Guild Wars 2

Morfedel.4165:

Zoser.7245:

Morfedel.4165:

But Mesmers themselves are still awesome. What we bring to the table is a lot of options no one else has. Utility. Flexibility. And arguably the best CC build in the game.

I also think they can DPS just fine. Just not top of the line.

I’m agree in the utility and flexibility but not in the CC. Other professions can “chain” CC better than us. Aside, we have some good skills for CC.

Can they? Who and how? realize I’m not calling you out, I’m genuinely curious. I play a few other classes, but not all of them. While I have an 80 on everything, I barely played them since getting them to 80; I do think a few were competitive, but not outshining the mesmer.

So if we’re talking about CC relevant in PvE, then we’re discussing the ability to burn through a large break bar. I just want to clarify that, because any other sort of use for CC in PvE isn’t even remotely important.

Burning through a large breakbar means being able to unload the largest raw quantity of CC possible in a very short time period. The best three skills in the game for this are Mesmer shield 5, revenant staff 5, and engineer slick shoes. I believe that slick shoes is best here, followe by the revenant one and thirdly the Mesmer skill, but they’re all far stronger than any other skills. Venomshare thief gets an honorable mention, but it requires the thief to run a non-optimal dps build, making it questionably usable.

It’s worth noting that interrupt traits and other cc ‘add-ons’ that Mesmer has access to are worthless here. Getting the chance to proc an interrupt is incredibly rare, so the only thing that matters is breaking the bar as fast as possible. While moa and the stun signet also are hefty CCs (moa in particular), the elite slot is necessarily reserved for time warp, and the signet ends up being overkill since you aren’t requires to break a raid bar solo; it’s a team effort.

Edit: For PvP, best cc is going to have to be scrapper. They have immense access to both direct and reactive cc from finishers on their skills, and have a lot of huge cc utilities to choose from between slick shoes, battering ram, blast widgety thing, and turret explosions. I’d say mesmers probably come in second for cc potential after engineers, but our cc is a lot more bursty. It’s on long cooldowns and more difficult to recover from if wasted into a stability-laden teamfight.

Scapper.4236:

Why I liked playing mesmer in the first place, cause you had to be good at it.

What you seem to forget in this ridiculous statement is that people can be good at other classes too. If you’re playing Mesmer and encounter someone equally skilled on say revenant, you’ll get your kitten handed to you.

With the awful state Mesmer is in, it’s not enough to simply be good at the class, you have to be massively better at it than your opponents are at their classes. This might work in scrub-tier unranked, but it’s not going to fly once you start fighting actual competent groups of people.

You’ve got some fantasy-land predictions for boon duration from chaotic persistence. 20%-30% means 7-10 boons. You’ll usually have might, quickness, and fury. You’ll sometimes have swiftness, sometimes regen, rarely stab, rarely prot. Vigor, resistance, retal, and aegis will all be almost never on you. At the absolute maximum, you’ll have 7 boons for 21%, but the vast majority of the time you’ll be at 3-4 boons for 12% maximum.

Quickness from shattering is solid, but it’s not easy to maximize the share from it due to how the rotation works. It is possible though, just more difficult.

Unless you’ve actually run this and tested it out, I doubt you’ll find that it’s as easy to keep 100% alacrity as you think it will be. Shatters are only 3s for a full 4-clone shatter, it’s not that much.

Buildup time is simple and inherent to condies. You don’t walk into a fight and dump truck 30 stacks of torment. It takes time to do that. Since each stack lasts 12 seconds, it’ll be a minimum of 12 seconds before you can hit your maximum potential. Given the ~12 seconds to do a full alacrity buffing combo, that adds another 8-10 seconds to your total buildup time since you’re not stacking clones and shattering when you’re dropping wells. Just those alone gets you to 22ish seconds of buildup time. Any deviation from absolute perfect rotations and setup will increase that time, easily pushing you above 25 seconds.

Ananeos.4587:

Great point, if Anet doesn’t want to do a pvp/pve split then what the heck is this? Was this change made in a non- aoe meta?

Actually, all the hp values used to be far lower. They then increased pvp/wvw values by 50% or something, and increased pve values by 270%, if memory serves.

Exciton.8942:

Totally agree with your assessment.

I also feel the best working build is condie shatter. You can still take portal and moa which are the most impactful skills from mesmer and get low cd F5 shatter as well. If you take inspiration line, you also have some potential for on-point fight. Necro is hard matchup but moa counters them hard.

Moa is absolutely not a hard counter vs a necro. In a team fight, they just run away for 10 seconds (like anyone does when moaed). In a 1v1, moa is great on a power build, but worthless on a condie build if the necro you’re fighting isn’t an idiot. They can just stand still and do nothing for 10 seconds. It’ll hurt a bit, but that drastically lowers the damage they take. After 10 seconds they pop out with a condie transfer, and you’d just better hope that all those condies you’ve been loading them with end up on a clone and not on you.

So I went and ran the numbers for this build. With some generous assumptions (F1 and F2 4 clone shatters instantly off cooldown and maintaining 10 stacks of torment permanently from the block), you’ll be able to sustain about 30 stacks of torment. With 2500 condition damage, this will do 7.7k dps on a constantly moving target.

7.7k dps is actually semi-decent from a Mesmer perspective. It’s certainly not good, but it’s not awful. Unfortunately, there are some major problems.

First, you’re not using chrono runes or any other sort of boon duration enhancer. This will ruin your quickness uptime, and that’s unacceptable. If you want to use this build, you absolutely must use chrono runes, no exceptions.

Secondly, 7.7k dps is on a constantly moving target. VG is by far the most mobile boss, and it doesn’t move constantly. It stops to attack and you’re not kiting it constantly; you kite it to the edge of the next wedge and then wait there. At best, I’d estimate that it’s moving 50% of the time, dropping your dps to about 5700 on VG, lower on gorse and much lower on sabetha.

Thirdly, my calculations assumed permanent alacrity. If you’re not taking improved alacrity, you most likely won’t actually have it permanently. This will not only impact your dps, but will impact the recycle time on your buffing rotation.

Ultimately, you could do this type of build as long as you used chrono runes. You would be similarly effective compared to a more standard build as long as you kept shield phantasms up for their buffing capabilities. The dps would be awful on gorse and sabetha though, and you’d have a 15-25 second buildup time of low dps every single time you did your buff rotation or a phase change happened (25 second side if you’re tanking).

Eponet.4829:

Fay.2357:

Eponet.4829:

Well, then what would be the closest thing to a shatter mesmer? Fresh air elementalist?

Uh….I guess that sorta depends on what aspects of shatter mesmer you’re looking to be similar to.

The fact that as a sustained build as opposed to the pvp burst one, it constantly feels like you’re doing something. There’s always something to do, and the fact that your offense and defense are tied together, so there’s always some degree of decision making on what’s more usable. While simultaneously making sure that the various cooldowns on shatters and clone generation line up well.

Mainly the fact that there’s very little time where you’re just autoattacking for extended periods like say, most thief or revenant builds.

So you’ve completely misread shatter builds. Shatter builds are the quintessence of a PvP burst build that’s totally worthless for sustained damage. That’s why they’re garbage in PvE: nobody cares about burst, only your sustained damage during a fight. Honestly, there’s not really any other builds that have offense and defense tied as tightly together as a shatter build, and that’s one of the reasons that other builds are better than shatter builds.

Anyway, I can work with your last statement though. Here’s a list of builds that primarily rotate cooldowns with less of a reliance on autoattacking:

• Condie tempest (sinister/viper)
• FA tempest (zerk, still autoattacks for part of the rotation)
• Burnzerker
• Chronotank/Chrono support (zerk, you still end up autoattacking a lot…but nobody cares about it. You’re there for flawless alacrity/quickness rotations with wells and such).
• Engineer (viper)

I think that’s mostly it. All the other classes are going to be very heavily reliant on autoattacks for their damage output.

Eponet.4829:

Well, then what would be the closest thing to a shatter mesmer? Fresh air elementalist?

Uh….I guess that sorta depends on what aspects of shatter mesmer you’re looking to be similar to.

Shatter builds are all absolute garbage in PvE. If you’re using a shatter build in PvE, you’re making a mistake.

Lalainnia.3598:

Can you link one please

With 3500 power and 25 vuln on target, a swordsman will crit for 9.4k on average (assuming 2600 armor). Swordsmen hit every 3.5 seconds with phantasmal haste. If you have 3 swordsmen out, that’s on average .857 hits per second. This produces a total of 8k dps.

A condie tempest will easily break 22k dps. Good luck doing 14k personal dps.

You want to play a PvE build that “slowly shreds enemies”? I mean…sure. There’s lots of ways you can play if you want to kill things slowly, but most people prefer killing things quickly.

If you want to kill things quickly, then condition mesmer is pretty garbage for most situations. You’ll particularly have difficulties in environments where you’re trying to do aoe damage, since that makes you limited to shatter condies…which are undiluted garbage in PvE. For bosses and such you can stack duelists for bleeding which is reasonable. It’s still not good, but it’s not awful.

Lalainnia.3598:

Where exactly was it proven that mesmers have trash pve dps I would think a mesmer fully buffed with 3 sword phants going would be pretty sweet on top of the fact that they can shatter now without destorying phant dps. Just curious why its always said that mesmer dps is trash still.

It’s been proven all over the place? Just look at any of the dps estimations that have been made since then.

I also love how OP is avoiding responding to my posts at all costs. It’s almost like he realizes that getting into a factual argument with me is a losing battle.

Anyway, let’s play a game, shall we? I’ll go through your posts, picking apart statements that are factually incorrect and correcting them. You can then explain how you want to reconcile reality with your version of things! I think it’ll be fun.

Biklen.5490:

This build is very good because it has AMAZING healing and really stays alive vs all the condi pressure it once died too!

Amazing healing? I’ve analyzed this with hard math in a previous post. Using incredibly generous assumptions, your total hp/s value comes out to 1715. How do you expect to stay alive with just 1715 hp/s against high output classes like thief, scrapper, rev, and reaper?

Biklen.5490:

Your a baddy…You cant hit Mantra and f1 at the same time…That requires skill….That is the effect of a player with only 6% brain power…

Ok, so once we get past the hilarious density of ad hominems in this paragraph, we actually arrive at a valid point of discussion: stability on shatter can protect charging the mantra.

Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly enough. First of all, stability against a reaper is just a free fear when corrupted, but they’re not the only ones capable of breaking it. A normal offensive scrapper rotation involved chain cc through various finishers and skills. Since you only get 1 stack of stability, a scrapper will hammer right through it.

There’s also pure dps pressure to consider. When you’re channeling a mantra, that’s all you’re doing. You’re not blocking, you’re not dodging. If you get a thief that autoattacks you for that 2.75s channel time, the damage they unload on you will absolutely dwarf the single hit of healing you get.

Biklen.5490:

Get on my 11% lvl bro…And i will pump my chest all day…Those wings give me 1 more leg to stand on than somebody whos only output too gw2 is copy and paste meta builds…

The fact that you’ve got PvP wings means absolutely nothing past the inordinate amount of time you spent PvPing to get them. The leagues were a grinding test, not a skill test.

Biklen.5490:

Same thing happen with the ranger builds I put out…People like you said the same thing…Guess what homie?…Those wings where earned on builds people said dont work…Same build that people dint try.,..Same builds that META builds dint have on their website…

As I said…you could hit legendary playing anything. People hit legendary just playing warrior. Is warrior good? No, it’s awful, but people that really wanted to play it could still get legendary through grinding enough. The fact that you achieved what you did with those builds says nothing about those builds, only that you played insane amounts of time with them.

Biklen.5490:

Also we dint put this build out for you to say it doesnt work…It does work…This is why it is posted…The people that said doesnt work are the same people that dint try it…

If you post a build on a public forum and don’t expect to receive critiques…I’m not sure what to say outside of Welcome to the Internet!

I’ve posted many builds to these forums myself. The threads didn’t degenerate into juvenile name calling and ad hominems because I’m mature enough to listen and respond in an intelligent fashion to criticisms, both legitimate and illegitimate. What you’ve done here is exhibit A of how to get everyone on a forum to dislike you.

Biklen.5490:

Listen, the forums is filled with warriors. We really don’t care what you or the rest of the forums has to say. We knew when we where posting this build we where gonna get a lot of hate.

If you didn’t care what all of us were saying, you wouldn’t be spending the time and effort typing up long paragraphs of prose to try and argue with us.

Biklen.5490:

We knew when we where testing the build it was different than what the traditional Mesmer has been. Thais the idea…

Yes, a bunkery sustainy mesmer build. Groundbreaking in originality for sure…

Biklen.5490:

We have tested this build for a long time to know its strength and weakness. You on the other hand remain a forums warrior and bash anything meta battle does not promoted.

Well, good thing that’s not an issue with me. If I cared to (I don’t) I could point you towards the multiple builds I’ve created and successfully advocated for in the past years, or my other contributions as a member of the mesmer community. You say that you have tested this build, but your actions in this thread and your demonstrations of the build have done nothing but demonstrate that we should be taking any statements of fact as having a very questionable source.

Biklen.5490:

We released this build as a different way to play Mesmer. This build is not ment to take over the meta but it is here to give a fellow Mesmer another way to support his team other than regular shatter.

No, you released it while making extraordinary claims about how incredible it is in all situations, not as a mere alternative non-meta pick.

Biklen.5490:

For all the people that have tried this INCLUDING myself approve of this build.

There’s at least 1 person in this thread who has tried it and said that it’s not good. Messiah is very good about actually going and playtesting things, and I respect his judgement on build viability.

Biklen.5490:

You try to sit there and call us BAD because our 1vs1s looked bad. Yea i already said that in the video. I’m a crap Mesmer and for me to be able to jump on it and eat everything a DH put on me is great….If i where to practice that build for a week i could take it a lot further. Like Ariel has and will continue too.

You’re completely missing the point here. Yeah, your 1v1s weren’t stellar, and that makes us doubt the quality of the presentation we’re getting, but the big problem is that you’re trying to showcase what’s supposed to be a teamfight build in 1v1s. If I just want to 1v1, there’s many builds and classes that blow this one out of the water.

Biklen.5490:

How is that possible [getting to legendary on a zerker ranger]?…Hmm…Maybe Guild Wars 2 has other working builds other than META?….NOOOOO WAY.

It’s possible because you played 7 hours a day the entire season (which is quite a feat, I might add), and the leagues were first and foremost a grinding test, not a skill test.

Welp, that was fun! I wonder if you’ll respond to this one, or try and hand-wave it away like the rest of the posts.

Fixing the thread.

Anyway…

@OP: If you’re constantly facing and beating abjured premades, you two clearly are a pro-level duo. I look forward to watching your debut in the upcoming ESL tournament, since someone that streams 7 hours a day and is as good as you obviously are would jump at an opportunity to put your skills to use winning a nice fat cash pot.

@Trigr: You missed

- OP abandons all pretense of reasonable and sensible discussion to take a wild ride on the ghetto side with added ad hominem for spice.

Love your picture btw.

Oh man. I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry at this post. Some random people whom I have literally never heard of before come and post a questionable build on the forums. Their ‘proof of concept’ for it working is dueling each other when they’re clearly not the greatest at dueling. Then, they proceed to fail miserably at answering any legitimate criticism of the build. Instead, they choose to try and use ad hominems, bluster, and raw ego to try and get the other people to back down.

Honestly, it would be adorable if it weren’t so offensive. The way I see it is that you’ve collapsed your choices down to three options:

1. Make a video showcasing the build’s effectiveness against people that aren’t bad.
2. Disappear and hope we all forget how much of a fool you made of yourself.
3. Continue digging your hole as deep as you can go, it’s bound to bottom out sometime, right?

Clownmug.8357:

Is there really a need to do any math?

I mean…no, probably not. But lets be realistic here: math always makes a thread better!

Just a fun proof-of-concept for what I’m talking about. If you have 2000 healing power, each mantra cast will heal for 4200. You have a 2.75s channel time with 1s cooldowns between your procs for a total cycle period of 4.75 seconds. You can add in an extra .25s of random time due to anything occurring to reasonably get kitten cycle. This gives 840 hp/s.

If you have 100% uptime on regen (you won’t), it’ll provide 380 hp/s.

A 2 illusion shatter will heal for 1700.

Mind wrack has a 12s cd, I’ll give you 11s with the tiny amount of alacrity you produce. If you do a 2 clone wrack off cooldown (you won’t) it’ll provide 155 hp/s.

Well of eternity provides 10,100 healing on a 30s cooldown, giving 340 hp/s.

If you add all these up, you get to 1715 health per second as the maximum realistic healing output you can provide.

Guess what does way way way more damage than 1715 dps? A thief autoattacking. Good luck tanking I guess…

Yeah, I have a very hard time believing this build will work well. Consider the following thought experiment:

During the bunker meta, Mesmer required a tanky amulet, precog, and high alacrity uptime for defensive skills to stay alive reliably in a team fight against other bunkers.

Now, most people are running builds that put out more pressure. Additionally, precog got removed and alacrity got a huge nerf. So the ultimate change is more incoming damage with less mitigation.

You’re claiming that you can just out heal the damage by spamming your mantra or something, and this makes zero sense. If it were possible to bunker by mantra spamming, people would have done it before. I tried it actually, it didn’t work too well because it’s very difficult to reliably sit there charging mantras in the middle of a team fight.

Anyway, if you provide some evidence of this build working against competent players I’d be more inclined to consider it as something worthwhile. Otherwise…pretty sure this is awful.

francescoG.1069:

geekilo.8512:

Can AT get the same treatment as necro Corrupted Boons? Reduce its CD down to 20s or 25s, because i believe Corrupted Boons will get nerf some times in the future, no need to make it 15s.

I fear that you are not contextualizing the skill with Chronomancer: if you consider the continuum spil + alacrity this skill would you use all the time … unfortunately I’m afraid of many things programmers have put a brake because of this.
They must fix something: use 2 times un’abità unusless does not make a profit and skills that recharge the too long due to the fact that there is alacrity, cancels the advantage of her and makes the basic mesmer a class even more useless, I would say that 30 seconds they’re fine, but I do not want the cast time.

You’re wrong. Alacrity and CS just make this skill even more of a waste of space on your bar when you could take something worthwhile to spend those cooldowns on instead.

There’s 2 options, depending on whether or not the bug got fixed.

1. Nothing happens because that breaks it.
2. A random defender will take the damage. The defender spreads a buff which is what actually triggers the damage transfer. When 2 defenders are out, they will each intermittently spread their own buff. Which one has the buff out at the time of damage is what determines which defender will take that damage.

Your build link is just a bit lacking, might want to update it.

Edit: full link here: http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAW8encfClohtqBmqBEgilejqeUb1Z9cEKhQwMAugMC-TZhHABDcBAGf/BAOCAB8AAE4gAAA

Novamatrix.2569:

There are traits and skills that give illusions distortion when summoned so they wont instantly die,

For 1 whole second. Such enduring survivability.

Novamatrix.2569:

also you can increase their health and make their attacks stronger and faster.

300% of really low hp is still really low hp.

Novamatrix.2569:

Its all in the build. Clones are designed to be weaker and phantasms are designed to be stronger in attacks and have higher health.

Sort of. There’s plenty of ways to boost phantasms, but even with the most pure phantasm build, they’ll squish instantly to any sort of aoe or cleave pressure.

slinkiestyew.6823:

Well, I would’ve liked to think Chrono would provide at least ONE build we could be ‘reduced to’. But after being abruptly kicked out of about five raid fights now BEFORE THE FIGHTS EVEN BEGIN simply because I’m a Mesmer and apparently ‘Mesmer dps sucks —-, play a different —-- class’, I’m starting to think it’s time to leave the class (or the game’s apparently awful community) :/

Yeah, I can bring Chrono to the Vale Guardian where boon-stripping still sees /some/ play. But it’s an inevitable kick once we down that boss because every(any) other class apparently outdoes us at the moment…? Perhaps it’s the awful luck I’ve had with absurdly selfish LFG groups of pricks, perhaps it’s the class. Either way, it’s certainly soured the experience for me.

Chrono is still an unarguable damage boost to the raid if played well. Anyone kicking a chrono on sight purely for being a chrono is just a bad and probably won’t finish the raid anyway.

Ananeos.4587:

Xyonon.3987:

Ananeos.4587:

Torment is the second weakest damaging condition in the game. No.

Only for PvE. It’s fine in PvP / WvW, since either they move or they become an easy target.

Good luck killing someone with torment. /shrug

I’ve managed pretty effectively with it. Say in WvW where you can easily hit 2500 condition damage, one single application of the scepter block will do ~12k damage to a moving target.

It needs to be mentioned that the ‘get up to 20k dps’ number is extremely circumstantial. You’ll hit that on VG probably 60% of the time when all is said and done. You won’t hit that on gorse ever, and you might hit it on sabetha 50% of the time, since the bosses swap out there. Additionally, condie mesmer lack of cleave is a HUGE issue for gorse and any FOTM that you run. Yeah, you can stack up damage on the boss once you get there, but you’ll be worse than useless for everything before that point.

bearshaman.3421:

what about condi?

I read the dulfy.net guide and I know he doesn’t have the highest opinion of it, but I hear condi is really good at higher level fractals…

To get a feel for condie, take how garbage each of the garbage builds were, combine it, and use that combined pile of garbage as your judgement call.

Condie for mesmer is still absolute garbage, but it’s a lot better than it was.

bearshaman.3421:

Before I recall seeing stuff about mesmers having 5 different kinds of builds (shatter, phantasm, support, interrupt, and something else…)

Now I am only seeing this one. That’s why I said reduced to.

Shatter has never been anything other than absolute garbage in PvE.

Support…isn’t a build. All mesmers brought support (read: portal and time warp). That’s the only reason they were there, but you couldn’t make a build out of it.

Interrupt has never been anything other than absolute garbage in PvE with the exception of about 48 hours after a patch one time.

Phantasm has been what the meta PvE builds were always based around. It wasn’t good…but it was the best we had.

Yeah, I take issue with the phrase ‘reduced to this’. We weren’t reduced to this, we were brought up to this level. Previously we were only brought for portal, and time warp was used because it was good, but wasn’t enough to actually have us in a dungeon party at all.

I’m gonna call bull on the danger time build. In any reasonable team, danger time will be far overcapping your crit, not to mention it doesn’t affect your phantasms. It’s basically just a gimmicky way of boosting your awful personal damage. That build would just end up being a really bad dps build that happened to give a bit of alacrity too. Way better to bring a normal support build.

Condie is questionable too. You’re sacrificing alacrity/quickness support for damage….but your damage is worse than ‘insert actual dps class here’. I’m sure you can clear with it, but it’s not a good choice.

Let me be frank: Your problems are originating from the fact that your build is absolute garbage, and that there is a clear misunderstanding of how damage works in this game. All the people coming in and commiserating about how bad mesmer is either completely ignored your OP, or simply aren’t functioning at a high enough level to understand this game.

Most of your build is rabid with the exception of a few trinkets and runes that are even MORE defensive. This is a condition set that has low (no) power damage, but provides defense through toughness, utility through precision, and damage from condition damage. You’re complaining that you don’t hit very hard? Yeah, that’s because you’re using rabid, and rabid doesn’t hit hard.

You’re also randomly using some zerker gear…for no apparent reason. This does nothing other than make you squishier for no appreciable gain in power strength.

Your weapon choices are bad. Sword has no condition damage strength, and is only useful in a condition damage build for the utility it offers, but you’re obviously not using it that way (more on that later). Staff and shield are fine…but you’re missing out on a lot of strength by incorrect traiting.

Your trait choices are totally garbage for what you’re trying to do. You have absolutely zero offensive in the entire build. Your inspiration traits are all healing and defense. Your chaos traits are all defense. Your chrono traits are utility. You make a build that’s as defensive as possible with absolutely zero offense, and then you have the gall to come here to the forums and complain about doing no damage? Incredible.

You need to take 2 giant steps back and completely relearn how to craft a build. The first thing you need to do is choose what you want the build to do. Do you want it to have a strong offense, strong defense, primarily utility, or a mix. Once you’ve chosen that, you need to get into specifics. Do you want condie/power/hybrid offense? Do you want stealth/blocks/invuln defense? Do you want healing/buffing/interrupting/supporting utility? Once you’ve figured out the specifics of what you want to do, you can then choose traits and gear that support that goal. If you want power offense, you take zerker and power shatter traits. If you want condie offense you take rabid/dire and condie shatter traits. If you want hybrid you take sinister/viper and a mix of offensive traits. If you describe what your intention for your build is, I can help you make something that actually works.

TL;DR: It’s not mesmer, it’s you and your build. I can help you if you want.

Hooglese.4860:

I thought they did… Do they not work with the new ones? They need to work with all of them

They work with clones, not phantasms.

Personally I like sw/sh + gs for open world stuff. The range and quick damage on the greatsword makes it nice for various things, and then you have good close range combat with sw/sh.

Don’t make the mistake of running that in FOTM or raids though, you should be using a standard chrono-buff build for those.

Edit: @Ferulio: There are no other viable builds. Chronotank and chrono dps are basically the same anyway. The only difference is that one takes a bit of toughness gear to control aggro in raids, and the other doesn’t.

Commanders has totally wasted stats for a solo player: boon duration. You’re sacrificing both offense and defense from other sets for a random stat that gives you as a solo player absolutely nothing. It’s also a lot more expensive than many other sets.

Commander’s armor for soloing is probably one of the worst ideas I’ve heard in a while. There’s no possible reason to go for anything that isn’t ‘insert full damage set here’, or full damage with minor defense mods like knights or cavs. Commanders doesn’t give a solo player anything worthwhile, and it’ll take you an hour to kill stuff you should be killing in 5 seconds.

That being said, if most of your time is spent doing stuff like claw of jormag, you could be naked and it wouldn’t matter much, so there is that.

StickerHappy.8052:

Velimere.7685:

StickerHappy.8052:

Velimere.7685:

Jourdelune.7456:

Velimere.7685:

A friend and I two-queued tonight, winning against a few notable folks such as Caed, Ostrich Eggs, and Noscoc (who was three-queuing) while playing this build (Paladin’s Amulet), but then we lost with Chaith on our team… and he called the rest of us bad.

Anyway, it’s basically a bruiser variant of the Bunker Mesmer build.

Yea, you played with Five Gadget and The Team I pug with was The First Straw.

I said to them over TS, that Velimere is the best mesmer of the two… I don’t remember your mesmer name.

We did win this game because you were not been able to kill the sustain of our group fight… and I was playing bunker support like always.

It was an okay fight, but I felt you could had gave us more difficulties. Your other mesmer soloqing was a dead weight doing nothing. Probably, it would had been harder with a necro or a rev.

Your chrono bunker with some offensive crit sigils seems something I want to try out.

Will give some feedback on it.

I don’t really keep track of character names either to be honest. No worries.

Now that I think about it, wasn’t Impact with you guys in that match too?

It felt like Chaith’s build and mine were the only ones with real sustain. It seems to be a current trend now where people think that just because there are more bruiser amulets in place of bunker amulets that sustained builds are now invalidated, and I see a lot more people over-extending from a two-cap into a three-point play trading their team’s two nodes for the one. It’s like they’re ignoring what they learned from the last meta.

I really like my updated Bruiser Mesmer build, but I also recently tested this Elementalist build (Mercenary’s Amulet) and saw great results over a streak of wins while carrying team-fights, so I’m not sure how much I’ll play my Mesmer when the next season starts.

That said, I’d still appreciate any feedback you can provide.

PS: Five Gadget is not Chaith FYI

I just assumed from the account name being Chaith. I don’t really keep track of character names as per your quote. Either way, I wasn’t talking about winning against him or anything whatsoever, so it’s completely and utterly inconsequential to say the least.

However, thanks for the heads-up.

Yeap np, I asked Chaith about who that was and he said he had no idea, otherwise you had chaith on your team, you might have won the match.

I’ve faced Five Gadget numerous times and he is definitely not Chaith, altho he/ she uses the same user id.

Chaith’s handle is ‘Five Gauge Chaith’. Five Gadget sounds like an intentional look-alike.

Condie Mesmer in zergs is pretty awful. There’s 2 tricks you can do to try and make it work. Guardian runes allow you to use your shield block as a burn applier by walking through aoe with it up. This is…quite gimmicky and doesn’t accomplish much outside of being decent for tagging. It also consumes your runes with a set that isn’t great for roaming.

The other thing you can try is using mistrust. Hypothetically, mistrust can be incredible in a tightly packed group environment as every interrupt will spread confusion to all nearby enemies, resulting in an amplified effect. Unfortunately, this rarely actually works. There’s too much stability for you to reliably land interrupts, and it’s too rare for your disables to actually interrupt on the off chance you don’t hit stability. It can work, and now and then it’s really fun to see massive confusion procs, but it’s extremely rare to occur.

Condie Mesmer for roaming is decent. If you want to go dire, you’ll probably want to skip the dueling line, as that’s important if you are dealing out crits. Rabid would go dueling, but not dire. For a dire build you’d probably go insp/ill/chrono for the sustain that insp offers. You could also potentially take a torch and go PU with chaos instead of insp. To make up for the lack of clone generation from DE, you’ll need both illusion generation traits in the chrono line.

Carighan.6758:

TheOneWhoSighs.7513:

A game development studio needs to have 3 basic tenants.

1. You cannot be bullied by your playerbase.
2. You cannot please everyone.
3. Trying to please everyone, will not please anyone.

Additional:
4. Not trying anything, will also not please anyone.

Yeah this is absolutely true. And where ANet really needs to improve. They seem to be stuck in the middle with no idea where to go, no concept for their classes beyond “esportslulz”, and that’S it.

This is the primary problem with Anet balancing. They have no vision, no overarching idea of how they’d like classes to perform, roles they’d like to see, general tenets to abide by. Every single new balance patch that comes out is just random adjustments made on the spot to try and whack-a-mole the balance problems that came from the last set of random adjustments .

The evidence of this is in the notes themselves. In one breath, they discuss how reliance on autoattacks for damage is a bad thing, and nerf rev autos. In the next breath, they say that thieves don’t do enough damage, and buff their autoattacks.

There’s other stuff too. Instead of trying to balance bunker builds, they try to remove the very concept from the game through the manipulation of amulets. Just think about that for a moment. One of the most basic tenets of game PvP, the tanky bruiser, is an archetype that they’ve conceded ‘we have no idea what we’re doing with this’, and have tried to completely purge it from the game. Now, obviously this won’t work. People will still figure out how to make bruisers, and until Anet figures out how to balance bruisers (hint: look at LoL), they’ll still manage to make them op, but the very fact that they even tried to do this belies a basic lack of understanding and intelligence about what’s even possible or reasonable to do when balancing a game.

How about something like when they added torment to the scepter auto? We as mesmers had been complaining about how bad it was for a long time. Additionally, the PvP community as a whole had expressed a displeasure with spammy conditions. This displeasure was even echoed by the devs, who proceeded to show their resolve at lowering the amount of spammy conditions in the game by adding another spammable condition. Not only does that show a total lack of vision, it also shows another basic failure to grasp what’s needed to make this game healthy. We weren’t complaining about the scepter auto because it didn’t spam conditions, we were and still ARE complaining because it feels awful to use and is incredibly mechanically clunky. The devs would have known this if they took the time to actually play the class and experience the very game they’re balancing, and so the fact that they completely misunderstood this really simple problem is something that shows how totally out of touch they are with the game they’re supposed to have control over.

Anyway…this sorta grew into a bit of a rant. Tl;dr: Balance in this game has the vision and resolve of twitch plays pokemon.

Yeah, the idea that you can’t react to conditions before they’re applied is just ridiculous. As Carighan said, a condition player doesn’t just mutter under their breath, wave their hands at their computer screen, and will you to gain conditions. Conditions are applied in all of the exact same ways that power damage is.

In fact, conditions have an additional reaction mechanism. Once power damage has been dealt, you can’t…un-deal it. You can, however, remove conditions. Even if you screw up and let somebody load you up with conditions, you can still remove them.

So, conditions actually have more reaction mechanisms than power damage does. You can dodge/mitigate/invuln/block the attacks that apply conditions, OR you can remove them. The whole idea of saying ‘oh, well unless I predict a condie bomb coming, I’m probably going to die’ is so wrong it blows my mind. Guess what else kills you if you don’t predict it? A full burst from a glass FA ele. Guess what else kills you if you don’t predict it? A full burst from a glass burst mesmer, or a from a burst thief, or guardian, or….etc. There’s nothing special about a condie bomb that makes it more dangerous or even harder to avoid. It’s all the asinine mindset of ‘oh condies are bad, and anyone using condies clearly isn’t putting any effort into playing because there’s obviously no possible way built into this game for me to somehow avoid or mitigate the condie damage’.

Demandred.7930:

The biggest necro buff was the nerf to diamond skin. Necros are running basically the same build from last season with wanderer’s instead of carrion. Yes, it now has auto-attack boon corrupt on scepter, but that amounts to 3 boons converted during a match, and almost none when the necro’s are being pressured .

You…clearly missed like 3/4 of the necro patch notes.

Arikyali.5804:

1. What’s the non-chronomancer meta build for mesmer, nowadays? I will get the expac, but not yet. So I need non-shield builds until then.

I believe they tend to call that ‘face down in the dirt’.

Arikyali.5804:

2. Do people still use double ranged shatter mesmer in PvP? I loved that build…

No. You’ll get eaten alive by thieves, necros, revs, DHs, and scrappers.

Arikyali.5804:

3. Is a soldier set with speed runes still a good investment, and viable today? It was basically for my zerker build for WvW, but with soldier armor to be more tanky.

…probably not? I can’t really imagine that being a good investment at any point in time, but not now really. Particularly since chrono gets a passive 25% movement speed boost.

Arikyali.5804:

4. Is glass zerker mesmer still the meta for PvE? (Fractals, dungeons, etc.)

Depends on the class, but for the most part sinister/viper hybrid builds are best. For mesmer, you should be kicked on sight if you’re not a chrono, and you should be running quickness/alacrity support as a chrono.

Arikyali.5804:

5. Perplexity runes are still a good investment, right? I’d hate to have my condi set be useless now…>.<

They’re still fine. I’ve never honestly loved perplexity runes, but I’ve also never really had strong feelings about something better to use instead. They’re fine still.

Arikyali.5804:

6. Is the trait ‘distort on shatter’ really gone? I loved that trait. >.<

What?

Arikyali.5804:

8. I heard mesmers got nerfed to the ground, and none of the recent buffs alleviated the damages. Is this the truth? Should I just forget about my main mesmer and play my thief for now?

Pretty much. Chronobunker got a lot of huge nerfs, and thieves/necros got a lot of huge buffs. Non-bunker builds got substantial nerfs as collateral damage to the bunker nerfs, and have ended up in a worse place than before.

Have you tried….never mind.

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

It’s not the feature of “arrows falling.” It’s a server side/lag thing. They give about a 15% bonus to the ranged projectiles. Positioning server mumbo jumbo (I don’t remember exact explanation). With both the shooter and shootee of projectiles moving, having arrows instantly disappear at 1200 range was causing a lot of unnecessary accuracy problems and they gave the extra bonus range. Since the GS is a “laser” it doesn’t have flight time and therefore doesn’t get the same “grace” range increase.

GS beam does get a range increase though, it’s just not as drastic as projectile ones. I think they called it distance fuzzing or something.

Jana.6831:

Fay.2357:

Jana.6831:

Fay.2357:

Jana.6831:

I’m sorry but I didn’t understand a word
I did test blind and condi remove today (although I already knew) by running into a wvw camp (the vets basically spam blind). I might try it with my necro. But what do venoms have to do with that?

As was already mentioned, you’re just wrong. Blind is a condition, can be removed like any other condition.

Then try it, please.

I’ve been playing this game since open beta, and I’ve cleared blind with condition removals more times than I could possibly count. You’re obviously testing wrong.

I capped ~15k camps, 10k of it solo – I have never been able to remove the blind.

Probably because you’ve been standing in the pulsing blind field the scouts drop. It’s invisible, but acts like the black powder smoke field.

Jana.6831:

Fay.2357:

Jana.6831:

I’m sorry but I didn’t understand a word
I did test blind and condi remove today (although I already knew) by running into a wvw camp (the vets basically spam blind). I might try it with my necro. But what do venoms have to do with that?

As was already mentioned, you’re just wrong. Blind is a condition, can be removed like any other condition.

Then try it, please.

I’ve been playing this game since open beta, and I’ve cleared blind with condition removals more times than I could possibly count. You’re obviously testing wrong.

Jana.6831:

I’m sorry but I didn’t understand a word
I did test blind and condi remove today (although I already knew) by running into a wvw camp (the vets basically spam blind). I might try it with my necro. But what do venoms have to do with that?

As was already mentioned, you’re just wrong. Blind is a condition, can be removed like any other condition.

est.9210:

if only chrono is placed alone in a sub group, what happens with all the buffs :0? I’m curious and maybe newbie on this but never tried that

Priority is determined by proximity.

kolompi.1287:

Sure, but to balance it, they’ll change alacrity to a boon and give it to scrapper and revenant.

It’s sad because it’s true.

Nah, someone else mentioned it…you can’t burst heal on a chrono. Well is 3s delay, mantra is a pulse every 4-5 seconds. A Druid can unload massive healing in seconds when necessary. Even the most aggressively heal-specced Mesmer can’t come anywhere close to that. Additionally, you’ll be losing out massively on quickness uptime without SoI. Yes, you have the trait. No, it doesn’t work. How do you plan on getting 3 illusions for the initial combo without using a phantasm skill? Answer: you don’t. How do you plan on doing your combo at all if you have to wait the 1.5s channel of shield block to cast a SoI. Answer: you can’t.

While I’m sure your healing is decent, there’s zero chance you’ll be as good as a Druid, and you’re sacrificing substantial quickness uptime to get there. No go.