It’s true we can totally 2 shot everything and like super heal to full every 3 seconds. Oh wait we can’t do anything that you described and all our stealth abilities have very lengthy cooldowns. Our 2 ability in the downstate only keeps us invisible for a couple of seconds, you can get your health up to about 65% before it wears off but that’s it.
We also have a downed enemy marker above our head if it’s really us and not the clone it leaves behind.
Honestly it sounds like you had no idea how to handle a mesmer and expected to faceroll a squishy caster.
I want to play a tricky caster that causes damage by attacking my opponents mind. Not a psychopath slashing frantically at everything in front of me with imaginary friend support that explode into confetti if you get to close. You know unless someone else assists my target. Then they just vanish.
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Anyone who thinks mesmers can’t do good damage… Equip staff, 1hd sword & focus.
On a reg mob (or a bunch of mobs), auto attack, run to mob, phase retreat, run to mob again, while casting chaos storm, then switch weapon sets, cast phantasm warden, cast blurred frenzy. Anything caught in this maelstom should be dead or almost dead if some attacks missed while you are full health. If you need to retreat you have temporal curtain for swiftness & snare (can also be used for a knockdown), you have you 2 dodges, you can pop out a melee clone, or use any of you other skills you have loaded on the right side of toolbar. For Veteran mobs rinse and repeat 3 times!
For people saying you can’t handle multiple mobs… There is no law saying you need to cast all your clones and phantasms on the 1st mob you engage spread them around so they don’t all die at the same time (clones aren’t doing any real damage anyway). Make sure your using weapon swaps and skills that create combos and make sure you have some means of escape, decoy, blink, & portal are all viable.
You’re really not addressing anything by describing that we’re capable of leveling solo. I’d sure hope we could do that. You also say to phase retreat before you chaos storm. Switch the order you give yourself a free chaos armor.
The issues are Dungeons, and events with a bunch of other players.In those situations the most fun we can have is running into the horde like a lunatic with sword in hand mashing 1 and 2 and switching to staff for Chaos storm for an AoE setting. In a dungeon the warden gets stomped before it can twirl most of the time.
The problem is not our damage. The problem is our delivery system and how having more people actually makes us less fun to play
Edit: Our damage is low but i’m not worried about that. Numbers are easy to adjust it’s the mechanics that worry me.
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You feel dull because you’re at 100 000ft away from the incoming mobs while you should be in front, ready to drop an Ethereal field on the incoming bunch, tank while you pop chaos armor, summon phantasm, summon clone -> leap and do your stuff after that.
edit
Meant as a joke of course ;-) nothing personal
If you mean chaos storm yay I can be useful every 30 seconds. Summon Phantasm summon clone? I assume you mean sword here since you say leap. Which phantasm, which clone? Pop chaos armor and tank ? So am I taking points in the Chaos tree here ? Do my stuff after that?
What exactly do you want someone to learn from this post?
I love my Mesmer. I used the great sword for a bit, but I’m about 95% sure they ninja nerfed the damage last patch, so I dumped it. Run with a staff and sword/pistol. For those of you worried about Aoe I am able to do large amounts of AOE damage on mobs by dropping chaos field with staff, it stacks conditions like poison unbelievably fast and destroys multi mobs that stand in it. Also I run up to a group Immediately pop mirror image gives 2 clones and the instant clone phase back from scepter (which gives me 3 clones before anyone has even hit a mob,) then I immediately shatter them LOTS of Aoe. Switch to sword and pistol drop you last pistol combo which is a stun and summon a clone and phantasm from sword skills and you are good to go, after just puttin off a large amount of Aoe.
It’s not a condition build and it’s not an phantasm build either.
I run mirror image, Decoy and the phantasmal shield in pvp which absorbs half of incoming damage.
Pve decoy, mirror image and blink.
I went 19-1 today in an SPVP match I joined halfway through with staff sword and pistol. Have to re look at my spec as I’m not at my comp now but I’ll post it later if anyone is interested.
Couple of things
1: In many DEs with enough people your target will be dead before the clones reach it to actually shatter leaving you with a 45 second CD on mirror image at least half the time.
2: If the target is still alive in a DE you’d have been better off placing our Iwarlock out and watching him crit for 2-5k depending on level
3: No one thinks we’re weak in structured. We’re slippery, we’re annoying and we’re more than capable of contributing there. It’s WvWvW Dungeon PvE and DEs with a lot of weaker mobs where we feel dull.
Mesmer have a few issues from what I have played.
AoE of any sort will shut a Mesmer down hard, becuase Illusions can’t take any damage as all, unless the Mesmer wastes a Utility slot on the Signet. Even if they do most AoE still one shots them.
All three heals are worthless. I only have played a Necromancer and Engineer besides Mesmer and both has VASTLY better healing abilities.
All three Elites are situation and have fundamental issues. Moa Morph is useless for pve, because veterans and champions still do a ton of damage of a Moa, and it lasts much less time. Time Warp is useless outside of a massive group, as the lack of cooldown reduction means it only really boosts most peoples 1 (and heal times), but it is still probably the best. Mass Invisibility is worthless unless perfectly coordinated and even then it’s pretty ‘meh’.You cant compare healing skills because they are set up to balance the class kits. You will say WTF did i just do with a mesmer once you get the hang of when to use quickness and how to stack daze on enemies, also mantras are there to pre cast, not cast in combat.
You are aware that Daze doesn’t stack right? Shattering Diversion in melee range is still a one second daze. Mantras are horribly underpowered and a trait pitfall for anyone unfamiliar with the class. The one that dazes can see some use but again I feel a lot of the posts defending the class are coming from people who have not run an explorable.
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I get what you mean in it not wanting every encounter to be laughable but during my brief adventure in Orr it felt like I couldn’t catch a break. With the mob concentration being so high unless you follow the event zerg it’s painful trying to collect skill points or PoIs simply because of how long it takes to kill things.
When trying to get the skill point at Balthazhar’s temple before the DE that flips it ( was unaware of that at the time) the mobs where spawning as fast as I could kill them.
The undead guarding it have the necro staff 1 ability so if you don’t move in one direction all the time and have some way to deal with immobilize you won’t get hit. I sat there for half an hour fighting 2 veterans and 2 trash risen until thief wanders up and demolishes them for me in 1 minute. That was when I made the decision to drop the class. I’d be fine if mobs were just tough and you really had to think to get something done. But I never want to need someone else for something as simple as getting a skill point.
Not familiar with necro PvP builds however guildwars2guru.com had a couple of build links so you may want to check over there.
I’ve really only played PVE so far, so that’s all I’m going to talk about. I hear we Mesmers are monsters in PVP. That said, Mesmers have the best survivability of any class I’ve played that isn’t in heavy gear. We can’t take too many hits, but then again a well-played Mesmer won’t take very many.
Personally, I love playing the glass cannon role because we’re tricky, tricky, tricky. Take stealthy abilities (Decoy is a must imo) to help you stay alive.
I don’t think our frustration comes from being so squishy. I think it stems from the fact that while I’m dancing in a circle around the mob my necro would have killed it and the 3 closest to it. Sure I’m not getting hit but with so much damage tied up in my glorified DoTs it’s not exactly satisfying to watch them melt before they can really lay into something.
That’s all Phantasm’s function as currently, DoTs in the guise of stupid NPCs that love standing in the fire.
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After leveling to 80 and playing a few DEs in Orr I decided to drop the profession and play a necro instead.
I really cannot understand for the life of me why our clones need to run at a target and be on top of it to shatter. What’s even more upsetting is the shatter damage missing because the target was moving. Did your opponent change elevation in PvP ? No shatter for you.
I would really like to see Mind Wrack and Cry deliver their affects from range and numbers tuned accordingly, maybe if the clones teleport to the target and then pop to give players a window to move away .
It just feels so wrong to see my clones attempt to suicide bomb something only to get crippled on the way and then limp ineffectually after my victim.
Just an aside I think we’re very strong at point defense if we run a phantasm build and shatter builds can work very well if you run signet of domination to set up a spike. However, killing a runner is nigh impossible with phantasms; they simply stand there when their ability is on cooldown before giving chase. And the shatter build exhausts a lot of cooldowns to achieve a smaller burst than other professions are capable of. The reward just isn’t there.
Another thing that really bothered me leveling was how much of our damage is tied into phantasms in conjunction with them vanishing whenever a target had died. In DEs and dungeons this left me feeling very underwhelmed in an AoE situation where other profs can contribute so much more than we can. I’d like to see more damage shifted into our auto attacks.
Speaking of AoE trying to run a phantasm centered build in most explorable is… hellish. Even with 20% health and signet of illusions there is so much AoE flying around that you simply cannot keep them up. Even when I noticed one was about to die and tried to eek out a little more damage with Mind Wrack the phantasm never made it to its target.
Perhaps this profession simply isn’t the PvE/WvWvW profession for me. But while I feel we can shine in structured, most of my experience in the aforementioned has been either spawning 3 warlocks on the champion target and hopping in circles while they crit for ridiculous numbers and sighing when I see this DE consists of waves of weaker mobs.
In WvWvW you mostly just feedback rangers on keeps and hope to god they’re stupid enough to commit suicide. If you’re feeling froggy you can also attempt to pull people off walls using the focus 4 or spawning a warden up there to get some bleeds out with sharper image before it goes squish.
Not being able to place my duelists exactly where I want them is absolutely game breaking when assaulting keeps. When that first Illusionary Unload gets obstructed on a target that I’ve been attacking for the past 2 seconds on a keep wall because the game decided to place him 4 yards to the right it makes me think they didn’t test our profession very much at all.
TLDR : Mind Wrack and Cry need to be a ranged affect. Not turn my clones into suicide bombers if they’re going to vanish when the target dies or die to AoE on the way. I worry about the PvP ramifications in structured and I do wonder if our clones being so killable will be enough with the utility Mirror Images. This would allow us a quick long range AoE spike. Perhaps allowing us to trait for it in a way that we’d be forced to give up some defensive stats for it or tweaking of Mirror Images would allow that change to happen.
Our Phantasms are too frail to be a reliable source of damage in PvE and our auto attacks are boring and pathetic.
(edited by Abarcine.7189)
Sever: Stormbluff Isles
Guild : Bladefall
After an entire day our guild is still not restored. I have members coming to me every 5 minutes asking why they were kicked. This has gone beyond mildly annoying to incredibly frustrating. What’s even more aggravating is the lack of support from Anet regarding this issue. Can we PLEASE get some sort of response.