Well, no matter what weapon you’re using you’ll mostly be doing your damage by spawning phantasms, shattering, and autoattacking. What really changes between weapons is how you use your abilities to survive, which for us is highly dependent on positioning. We have a lot of versatility in our utilities, but I’d say most of them are more significant in pvp than in pve.
So we are versatile, but not in the same way as an elementalist or engineer.
You can test it yourself on the thief npc in the heart of the mists. She uses the player version of dagger storm and iirc feedback doesn’t cause her to take damage.
“Because if it is simply their damage they inflict that would be negligible.”
That is what it does, and for clones it is indeed negligible. That trait is a relic of an earlier beta build when clones did damage, but now it’s functionally a carbon copy of phantasmal strength.
Clones don’t deal damage. They can inflict conditions though (staff and sword clones, and on crits with the sharper images trait). All clone attacks are single target, but staff clones attacks will bounce once. The #1 and #2 shatters are aoe and #3 is single target unless traited.
power = increases direct damage (everything that’s not a condition, eg mind wrack)
condition damage = increases damage that conditions do (eg, confusion from cry of frustration)
precision = chance for direct damage to crit (eg, mind wrack)
crit damage = how much extra damage a crit will cause
Trahearne, a necromancer powerful enough to summon a dozen flesh golems at once but gets downed by a zombie in 1vs1 combat >.< Maybe Jennah is his sister.
“Since this is the only weapon left that is somehow useable as Mesmer” um… no, not at all.
“The developers showed here that they havent understood simples Physical rules” It’s a beam of magic shooting out from a sword. physics has nothing to do with it.
Anyway, just think of it as bonus damage for when your target is too far away to give yourself stacks might with mirror blade. If they did remove it we would probably lose damage overall anyway.
@ShadowPuppet to clarify, I’m using the word inefficient deliberately instead of something like slow because I meant it in terms of farming/powergaming. If kill speed parity is a major concern for someone then the mesmer probably isn’t the class they want to play. I do not mean that mesmers are bad at pve (DEs aside), or that this is something that I’m concerned about.
The mesmer is not an efficient pve class, which is probably why most people don’t stick with it. You can kill things, but it’s going to be slower than other classes thanks to the setup time of phantasms and shatters. You can survive quite well (even when geared as a glass cannon), but it takes a practice and finesse to make it happen. We’re the slowest class outside of combat afaik.
The only real reason to play a mesmer in pve is for fun. Although you’re not as efficient as other classes, you can triumph in nearly any situation with skillful use of the abilities at your disposal. Combat isn’t as repetitive as with other classes, and it’s a good choice if you like to push your limits. It does get better once you get master traits, but if you feel you’ve given the class a fair shot and you’re still not enjoying it may be best just to play something else.
Well, the first trait in illusions is pretty much mandatory. Beyond that, it depends on how you want to play and what weapons you use. Respecs are cheap, and unlike some other classes we have a lot of viable options.
Deceptive evasion from dueling is pretty popular, and also gets you critical infusion+sharper images along the way.
Crippling dissipation from domination is fantastic when soloing.
The weapon cooldown traits are very useful, particulary for the focus, greatsword, and phantasm heavy playstyles.
Illusionary elasticity is very nice for the staff.
Illusionary persona and mental torment are great if you shatter a lot.
It’s actually not a stun breaker. You can use it while stunned, etc., but the effect still lingers after you teleport.
Right, wiki says it’s not even flagged as stunbreaker. But it behaves like Blink or Mirror images (which are flagged so). You can successfully cast it, but are still 1+s unable to move or use non-instant spells.
It’s just because it’s instant cast. All instant cast spells can be used while stunned.
Well, what I usually do is basically this:
Grab domination V, dueling X, and illusionist’s celerity.
Pick whatever weapons you want (I recommend against scepter, torch, and pistol though).
Pick up weapon cooldown traits (I only get these when using gs, sword/sword, or /focus but ymmv).
Pick up damage increasing traits with whatever points are leftover.
Just do what other people do and don’t use the scepter. The ability to overwrite a phantom with a clone on demand is actually pretty handy on the sword, staff, and gs.
It really helps to opening with a clone/phantasm and then getting a second one out quickly, you’ll have trouble losing aggro once you grab it. With the gs in particular it helps to open with the berserker rather than mirror blade as you’ll pick up aggro in the time between the blade hitting and the clone spawning.
The consensus seems to be that power builds put out more dps than condition builds for pretty much all professions (I think even for necros the dagger is their highest dps weapon). However, for the pve mesmer imo it’s better to pick your weapons first based on what utility you want out of them and then gear around your playstyle ( if you rely on your staff clones then bring condition damage, if you use your staff as a backup weapon to your greatsword you should probably stack power, etc).
note: for dynamic events conditions are simply not very viable as mobs die too quickly and champions easily hit the condition stack limit.
The damage output is fairly average, and it has its weaknesses (backloaded, nullified by aoe, poor against objects, not very bursty, etc). The strong point of a mesmer is its survivability (don’t read this as the ability to take hits though, we’re kind of like agility tanks). It’s a fun class with a lot of neat tricks, and if you don’t mind trading efficiency for style (in pve) I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.
Apparently they’re planning to put in a token system to let you pick a reward a la gw1. Still, I couldn’t help imagining the npcs saying “Hey, thanks for saving us! Since you’re not doing anything anymore, you could throw this junk away on your way out?”
Ah you are correct, confusion damage is calculated differently in spvp vs pve/WvW. I believe I’m still correct about why they’re not using the system to balance skills differently though.
My confusion is, why with their system of being able to balance pve and pvp separately, they wouldn’t just make this a pvp change, but decided to make it a pve change as well.
That system from gw1 isn’t in gw2 because they don’t want players to have to learn two different sets of “rules.” Yet.
That would be unfair, right? Well so is the fact of not being able to play the way I want with the profession and weapon I chose.
You’re wrong. Your opponents are people not mobs. If you play like a mob and don’t adjust to what your opponent brings to the field you deserve to lose. As others have pointed out, the ability you’re complaining about isn’t even very powerful but you’re getting stuck because you’re not dealing with it.
These two classes are very op, even in WvW, they are worse, either perma stealth + 1 shots, or millions of clones + 1 shots, how these classes made it out of beta is astonishing
Perma stealth is not possible, if for no other reason than the revealed effect.
If a mesmer can 1 shot you, you’re doing something horribly wrong.
In pve, not viable in the slightest. Enemies simply won’t trigger it frequently enough and it’s extremely difficult to maintain a significant number of stacks. In pve it’s probably the weakest condition.
In pvp it depends on your opponent. If they don’t know what they’re doing players will kill themselves with things like unload rather quickly. If they do know they’ll either wait a few seconds for the stacks to drop to trivial levels, use a condition removal, etc. Like Embolism said, it’s not a primary damage source.
Viable? Yes. You can solo to 80 and in orr, etc. You’ll be slower at clearing trash mobs than other classes (makes some of the story missions pretty hard, especially early on), you won’t be able to do much against enemies that spam aoe (mostly just applies to specific dungeon and dynamic event bosses), and you’ll have trouble tagging mobs in dynamic events. On the other hand, once you get used to the class you’ll find that you only die when you screw up.
Fun? Depends on what you like. It’s very different from playing any of the other classes. You kind of just have to try it and see.
and I can still get gold medals in DEs without any trouble.
The issue that people complain about with DEs isn’t getting gold metals, it’s getting the xp and loot from the mobs themselves. The issue with the nerf isn’t that it breaks us in pve, it’s that it weakens us where we were already weak and doesn’t impact us where people think we’re too strong. It’s a ‘wtf?’ nerf.
Frizz, how pray tell is a mesmer supposed to play without relying on clones and phantasms?
You still have clones etc. They didn’t take them away.
Okay, so shatter builds? You think phantasms were op and mesmers should be playing shatter builds?
I agree with that call.
Alright, it’s just that the way that you were posting made it sound like you though mesmers should be relying on weapon attacks or something. I think building for shatter in pvp is actually much stronger than building for phantasms anyway.
Frizz, how pray tell is a mesmer supposed to play without relying on clones and phantasms? I believe hearing how you think the class works would be fascinating.
“I’m not much on talking about OP but the Mesmer nerfs seemed just about right to me so far on paper. Will have to play more to see how it affects things.”
Could you please elaborate? As primarily a mesmer player I don’t see how this change addresses any of the complaints about the class in pvp, and just makes the pve problems worse.
