Guild Wars 2

I am having a nightmare fighting mesmers/chronos with my reaper. What do you do to win 1v1 against them in WvW?

The trick to fighting any mesmer is knowing exactly when to dodge. Most of their burst comes from shatters. This actually applies to any profession fighting them. If you can negate their burst, you’ll force them to run away or stealth. Be ready to CC or dodge them as soon as they reappear. You can also pop a CD and try to burst them away, but keep in mind that they can shatter and summon clones while stealthed. Learn to identify clones from the real mesmer. It’ll take a lot of practice.

If you’re caught in a moa, skill 5 is an evade, and 4 is AoE weakness. If hit by GW, you’re kittened unless in shroud and stability is off CD. If not, you’ll take a LOT of damage. Note that they can cast these elites twice. You’ll know if they’ll cast it a second time by seeing a some continuum thingie (forgot the name) appear by the mesmer before or while they’re casting an elite. This is the Chronomancer’s F5 skill, Continuum Split.

In the end, dodging and identifying the real mesmer is key. Mesmer defences are on fairly long CDs, but can be cast twice due to F5.

One last thing, unless they’re running the Inspiration tree, they have also no condi cleanse. Bomb them! Better yet, if they are condi themselves, send their bomb back to them! Just be careful to make sure you send the bomb to the real mesmer!

the easiest way to figure them out is to play one, once you learn where the real one will be given what abilities they used it will make it a thousand times easier to spot them, because you know how their skills work and where they will end up

Land Staff 5 and Staff 3, maybe use #2 or #3 on scepter if you fancy, then leave. They should die from that.

I mainly smash buttons and hope that mesmer is bad. If you play necro you really can’t outplay good mesmer no matter how good you are. Necro is just too simple class.

It being simple isn’t going to stop you from beating them. Like everyone said, find the real one and focus him. Watch for when the clones all run at you because incoming shatter, stealth is annoying but it makes it obvious which one is real when he reappears.

save your shroud for their burst. if you see him and went stealth get ready with dodge or shroud as he will try to immobilize you and shatter
if he miss his shatter you will have 8 sec for his semi-burst and 15 sec for another full burst. so save dodges
use rise to negate dmg when you see 3 clones up
use chill as much as possible as they hate it
if you condi you shouldnt have much problem
if you power than use the above

messiah.1908:

save your shroud for their burst. if you see him and went stealth get ready with dodge or shroud as he will try to immobilize you and shatter
if he miss his shatter you will have 8 sec for his semi-burst and 15 sec for another full burst. so save dodges
use rise to negate dmg when you see 3 clones up
use chill as much as possible as they hate it
if you condi you shouldnt have much problem
if you power than use the above

Thanks for this. I think the main point is to calm down and watch what they are doing instead of trying to dump a spike on them.

Junkpile.7439:

I mainly smash buttons and hope that mesmer is bad. If you play necro you really can’t outplay good mesmer no matter how good you are. Necro is just too simple class.

That’s completely unhelpful. If you smash buttons against anyone you should lose ( in a good game balance at least). The main thing with mesmers is to play smart and don’t just charge in. A lot of the time it’s better to be on the safe side and stay close to max range. If you can apply conditions to them and kite them it becomes a lot easier. Mind you, you don’t have to be a full condition build to accomplish anything, i always build as a hybrid and it works. Keep up a steady stream of damage, know which attacks to dodge, soak and which ones you can eat ( usually conditions so you can transfer them back) and finally try to figure out where they’ll be going in stealth.

If you build for pure damage, most mesmers will destroy you. A good threshold, in my opinion, for defenses are around 2750 armor and 24k hp. I run this for roaming and can last a long time.

You’re running power or condi, Svarty?

Mesmers painfully lack condi clear. You’ll want to hit-and-run. Load them with condis and GTFO. Let them stealth and blur and blink around in agony while your condis tick on them.

Play condi Rabid/Carrion/Dire and they lose, no skill needed. Better defense and better damage than berserker/valk. You can eat shatters and kill them during distortion with mass application.

As a power build in WvW, you’re often not going to beat a good chrono. Too much distortion/block effects and huge bursts/kiting can make the build almost unstoppable when played right. Basically just going tank is the way to not die, but won’t really kill them, either.

Good Mesmers are a lot like good Thieves and Engineers. When they get to a certain skill ceiling, they become almost unbeatable.

That’s not to say they are unbeatable, just that the tools these professions have access to make them extremely difficult to beat if they’re skilled enough to use them all to their maximum potential.

Mesmers are also one of the natural counters to Necromancer due to a lot of low cooldown skills, the ability to force you in to dropping target on them constantly, fast attacks and insta-CC’s. All things that can be a huge problem for Necro’s to deal with.

If the Mesmer is glassy, dodging their burst is the best way put them on the defensive. Mesmers are not a sustained damage profession, they’re spike damage. They rely on hammering through your health in a split second which can be devastating if you don’t know what to look out for. Fortunately, this also means that they put a lot of skills on cooldown if they miss their burst. A lot of the time you’ll see them start with a greatsword throwing type animation followed by a phantasm coming at you from the right or left side. Dodge this as those skills and what they can follow it up with will deal massive damage.

If they’re condition, you shouldn’t have much trouble as a Necromancer. Condition Mesmers often have poor condition management and Necromancers are the masters of returning to sender.

Over all, practice makes perfect. Condition Mesmers shouldn’t be much of an issue for you as long as you have at least a few transfers ready which shouldn’t be difficult. And power based Mesmers are all about dodging that lockdown. Don’t tank their burst and make them waste their key skills to send them running.

Many good tips here.
How about a video to see you through =D

the trick is to equip the rise shout.
oh and don’t play power reaper because it is terrible/outclasses by almost every other power build

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Mesmers are also one of the natural counters to Necromancer

It actually is, and pretty much always was, exactly the other way around. Since HoT even moreso. And if you as a Mesmer happen to encounter two Reapers at once (doesn’t matter if teamfight or not), you’re dead before you can say “oh sh…”. Unless you quickly hightail out of there.

IF I want to have a chance to beat a Reaper in any fight, I need to seriously outplay them.

Saturn.6591:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Mesmers are also one of the natural counters to Necromancer

It actually is, and pretty much always was, exactly the other way around. Since HoT even moreso. And if you as a Mesmer happen to encounter two Reapers at once (doesn’t matter if teamfight or not), you’re dead before you can say “oh sh…”. Unless you quickly hightail out of there.

IF I want to have a chance to beat a Reaper in any fight, I need to seriously outplay them.

Then you’re not playing Mesmer right.

Reaper has a much easier time with Mesmer because it has good access to stability, cleave, Chill and Death’s Charge can really help with sticking on top of them.

Core Necromancer however is far too slow with poor cleave and no way to avoid Mesmers literally spammable insta-CC’s with Mantras on top of all of Necro’s huge cast times (most skills are 1second +).

I’m not going to take all the variables in to consideration or this will become a debate but the only time Mesmer should have trouble with Necromancer is if the Necromancer is condition. Even then, Mesmer can have access to quite good condition removal just that a lot choose not to.

High cast times, no blocks or invulnerability, no way to disengage, high cooldown skills versus the total opposite. Low cast times, lots of blocks and invulnerability and lots of ways to disengage.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Saturn.6591:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Mesmers are also one of the natural counters to Necromancer

It actually is, and pretty much always was, exactly the other way around. Since HoT even moreso. And if you as a Mesmer happen to encounter two Reapers at once (doesn’t matter if teamfight or not), you’re dead before you can say “oh sh…”. Unless you quickly hightail out of there.

IF I want to have a chance to beat a Reaper in any fight, I need to seriously outplay them.

Then you’re not playing Mesmer right.

Reaper has a much easier time with Mesmer because it has good access to stability, cleave, Chill and Death’s Charge can really help with sticking on top of them.

Core Necromancer however is far too slow with poor cleave and no way to avoid Mesmers literally spammable insta-CC’s with Mantras on top of all of Necro’s huge cast times (most skills are 1second +).

I’m not going to take all the variables in to consideration or this will become a debate but the only time Mesmer should have trouble with Necromancer is if the Necromancer is condition. Even then, Mesmer can have access to quite good condition removal just that a lot choose not to.

High cast times, no blocks or invulnerability, no way to disengage, high cooldown skills versus the total opposite. Low cast times, lots of blocks and invulnerability and lots of ways to disengage.

Every necro is “condition” and the ones that aren’t, aren’t worth worrying about.

Junkpile.7439:

I mainly smash buttons and hope that mesmer is bad. If you play necro you really can’t outplay good mesmer no matter how good you are. Necro is just too simple class.

You know what’s so funny? I just left the mesmer forum like 30 seconds ago, where they are talking about how mesmers just might as well give up vs necromancers lol

Real mesmer has all the buffs. I hit tab until the target has buffs. Real mesmer dodges and leaves clones.

I do shroud 4 and 5 when I have no idea where the real mesmer is.

I keep life force fully filled. If mesmer, or thief, hits suddenly, is f1 the panic button and start of the fight. Works with the binding root + longbow ranger too.

I run aggressively after and around the real mesmer with dagger, making the mesmer to loose track of my char. I use dagger/ + axe/ because I always aggressively chase.

Axe 2 channels through invisibility. But I don’t know how shroud 4 and 5 works.

Rym.1469:

Land Staff 5 and Staff 3, maybe use #2 or #3 on scepter if you fancy, then leave. They should die from that.

I tried that, it doesn’t do much.

You never kill good mesmers they have way more survivability and damage avoiding skills + mobility and burst that is impossible to outlast with necro. Less skilled or terrible mesmers yes they can die but other than that its insta loss for necro or mesmer just goes away if kitten happens.

Dodge Echo of Time and the Illusionary Leap Immob as top priority, use Putrid Mark and Plague Signet on clones instead of the actual Mesmer, save Consume Conditions for after they blow decent cooldowns on you for a condi-bomb, and maintain reasonable distance. The effectiveness of the entire build comes down to their ability to generate clones and shatter on you, which is heavily reliant on both melee range and Echo of Time. If you can mitigate both of those things, then you gain a lot of additional breathing room to deal with them.

I’ll clear up one myth right now: Mesmers have condi cleanse. It’s through shatter. I main Mesmer and if I’m up against a Necro I can play in a way that let’s me shatter 12 times in a row with continuum split.

So no, dropping a few conditions and then assume “that will kill them” or that they will “jump around in agony” is wrong, I can cleanse everything you throw at me just by spamming shatters if I need to and the conditions will be cleansed regardless of your dodging.

I’d say in general you’re gonna have a really hard time but picking the real Mesmer is not your main prob. If you’re running the cookiecutter build most of your stuff is aoe anyway which will take care of the clones for you. Your main problem is that you’re a sitting duck with no defense or much cc (you have 3 in total iirc). Not only that but waiting until you’re low to go into shroud = bad idea, that’s pretty much my queue to go ahead and Moa you and laugh at how surprised you seem that your shroud didn’t save you.

Anyway, point is that you can’t beat a good Mesmer 1v1 (at least not with the standard build) and that is not your purpose anyway.

Crowley.8761:

Anyway, point is that you can’t beat a good Mesmer 1v1 (at least not with the standard build) and that is not your purpose anyway.

Imo the biggest culprit here is moa. A decent mesmer will always land that skill, dodging it as necro would be incredibly lucky. So that will either kill you right away or force you off point.

Other than that, the only way to stand a fair chance is by sustaining yourself by hitting clones. So Locust Swarm/Signet, traited wells, traited shouts etc.

Fighting Mesmers:
It’s very difficult to fight mesmers as a Reaper but here are a few tips.

STEP 1: TURN OFF YOUR AUTO-ATTACK. Learn to start pressing your auto-attack yourself. This will make sure you’re not taking unnecessary damage from confusion.

- If they burst you, transfer conditions to their phantasms. It’s alot faster than transfering it to them.

- Be Patient but quick to act. They’ve got so many skills do go invulnerable so you have to really pay attention to your opportunities. There’s a frame before they go into Blurred Frenzy that you can use to your advantage and when they finish blurred frenzy, you have to wait an extra millisecond to hit them because the evade frame lasts a tiny bit longer than the animation.

- And when they decide to block, Fear them if you’re running Soul Marks in Soul Reaping, but if you’re running the meta build then Warhorn is better for getting through blocks.

- Land CC on them and expect them to use Distortion, if they don’t immediately distort, then punish them for that.

- If you go into deathshroud, make sure you have a couple of dodges handy or that you can get yourself away from line of sight because, they will probably immob you and moa you.

- Placing a fear mark on yourself when the Mesmer uses illusionary Leap. This will either make them leap into a feared clone or make them leap into a fear mark.

- Always dodge when their block is about to end. Their block (a pink bubble around the mesmer) lasts for 2seconds and creates a clone if they have perfect line of sight or if you don’t dodge or if they aren’t blinded. So, if you dodge right at the end of it, you will prevent the clone creation. This apparently reduces a lot of their dps.

- Always keep in mind what Signets are active on the mesmer. If the mesmer has 2 signets on their health bar, it means they haven’t used Moa yet and they haven’t used Signet of Illusions yet. Once they’ve used Signet of illusions AND their Continuum split, you can them easily condi bomb them.

- If you ever decide that you want to use Spectral Wall. it’s actually quite fun to use against a mesmer. If a mesmer approaches you with staff, just place the spectral wall in between you and the mesmers clones, the mesmers clones will continually bounce off the spectral wall, allowing you to condi bomb them. Just make sure to also watch what the mesmer is doing as well so that you can prevent all the other things I mentioned above. Condi bombing the clones, will obviously prevent a lot the effects that the mesmer wishes to execute.