Guild Wars 2

Share your favorite mesmer tricks with other mesmers. Just small little hints that you like to do in PvP/ PvE. Like one of my favorites is dropping a chaos field then switching to pistol and stunning my enemy Inside the field for the full duration.

• conjuring a clone before a phantasm can help draw aggro to ensure phantasm lives (PvE)

• blink, phase escape, and swap can all be leveraged into a pseudo extra dodge

• torch has our only blast finish, but combined with chaos storm, time warp, or a glamor, this becomes AoE chaos armor

• chaos armor is awesome, use leap finishers like illusionary leap and phase escape to armor yourself whenever possible

• feedback basically causes unaware ranged attackers (like npcs) to kill themselves for you

• set a portal before a difficult jump to flash back where you started in case you missed, or use it to help people to the top of jump puzzles you’ve completed

• descent into madness, available at 10 point chaos, reduces falling damage by 50% which increases our exploration potential

• goes for everyone, but: major traits and utility skills can be swapped out of combat to better tune yourself to a given situation

• chaos storm can actually be stronger placed on you/allies/illusions as a defense rather than offense

• deceptive evasion and illusionary persona traits are amazing, illusionary elasticity buffs mirror blade and winds of chaos considerably

• when possible, conjure clones around corners or in heavy spell effects to help confuse enemies

• know your instants: skills loke mantra charge use and shatter can be cast as you channel other skills (like stomp)

• drop your illusions apart from each other to make them less susceptible to AoE

If you are up against a profession that can move while downed (Mesmer, Thief, Ele) you can use Blink mid-stomp to move over to their new location and finish them.

Against professions with an interrupt (ie Necro, warrior, guardian) you can time activating Distortion to prevent them from interrupting you.

Diversion makes an excellent stomp interrupt to help your allies, especially if you have Illusionary Persona.

Jairyn.6913:

• staggering your illusion’s distance from the target can help your stack Diversion, stripping champion mob’s control immunity

I didn’t get that one, could you elaborate?

Iruwen.3164:

Jairyn.6913:

• staggering your illusion’s distance from the target can help your stack Diversion, stripping champion mob’s control immunity

I didn’t get that one, could you elaborate?

I’m blanking on what it’s called, Defiance or something. The buff a champion gets when it suffers a control effect makes it immune to the next 3 (actually, it scales to the number of players present). As each illusion counts as a separate Diversion, staggering them out so that they each hit separately will count as three dazes and peel off three layers of control immunity. Diversion doesn’t stack, though, so you have to get the timing/placement right such that each illusion casts its Daze before the next reaches the target to shatter.

Correction:

Embolism.8106:

You don’t have to stagger them out, using Diversion with 3 Sword Clones and Illusionary Persona at point blank range will remove 4 stacks of Defiant regardless. Staggering them out just causes the Daze to last longer, but even if they all hit at the same time they still count as 4 Dazes.

I also like the back dodge/ staff 2… Gives a lot more distance.

Some nice little tricks I have found to work which are actually pretty funny whenever your opponent is new.

• Mirror Images, Decoy, and any shatter skill.
• Scepter 2 spawns a clone on a successful block.
• Sword 4 (Off Hand) spawns a clone on a successful block.
• Scepter (Main Hand) and Sword (Off Hand) spawns the most clones possible of any weapon combination, has the most blocks, and ultimately makes your character hard to kill.

Blinding Befuddlement is very strong, even without Dazzling Glamours, due to the ability to keep a high uptime of Chaos Armor through various combos.

Sometimes in PvP I will run away then randomly stop and about face, spamming my #1 to make it look like I used decoy. While sometimes it doesn’t work, about 1/3 of the time, people will continue running on.

With staff, I like using chaos storm, sit in it until I hear the giggle, then use phase retreat to gain chaos armor, then use chaos armor when that wears off.

I’ll use diversion against downed characters that teleport and stealth.

I’ll sometimes carry a mantra of distraction to stop channeled skills.

Portal can be used to kite melee characters for ten seconds by placing them far apart.

I see a lot of Mesmers who like to shatter right away or kite. This is fine but another strategy is to hide within your clones. This works especially well with 20 points in Dueling for Deceptive Evasion while using a staff.

Just use Staff 2 Phase Retreat (don’t Phase Retreat out of Chaos Storm yet otherwise you get the obvious Chaos Armour bubble – save that for later) then Mirror Images to summon two more clones and let your target try to figure out which one is you while you and your clones (with Sharper Images for bleeds) slowly take down his health.

The key here is to try to not to move otherwise it becomes more obvious which one is you and which are the clones.

If your opponent gets too close, blink behind your target at max range then summon more clones via Staff2, Decoy or using dodge and keep auto attacking. Don’t bother summoning a phantasm yet.

If he is smart and figures out which one you are, you can go into your high DPS routine (Shatters, Chaos Storm, Phantasms, weapon switch, etc.).

However you might be surprised on how many opponents you can down just with auto attack.

Boss fights
Fractal – Dredge Power Suit: Feedback when he goes to do bombs, you’ll do massive damage to him.
The Jellyfish boss on the water level – Arcane Thievery his might stacks (up to 45!)
Seal Level – Last Boss – When he stuns the whole party I like to blink out and start hitting him. You get like 3-4 seconds of extra dps on him while he’s picking up his hammer.
CoF P2 – The part after the acolyte event try to run through the door as it’s opening, drop portal – blink – dodge – dodge will get you past the flaming boulders before they even start rolling.
CoE – Alpha Boss – Blink/Phase Retreat/ Swap – All will get you out of crystal + blurred frenzy is great for hitting the boss and avoid his massive aoe.
Pvp
Warrior running at you – Often times will buff the kitten out of themselves before they get to you- Arcane Thievery all their buffs. — If 100 blades spec I love using Blurred Frenzy while they try to 100 Blades you XD
Any kiters – Pistol 5, swap, Blurred Frenzy is a good one.
Someone goes down but made it to the middle of their zerg? Timewarp ontop of them, blink in and take them down in ~1.5 seconds. Phase Retreat/Stealth out

• You can compansate our lack of AoE in WvW by either a galmour or a shatter build. Shatter builds work better if you roam around in a small group while glamours benefit from big raids clashing.

• You don’t need to have tha focus on equippedall the time if you just want it for the speed buff. Open you inventory equip the focus use the speed buff and switch back to your off hand weapeon of choice . This can help in PvE, sPvP and WvW.

• With Illusionary Persona you can use our shatters at any given time. Which means you can. Do a 4 shatter with Mind Wrack and hit Diversion to get a bit of extra time. You can also use Destortion this way to “tank” a big hit or survive just that bit longer for your heal to come of CD.

• A lot of PvE bosses that don’t spawn ground traget AoE will jump on our Illusions if they are to close so try to set them as far away as possible and spead them out a bit.

• Blink can be a bit tricky to use. The rule of thumb is if can walk to that point within 10sec without jumping you can blink to it. If you blink down it will only blink as far down as you would not take dmg from the fall but that only works if you blink to a place that is ground level. If you try to blink from a roof to a lower roof it fail most of the time.

WvW
- cast iWarden, lay temporal curtain on top of iWarden, by now warden should be spinning, close curtain, enemies get blasted
- Near cliffs, lay temp curtain at the edge, close curtain, watch them fly, if they don’t fall off the edge get bonus points and swap to GS and hit a homerun with illusionary wave
- keep defense – drop portal, temp curtain the mass of enemies, hop down, mirro images, diversion, illusionary wave on rammers…
- learn edges and cliffs you can blink up to (very helpful)
- have a set with centaur runes
- GS skill 2, clone on target, interrupt
- double dodge = 2 clones, decoy = 3, send them into the zerg
- use staff chaos storm right before fighting to get easy buff or 2, quick switch back to primary (same with bubble or armor)
- time warp stomps & time warp building siege
- sometimes its nice to try to look like a clone (moving like AI)
- bubble ballistas
- illusionary wave on gates
- watch people get on tower edges, curtain them, blink to port, aboutface, illusionary wave
- warden & beserker on gates
- curtain ppl building siege
- curtain ppl trying to rez downed & illusionary wave ppl trying to rez (bonus points for catching thieves invis and then batting them lol)
- with thieves be careful not to shatter so quick, try to keep one out it will show you where they are

Jairyn.6913:

Iruwen.3164:

Jairyn.6913:

• staggering your illusion’s distance from the target can help your stack Diversion, stripping champion mob’s control immunity

I didn’t get that one, could you elaborate?

I’m blanking on what it’s called, Defiance or something. The buff a champion gets when it suffers a control effect makes it immune to the next 3 (actually, it scales to the number of players present). As each illusion counts as a separate Diversion, staggering them out so that they each hit separately will count as three dazes and peel off three layers of control immunity. Diversion doesn’t stack, though, so you have to get the timing/placement right such that each illusion casts its Daze before the next reaches the target to shatter.

You don’t have to stagger them out, using Diversion with 3 Sword Clones and Illusionary Persona at point blank range will remove 4 stacks of Defiant regardless. Staggering them out just causes the Daze to last longer, but even if they all hit at the same time they still count as 4 Dazes.

@Xavi:
And to anyone who read his post, this is a largely noob eating tactic. Any player that is in a PvP environment should know to turn off NPC names and only have player names turned on so that all your bouncing around and making clones doesn’t work at all, only the real you will have a name tag over your head.

As for tricks I use, Illusionary Membrane pairs beautifully with Regen from Phantasms granted by the Trait Phantasmal Healing. . . what a lot of people don’t realize is that you can stand next to a healing turret or in a Healing Rain or the Guardian Symbol that gives Regeneration to get several stacks of this protection rapidly and share the love with Signet of Inspiration. This also pairs well with Runes of Dwayna.

Shattered Strength gives a lot of stacks of might, coupled with a good amount of boon duration increasing you can end up with a lot of power and condition damage, and it can be used for higher burst. I will often dump as many clones out as quickly as I can to shatter and work my way back and forth between Mind Wracks and Distortion Diversion Cry into the final Mind Wrack with sometimes over 15 stacks of might on me.

• Sword 3>3 (Illusionary Leap > Swap) while standing on any combo field will grant you the leap effect both times. Works best for stacking effects like the retaliation from light fields, like Temporal Curtain.
• Mirror Blade (greatsword-2) is ideal when you have exactly two enemies to hit, it will bounce between them for surprisingly good damage particularly with Illusionary Elasticity (Illusions-VII). If there’s no other opponent around, make sure you’re close and it will bounce off you instead, which can get you a decent stack of might.
• Speaking of I-elasticity, with it Winds of Chaos will bounce a second time, so try to pick targets standing near at least one other target to try and get out that second hit. (the extra bounce won’t apply to your clones’ WoC so don’t lose any sleep over that).
• Spacial Surge (greatsword-1) will trace a beam directly to your target even when you’re out of range. If you’re not careful this will give away your position, but it can also be used to point out enemies to the people around you, even if they’re not in your party.
• Underwater, you can get a speed surge for you and your allies out of spear-4 (a sort of a variant of Temporal Curtain) and it will also block pursuers as well. You can also use spear-2 to surge forward (and forgo the swap) to get a little extra distance.
• After Mimic absorbs the first projectile that hits you, you will block melee attacks and reflect all projectiles for the rest of its duration… I only just learned this myself from this thread
• Moa Morph will overwrite an enemy’s transformation (Lich Form, Rampage, Tornado, Plague, etc.), and leave it on full cooldown.
• Medic’s Feedback (Inspiration-I) is a great way of getting a second Feedback bubble if you don’t mind it being centered on yourself, but this can be advantage for rangers and such who are used to it being around them. In WvW in particular, you can “revive-tap” a dead ally then quickly cancel if you didn’t intend to spend the whole time reviving them. Semi-related, Feedback’ing an enemy in melee can make it look like it’s a “friendly” feedback to enemy archers.

Embolism.8106:

You don’t have to stagger them out, using Diversion with 3 Sword Clones and Illusionary Persona at point blank range will remove 4 stacks of Defiant regardless. Staggering them out just causes the Daze to last longer, but even if they all hit at the same time they still count as 4 Dazes.

Good to know. Thanks!

TBH I spotted a thread like this in the Elementalist sub-forum and thought it was a brilliant idea.

• Moves with CAST TIMES such as Mantras, Staff 3, ect. do not leave you totally helpless if you’re properly equipped. Staff 2 & 4 (Phase Retreat/Chaos Armor), F1-4 Shatters & Blink can still be used without breaking the cast (Shatter 4, Distortion, is great for defense. You can always pop Chaos Armor (Staff 4) under any circumstances (Revives, communing with a Skillpoint)

• Shatters 1 (Mind Wrack for damage) & 2 (Cry of Frustration for confusion) are generally OFFENSIVE. Shatters 3(Diversion for Daze) & 4 (Distortion for… uh, Distortion) are more useful DEFENSIVELY

• Popping Diversion (Shatter 3) for the daze with 3 clones will still only give 1 second of daze. To get 3 seconds, try and place your Clones/Phantasms at different distances, so that they run and shatter on the target at different intervals. iWarden and iWarlock are great for this as they tend to be stationary.

- The “i” in iSwordsman, iWarlock, iBerzerker is short for “Illusion” … Believe it or not some people do not know this.

Merged! Glad to know some mesmers are on the same page.

Bump’d, because the thread is still useful, relevant, and awesome.

I’m bumping this thread, because there are a lot of mesmer tricks we don’t know off, and the fact it is a part of the common readed “All mesmer’s guide”. It deserves more content after all patches; I don’t want to make a new thread for it.

Please add more hints and tips

some i got from reddit (here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1124ja/10_things_you_didnt_know_about_your_mesmer/)

I don’t know sure if everything is still working, lets find out.

1. portal entrance is actually a glamour field; so if you trait right (like blind on glamourfields) you can get blind for 60sec up.
2. Gs skill 4 (iberserker) doesn’t need LoS, it only needs range
3. The Phantasmal Defender utility skill does not mention that its buff – applying a 50% damage absorption – affects up to 5 allies in a 600-unit range around the Defender. Yes, a party-wide 50% damage reduction depending on positioning. Did I mention it’s given bonus health from Signet of Illusions?
4. The Prestige is a blast finisher.
5. If you blink onto the door of a keep you own you’ll automatically go through the door, making it much more feasible to escape / get through a mob that’s on your gate. (still true??)
6. if you shoot (pistol 5) through a lightfield, you will cleanse conditions ^^
7. portal and blink-stomps!!

(english not my mainlanguage )

Spatial surge locking on targets is handy to keep an eye on where someone might be hiding, if they don’t break target with stealth (for example around the clocktower on khylo).

When running from a mini zerg cast sword 3 as you run, hold the leap for a second then use it as the chaser get on top of you. Swap place and run the other way. People get fool by it all the time.
Phase retreat does not require los, you can target someone behind you and blink forward.
drop 3 clones right close to each other then stand right inside them. Anyone who attacks you are either have to be prepared to eat a full shatter in the face or get a crap load of condis from killing them all depends on your build.

The most obvious thing I see mes not do is use their illusions defensively. Standing behind them can block single target attacks/missiles. Mes with IP can use diversion mid res to interrupt a stomp without having to stop ressing. The only other big thing I see is people not realizing that you can use most insta cast skill mid channel. So when you try to MI, channel a mantra, or heal… blink/phase retreat mid cast as necessary. Strangely enough you can’t decoy mid cast. Technically it should fit the bill but idk. I’m assuming it’s the stealth effect that cause it to interrupt. Anyway do those things.

Phase retreat blinks are probably my favorite tricks. Whether its targeting the enemy and blinking forward to run away, or spots like blinking into mid on khylo. I do not think I will ever be able to drop staff because of the amazing utility that one skill has.

• People often overlook the fact that Spacial Surge (GS1) and Confuse Ray(Scepter 3) are piecing lazers. They both hit up to 3 targets and have a small aoe at the point of impact, hitting enemies in melee range next to the target.

• You can use Phase Retreat (Staff 2) in the middle of Ether Feast to gain an extra clone to heal from.

• You can summon a clone out of range and Blink into range before the cast finishes.

• There are more powerful Mesmer builds than are posted on the forums, so explore!

• Using Focus Pull, Mantra Daze, Phantasm Summons, Illusionary Leap, and anything else that doesnt do direct damage will not break stealth.