Guild Wars 2

In contrast with the guy above, Marauder is in fact fairly useless for what you are asking about (might be good in WvW idk I don’t play that mode) Mesmer already has fairly high base health and a lot of active mitigation to help you stay alive. If you want additional vit its much easier to just pick up a valk ring or two instead of crafting an entire marauder set.

As for Commander, yes it is very useful for raiding. The problem you hit is that you can’t get boon duration off runes since you wanna use Chrono runes for the quickness on wells. What you stand to gain is the boon duration off the armour. Your aim is to hit 100% boon duration (actually slightly less but not too important for present purposes) to pump out quickness to your team. With full commander armour and the necklace from story achieves you will hit ~18% boon duration. You get an additional 30% from food (48%) and if you group with a rev you will hit 98% which is enough, commander weapons are not needed if you run with a revenant.

Without a rev you can still get to 100% but you will have to run the 33% Sigil of Concentration. With Commander armour, weapons and 2 exotic commander trinkets with plat doubloons in them you will reach enough boon duration to hit 100% (including 30% from food and 33% from the sigil)

For those reasons its pretty useful in raids (the toughness also means you dont need extra rings to tank some fights)

As for actual damage and to answer the question it really doesn’t matter that much because mesmer dps is so bad, from my testing with the tank build in commander gear you are gonna hit 7-8k dps with normal buffs, with zerk and a dps build you will hit 10-11k (check this post for a good outline of relative dmg between classes https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4ft01q/qt_dps_benchmarkstests_for_all_classes/)

So yes you lose a bit of damage, no it is not a lot cus mesmer dps is already so bad however you get the ability to max out boon duration. In fractals/dungeons this doesn’t really matter that much, for raids it does. If you are serious about raids I’d get commander, if not, get zerk. Zerk is useful since you can use it on other cloth classes, commanders is pretty niche for mesmer raiding.

Honestly a solution that would go a long way to combat this problem would be making the end merchant accessible. I know I certainly afk in DS before because I don’t really need anything from there except to talk to that guy.

Another solution might be to look at the scaling to be able to complete it with less people, giving players the ability to kick is just gonna be abused as it is in any other game (including this one with the party kick system). Would be pretty bad to spent 1.5hrs in the event only to have some griefers kick you before you can collect rewards

It’s shocking aura that gets put on the ele after finishing the air overload

Not surprising, the trait never seems to work when you get transformed. For example it doesn’t work during path 3 AC once you turn into ghosts

He is not too bad, it just requires a bit of coordination. I had 2 people rq a PuG last night on this boss fight. But we managed to 3 man him. You just need to fall into a rhythm, we had the squishiest person running up the top dropping lava with the other 2 of us down the bottom. Keep kiting him in a clockwise direction so you are always ready to drop more lava on him when the flame shield goes away. Dodge bombs backwards, or stay at max range and they wont even hit you. The shockwave thing can be partially dodged but even if you dont it doesnt 1 hit kill.

If someone goes down and you cannot res without risking yourself, better to just let them die otherwise people keep going down dying trying to res.

There is a cond/prec/tough set, called Rabid. It can’t be crafted but you can get it from dungeons or karma vendors in orr
There is also Rampager which is prec/cond/power which is craftable and comes from like 5 dungeons (including CoF)