Guild Wars 2

I’ve been avoiding dungeons as much as possible, but now end up in fotm a fair bit. The mesmer only goes into wvw as a portal/siege kill monkey (I use a different char for wvw 95% of the time)

So could use some advice on build/armor, with the main goal of survivability I suppose. I do like to keep a little mf on him in places where he can get away with it

Should he use the karma power/toughness/vit sets, with maybe some power/toughness/condition pieces as well? Tbh i dont know how toughness and condition interrelate (other than something in a trait line that gives 5% bonus from toughness to condition or something?), but that’s a separate matter.

His biggest help in fotm seems to be Feedback/portal/iwarden, so I’d like to trait him for supportish role (is signet of inspiration the only useful party signet?) with survivability. I’m also trying to get some speed on him.. relying on the focus speed burst just isn’t enough

right now he’s got pirate runes and im wondering if he can keep those until fotm 20 or so, or if i need to switch to centaur or something.. I do want to keep some mf on him somewhere in addition to food, if possible, otherwise not sure how much sense it makes to hit fotm dailies.

yeah i know this post is all over the place.. sorry about that. My mesmer is fun as hell, but I’m still p nub in terms of build, despite research (which ends up glamour builds/ shatter builds/ etc). Not sure if what I’m looking for fits into a nice neat category

You have some good ideas there, now put them down in concrete form and focus on which aspects of the Mesmer you like the most. From there, you can then find your primary weapons and build, so on and so forth.

Survivability? Well you have some options. I noticed you said you liked focus for swiftness and iWarden, so you might want to check out the Inspiration trait tree for the reflect on Focus skills and 20% CDR.

That also opens up healing mantra support builds, thanks to Restorative Mantras. (AoE 2.6k + .2*Healing Power heal on end of a mantra channel). You can build those pretty tanky, with Cleric’s or other such gear with vitality or toughness, healing power isn’t strictly necessary as your mantra heal really doesn’t scale all that well with it.

Other survivability options are available, if you enjoy staff. Going 25 into Chaos for 5% toughness to condition damage + Rabid gear (Cond, prec, toughness) turns you into a somewhat tanky (if you get some vitality in there) staff + offhand mesmer that hits very well with conditions and Sharper Images in Dueling. Further benefited by Nourishment (6% toughness, 4% vitality to condition damage at level 80 Nourishment) and Superior Runes of the Undead, which do the same thing as the trait. It all stacks for a large amount of condition damage.

Another variation on survivability is a shatter build with any of these stats and side playstyles. There’s tons of Mesmer builds out there, experiment, figure out your playstyle, and go from there.

Be as tanky as possible. Sad but ressurection system riggs it towards such a meta. You basically get almost infinite defense if everyone can just keep rezzing everyone else back up, and glass cannon don’t have a role in this.

This link talks about several different builds that mesmers run in higher level fractals:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/75587-12-fractals-build/

Tanky build is definitely not the only option, especially for mesmers. We have lots of ways to avoid damage. Good luck ressing people in the harpy fractal on higher levels when everyone is bunched up together. As another poster suggested, if you like the reflection aspect of the mesmer, you should consider traiting into the vitality line for focus cdr, and reflection on iwarden. You may also wanna consider using the staff as it’s probably a mesmer’s best group support weapon with chaos storm, and winds of chaos. The staff aside from iWarlock relies almost completely on condition damage for damage.

Centaur runes make no sense in fractals, since most of your time will be spent fighting, not running, and you don’t want to waste your heals for a swiftness buff that won’t be done when you reach the next point.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. I will do more research based on your steeerings. And apologies again for the shotgun approach OP.

Adenos.3018:

Centaur runes make no sense in fractals, since most of your time will be spent fighting, not running, and you don’t want to waste your heals for a swiftness buff that won’t be done when you reach the next point.

Without centaur runes (which i am happy to avoid for dungeons), how does/can a mesmer get speed in addition to switching to the focus? I dislike being the last one to get though the woods in snowblind (for example)*

Does the superior sigil of water do any good? That’s probably been discussed in other posts though.. I like the idea of helping people rez/heal quicker to keep party upright

Adenos.3018:

This link talks about several different builds that mesmers run in higher level fractals:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/topic/75587-12-fractals-build/

ooh nice link, thanks. Funny how some say toughness is “useless” on a mesmer and some love it xD, for fotm.

*I’m watching the “frac 36: DPS mesmer” vid from that thread right now, and i notice the narrator seems to be doing just fine with only the intermittent speed bonus from focus

I’ve been trying to find some solid builds as well.

The GW2Guru post is heavily weighted towards one player’s success using a 20/20/0/0/30 glass cannon build. He’s got great videos showing gameplay, which is awesome.

I’m still looking for alternates though. It’s been hard to find any mesmers in fractals 30+ who aren’t running some variant of that build. I haven’t heard of any going deep in to Chaos or Inspiration and Staff and Scepter seem even worse off.

Anyone on here running something different than the “glass cannon phantasm/shatter” thing and having success in high level fractals?

I use a 20/20/15/10/5 build with gs and sword/sword.
I chose offhand sword because I just like the looks of dual swords!

The major traits are mind wrack 20%, gs recharge 20% sword recharge 20%, deceptive evasion, random condition on clone death, remove condition on heal.

My utilities are blink, mirror images, and feedback/null field/portal depending on situation, but i usually use feedback. Elite skill is time warp.

My weapons are soldier, my armor is berserker and my jewleries are knight.
I chose a more balanced build, slightly leaning to defense more.
Currently, im surviving well in all dungeons, and I revive glass cannons pretty often.
In future, I may change my armor to knight and jewleries to berseker for slightly more offense.

I use the same setup for wvw too, but I carry along a focus just in case that I want to pull someone off a wall.

If you prefer a more balanced build, you can consider this one.

Nice! I like that spread a lot. I don’t find myself taking advantage of the shatter-on-self as much as I thought I would, so redistributing those points into chaos and inspiration could be cool.

I’d love a staff build, but I’ll hang on to my GS until I can find one that works.

For a staff build, I switch between 2 builds, both are similar.
They focus on condition damage and conditions-on-clone-death traits.

0/25/25/0/20 – http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmc0MMMzMnLrmMnLrm0pp0GVaVack

10/20/20/0/20 – http://www.guildhead.com/skill-calc#mcmc0MMMzMnLrmMnLrmaGG0GVVaVack

My weapons are prec/cond/tough, my armor is prec/cond/tough and my jewleries are carrion.
I use sigil of corruption and runes of undead to boost condition damage.

I will try to maintain 3 clones up at all times to bounce all the Wind of Chaos around.
If Wind of Chaos hits enemies, they get condition damage.
If it hits your allies, they get buffs.
If enemies kill your clones, they get more conditions.
Use Chaos Storm on your melee allies to protect them and damage enemies at the same time.

IMHO, abilities that help you avoid hits completely are far superior to anything that helps you take a hit. This is mostly because unless it’s a relatively weak target, the hits are going to still really hurt. This includes your own skill at avoiding damage through dodging and just plain moving around away from things that want to hurt you.

For me, that’s just moving and using Decoy. Others also use blink and even portals as well, which I thought was pretty clever when I heard about using portal defensively.

There aren’t any fights I know of where you just need to out live things without killing. There are fights where you have to kill quickly.

So, I build for pure DPS. I’m still using 20/30/0/10/5 with another 5 free floating points (atm in Illusions, but I move it around). I want to give up Inspiration entirely because so many traits just plain don’t work, but I rely a lot on Mender’s purity, which does work (remove condition on heal). Gear is 100% Berserker.

Unfortunately, all GS builds except for pure shatter builds are rather broken due to the iBerserker bug. So, I’m playing my alts for the next couple months until they get around to (maybe) fixing things.

Re: Bob.1039
I totally ran a very similar build for a long time. I think the only swap I made was getting the Confusion Duration where you went with 3% more damage per illusion. I didn’t think that trait ‘counted’ on condition damage, so I avoided it. Loved the build though. Thinking of swapping back to it and stocking up on veggie pizzas… the 40% condition duration increase will hopefully extend Confusion long enough to make it worth its weight in gold.

Re: Okuza
I’ve heard a lot about a berserker bug (berserker missing 1-2 hits on its first volley) but I honestly haven’t seen it lately. Are you still running in to it? Mine regularly swirls through enemies for his normal amount without any misses or low damage.

Okuza.5210:

IMHO, abilities that help you avoid hits completely are far superior to anything that helps you take a hit. This is mostly because unless it’s a relatively weak target, the hits are going to still really hurt. This includes your own skill at avoiding damage through dodging and just plain moving around away from things that want to hurt you.

For me, that’s just moving and using Decoy. Others also use blink and even portals as well, which I thought was pretty clever when I heard about using portal defensively..

That seems to be a recurring theme upon more research. Was planning on weaning myself into glass cannon bit by bit, starting with a little vit/healing. Had respec’d to 20/10/10/20/10 yesterday to get some vit/healing along with GS and Focus 20% recharge bonus/phantasm reflect and spent 42k karma on grenth power/toughness/vit robe. Then i came across this thread re fotm and vit: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Why-does-agony-punish-vitality-builds. lol xD

So need to re-evaluate. I like the idea of complete damage avoidance / feedback stuff (kind of why i like the iwarden buff and projectile reflection with Inspiration) but yeah, may instead just ditch Inspiration altogether or drop to 10 and keep purity or medic’s feedback (the latter which can be p huge against some bosses in fotm) ..especially now with the note on vitality in fotm.

Mimic/decoy/stealth/blink/feedback/distortion, portal, dodge… perhaps ill look for a max ‘complete avoidance’ /dps hybrid build, lols. Unfortunately, my laptop gets sub-10 fps and my reflexes are slowing down with age, which makes for a bad combo, espesh in fotm. I saw this video and even with only 5 agony resist at lvl 36., he makes glass cannon look so easy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZgS1-4npAKU. me jealous

@bob, hey now that’s an interesting build. Do you use it fotm and if so, what level?