Guild Wars 2

Well, EU tier 9 has completed it all now. But I have to thank [TKS] Tequatl killing squad for their time, the entire guild is guesting servers to teach people how to do it.

I would love to see a weapon around this range, not quite melee but not ranged would suit the ranger nicely and fill in it’s current gaps. I also really want to go in dungeons and groups and actually be able to support my allies. +1

I cracked up at the Trahearne bit. I always felt fine with him, but as a Sylvari you spend your story with him anyway so he doesn’t seem like a nobody.

Anyway, I like the idea, I just hope Anet concentrate on another Dragon but prolong it, I mean Zhaitan is the almighty Elder Dragon of the Risen and he died faster than a fat ettin.

+1

What else needs to be said? We need a wooden potato food item that gives us something…

Chopps.5047:

Lol I need the inbox full hint achievement though T_T y r u bugged anet???

Seriously, I’ll clear it out today. If anyone knows how to get that achievement just send me in game PM. Lol!

I think it’s bugged. However I got the achievement today by deleting one of my mail, as another one filled up it’s slot the game gave me the point… Not sure why you need to delete it like that but it worked for me.

Hey guys,

I come from the background of a Mesmer, having played one since launch for many hours I decided I wanted to alt the shadowy cousin, the Necromancer. Basically, I’m not a noob to the game nor forums, but I’d like some leveling tips and recommended meta builds post 26th June launch, any guidance would be appreciated

Cheers

I don’t use Centaur Runes and Mesmer is one of my fastest classes. I don’t use a full dps build though. I use a build that specializes in Mobility, go check out Osicat’s advance guide. Once you learn how to do full Cat Leap’s you can litterally move 2000+units in about 2 seconds and then add swiftness on top, while all the cooldowns recharge you can do mini 1000+ jumps and use your blinks.

tl:dr
Mesmer can be one of the quickest burst movement classes for chasing or escaping, but you still need to trait for a build that enables that. All other builds suffer.

Who needs intelligence and colleges when you can be 8 feet tall, also regarding the fact that all Norn are actually extremely intelligent also, but those half-Norn “Humans” take away all our limelight with all their scrawny bodies and war against cat rubbish. Norn,Sylvari and Asura are the way to go!

It looks like they are making the Mesmer more Mesmer again. Moving away from the dps (although that 500%…) towards the Mesmer from GW1. I mean, look at all those interrupt traits, if that makes final patch then we finally could be the true mesmer control that we once were.

Tome of Madness is nice… Tome of Anarchy: A Mesmer Guide sounds nice to imo. Good luck with this Chaos!

Thief + Mesmer is actually pretty good. Joint up with a thief on my server, no voice chat, we won a 2 v 12. That same thief then partnered up with a warrior and 2 manned hills. As much as he is a good player, Mesmer + Thief does work very well.

Kittening hell guys, why does this always pop up? Mesmers are not Overpowered. They work as intended, to confuse the opponent. Phantasms to distract them, invis, teleports and trust me here if you are not intelligent or capable enough to fight a mesmer in this game, try fighting one in the original Guild Wars. In Gw1 Mesmers would punish you for using skills (confusion) but they could also punish you for not using skills, they could stun lock you in place and literally control you the entire fight, making them a great team utility. Imagine Hexes in this game?

In this game, Mesmers are SO easy to fight compared to GW1. Mesmers have to put all their trait points to excel in a build, because OUR class is Working as Intended. Of course we have some bugs, but lets face it, until Anet fix all the other classes you will be sub par when fighting a Mesmer. We recieve nerf after nerf because of other players incompetence, but we are still the most balanced and fixed class. Fix all the other classes bugs first and then it will be an open playing field. Also remember, Mesmer is meant to be the hard counter to people that don’t play smart, just as Thieves are hard counters to opponents on their own and Warriors are hard counters to ranged classes. Some classes are meant to dominate in some fields, stop QQ’ing and request Anet fix the classes that you want. It annoys me that these threads pop up all the time.

I may as well create a guide on how to kill mesmers to make you all relax.

Covering too many areas? Not really, it works as a Glamour Build with aoe support heals, with those traits you can still aoe heal 2.8k in a zerker build, so I think it will work quite nicely. I will play around with it later, probably using rampagers gear with cleric accessories.

I come from the perspective of a Mesmer myself, running a shatter build. Generally, I don’t lose to guardians, however when I do, it’s always down to the same things.

The builds that I do lose to are normally skilled D/D eles and big healing guardians. For advice, use a build that can maintain decent pressure while healing up most damage, and then go down to town with a somewhat burst. I find that GS and S/F guardians are quite tough, however remember that if you face a retaliation mesmer, you will kill yourself if you use whirling wrath (retaliation on the mesmer, and 3 clones can hit you for 600 damage each of each hit for a total of around 10-14k).

If the mesmer has a high pressure on him then he is gennerally a shatter mesmer, a good one will immobilize you or stun you, so try to make as much distance as possible and hope you have high protection and toughness. Phantasm mesmers are easy to beat as long as they don’t run the OP 10-30-0-25-5 build in which case you will die(look for sceptre/sword and sword/pistol).

Don’t try and kill a bunker build, there are generally 2 main mesmer bunker builds, the Chaos Maestro which can uptime more boons than you, and the imortal build which won’t die unless it is a 2v1 or 3v1.

Retaliation is your friend, phantasms will die off of it and it will catch a shatter mesmer off guard, switch to a hammer if you face a tanky mesmer, all others (except retalitaion/imortal) faceroll with your GS and S/F. Good mesmers are hard to beat, as with any class, but you can still do it, if all else fails remember to target the real mesmer or tab through clones quickly and try to juke him.

Well, some people like to have variety. What does need to be buffed, as you said is our Control. That is it, everything else, no matter how hard they hit us we still perform the best in. I agree with what you say, making the Mesmer more like the Gw1 equivalent, and I think they are moving towards that area with mantra buffs etc, however other classes need fixing more.

Chaos Maestro > Guardian Boons.
Immortal Mesmer > Guardian Retaliation
Shatter Cat > Thief Burst
Phantasm Builds > Warrior DPS (2 Duelists anyone?)

See how many “>” there was, that’s because we are possibly overpowered, but most certainly one of the most fixed classes, ok they nerfed confusion, we can still do the other stuff. So we need a list of what needs to be done:

→ Fix other classes
→ Give us CC

First, pick a build. Condition builds, we are working on them since the confusion nerf, in my opinion it has opened many mesmers eyes to the world of non confusion builds, but they are hopeless in PvE. Phantasm builds are the easy dps route, less control/skill cap with high damage. Shatter builds are the harder dps route, more control but a higher skill cap.

The build you showed has really no defensive/survivability capabilities, the idea of fitting all roles in reality sounds nice, but it doesn’t work that nice. If you want a good sword / sword build have a look at one of the shatter builds in the sticky list.

Pyroatheist.9031:

This is mainly a skill that just takes time and experience to develop.

Welcome to the ranks, we all hope you will stay and learn to love our class, and remember to look around the forums for advice. But remember, leveling a mesmer takes way too much time. It is a really slow start, but once you reach 40+ especially 60 when you gain access to tier 3 traits (illusionary persona for me) then it goes really quickly and you soon become a purple god. Ignore the nerf posts, some people just can’t handle change…

My highest was 27k on an upleveled ele. I did a daze shatter on him, blurred frenzy, 3 clone mindwrack (plus personal) as well as spamming mantra of pain twice. It is doable, but why would you want to continually do that? Takes away the fun.

As much as I’d like a speed boost, I take the opinion that if every class had some form of speed buff, none of us would actually be getting buffed as we would all be equal. They would have to be class specific, so in our case maybe have a speed boost equivalent to our shatter recharge rate or so on etc.

It’s a nice base idea, but the mix between condition and zerk is a little odd, however it may work. I would drop veil, nice stealth, but is glitchy for me. Blink confuses people even more with the instant teleport, and if you roll into it you create a clone at your position and appear elsewhere. Go for 6x runes of the air, more swiftness for a start, crit damage is useful for you since you have 20 in dueling. The 20% lighting on hit procs a lot and can hit for 6k, great damage there.

Sigil of fire on the sword would work great, good aoe fire damage, complements the build and a sigil of geomancy on the of torch for bleeds on swap is great. I’d like to see some videos of this in action as well.

One thing I like…Illusionist elasticity actually works 100% of the time for me now rather than whenever it chooses to. So now staff 1 is reliably epic.

First rule of thumb, Mesmer is the slowest class to level up until 40, and one of the hardest. Once you reach tier 2 traits though… we become one of the easiest and fastest levelers from 40 to 80. Saying that, check out Kai’s Lazy build…It’s easy leveling, or at least as easy as you will get, but trust us, Mesmer’s are Extremely fun post 40.

The Chaos Maestro build I believe (may be wrong here, Archangel can correct me) can on the second rotation have EVERY boon up so yes you can. Sigils that provide base stat improvements do I believe affect illusions, Precision, Power etc but not crit chance/damage/condition damage. Again, may be wrong there.

CrazyAce.3842:

you will be arguably the hardest class to kill aside from Thieves and Elementalists (and tanky Guardians)

No. Not arguably. We are THE hardest to kill against noobs. Then there are the pro’s. Still, extremely hard to kill, with all the stealth, teleporting and leaping. Unless you go full zerker and just spam sword/pistol 5. We are pretty tough, even against guardians. Infact, I once had a 25 minute fight against a staff guardian (I was Immortal Mes). It was so even and in the end he killed himself off of my retaliation, but still, one of my fave fights.

Pfff, Conditions? On a side note, yeh we aren’t amazing at dealing with them, but you should kill them before they get that many on you, you are using power gear! Utilities.

Blink is good, Decoy is also a must have for zerkers survivable stuff, then use arcane thievery if you aren’t confident with conditions, but pick your favorite there.

The guy above who said iDisenchanter. No. It is our most broken skill IMO and is a waste with that massive cooldown. Doesn’t always work either, bit like iMage tbh.

Acelerion.6820:

I wouldent call that minor

It is to me, as a WvW player 90% of the time all of my attacks hit.

ExZee.8109:

Most. OP. Skill. Ever.

Did a Mesmer send you back 25 stacks of bleeding and poison? Poor Condition-mancer.

It was broken two months ago. They fixed it, it’s damage is normal now. The only bug is when all the hits don’t all reach the target, but that’s minor.

Confusion ticks after skill use, so if you swap it then no, it wont hurt.

Ah ok, it appears that after a bit more time in WvW I seem to be cloaking during the channel, meaning they still attack me even as I move in stealth. Thanks for that guys.

Hey fellow mesmers, I have been doing a lot of sPvP and WvW recently and have been dueling some other mesmers and I have noticed that when I use Decoy or Mass Invisibility their phantasms still follow me and attack, primarily Pistol #4 and iZerker. I haven’t noticed this with my phantasms, and I have been downed in a Mass Invisibility because of it.

Is this because the phatasm was summoned as I entered stealth and it followed through or is it a bug with the two illusions? I haven’t seen my phantasms do this so I couldn’t test. Or is this just Working as Intended and I didn’t know in my entire Mesmer life lol.

Ballads.2509:

Soon as other classes get off hand sword, sure.

Why? Mesmers back from guild wars 1 were designed as duelist characters, or “fencers” using swords.

http://www.guildwars.com/images/3drenderings/gw-mesmer-large.jpg

Other classes don’t necessarily HAVE to have the OH sword. Back to the discussion, I’d love a MH Pistol, it matches our class design and whats as cool as pew pewing with two of the things?!?

Toying around with this build for a bit more, learning how it works in WvW and sPvP and it turned out really well. The build was efficient, a few gear swaps and it became quite survivable allowing me to drop 2 people in a 1 v 5 which surprised me due to the lack of toughness/vitality. Oh, and Rangers. Pyro was right, they’re easy, beat them every time since my last post, just have to work out the synergies of the build.

To answer all 4 questions in one go. It doesn’t matter, we have more builds than any other class and they are all seriously flexible. However, Condition is horrible in PvE for mesmers, but great at noob busting in PvP. Crit’s work in both, which is what I generally use. Keeping clones or kill them? Easy, if you are using a phantasm build, (10,30,0,25,2) then you will keep them and use traits to inflict conditions and boons on your crits, especially iswordsman which can hit 4k+ per strike. Use them in a shatter build for that F1 and F2. You can also keep them in a bunker build (idefender is your best friend).

Survival is pretty good for mesmers, in wvw or pvp you can run retaliation builds (imortal mesmer) or you can go for shatter survivability builds…F3 and F4. It’s up to you, as I said illusionary Defender is your best friend, get that utility ASAP. Anyway don’t worry about survivability although a lot of it comes in later levels, (we had that guy that soloed Lupicus in 17 minutes).

Swords have HIGH defense and HIGH damage. Sceptor is kinda meh… Use both!

Until level 40 work on staff and sword/focus as it is a great combo that has good defense from the sword and conditions from the staff (plus the movement speed from focus). After 40 put 5 points into illusions and it will be a breeze!

No, not fun. But it’s life I suppose, try and find the problem (thief) and combat it. Thiefs are easy to deal with, as soon as you see them pop up try and stun break and escape (blink or phase retreat), gennerally I then stealth before popping phantasms on them which messes up their rotation quite bad.

Another rage post ay? You know you will get one shot if you don’t move, especially as the mesmer is pretty good at dealing with thiefs and warriors. But back to your question, It isn’t going down. We have been nerfed, but not every day, and they complimented it with buffs .

Generally you have to ask a question first, then we will gladly help you? So what is that question?

wookie.8934:

I will add that I’ve been using my build in wvw with great success. Greatest counter to this build is, in my opinion, blinds. If you can blind the mesmer, the phantasms can’t be spawned while they’re blinded.

Explains the ruddy ranger heheh

Testing the build out, however the only person I found was a ranger. 3 fights with the ranger and I got him down but his pet pulled me down and killed me forcing him to rally. No pet and I won each time, pet I lost hahah

EDIT: 4th fight I won. 5th Fight he burst me down in two seconds. Dunno how to combat the ranger 1v1 with a dog. Other classes seem fine though…

EDIT2: So, every fight against a ranger I get him to the downstate and can’t stomp him and die. :/

EDIT3: On the plus side, our fights lasted 7 seconds to get us both downed. thats insane damage

Guardians that don’t use greatsword. I lost a 15 minute fight to a guardian the other day, I’d put up retaliation but he would wait till it wore off, and didn’t have hard hitters like Whirling Wrath to kill himself on. It was a bunker v bunker build and he ended up winning as I burst my shatters and he stunned me before finishing me off. Has to be guardians. On the other hand I haven’t lost to a necro in months.

As Far as Mesmer damage output in a dungeon, I reckon thief hits harder. To start off with, the only area where Mesmers excel in damage against a thief is shatter spike damage where you can pop a 6 clone shatter in 1.5 seconds dealing around 22k and up, similar to a thief combo. However this is situational and most of the time pvp only. In dungeons Mesmers can’t set up shatters the same, so it brings it down to 2 builds:
Phantasm
Condition.

Phantasm builds can deal good damage, when they work. Our main form of Phantasm damage is via the offhand sword which can produce high damage, focus 5 or greatsword izerker. But, izerker is bugged, and does low damage.

Condition mesmers really shine in a dungeon, when paired with a necro. The staff phantasm does 10% more damage based on each unique condition, and it is compound. So the iwarlock can hit 14k per bolt on bosses with stacks of every type of condition, but it is relativly weak without conditions.

It is basicly opinion based, and as far as mesmers go in dungeons, to do it well you have to hit your combos and fields perfectly which can be tricky, however a mesmer has higher survivability, with so many Get-me-out-of-here skills that often enough they sustain damage for longer.

Dastion.3106:

It didn’t inflict confusion two months ago, or even six months ago. You probably had the Dueling trait which applies confusion when a clone dies.

Didn’t think about that +1

Sebrent.3625:

I’d rather use blurred frenzy … it’s a much shorter cooldown than decoy and hits the thief in the face when they steal to me.

This. However I did fight 1 thief (spvp duel) who was quite skilled, he waited till I popped frenzy then shortbow teleported behind me then backstabbed. I loved that fight ahah.

Lets narrow this down.

Necro: Fast until level 20.
Engineer: Pfft…whats an engineer?
Warrior: Fast until…fast until 80
Guardian: Fast all the way to max again
Elementalist: Slow until 30, then quicker
Mesmer: Craft your way to 40, then it’s smooth sailing
Thief: Pretty average all the way to 80, on the quick side.
Ranger: Fast leveling as far as PvE goes.

I understand everything you said, but the answer is Lore. An Elementalist studied the arcane arts, not to wear heavy armor. A mesmer is meant to be a dueler, think of fencing. Swords yes, but they don’t wear massive armor. IMHO I would love this option though, want a heavy shoulder piece on my norn.

First rule: Ignore all tooltips.

Anyway, last time I used scepter (arguably about 2 months ago) it did apply confusion, however the scepter auto chain is bugged horribly as it attacks faster or slower depending on how close you are, so maybe if you are further away the coding forgets the condition? Test if it is applied at melee range and at 800 units away.

When you transmute an item it creates a “new” item, not just an item with a skin. So while in theory what you said would work, it would be complicated an we would have the whole soulbound/accountbound problem. But it could work. Possibly.

I like the idea and it would be good for punishing players that don’t pay attention as you said, but instead of it damaging them when it is removed, how about just when it expires anyway. This means if a mesmer sends it back to you, you get punished (which fits the mesmer playstyle). Having it damage you at removal means classes who do see it, and try to fix it still get punished.

@Magnum I kind of like the madness ability, make it like confusion but perhaps it is a weaker aoe version? Less damage per skill, more people affected

Bandicam. Same quality as fraps. Although. A 30 minute video. Is. Only. About 200 mg, compared to fraps’ 12 gb