few different builds, but nothing that I’ve really found to improve the situation of my survivability. Therefore, I’m looking for some help with some builds that will help my survivability in these smaller sized WvW groups. I’m looking something that will be more of a support role in the group than being a high damaging role (which would most likely result in me being a glass cannon).

Also, any tips are greatly appreciated! Cheers!

To start off with:
Are you already using Blink and at least one Energy sigil?

I find this build really good to beginners:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8dlknpMtFrxINUrNiqBd6fkkpQqAU6MsteC-TVSBABQqEEH1f4Sp3VKDIa/BU0NswDAQjLCAAHBASBMwQL-w

It provides a lot of support through condi cleansing and healing in regroups. A few tips:
- Playstyle is mostly with GS at range. Stats and Triumphant Distortion will bring you a lot of survivability.
- Dodge and quickly shatter, even if you’re at range. Shattered Conditions work on activation, not when clones shatter.
- Swap to S/F when there are a few downed, so you can do more damage with BF and autoattacks. With Triumphant Distortion you don’t have to fear a lot.
- It’s also quite customizable, helping melee with the mantra that gives stability or changing it to Feedback and take focus trait to have a lot of reflection skills.

PD: Stats are orientative, if you still feel squishy, put more defense. Pack runes are one of the best, as they grant tons of offensive stats and AoE boons at the same time.

ASP.8093:

To start off with:
Are you already using Blink and at least one Energy sigil?

Blink, null field, and veil is what I’m currently using as util skills. Currently, I am not using any Sigils of Energy

Koltiron.6329:

ASP.8093:

To start off with:
Are you already using Blink and at least one Energy sigil?

Blink, null field, and veil is what I’m currently using as util skills. Currently, I am not using any Sigils of Energy

You should get double sigils of energy for sure. You’ll also want to get a good amount of knights/cavs/soldiers armor for that defense. No matter what you do, you won’t really be doing good damage as a mesmer in a group, so just build how you’d like for the utility. Glamours are a good choice for group utility if you want to go that route, so that’s fine.

Really, your survival is going to depend on some mix of two things. You can either build extremely tanky (if I’m going frontline, I build full knights/cavs and end up with 3100 armor) to stay alive. Alternatively, you can be a bit less tanky on the gear but far more conscientious of your positioning; staying out of the melee train and continuously moving to maintain that good positioning.

From my experience, your role can change quite a lot from running with 12 people and fighting similar numbers to running with 20 people and taking on zone blobs and bigger guilds.

If you have a backline-focusing group, you can easily run squishy gear and:

• any variation of shatter builds
• interrupt builds
• phantasm-based builds (somewhat less effective)

If you don’t have a backline-focus group, you might go for a frontline-shatter build (but you’ll need very tanky gear and lose most of your damage) or some hybrid phantasm/mantra build like the one Ansau is suggesting or the ones I’m discussing in this other thread that are a phantasm/mantra

Here’s a tanky frontline utility-shatter build I’d encourage you to try out.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAsdWl0npYtVpxMNUrNyqxcqlQdYrlWpvI7AA-TFyHwABOFAW0E8T5nY9ANVCqa/B/q/A4JAQKgIGDA-w

It is very good at helping you stick to your driver and cleaving downs in melee range.

Honestly giving someone advice without seeing his gameplay is rather impossible.
If I were you I would be running 26006 with triumphant distortion. Like that you can deal fair amount of damage with izerker on the enemy melee and also combine that with another bomb such as wellbomb or meteor showers and just keep your shatters for surrounding enemies such as eles, necro, rangers, other mesmers and thieves. Depending on your suvivability you can either chose sword-torch or sword-focus.
Run decoy-blink-veil with that.