Ok, so. I would recommend reading the link maha provided~
Conditions are not worth going for with Mesmer in PvE. To be somewhat effective with conditions, you need to be reliably getting full stacks of bleeding. The best way of getting bleeding is Sharper Images + Phantasmal Duelist + Phantasmal Fury, which you don’t even have— but even this can’t get 25 stacks of bleeding easily. Moreover, in a party, your high damage stacks are going to get overwritten by your teammates stacks, removing your main source of damage. This is why conditions work somewhat well in solo settings for classes that can easily cap bleeding— this class is not one of them.
You have Signet of Illusions to boost clone health, which works directly against the V in Chaos, where you want your clones to die. The 5 in Chaos is only ever really good if you have a lot of ways of pumping out clones quickly— with Deceptive Evasion for example. This can be useful to apply condition pressure in PvP, but in dungeons, the few random conditions you get from clone death are not going to hurt anything.
Finally, the Greatsword is not a condition weapon at all— but it’s also not a good power weapon for dungeons. Offhand pistol is better suited for both sorts of builds, and offhand sword is best for power.
In summary: conditions are bad in PvE, and you shouldn’t use them. But this build is not a particularly good example of a condition build either, because of the lack of weapons/traits to actually apply high amounts of conditions.
Alright, I see your point.
I could swap around Dueling’s IV for Phantasmal fury, which I had been thinking about.
I understand your points, and the purpose of this build is not to create an optimal build, just a viable or at the very least decently working build.
It’s not supposed to rely on conditions, it’s supposed to rely primarily on high crit phantasms, backed up by a minor condition source.
I’ve always wanted to kind of try to work something out like this.
Do you think, it’s not possible at all to create a hybrid like this?
From what I see, Anet’s “play the game the way you want” philosophy really does not work out very well; there’s, at least for the mesmer class, a pre-set path, and everything else is generally not recommended, at least for PvE.
Back to my build; You say, bleeds (moreso, a stack of 25) is the most reliable way of getting condition damage. Are any other sources of conditions, not worth getting at all? Torment, confusion, poison, fire.
The current signet advice, involving signet of illusions, is a helpful pointer.
I definitely hadn’t thought of that myself. So thanks for that.
I’ll see if I can work something out for myself in the future involving a hybrid build (I’m aware the GS in PvE content, where you stack up with other people for buffs, condition removal, etc. is not ideal, mostly due to it’s distance req. I’ve thought of switching to an all different weaponset, involving a staff primarily. But this would probably ask for an all different build.)
Last, but not least; are you able to recommend some primarily high power crit builds for me? I’d prefer to see a couple different ones, just to see which one I may like the most.
Thanks again for all your information!
~ Love, Lexxy
I have a rampager/celestial set I sometimes use for that, just for feels. Here’s hoping it’ll be a more permanent set to be worn sometime in the future.
