Guild Wars 2

Edit: Conceded and reverted to full condi but still trying out revenant runes with traited mirror.http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAreWlsnhy0YRawRNwtGLEHlZAkZLU9l2phKao9QlGA-TJxHABB8EAOqMw67PAwpAAA
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Edit: oops, wrong amulet in the link.

So I decided to try a cele build because I was getting bored and landed on this:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAreWlsnhy0YRawRNwtGLEHlZAkALU9luphKaK8QlGA-TJxHABB8EAWf/BAOFAFVGAA

I tried Inspiration instead of Illusions, but the damage pressure is just not good enough without confusion and torment on shatter and I didn’t find I needed the survivability boost from Inspiration.

I tried Domination, but I found Chaos gave a more rounded approach and personally I wanted to use traited mirror heal with Revenant runes for the 2s resistance on heal and it works surprisingly well vs conditions. Bountiful Disillusionment gives that almighty 5s resistance on F5 amongst all the stability and other boons.

I’m still trying to figure out what I want to achieve with this build – it’s a bit of a brawler with good cc but lacks enough burst damage to focus and down enemies fast, and doesn’t have quite enough in terms of defence to be a dedicated bunker.

I know I should take Time Warp as the elite, but enjoy mass invis more – to save allies from stomps and so on.

Slow sources are of course aoe F3, shield 5, chaos storm, iAvengers and F5 revert (master of fragmentation) which boosts the crit chance to increase damage on things like scepter 3.

The only reason I took MoResolve is for clutch condi removal – but I could swap it for null field.

Anyway as said, I don’t quite know what I’m trying to achieve with this – just throwing together things I find fun like traited mirror with revenant runes and things like that and seeing what I can make of it. Maybe cele isn’t the best way to go – maybe I should go all in with Sinister, but I don’t fancy playing full glass with this.

Any ideas/advice would be welcome – even just say drop cele and use something else! xD

There are 2 problems in mesmer which in my opinion prevents celestial:

• bad healing power scaling of inspiration
• shattered strength and MtD competing

If those 2 were fixed, I really think a cele chaos/insp/illusion or insp/illusion/chrono would work perfect.

What Silverkey said.

I think the best way to approach a Cele-ish playstyle on Mesmer would be to grab Vigilant or Wanderer armour on a bunker build. I really liked bunkering with Chaos/Insp/Chrono during the betas. At the time, I used Knight’s/Crusader’s, but if I did it now I’d probably use Vigilant instead.

I’m undecided about which runes work best. I feel like Dolyak or Earth are probably the best choices for pure survivability, but Guardian is tempting.

Of course, the build you posted is much more of a hybrid power/condition build than a Cele bunker. So that one’s easy. Suck it up and go glass with Viper Amulet and Berzerker runes. Rely on your active defences to survive. Or go Rabid instead of Viper if you really don’t want to be glassy.

Yeah, thanks guys I’m going to have to drop the cele amulet.

I just had an endless (and I do mean endless in that we both had to step back after 10 minutes of not finishing each other off) 1v1 against a decent mesmer also trying a weird build on an empty hotjoin map – while I managed to stay alive without properly knowing what I was doing in terms of the build and dish out a reasonable amount of damage, it was just… meh… well it didn’t do anything exceptionally well.

I really want to keep the revenant runes because that resistance on mirror is pretty sweet, but I’ll probably go either hybrid or full condition with one of the amulets and deal with being glass. Not interested in bunkering though.

I tried heaps of variations of this in the beta and found a couple of things: GS+staff was consistently better ( :[ ) and carrion is probably just better than cele.

I believe celestial can definitely work on mesmer in all levels of soloq and even low to mid tier team play (high end it won’t work). This assumes the right build of course.

Before 6/23 I played a celestial utility build using sc/f-staff that worked decent. After 6/23 it only got better. Going chaos/insp/ill worked really well for me. This is what I use:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNArdWl0nhS1YtawRNwtGL9G05I6QrNDwFyI6N64KA-TZRHwADOEAFeCAc2fAwJA4YZAA

As others mentioned, celestial poses a problem for us because we lack good team healing utility. The tenets of celestial were already mentioned but I’ll echo them here. It must have

• Decent damage (power/condi)
• Decent ways to take advantage of healing power
• Decent ability to stack might

In this build I mentioned, power/condition damage is decent. This increases of course with might. Healing power is primarily utilized by perma regen and power return, which actually scales decently. While most despise it, I use illusionary inspiration which not only gives my team good regen uptime, it passively shares the gobs of boons I have semi-frequently. I play around the disadvantages, have just gotten used to looking for the signet animation when I cast a phantasm. These sources of healing are enough for me to justify the healing power investment of celestial. It gets better if you use ether feast or restorative illusions.

Now to the might. I struggled a lot with MtD vs shattered strength. I was on the latter for a long time and doing well but MtD staring me in the face 2 slots down was tearing at me. I finally went with MtD. To solve the might problem, I went with battle sigils on each weapon set. That, with BD and strength runes can easily keep 8-10 might stacks on yourself. Though it’s only two sources, the might lasts a very long time, especially with a good MW cadence. While those numbers aren’t amazing, it’s enough for me to justify. It provides a base from which growth is inevitable as you receive splashes of might from others in active fights. With any coordinated team able to share might from their builds, this build just gets stronger and stronger.

My build uses focus for the reflects, control and mobility. The reflects are of course situational but with all these DH’s running around it’s very nice. That said, it can be played with another OH weapon of choice and restorative illusions can be taken instead.

The build is very strong in both dueling and team play. I’m not saying it’s the end all/be all answer here, but it’s certainly something that can and does work in most PvP scenarios.

Finally, OP – I tried adapting my build to chronomancer in a similar fashion as your build using chaos/ill/chrono, sc/sh-staff. Here’s what I ended up with after BWE3:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAreWncfClqh1qB2fCEgilejyMAugMqeUX1XF916oVA-TZRGwAAOBAHOEAJeCAg2fYZZAA

It works rather well. I could sustain about as long as the other build, simply due to the shield block. Inspiration was sorely missed and there are a couple other pros/cons. To be honest though, I didn’t notice a big improvement from the other and would say they are close to even.

Countless played a cele Mesmer build that didn’t have any might stacking at all, but instead a ton of vuln uptime so his damage was still really good.

nearlight.3064:

Countless played a cele Mesmer build that didn’t have any might stacking at all, but instead a ton of vuln uptime so his damage was still really good.

True, but ultimately he decided on carrion for that build I believe.

I did play a celestial build for some time before HoT. It was decent. The might stacking was done by interrupts (chaotic interruption). The main problem was the fact that it was mantra-heavy and mantras are quite annoying without stability since you don’t take bountiful disillusionment. So I did run the stab mantra which was also my stunbreak. But this mantra is just awful…

This was what I was running on my mesmer in WvW before HoT. But it’s kinda hard to upgrade to Chrono.

I’m still experimenting with Chrono hybrid builds and so far Duel/Illu/Chrono and Dom/Illu/Chrono with a mix of Viper/Sinister/Zerker are my favourites. Haven’t tried with celestial gear yet, but I have some doubts due the lack of might on the non-Domination one.

:o

Thanks for all the replies – a lot of food for thought and a lot of stuff to experiment with.

Yeah MtD vs Shattered Strength is a pain – the 3 stacks from Bountiful Disillusionment on F1 is not enough on its own so I suppose I should use Battle sigils and strength or hoelbrak runes.

I might not give up on it yet after all.

Curunen.8729:

:o

Thanks for all the replies – a lot of food for thought and a lot of stuff to experiment with.

Yeah MtD vs Shattered Strength is a pain – the 3 stacks from Bountiful Disillusionment on F1 is not enough on its own so I suppose I should use Battle sigils and strength or hoelbrak runes.

I might not give up on it yet after all.

You Might not give up

Silverkey.2078:

Curunen.8729:

:o

Thanks for all the replies – a lot of food for thought and a lot of stuff to experiment with.

Yeah MtD vs Shattered Strength is a pain – the 3 stacks from Bountiful Disillusionment on F1 is not enough on its own so I suppose I should use Battle sigils and strength or hoelbrak runes.

I might not give up on it yet after all.

You Might not give up

lol, totally unintended. xD

Hmm I tried putting a random cele build together last night and it was an abject failure.

I think it’d work better with base mesmer though, just because its so hard to take boosts to healing, condition damage pressure, and mightstacking AND chronomancer all in one build for various reasons. Its similar as to how cele reaper eats kitten compared to cele necro, because they lose the synergies needed to abuse cele by dropping a traitline for their elite spec.

As of now I think chronomancer works best as either an ironic tank build, or the same burst build we’ve been pigeonholed into for all these years haha.

This was my WvW build before HoT. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQRAra8fnsICFohlpBOqBcrhlXDysDLbElVo3RDNA585A-TFCEABTcEAEUJImq/olyPj3foP9DA8AAe4kAEAABYn1ZdWnBDdoDdoDdotzhuzhuzdWKgFVGB-w But then Anet removed guard stacks and destroyed my cele build. It still works but without 2000 health, 250 power and condition.