Guild Wars 2

Personally I use a combination of Rampager, Knight and Carrion to take the edge off the squish factor but still get me a good chunk of offense.

Regardless of build intent I strongly suggest getting 20 Dueling for the clone on dodge trait. The additional clone generation is extremely useful. To point that I personally would call it the single most useful trait for Mesmers, no contest.

Also I stand with the previous poster on the importance of 20 Illusions for the additional bounce when you are using staff. The trait effectively increases the power of the staff by 50%.

On torch. I love the idea of the torch abilities. I don’t like the implementation. The Prestige would be a much better ability if the flame attack portion triggered even if we cancel the stealth manually.
The mage phantasm is also unfortunately weak compared to the phantasms it competes with. The pistol phantasm does very good damage, triggers ranged combo fields and does multiple hits to trigger the bleed trait. The warden phantasm is also multi hit, also high damage, triggers whirl combos and creates a bubble that blocks enemy projectiles while it is attacking. The single stack of confusion, low damage and retaliation that is not directly controlled by you and requires you to be within bounce range of the target the mage is attacking are just simply not enough to compete.

Edit: on condition damage. It is absolutely useful. Roll with extra bounce on staff and give it a try. It seriously works. What a lot of people assume is that the extra bounce won’t go back to targets already hit. That is an incorrect assumption. One on one with staff you lay down some serious damage with the extra bounce trait.