Guild Wars 2

Swish.2463:

if you run a Sword Focus all the time I’m sure the foe sitting still and staring at you is entirely true Pyro.

I’ve brought it into basic PvE and Dungeon runs with minor changes and it works just fine. is it super meta? no but it works :P Give it a try, you might like it.

Yes, yes, I’m sure it works in pve. This is because literally anything can work in pve because pve is so easy. That doesn’t mean that it works well or that you’re not a wasted spot on a team for running it.

Foes standing still and attacking slowly is not dependent on weaponset. That’s simply how enemies behave. They use slow attacks slowly. They’re animation locked, so no moving while attacking. In 5s they’ll use maybe 2 attacks if you’re lucky. If you try and kite them around to get torment ticking…they’ll just switch aggro to someone not running in circles. Additionally, I’d love to see you do any damage whatsoever to some bosses like the molten duo that would laugh at your attempts to shatter anything.

This build falls squarely into the list of ‘kick on sight, no questions asked’ builds if I’m not in the mood to carry someone that isn’t contributing anything to the team whatsoever.

Jeremlloyd.6837:

For some professions yeah, but I’m not sure it is the case for mesmers. But I didn’t test that so we would need a confirmation from frifox for it (if he tested it)

Yeah, he’s done some dps tests. The condition sets pull ahead particularly in cases where maintaining full melee dps soling isn’t feasible.

Just posting here so I can say I got a post in before it went south.

Yes, it does work on shatters. If you dredge deep into the history of this forum you’ll find a thread somewhere comparing the two traits together. The conclusion was that compounding power is going to add slightly more damage to each shatter, even with quite high critical damage.

Sorry Chaos, but your reasoning here is completely awful and just smells like a last grasp at not wanting to believe that this lockdown trait is fully and truly awful.

Your reasoning applies to literally everything in the game. ’Wouldn’t a bunch of d/d eles spamming boons on each other be really overpowered?’ Why yes, it would be, same with a whole bunch necros all using lich form or spamming condies or a bunch of medi guards all bursting at the same time.

If you take any large group of the same build and stick it into a theoretical situation where the opponents don’t fight back at at all, it’ll seem quite overpowered. However, there’s really good reasons why teams don’t run 2 squishy lockdown mesmers, 5 medi guards, or 4 p/d thieves. There’s also really good reasons you don’t see roaming groups of lockdown mesmers in wvw. It simply isn’t effective and has many counters due to the one-dimensional nature of the attack.

I’m not going to comment on its PvP/WvW effectiveness, since you’re probably aware of the potential issues that it runs into there due to build mechanics/stat choices. I’m just curious as to where any amount of PvE viability even begins to creep into this build?

It’s a hybrid build (not good in PvE), a shatter build (awful in PvE), using greatsword (usually pretty bad in PvE), using torment as a primary damage condition (fairly bad in PvE) and confusion as a secondary damage condition (absolutely awful in PvE). Condition burst doesn’t work on mobs. They don’t chase after you and they don’t spam skills in a panic. They just get hit by it, stare at you dumbly…and that’s about it.

Urosh Uchiha.9732:

Blurred Frenzy applied distortion back in the day but they nerfed it. Although I still think Masterful Reflection works on it. Not sure to be honest, but somehow I think it does. Will have to try against a pew pew ranger

It doesn’t and never has.

fluxit.8247:

So tell me again why you think sword/pistol is cute.

Seems in character, check the posting history.

Jeremlloyd.6837:

For PvE, you don’t want to use conditions, direct damage is still the way to go

Can be noted that for solo only condition sets can rival power builds.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

These labels often don’t take one major factor into account: player skill.

I’m going to go ahead and take a bit of an issue with this argument here. This is a discussion I’ve had a lot of times before, and a lot of people seem quite confused on this point.

The quality of a build and the quality of a player are two separate variables that have no inherent connection.

So what does this mean? Well, it means that you can absolutely analyze and label builds as ‘good’ or ‘great’ or ‘worse’ or ‘horrid’. It means that you don’t have to ever worry about if those builds could potentially be played amazingly. It means you’re allowed to make assumptions such as ‘competent player fighting competent player’ or ‘competent player fighting incompetent player’ or ‘incompetent player fighting competent player’ to try and analyze the effectiveness of the build.

It also means that the quality of a player can’t be determined by the build they’re using, and more importantly it means that the effectiveness of a build can’t be determined by how effectively a player is actually using it. Let me put this in a slightly different way.

I could trait 2/2/2/2/2 and murder people all day long in hotjoin/unranked/ranked to some extent. Does this mean that 2/2/2/2/2 is a fantastic build that everyone should use? No, absolutely not. It means that I as a player understand the interactions between skills and builds and classes and players and am able to brute force an awful build into working. It’s like if you’re trying to drill a hole through something with nothing but a toothpick; it’ll work if you put enough force behind it, but a drill press would do a better job with less effort.

If you’re going around kicking butt while traited 2/2/2/2/2…then props to you because you’re probably an incredible player…but that has absolutely zero bearing on how good the build you’re using is.

The take-home message here is that crafting an effective build and using that build effectively are two completely separate skillsets. One should endeavor to be great at both of them, to both fully understand why your build is effective, how to make it more effective, how to modify it and adapt it and adjust to changes as they happen AND how to play it and execute combos and skills and everything successfully. This also means that if you’re performing fantastically, criticism of your build may still be valid, and if you’re failing miserably with the meta builds…you might just need some more practice.

As an aside…

Brew Pinch.5731:

Used to run the current Mesmer meta way back. It was considered a bad build by forum-tards despite my consistently strong play.

Yes, double-ranged shatter was considered a bad build back then because it was a bad build back then.

Brew Pinch.5731:

There have been no patches making any significant changes to the build since then.

And this is why. Everything else got nerfed, broken, and nerfed again. Congratulations on consistently playing a rather poor build that eventually ended up as the best due to the Anet version of ‘process of elimination’: Eliminate everything that works well.

fluxit.8247:

or blurred frenzy.

BF applies ‘blur’, not distortion.

Teutos.8620:

Shintei.9061:

Mirror Images needs a target to be activated

Can’t you use it just as a stun breaker anytime?

I don’t believe so.

DoomKnightMax.6592:

Now, I have attempted a PU build with full zerker gear, and even with some knights trinkets where and their but the results aren’t as impressive as expected. Now, I’m leaning towards a condition build. Is it possible to find a condition build with high mobility ( for escapes or to catch up to a target)* and provide condition “burst”?*

High mobility can mean several different things. It can mean in-combat mobility, being able to maneuver through a fight effectively. It could also mean pure in-combat ground speed, how fast you can turn tail and run. It could additionally mean out of combat ground speed, your maximum possible speed swapping weapons and such to make yourself speed from point to point.

Mesmer has generally awful in-combat ground speed. Our fighting weapons are not generally our mobility weapons. On the other hand, mesmers have quite decent out of combat ground speed, between swapping on focus and using blink and phase retreat swaps to cover ground quickly. Lastly, as I mentioned in my first post, mesmers have fantastic in-combat mobility with pretty much every spec. Phase retreat, stealths, and blink allow you to cover ground within a fight rapidly and safely.

PU condition burst is a bit tricky to pull off. Most people simple say it’s not possible and leave it at that, but those people just aren’t good players. The burst has a lot of aspects that all need to work properly in order for it to execute effectively. You need to have 3 illusions up, preferably at least a couple clones. The clones need to be close to your target, as do you. This means you need to be skirmishing in melee range. You need to be able to successfully block attacks to apply the torment from the scepter. I like to do this reliably by baiting attacks using confusing images. This has the side-effect of adding confusion to the combo.

Confusing images applies confusion. The torment block applies 5 stacks of torment and produces a clone. That clone causes 1 explosion. At this point you can use the prestige, dodge roll (explosion 2) and swap to staff. The prestige applies blindness, the swap to staff triggers your doom sigil and energy sigil. Chaos storm applies the doom poison and potentially dazes (interrupt = confusion), chills, and poisons. Another dodge roll and then phase retreat produces 2 more clones (4 explosions in total). The prestige explodes for burning.

This combo will apply between 3 and 10 stacks of confusion, 5 stacks of torment, poison, cripple, weakness, burning, blindness, chill, vulnerability, and 2-8 stacks of bleeding. Consider that your target already will have a couple stacks of bleeding, torment, and potentially burning. This is a phenomenal condition burst when executed properly. Bonus points for somehow working in a third chain scepter auto and applying aoe chaos armor with the prestige blast, since each chaos armor has its own internal cooldown for conditions.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

I’ve seen some outnumbered mesmer builds (try to google/youtube it btw, they’re old tho) and they are either based off an abuse of light and ethereal fields or effects when clones die.
For example, using iLeap on a temporal curtain gives a light aura, then swapping to staff and applying a chaos armor will lead to high damage reduction, many boons and many conditions on your enemies.

You’re probably referring to my old Immortal build. It worked exceedingly well for outnumbered fights, but it’s no longer viable.

The current outnumbered mesmer builds are all PU variants. There isn’t currently really any good way to build that has enough defense while maintaining a strong enough offense to accomplish anything at all.

I personally much prefer PU conditions, as condition gear (rabid) doesn’t sacrifice defense while having the necessary offensive stats. PU power is going to be less tanky than PU conditions, while at the same time having a somewhat less potent offense

In a PU condition build, you can expect to have around 1900 armor, 1800-2000 condition damage, and extremely good in-combat mobility between phase retreat and blink. I usually run it with perplexity runes, but I’m definitely not convinced that they’re the best choice, so you could experiment with other things. Ether feast provides incredible sustain when combined with that much toughness and protection, pDisenchanter provides boon stripping and condition removal along with the traited torch skills. Your damage comes from a combination of clone-death bursting along with skillful landing of the scepter block. I also take doom sigils to add poison into the rotation. The build allows you to play aggressively in bursts, even against 3-4 people, because the combination of blink and a couple of stealths allows you to both stomp someone you’ve downed and escape to a safe location without getting killed.

Glass cannon shatter mesmer is probably the single worst spec in the game to solo roam on. You have extremely low defenses against the current roaming meta. On the other hand, it’s a great choice for a 2-3 man party, especially if you’ve got a guard or something to engage for you. Shatter mesmers can instantly kill even quite tanky specs if you set up your burst properly, so if you can find a roaming buddy it’s absolutely a great choice. Take a look at some of bamf Joe’s videos for some of that sort of playstyle.

You were pointed at several guides that are both very good and very specific. I find it hard to believe you made this build based on what you could have learned from those guides.

Greatsword is worthless in the vast majority of dungeons and fotm. There are a couple niche encounters where it can be used, but it’s generally worthless. It deserves a spot in your inventory just in case, not a slot in your build.

Why do you have mirror images? What possible benefit are you expecting to gain from that utility?

Why would you go just 5 points into domination? Wastrels punishment is an awful trait, and it’s not like that one point doesn’t have another very strong place for it (illusions X).

Why would you take deceptive evasion in a phantasm pve build?

You’re using 5 runes of the Mesmer and 1 ruby orb? You couldn’t find any runes that gave a good 6-set bonus (like pack, ranger, strength, scholar)?

The build isn’t complete and total garbage, but it’s not good at all. I’m honestly confused as to how you could come up with that after reading the guides you were pointed towards.

I’m not normally this exceedingly negative about a random build, but you specifically asked for the optimal build in your post. Optimal for Mesmer is not something that’s particularly variable or uncertain. There is an optimal build or two, and they are used by every single dungeon Mesmer that wants to play optimally. Your build is nowhere close to any of them.

My advice: don’t.

Long videos suck. They’re hard to get through, turn people off, a pain in the rear end to upload, just all sorts of bad. Instead, aim to keep your videos at 10 minutes or below. Starting from that length, pick a limited range of topics to cover in each video. One on matchups, one on builds, one on tips and tricks, etc.

This way you can link specific videos for reference instead of saying ‘oh, it’s somewhere between 12:00 and 20:00. It allows you to do it in pieces to make the project more manageable as well.

Ross Biddle.2367:

Fay.2357:

Ross Biddle.2367:

“This video contains content from mgmdistributiondigital, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.”

Doh!

Hola better Internet. Learn it and love it.

It’s because I’m a filthy foreigner to this native video. I could work some fancy tricks but its just so much effort D :

https://hola.org/faq?ref=be_user_nav&utm_source=holaext

Hola better internet. It’s a chrome extension that allows you to vpn from a chosen country just with a single click, incredibly useful.

Ross Biddle.2367:

“This video contains content from mgmdistributiondigital, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds.”

Doh!

Hola better Internet. Learn it and love it.

@Chipmunks: The build is 0/4/6/0/4…but you have no idea what you’re talking about. If you want shatters, you’ll be wanting a build that’s not PU condition.

@OP: The playstyle is decent. I have a couple critiques though.

You’re clicking all of your shatters, heal, utilities, and elite. You’re not clicking your 1-5 skills, and I noticed that you still have all the default keybinds, so I think this might be a case of bad keybinding.

Clicking any skill is always a horrible choice, but the default keybinds are very much unusable. My keybinds that I use in place of 6-10 are q e r t x. I also use ctrl+1/2/3/4 for my shatters instead of F1/2/3/4. This allows me to hit all of my skills without moving my left hand away from wasd.

My other critique involves your traiting with regards to your playstyle. You’ve got illusionary elasticity, but you actually use staff fairly rarely other than to just drop a chaos storm. You may want to work on using the staff more to get more mileage out of that trait, or alternatively try using 4/4/6/0/0 for a slightly different flavor build.

The short answer to your question is no; the build you’ve linked is unequivocally awful. The key, though, is why?

Firstly, the concept is a bit flawed. As you actually said in your post, confusion is a condition that only ends up dealing a lot of damage to careless foes. Designing a build to only function properly if your enemies are incompetent is a flawed decision from the start. On top of that though, mesmers actually aren’t great at applying confusion in general, and your build isn’t optimized for what Mesmer can do.

First, the traits.

In domination, you’ve taken confounding suggestions. In a build that relies almost completely on your opponent making actions to proc confusion, taking a trait that adds daze duration and stun conversion is a poor choice. That aside, you also have one source of daze in your build, on a 28 second cooldown. You’re making fairly poor use of the trait. Cleansing conflagration is a fine pick, but then you take crippling dissipation, which I’ll come back to later.

In chaos, you take chaotic dampening, which is fine. You also take debilitating dissipation. The dissipation traits all require large amounts of clone production to provide ample fuel for them. In your build, you have very limited clone production; mainly because you don’t take Dueling X: deceptive evasion. This means that now and then you’ll get the dissipations to do a little something, but the vast majority of the time you’ll be fighting with 0-1 clone out.

Lastly, you’ve taken master of misdirection in illusions, which is fine in theory but ends up not doing much. The big problem here is blinding befuddlement, which is a singularly awful trait that used to be great. Blinding befuddlement was slapped with a hefty internal cooldown. The internal cooldown not only means you can’t use it to apply much confusion to one person, it also means you can’t use it to apply confusion to more than one person ever, even with aoe blinds. The trait is awful now, literally never worth taking in any build.

Overall, confusion as a primary damage source in a build only works against bad players. Additionally, this build has some odd lockdown elements that actually work against your confusion damage, and the build is in general pretty awful at applying confusion at all. The typical confusion burst comes from shatters, but you have no clones, so you’ll have nothing to shatter. Confusing images is easily dodged aaaaand that’s it. That’s all your confusion, gone practically before the fight even starts.

Oh, and the iMage can literally be dodged by a slowly ambling dolyak, so that gives you an idea of how reliable that is.

FrownyClown.8402:

Ross Biddle.2367:

FrownyClown.8402:

Hey all, my friend made this build almost a year ago. Its much easier to play than the double ranged shatter and has better survivabilty. Hey is a video of him running it in wvw and a link to the build in pvp.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VAiFk9FkOQ

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAR8flknpMtNqxYNcrNiqxY6XquFSGwClsktB-TpRBwARuAA02fQzRAgcZAAHEgHPAAA

The traditional combo would be greatsword 4,2,5,3 then switch to s/t and teleport to target with 3 then do 2/shatter.

Please don’t tell me I’m bad, I have never played mesmer before today, I just thought this build worked better in pvp.

Works better at what though? You’ll need to define that term.

PvP is about capping and holding circles for points. Team with most points wins. There’s entire, weekly threads about why PU, or anything other than “traditional shatter mesmer” isnt viable for PvP.

Your video is set in WvW which is not “PvP” so to speak. There PU does work well, though the setup if zerker with PU which has its ups and downs. Yes, PU is great for WvW roaming, everyone knows this (and funnily enough this also comes up on a weekly basis on the forums).

So you’re new, you’re having a good time with your build, awesome. It’s not new around here though, just an fyi.

It makes a good roamer, that won’t die as easily as a shatter build. Not sure why it isn’t as popular with all these terrible mesmers I see.

PU is very popular, just most people play it absolutely awfully and get steamrolled as a result.

Rangerdeity.5847:

better than nothing and with sigil of blood and food its a healthy supply of incoming health.

2000 health every 20 seconds isn’t a healthy amount, it’s hardly noticeable. It’s literally worse than every other heal that mesmers have access to. “Better than nothing”…? That heal is the nothing that the other heals are better than.

Rangerdeity.5847:

running with guards and necros that know how to condi clear and stabilize on voice request thus my focus on reflect spams.

Relying on other people is a great way to get killed. What happens if someone isn’t there that day? What happens if they’re slightly out of range? What happens if the 5 target cap doesn’t include you? As the commander, it’s essential that you’re reliable and predictable. If you move erratically and get immobilized every 10 seconds, nobody can follow you.

Rangerdeity.5847:

the sigil you have a valid point but in t2 given the current WvW population they last much longer than they should usually about 5 seconds average which is enough to get 1-2 heals from them.

I play Mesmer in t2 too. They generally don’t last that long. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt though. Every 20 seconds you’ll get …4-6 ticks. Every 20 seconds you’ll receive 1200-1800 hp. Abysmal in every sense of the word.

Well, there’s several pretty wonky things here.

First of all, you’re using signet of the ether. This happens to give 0 health regen if you don’t have illusions. It also pulses once every 3 seconds. That in mind, over the course of a 2 minute group fight, you’ll get somewhere between 0 and 2000 health in total. You’ll literally never have illusions up, they’ll die in a maximum of 2 or so seconds after spawning. Unless the only reason you’re taking that heal is for the cooldown refresh, it’s an awful choice.

Next, your sigil choices are poor, but Ross already covered that.

A bigger problem is that this build seems to have been made with literally zero understanding of what a commander needs to be able to do. You need to be able to wade through the front line of a zerg without being stopped or locked down. There are several aspects to this.

First, you regard condition removal as something that deals with damaging conditions. While technically correct, it’s also horridly incomplete. The big danger posed by conditions is the control they provide. If you get hit with 10 seconds of immobilize and chill without a way to remove it, you die. Condition removal is 100% essential.

Next, you have zero stability and no stunbreaks. You acknowledge this…but fail to offer justification as to why it’s ok. The answer is that it is not ok. Stunbreaks are actually less important than stability here though. Lines/rings of warding, unsteady ground, and other area denial skills require stability to pass. If you don’t have stability, you’ll just stand there bouncing off of them like a fool. A commander with no stability is no commander at all.

There are several other small things that don’t make tons of sense in your build, but they pale in comparison to the major issues that make it completely and totally inadequate for anything even remotely resembling commanding.

Stickied dungeon guide. Sandy’s guide is also good.

There are really no builds for Mesmer that absolutely require a specific set of runes. The disclaimer is simply that it’ll be somewhere between somewhat and significantly worse when using traveler runes.

After my immortal build got squashed, I dabbled a bit with some more pure bunker builds for pvp. What I found was that in general they functioned decently, but no spectacularly. Overall, the Mesmer (at least currently) is better suited to providing roaming support.

That being said, I still run a full bunker build on spirit watch simply because it’s the only way you can really play the map properly. I run 0/2/6/6/0 or 0/4/4/6/0 with staff+sw/f, I haven’t decided which trait set is the best. The heal is always ether feast. There is no other correct option for a bunker build, because ether feast has massively higher healing output than any other heal, especially when you consider healing power. I usually take pDefender, pDisenchanter, and decoy or mantra of concentration for stunbreaks. I run it as a mobile phantasm bunker, allowing me to run the orb pretty much without any interruption. The two utility phantasms create an enormous amount of defense and sustain for you. Combined with good use of the evade on blurred frenzy and the defense of chaos storm, you become extremely difficult to kill. I run it with a cleric’s amulet, and this allows ether feast with 3 illusions to heal for roughly 50% of a fairly large health pool.

Something like this: http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fhAQNAsdWlknpStFqxKNcrNCvxY6ByI2TnyKfUqAA-T5wHwAILDca/BAPBAA

Firstly, don’t ever try to mix builds between wvw/pvp and pve. What works and is applicable to fighting players is almost never good for fighting AI.

That being said, before I can give more specific advice I need a bit more information. What aspects of wvw are you interested in building for. Same thing for pve, are you planning on just roaming the open world or do you expect to find yourself in dungeons?

Since you also mentioned critical damage, I’ll clear up a couple more things for you.

So firstly, we have 4 stats that we’re going to talk about here: precision, critical chance, ferocity, and critical damage.

Precision and ferocity are basic stats. Critical chance and damage are the secondary stats. Increasing your precision results in an increased critical chance. Likewise, increasing ferocity results in an increased critical damage.

Now, what do these stats do? Critical chance makes it more likely that a hit will be a critical bit. Critical damage makes critical hits hit harder. Critical damage, as you read, only applies to normal direct damage, it doesn’t affect condition damage.

Lastly, how do these stats affect illusions? Illusions inherit your base stats, but not your secondary stats. This means that they inherit your precision and ferocity and power and condition damage, but not critical damage and critical chance. This becomes important when you look at certain buffs.

Fury increases your critical chance by 20%. Because it affects the secondary stat only, it means that fury on you won’t affect illusions. It also means that fury on illusions does properly increase their critical chance by 20%. This is why phantasmal fury is a great trait.

Might increases your power and condition damage. This means that might on yourself will increase the stats that the illusions inherit. On the other hand, since illusions inherit their base stats from you, might on illusions has no effect.

Lastly, sigils do not apply their effects to illusions, they are only applied to you. This means that stacking sigils (that increase your basic stats) will have the result of boosting illusions, but any other type of sigil doesn’t work on illusions.

This was fixed ages ago. The medal won’t show up at all to enemy players.

This is absurd. If PvP was based around 1v1s, mesmer would be god tier. It’s only because PvP absolutely isn’t based around 1v1s that mesmer is weak.

It works, test it out yourself and see.

Shintei.9061:

Dondagora.9645:

If you’re going power shatter mesmer, it might be better given how you strip a boon per illusion. This means no boons on your opponent to keep them strong or safe.

It is not 1 boon strip per illusion, it’s 1 boon strip per shatter if I remember correctly.

It is 1 boon strip per illusion.

StickerHappy.8052:

Fay.2357:

Ultima.5318:

I hate to inform you guys, but sadly that is just a troll. I even talked to seven myself, if you don’t believe that is him, his youtube has the same name. Unfortunately that is just one of those things that happens.

Well that’s a shame.

Wait wait wait. Is Seven A member of OMFG?

I saw Twisted Fate on the roster and his mesmer is named Seven Mirror.
And the his replies here on the thread implies that he knows rytlock (which is a good friend of his)

So which one is it?

Seven Mirror is not in OMFG. OMFG formed significantly after he quit.

I’m not sure what’s the best part about this, quite honestly. The fact that it is literally a picture of the screen is pretty cute, but the idea that everyone wouldn’t immediately recognize what you’re obviously screenshotting is also rather cute.

Ultima.5318:

I hate to inform you guys, but sadly that is just a troll. I even talked to seven myself, if you don’t believe that is him, his youtube has the same name. Unfortunately that is just one of those things that happens.

Well that’s a shame.

vasilismartsis.8930:

Ok. Then is any way to make him like more male? :P

Mesmer is plenty manly, you just have to own it!

Dondagora.9645:

vasilismartsis.8930:

Hello. I was wondering, Mesmer’s color (and his effects color) is only Shades of purple?
If yes is any way to change them?

Yes.
No.

Short and to the point, I like it.

twisted fate.7251:

Wow guys, really old bump but I’m glad I left my mark and thank you for your kind words! The return is nigh! , and yes andromada taught me a lot, and defiantly showed me the benefits to phantasm builds!

-seven (incognito friends account)

Oh sheeeeit. So it begins

Steinpilz.5078:

2. I constantly get immobilized – seems everyone except me can immobilize.
How do I get rid of this?

Mesmer has immobilize on sword 3. There’s also a grandmaster interrupt trait that can apply immobilize.

Immobilize is a condition. You get rid of it just like any other condition in the game. Alternatively, you could avoid having it applied by dodging the skills that put it on you.

SlimChance.6593:

trooper.2650:

Tbh I do not really care and I am far from complaining. But I find frustrating being teleported in a middle of an aoe when the skill is supposed to help. On the other hand I sometimes got teleported on a safe spot, even on a different level where I could heal up, but that happened very seldom. All in all a bit of fairness would be welcome

Agreed, in my experience, all the 2nd skill is is nothing more than a minor delay in getting stomped. And pretty much every player knows it. #3 skill takes forever to come off cooldown and the phantasm really doesn’t hit all that hard(or often). The distance of the 2nd skill should be increased.

What on earth are you talking about. There’s so much wrong packed into this small paragraph it blows me away.

“A minor delay in getting stomped”?! What exactly are you looking for? “Teleports the player 1500m away from any hostile targets and drops a nuke at the original location?” The 2 skill will stop a theoretically unlimited number of stomps from hitting you. That’s better than every single other skill in the game other than vapor form. Let’s look at that, shall we?

Guard: Stops up to 5, blocked by teleport stomp, blind stomp, stab stomp, invuln stomp
Thief: Stops unlimited, blocked by teleport stomp
Ranger: Stops up to 5, blocked by teleport stomp, blind stomp, stab stomp, invuln stomp
Engineer: Stops a maximum of 1, blocked by teleport stomp, blind stomp, stab stomp, invuln stomp, body blocking, projectile destroys, projectile reflects
Warrior: Stops a maximum of 1, blocked by teleport stomp, blind stomp, stab stomp, invuln stomp, body blocking, projectile destroys, projectile reflects
Necromancer: Stops a maximum of 1, blocked by teleport stomp, blind stomp, stab stomp, invuln stomp

Mesmer is vastly superior to all of these. The only one that even comes close is thief.

The 3 skill takes just as long to come off cd as every other 3 skill does. In fact, I think it might even be affected by IC. Unlike other 3 skills, the phantasm hits like a truck (I regularly see it doing upwards of 9k), and sticks around to keep doing that damage over and over.

Mesmer downed skills are incredible. People just don’t understand that being downed isn’t supposed to give you some awesome skills, it’s supposed to just barely let you cling to life with a bit of luck and a bit of skill.

maha.7902:

The fact that basically any member that has contributed anything of relevance to the entire forum have extensive infraction histories and single or either multiple bannings means the whole forum specialist garbage is just going to be some ANet yes-man giving them watered down information about what people are currently having problems with.

Honestly, I don’t think this position should have nearly as much input as many people think it will. Here’s my take on this initiative.

Anet isn’t looking for a person to provide feedback. They already have that. They have testers, they have people giving feedback and whatnot. The “forum specialist” is simply supposed to be an efficient conduit allowing for feedback and information that comes up on the forums to be relayed to the devs through a completely impartial pipeline, with no filtering or bias.

Anet doesn’t have/doesn’t want to spend money on the manpower to adequately collect the massive amount of feedback present on the forums. Instead, they’re basically outsourcing the role to volunteers; the forum specialist.

Say I was the forum specialist. I personally enjoy the PU playstyle and don’t think it’s overpowered. However, there are not infrequent threads discussing its strengths/weaknesses/complaints, etc. As the forum specialist, it would be my duty to simply note the existence of the thread, note the complete contents, and relay that in a concise manner to the devs, without inserting commentary about whether it’s a good thread or a bad thread or a foolish thread. This could be done by someone that’s never even played the game before, they just need to remain unbiased and efficient at presenting information.

trooper.2650:

I just wish #1 coul deal more damage. I some time feel I am tickling the enemy with it whereas some professions can really hurt. Does anyone know how the downed skills scale with power?

People seem to think that the downed skills should hit hard, or have oomph, or idk…be in general useful? Being downed is not a good thing. You are being punished when you get downed. You’re on your last chance. The purpose of the downed skills is as follows:

1. Do barely enough damage to finish off something that was low and you had almost killed
2. Avoid a stomp in PvP
3. An unspecified but fairly strong effect, since you should usually not get to cast this

That’s all. 1 isn’t supposed to deal damage. 2 isn’t supposed to instantly save you. 3 isn’t supposed to instakill everything nearby. The skills are simply designed to just barely give you a fighting chance.

Iris Ng.9845:

Frifox, you may add “in dungeons”. Based on your data, staff looks quite good for World Boss.

I recall the only time I use staff is at Brie. Pump clone -> Shatter while 111 with sword. Not sure what is the best way there.

Yeah, staff is theoretically good for world bosses. I say theoretically, because there’s not really any compelling reasons on the vast majority of world bosses not to just spam gs 1 from max range.

The number 2 skill is a 100% guaranteed stomp-stopper. It is without a doubt the second strongest 2 downed skill in the game, full stop.

Ink.9058:

If I could speak for myself, the reason I’m asking for advice is that my usual jump-in approach didn’t work out the first couple times I tried to roll a mesmer, so I figured I might want to get the lay of the land this time.

From what I can tell, it seems like there are essentially 3 main types of builds for WvW roaming (one of the things I’m most interested in):

Power Phantasm
Power Shatter
Condi Phantasm

Is there one that I’m missing? What are the general strengths and weaknesses of each? Right now I’m looking for really macro-level information; some of the guides linked seemed to have great content on specifics, but I don’t really have the game knowledge where mesmer is concerned to make good use of it just yet.

So you’re not quite accurate with what you’ve got here.

There’s really just one optimal choice for wvw roaming; PU condition builds. They’re tanky, they’re slippery, they have good sustain and can effectively kill people.

Power phantasm is incredibly dangerous to roam with. You can demolish camps+single roamers, but if you ever find yourself in a 1v2, you’ll almost definitely lose really fast.

Power shatter is awful for solo roaming because it has drastically fewer defensive options than the other builds mentioned. It is, however, extremely effective in a small group.

Condition phantasm isn’t really a thing at all.

Condition shatter has essentially the same pros and cons as power shatter, just a slightly different delivery method.

You know, I can have a pretty contentious forum manner, and I’ve gotten into some rather heated discussions from time to time, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen something quite like this thread.

The primary downside to staff is that the autoattack does close to zero damage in a power build. While the phantasm hits very hard, it doesn’t hit hard enough to offset the total lack of damage from the autoattack. The staff has good utility purposes…. for yourself. It doesn’t really provide much of anything in the way of party utility.

witcher.3197:

Fay.2357:

witcher.3197:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Or take the dive in approach.

• Find some weapons you like.

• Throw together a build

Don’t. There is no way it will end well.

It’ll end just fine as long as they also follow the rest of what Ross suggested, which is posting it on the forum and asking for suggestions.

There’s no way that a first build will be highly effective, but what it’ll do is give you a feel for how the class plays, what sort of things you like and don’t like, and then provides a base for suggestions to build upon.

I just don’t think the best way to teach someone how to write is by showing him all the letters without any explanation and then ordering him to write an essay.

He should get familiar with the current builds, learn to use them, understand the reasons behind traits/skills/etc. After that’s done, he can start experimenting on his own, but until then it’s pointless.

People are too reliant on guides and builds and whatnot. How do you think all of us that played before the guides existed did it? How do you think we made the guides, how do you think we made the builds?

I made my immortal build just on a bit of a whim, the vague idea of ‘what would happen if I made a Mesmer really tanky?’ It grew and evolved as I used it and refined it and perfected it, and eventually it became one of the most popular builds at the time, before Anet nuked it from orbit.

Don’t assume that people are just mindless drones that can’t learn and think for themselves. Not everybody needs to be spoon-fed every single game mechanic, and not everybody requires a dedicated seminar on mechanics to figure things out. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, at least to begin with.

witcher.3197:

Ross Biddle.2367:

Or take the dive in approach.

• Find some weapons you like.

• Throw together a build

Don’t. There is no way it will end well.

It’ll end just fine as long as they also follow the rest of what Ross suggested, which is posting it on the forum and asking for suggestions.

There’s no way that a first build will be highly effective, but what it’ll do is give you a feel for how the class plays, what sort of things you like and don’t like, and then provides a base for suggestions to build upon.