Guild Wars 2

I squeeze in about 200 toughness and 250 vitality, everything else full zerker. You could definitely do fine with full zerker gear though.

Keep in mind that the stat budget on GW2 items is pretty random, and you can actually end up making bad gearing choices sacrificing more stats than necessary with hybrid builds.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature

Simplify? no. Many of us really enjoy how complex and unique the class is.

Redone? hell yes. Anet bit off far more than they could chew and now have a class that they do not understand and cannot balance.

In the end though, there are still actual typos in mesmer trait tooltips, so expecting Anet to not only clean up and polish, but redesign everything is obviously not realistic. My guess is that we have to wait for an expansion for any real changes.

I would start complaining about elementalist and guardian healing a year before I would think about starting to complain about how overpowered mantra heals are.

Really good clear guide. Great to see mesmers thinking for themselves and coming up with actually viable builds.

It does have a high skill cap though, definitely not for everyone.

For the low levels just stick with staff. It is much slower than all other professions, but it is safe and gets the job done.

Things will change a lot when you level up and gain access to more traits. Shattering will become much smoother, pooping out clones will be much quicker, and some skills like GS2 will have a very small cooldown and an additional bounce for much better damage.

Seeing though that tagging is important to you let me just add that you will not be able to tag much in WvW or CS events, the difference between elementalist and mesmer tagging power is polar.

GS3 is a questionably viable skill in general, so don’t worry about it. You could never use it and still perform at 99% of the profession’s potential.

Oh god timewarp makes perfect sense as the next scapegoat.

Mesmers will be completely crippled, randomly broken with layer upon layer of cheap random bandaid by the time the actual root of everything gets adressed: portal. I wish elementalists shipped with the curse of portal instead of mesmers.

Lankybrit.4598:

Alex.9268:

The sad irony really is that in WoW real money can strictly only get you cosmetic stuff.

Not true. You can buy the Guardian Cub and sell it in game on the AH. Then you can use that gold to buy anything off the AH. Exactly the same as buying Gems, selling them for gold and using that gold on the TP in GW2.

Cheers.

Good luck buying your BiS gear with gold from the AH. Oh wait, you can’t.

If you want the best gear in WoW you have to raid or PvP for it, no gold or cash will get you there or even help you get there.

Not to mention, that there is absolutely no way any amount of gold or real life cash could get you a legendary in WoW.

Point is, there was no incentive for Anet to make legendaries BoE other than blatant greed.

If legendaries in GW2 were soulbound and a huge timesink instead of a monstrous money sink all would be well, but they are not.

We can’t even inspect and judge other people’s gear, so elo doesn’t seem to be Anet’s intention at all.

I love underwater combat on my mesmer. Hate it on my ele though..

The sad irony really is that in WoW real money can strictly only get you cosmetic stuff.

If Anet actually had some honor and decency, ascended gear would look better than exotic gear instead of having better stats, and legendaries would be soulbound, not greedily sold on the the AH allowing few rich gamers to line Anet’s pockets.

If you want pure condition damage, every other profession can utilize condition damage gear better than mesmers. Just keep that in mind.

Rieselle.5079:

You can have +speed signet, if my Ele gets to have Portal.

Oh please go ahead and take it. If portal is the mighty reason the entire profession suffers from long ignored bugs, inconveniences and sloppy randomness, I’d be happy to pass that curse over to elementalists. Don’t forget to leave us ride the lightning and all your aoe skills before you leave!

I love my mesmer because I can build nearly full glass cannon and get away with it both in PvE and PvP.

The cooldown on centaur runes is 15 seconds, even though it says 10 seconds in yet another inaccurate tooltip. Mantra heal is overkill if all you want is get the most out of the runes, mirror heal does the same job.

We do have ways of gearing for perma swiftness yes, and that is the whole point many reasonable people try to get across:

We don’t want to gear for out of combat speed.

It’s with changes like these that the difference between Anet devs and Blizzard devs really shows. I don’t miss much from WoW, but mathematical balance and reliable viability is absolutely nowhere to be found in GW2. Everything is random and band-aided.

All the frustrated complainers should roll a mesmer, and then come back to these forums and report on exactly how OP they still think mesmers are.

This is assuming they are good players that know what they are doing in the first place.

Just running away from stuff seems like it would be a challenge at 5fps.

Staff horrible for tagging mobs, at any level. Crap damage aside, the projectile moves extremely slowly.

GS is ok for tagging, especially great for tagging single targets that are spread out because the auto-attack is instant and has no projectile. For aoe shattering is really the only way we have of tagging big groups. When f1 and f2 are on cooldown you can whip out some pom poms and cheer on all the warriors and elementalists that effortlessly keep on tagging everything in sight.

Fay.2735:

Lysico.4906:

umm centaur and mirror heal is .5 sec downtime on swiftness. Gee think I can take that..

Plus centaur is not horrible rune set.

Some folks complain just to complain at this point

The thing is you shouldn’t have to waste a rune slot just to keep up with all other professions (apart from maybe guardian, but even they have easier sustainable swiftness). It’s not really complaining as such it’s about getting some balance in regards to swiftness among professions.

Not being able to keep up with the general battle because you are still half way across the map slowly crawling your way to the other side but not being able to switch to focus in case you run into a friendly neighbourhood thief and his gang of d/d ele’s. (Not to mention the annoyance of having to constantly swap weapons)

Or able to keep enemies from running, denying fair kills (Warriors and thieves I find being the worst offenders with their charges and stealth, I feel like a slug trying to go after them) Is just annoying to say the least.

The point is that we shouldn’t have to sacrifice more useful runes that fit our playstyle, entire builds or an offhand that’s pretty meh compared to pistol and sword just for some reasonable speed.

Other professions have weapon swiftness and permanent utility swiftness. One idea would be to make Blink into a sigil where the passive is the running speed buff, Would make sense to me anyway.

Exactly, well put

Electro.4173:

Maybe a moderate AoE decrease along with cooldown reduction.

The cooldown is the problem? You are already using it on cooldown, and want to use it even more frequently?

Kazhiel.8194:

Alex.9268:

Signet of inspiration, centaur runes and a focus offhand. It is more than enough to keep perma swiftness up in WvW with ether feast.

It sucks.

If you have Rune of the Centaur ditch the focus (if you’d rather use a different weapon) and use Mirror for heal lmao, it’s nearly perma swift with no focus needed.

Yeah, no. Signet and centaur runes alone do not provide 100% swiftness uptime.

Mirror heal is ridiculous, so no I won’t be using that as a band aid either.

For now I gear for speed, and it works. And it sucks.

I have to say, most painful of all is watching D/D elementalists’ air4.

I would trade portal in for ride the lightning any day.

If Anet just fixes the shatter bug, all is good. It makes us too bursty, and well it is a bug, so fix it!

If Anet instead decides to take the opportunity and nerf our damage as a whole again, it would really show yet again what amateurs they are when it comes to monitoring and balancing a modern MMO.

Signet of inspiration, centaur runes and a focus offhand. It is more than enough to keep perma swiftness up in WvW with ether feast.

It sucks.

Mesmer has great burst potential, and mediocre dps. Condition damage is also bad-mediocre, but we can spec for a lot of confusion.

As others pointed out, until you level up and get some essential traits, leveling will be much slower than other professions.

Most mesmer tooltips and traits are messy. It seems like they sturggled a whole lot with balancing the class, but never took the time to polish and clean everything up.

It really is a fat middle finger in your face.

It is as if Anet waits until the very end to drop the facade and show how run-of-the-mill MMO they actually are, after all.

Thing is with scepter1, continuously landing a full auto-attack chain is impossible. It is extremely unreliable.

Only high HP mobs like bosses and champions, or very stupid players, will stand still and live long enough for scepter auto attack in a build like this to actually be effective.

In most cases you are much better off just actually killing quickly with a decent build.

Troponin.4081:

I rolled a D/D ele, and with a mix of toughness, healing, power and condition damage, he’s a beast. He can tank and do pretty crazy damage all in one

Tanky D/D elementalists are indeed beasts, verging on immortal troll gods.

However they do not do crazy damage. As a matter of fact they do crap damage. Zero killing power. No way they can kill even an equally skilled glass cannon 1v1.

Mind stab is really the kittentiest skill on any mesmer’s bar.

There are extremely few situations where it is a good idea to root yourself down to mind stab something or someone.

What Anet should do is scrap the laughable 1 boon removal, and triple it’s range. Keep the root, cause we don’t want mesmers to be OP duh.

That way we finally have a half-decent AoE, and we might actually start using GS3 once in a while.

Anet has made it pretty clear though that they are not willing to make any substantial changes to the classes ever, so all this amazing feedback falls on indifferent ears.

Anet should really just figure out a way to give us out of combat speed in order to avoid even more mesmer QQ. Very few of us are begging for in combat mobility, we are ok there. Out of combat speed though is an issue that gets in the way of everything non-combat related and is just plain unfair when we are the only profession that actually has to gear for acceptable levels of speed.

/Signed

Magic find is a frustrating greedy decision to make in a game that is supposed to be all about fun and cosmetic decisions where gear does not play a vital role.

I would like for our all our current weapons to be made reasonably viable first.

Would another scepter or torch really make people happy?

Their only “dangerous” burst comes from charging up a longass earth 5 from a distance and then flashing on top of you, which is a very very long obvious cast that you can counter by simply creating some distance. Their only dangerous CC is air 5, can’t really do much about that. Both are on big cooldowns. Everything else they can do is easily fixed with a simple heal, dodge or blink.

Also removing their boons is not really useful. They have extremely easy access to them, and they will have everything on them again after a few seconds.

Burning them down to lowish HP and then going all out in a quick shatter is really the only way to finish them off. Confusion and conditions are pointless since everything slides right off them, including crippled etc.

It is very difficult to kill a good tanky elementalist. Thing is, they look like immortal god trolls but in reality they barely do any damage. Either burst them down, wait for allies or crawl away. They can easily follow and catch up with you of course, but again they can’t really kill you (if you are decent).

With centaur runes, signet of inspiration and the mirror heal I have pretty much 100% swiftness uptime without much effort.

And it sucks. I want to use divinity runes or ruby orbs, and I certainly want to use a decent heal at all times instead of the kittenty one. Signet of inspiration is also wasting a lot of space on my utility bar.

AmateurGod.5403:

We all know that phantasm builds don’t shatter unless the apocalypse is about to come

To be fair you actually should be shattering regardless of spec every time your target (or phantasms) is about to die, which is frequently with few exceptions like bosses and champion mobs.

When a mesmer raises their greatsword over their head a zerker is coming your way so dodge.

Mesmers are turning into the frost mages of GW2: extremely OP for stomping noobs, average at high rated pvp.

Disastro.4086:

Combined with staff/gs to maximize sharper images and standard condition damage combined with confusion especially in rampager gear will pull ahead “by far” in sustained damage compared to other builds.

Yeah that would be nice, but no.

Insane claims (“I spent a lot of gold on my gear and it isn’t wasted, just watch me pull a theory out of my kitten to prove it!”) like these, kinda almost make me miss recount, sims and logs a bit.

Yes there should be more. Out of combat speed really should be fair across all professions period. After the patch we are by far the slowest of them all.

Honestly, mesmer leveling is one of the absolute safest and smoothest professions to level. Between illusions tanking and all the defensive staff skills you can build full on offensive and barely ever risk dying. Elementalist for example is a far more risky profession to level with.

Other than it being slow, there is not much else to complain about. Lets try and focus our complaints on real issues, so the 1.5 devs working on balancing this game don’t get lost in a sea of BS.

SoggyFrog.4170:

Setting aside a whole slot exclusively for swiftness seems weak, while it still doesn’t solve the problem of our lacking a passive speed boost.

What might be more useful is adding a trait that gives a passive speed increase based off of charged mantras (the illusion one doesn’t make sense). That way you can decide between utilities that give more of a mobility burst or mantras that make you faster… in the long run.

Now that is a great idea. 5% passive speed for each charged mantra. We would still be the slowest profession as Anet intends, but we would be able to sacrifice a whole lot of utility for decent speed (for jumping puzzles for example).

I love how elementalists are so mobile as it is, we don’t even care about the signet change.

I would kill to have that signet on my mesmer.

Because clearly Anet wants one of our mesmer tradeoffs to be being the slowest moving profession. 15% is enough to ensure we still are the slowest profession, but at least it wouldn’t be as frustrating as it is now.

You clearly don’t play a mesmer.

I would prefer they completely redid signet of inspiration to simply give a 15% passive movement speed boost.

We would still be the absolute slowest moving profession of the game which obviously is Anet’s intention, but at least the gap wouldn’t be this obvious.

The 2 extra seconds on swiftness is barely noticeable, and the change to signet of inspiration is ironically extremely unreliable.

If anything after all the other profession’s speed buffs, we are now actually relatively slower than before.