Guild Wars 2

NinjaEd.3946:

That’s what I’m saying, just keep the ICD per unique target. If 5 people want to start wailing on a target with chaos armor and they manage to live through it, they deserve a little boon treat. If it’s just 1 target with quick attacks having them give you 15+ seconds of multiple boons it seems a little crazy, especially since chaos armor has the ability to not be visible at times (bug, but still).

Don’t take bugs into consideration for balance recommendations.

If you’re fighting one person and they decide to unload with pistol whip or whirling wrath or some other multi-hit attack when you clearly have chaos armor, they deserve to be punished for that negligence in the form of high condition load and boons on you. If you’re able to activate chaos armor during an attack like that, you should be rewarded for skillful play.

Currently, you are neither rewarded for skillful play nor are enemies punished for unskillful play. This is not a good thing in a game that is supposedly skill-based, but it is more friendly to bad and new players.

Sors Immani.8429:

Not to mention, if you’re like me, the RNG likes (as in about 60% of the time) to have Chaos Armor proc Retaliation, Protection, and Regen

Usually the condis are some bleeds, poison and vuln, but still, the above boons.

If you manage to get retal from chaos armor, I’m impressed since that boon isn’t part of the skill.

If you manage to cause any of the three conditions you mentioned, I’d be impressed since chaos armor doesn’t apply any of them.

Sweeps.3059:

Oh ok wow its that easy cool thanksmalotmfor the help guys.

x/focus+greatsword. Just make sure you tag the big bosses.

Malakin.2809:

Wow, you could at least read the OP before calling people ignorant. He doesn’t care about mesmer being weaker than other classes, he just wants to have fun while leveling. And for that, mesmer is fine in PVE. You can level a mesmer completely solo with no problems at all. And it’s a lot more fun/less boring than leveling other classes. Nobody is saying the class doesn’t need to be fixed.

It doesn’t matter how slow you want to level. The experience will be awful either way. You’ll be doing incredibly low damage and have little to no utility for about 40 levels, then you’ll be doing quite low damage and still have little to no utility for another 20 levels, and you’ll finally have some damage and more normal utility for the last 20 levels.

It sucks. It doesn’t matter how slow you’re willing to go with it.

It’s absolutely horrid for leveling.

Mesmer is far and away the worst class to level. It’s always been bad because mesmer is incredibly dependent on traits. Unfortunately, when anet shoved all the traits back 20 levels at the feature patch, that means mesmers went from being incredibly brutal for 40 levels and very difficult for 60 levels right to incredibly brutal for 60 levels and very difficult for 80 levels.

If you have leveled other classes and you attempt to level a mesmer to 80 normally (as in no eotm training, no crafting, etc), you will quit before you hit 60.

Arikyali.5804:

The OP has a very good point. What the mesmer is going through now is similar of what the thief class went through for rebalancing. A majority of thieves left, leaving behind only those that were willing to conquer the nerfs and adapt to the changes. Thieves are still a pain in the neck, but no longer for the reasons even the high tier thieves called ‘faceroll cheesy gimmicks’. I’m expecting mesmers to rise up from the ashes.

Yeah….that’s not true at all. Unreasonable dodge spam couple with extremely high offense and evasiveness is still a thing. Yeah, S/D got nerfed somewhat…but thieves never had a mass exodus like this, and never have had to contend with over a year of non-stop bugs and nerfs.

DoomKnightMax.6592:

Lets forget about what I said, and get to the point about the build. Will it work well, yes or no?

No. You can’t stack might effectively.

Interrupts can work sometimes, and you’ll be able to get some decent burst now and then, but the majority of the time and particularly against certain classes you’ll have nothing from interrupts.

Weapon swapping only gets you 6-9 stacks, and then shattered strength only will get you about 3 permanently. It’s just not enough to make it work effectively.

While I don’t deny that your logic can be true in some ways, it doesn’t help for those of us that no longer find mesmer fun to play because of what it can’t do and because of what has been lost. I’m already acutely aware of its advantages, disadvantages, and how much it stands to gain from a buff. Because of this awareness, I’ve chosen to go play something that feels less like smacking my head on a brick wall.

Yeah, I’m not really seeing it a whole lot. I’ll go through this more in detail, but let me just start with real general.

You’re using a celestial amulet, attempting to do a hybrid build. This does not work on mesmer. Elementalists, warriors, engineers, and thieves to an extent can do this extremely efficiently because they’re able to stack high amounts of might.

The celestial build on its own is a build that has not very good condition damage and not very good power damage, and doesn’t do much of anything. The celestial build with might stacking suddenly becomes a beast that has both moderately high power, moderately high condition damage, and reasonably high defense.

Mesmer can’t stack might like that, and this build obviously has literally 0 might stacking capability. This means that you’ll fall under the first situation: low condition damage, low power damage, and doesn’t do much of anything effectively.

Now specifics:

You have 1300 power and 36% critical chance with actually fairly decent critical damage. Unfortunately, the low critical chance and incredibly low power means that even hard-hitting phantasms like the iSwordsman will barely tickle coming from this build. Additionally, the only skill you have that does any reasonable power damage (non-phantasm) is confusing images, which is slow and easy to avoid. Overall, your power damage is incredibly weak.

You have about 800 condition damage. This also is very low. This results in the conditions you apply being largely ignorable. Confusion won’t hurt much, torment will hardly tickle, and your burns and bleeds really won’t add up to anything truly dangerous.

The overall combat dynamic with this build simply isn’t dangerous. None of your phantasms will do strong damage, and none of your skills will do strong damage either. This means that your potentially damaging conditions (confusion and torment) can simply be countered by standing still and not attacking for a moment or two. Since you have no power pressure and no other condition pressure, this isn’t dangerous or difficult to do. Retaliation isn’t even something to consider in this build either. You have very low power, so retal doesn’t hurt much, and single target retaliation isn’t strong anyway, so it’s not even close to a damage factor.

Will you beat some people with this? Sure, you can always find someone to beat with any build. Will you kill anyone who really knows what they’re doing? No, probably not.

Lishtenbird.2814:

Was surprised not to see Rune of the Traveler mentioned. While it’s not optimal for maximising damage output, it looks like a very common choice for generic PvE because of mesmers being extremely slow and having broken swiftness and broken blink.

It’s really just the lazy man’s rune of the centaur, and rune of the centaur is really just a map completion/wvw roaming utility skill for mesmer. There’s absolutely no reason to use it in dungeon PvE.

Well, it looks pretty bad.

Staff doesn’t do much dps, so you’re going in the wrong direction there.

You’re taking confusion duration in illusions and confusing enchantments…in PvE? Why would you ever do that?

You’ve got deceptive evasion as if you were going to be doing shatters for damage…and then rending shatter killing any chance of actually doing damage with shatters, on top of the fact that shatters aren’t good for damage anyway. Lastly you’ve got both mantra traits…and 1 mantra.

Build is chaotic and ill-suited for any sort of PvE, dungeons especially. I’d recommend scrapping it and getting one of the standard builds from maximion’s thread.

Kadj.6725:

I really don’t want to be a minstrel. We could summon one, that would be cool, but the whole joke is we aren’t minstrels. >_>

(Although a phantasm-based weapon that lets you effectively summon an entire band – THAT would be pretty sweet.)

Elite Phantasmal Rhapsody

Genlog.4983:

magic cloves

wat

Esplen.3940:

maha.7902:

Esplen.3940:

The way I see it, as a Mesmer in PvE:

In PUGs, I work really hard to make sure everything goes smoothly and get blamed for everything that goes wrong.

In coordinated groups, I work really hard to ensure everyone else does good dps.

In Open World PvE, my Mesmer hits extremely hard but I feel like I could do more on my Warrior… with a lot less effort. Actually, this is true in almost every scenario except during projectile destruction or reflect because Feedback and untraited Wardens are so good.

Keep in mind, I’m wearing full Assassins with Ranger Runes + Berserker Trinkets and Assassin Weapons (all ascended or legendary) on my Mesmer, whereas my Warrior is wearing Exotic Berserker everything with Masterwork Berserker Trinket.

I’ll just tell you now your Mesmer does not hit extremely hard and never will

Oh, I guess if we word it like that, then yes. But 3x Warlocks all traited the boring 2/3/0/5/4 can easily do ridiculous amounts of damage to World Bosses. I suppose that’s not really “my Mesmer” doing the damage.

I think colesy was talking about every possible situation that doesn’t involve stacking 3 warlocks on a world boss.

Syprus Soulslayer.1640:

All this QQing, mesmers aren’t as useless as some of you make them out to be. I’ll just leave this here. BTW there’s a shatter Mesmer in grp 2 running the classic 4 4 0 0 6 build he just factored in some toughness to survive a bit longer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcKD9tZcIJ0

Just gonna go ahead and point out that what you were doing would have been performed about 10x better by an axe/gs destruction warrior.

Domzz.1260:

Fay.2357:

Greatsword+Sword/focus will be your best bet. It’s a good mix of aoe and control. Also required for easier going is centaur runes and either a perma-tonic or mantra on autocast.

Why not traveler runes; expensive?

They’re more expensive, they offer bad stats, and mantra on autocast with centaur runes is permanent swiftness…which is better than traveler runes.

Domzz.1260:

From those who’ve achieved this or are working on it — what’s your experience?

Ugh

Domzz.1260:

Is it relatively fun?

It’s ugh.

Domzz.1260:

Easy?

Laughably so.

Domzz.1260:

Enjoyable?

Ugh.

Domzz.1260:

No?

No. Map completion sucks hardcore.

Domzz.1260:

I know it’s just PvE, but what kind of setup do you use? What might you recommend?

Greatsword+Sword/focus will be your best bet. It’s a good mix of aoe and control. Also required for easier going is centaur runes and either a perma-tonic or mantra on autocast.

Zelulose.8695:

I find that Chaos armor is too useful as it is already. If you use glamours and a sword, staff, or torch, combo-fields will give you chaos armor in addition to the chaos armor from the staff. One can stack large amounts of chaos armor this way.

I must have missed the part where you explained how it’s useful.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Okay but imagine the situation where one Mesmer is moving through a zerg, and getting random aoe. This produces a Xv1 situation without the actual targeting of Xv1. Added is the fact that we can share our boons. Guardians are good but they can’t give perma protection/retal/regen to five people around them.

Gosh, that might actually make mesmer potentially useful other than ‘veil in front’. We can’t have that obviously.

Sergoros.4398:

NinjaEd.3946:

Carighan.6758:

NinjaEd.3946:

What if it isn’t removed/stolen/xfer’ed?

As someone said above, it wouldn’t matter.
The whole idea of stacking high duration Protection from it would rely on X targets, with X being a significant number, all attacking you. But if that happens, sorry, -33% damage or not you’ll melt in 1,5 seconds tops.

It still doesn’t make removing the ICD justified, especially against multi hit weapons. a 33% chance to get protection for 5 seconds (idk if boon duration effects this) per attack, 1 target alone could end up stacking a ton of boons on that target. Even for its short duration that 1 buff would end up changing the battle very quickly. Only exception is yes, multiple targets focus firing don’t make a difference but nothing really would to begin with. The point is to balance it on a smaller scale where 2, 3, even 4 people putting out little hits on someone with chaos armor would be overwhelming without an ICD.

Perhaps keep the ICD but split it per target and slightly increase the base duration of the boons applied (5 seconds protection is fine, maybe equalize the regen and and swiftness to 5 seconds as well if not 6 seconds). It would still be punishing for the enemy(ies) to hit you but it wouldn’t stack to high. At least if the enemy slips and hits you a few times you get something for a little while from the chaos armor. As for dealing with blobs, that’s not something chaos armor can solve.

Well. Then, for the same reason. They should add Icd for retaliation. After all, imagine how much dmg it can deal vs fast attks skill? cough*blurred*cough*frenzy*cough*.

But srsly. This skill is supposed to make enemy stop hitting you. If he goes all flamethrower on your chaos armor…its his fault.

As I said at the top of this thread, it was changed a while back when it was decided that punishing people for poor play was not supposed to be a mechanic in GW2.

frifox.5283:

I would argue that Blink is an ooc mobility skill.

Sorta. It’s important to have it as in-combat, to escape sticky situations. It’s ooc mobility on some maps, like khylo and temple though.

Klonko.8341:

Fay.2357:

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

Portal… and for 1vs2 thief or mesmer are enough deceptive to survive that. And in Spvp its rare you are OOC unless you killed your opponent. The map is so small…

I don’t think you understand what ooc mobility means, despite me having stated what it was -_-.

Portal is once every 90 seconds….ok I guess?

Phantasm mesmer can’t do 1v2. The mechanics cause it to immediately fall apart in anything other than a 1v1. You seem to have this odd perception that ‘mesmers and thieves are much deceptive’…not really sure what you mean by that unless you’re talking about a PU build.

Klonko.8341:

define that poor mobility….

Because blink + stealth + invulnerable + clone swap is kinda something every class wants. as mobility…

Stealth is not mobility, invulnerable is not mobility, and blink and clone swap are in combat mobility.

In order to be a good point assaulter, you need to be able to traverse the map rapidly. Thief can do that. Mesmer can’t.

Klonko.8341:

Idk why thief seems the way to go for far point assaulter. I mean a zerker phantasm mesmer deals as much pressure from a safe distance and is as much deceptive and can brings things thief doesnt provide. Just my tought.

Because phantasm mesmers have poor mobility and will crumble instantly when the fight becomes a 1v2.

Benjamin.8237:

Mesmer is one class that requires a high skill cap to play well. The two Mesmers representing are two of the highest skilled, and best, players in the game.

Just a note…supcutie won’t be playing Mesmer. This is common knowledge, he plays thie in tournaments now.

Sergoros.4398:

ASP.8093:

Avoiding PU on principle is silly.

There’s nothing dirty about a light-armor class using Protection (there’s not even anything dirty about a Guardian running Protection, really).
There’s nothing dirty about the most misdirection-oriented class in the game using stealth — the only real form of misdirection available to you (clones will never fool a good player).
There’s nothing dirty about the capstone ability of a trait line that’s all about boons and Toughness actually helping you actually survive a fight.

People whine about every single ability that doesn’t suck. It’s just that mesmers have only a few abilities that don’t suck.

So, seriously, use PU whenever it makes sense to do so. Don’t cripple yourself arbitarily.

EDIT: I wrote “Guard___ using Protection” initially and it changed it to “Guardikittening Protection.” This site is the best!

I avoid it, because Pu build isnt good in my eyes. Yeah. It has great survivability, but dmg is meh. I still prefer mantra phantasm. At least I can kill enemy’s with it ( except some of the best duel meta builds of other classes would win, but at least I can kill some noobs). From Pu mesmers people can just walk away -_-.

While not actually accurate, you do have real reasons other than ‘PU bad’.

I’d have rolled Mesmer or not rolled at all.

The cooldown won’t be removed. It was added in the past when it was deemed that punishing people for poor play wasn’t supposed to be part of this game.

Top notch build. I can’t imagine how none of us thought of it before. You should be commended for your incredible contribution to the mesmer community!

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Who cares, honestly?

Yeah Mesmer is in a bad place, and thats why a few of these tear-filled threads are good to make sure the devs notice, but how many of you here play the class for a statistical advantage over other classes?

…

Exactly. We play the class because it’s fun, everything else is noise.

But what is fun?

Winning is fun. But playing Mesmer provides a disadvantage compared to playing other classes at a similar skill level. That means you’ll win less, which isn’t fun.

You can have fun without winning though. Contributing to your group in a meaningful way can be fun. Being a significant part of a larger whole can be fun. However, can ‘veil in front’ truly be described as significant? I can’t personally call it as such anymore.

It can be fun to hide in a keep and ninjaportal for it, but that’s a rare situation more dictated by enemy incompetence than your personal skill in playing.

Some people find pve fun. I’m not one of those people. Additionally, pve happens to be where some of the worst Mesmer bugs are highlighted and brought front and center, making it go from a merely un-fun experience to a truly and massively aggravating one.

So where is the fun in playing Mesmer? I can’t find it anymore.

WhiteRose.6934:

Oh goodness, seems I upset a couple people since I last checked. I love how defensive people get when a simple no one like me states my opinion on the PU build.

By all means, use the build. Why should one care what I think? Everything you state is correct of course, it’s more challenging to play other specs when roaming. That is why, in my opinion, those mesmers are simply better than the PU ones.

The fact that one instantly jumps to “Go do a 1v4 with a thief” is silly. Because the only way a build should be deemed viable is if you’re able to roll around like a buffoon and still survive 4 people fighting you? Thank goodness you use a build that doesn’t require you to actually think right? This is why no one likes warriors, and why they are considered ‘easy mode’. That’s all I’m saying, that PU has lowered mesmers to a dumbed-down state, and that’s saddening to see.

That’s it. Just an opinion, nothing more. I don’t wish to derail the thread anymore than I already have.

Hm, lets see.

WhiteRose.6934:

Everyone runs PU because they can’t play mesmer without using a build that carries them.

I’m sorry you feel the need to express wrong opinions. However, since you’ve expressed wrong opinions, it falls to the rest of us that aren’t wrong to point that out to people who might not know better.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

UrMom.4205:

umm….how did you miss the nerf that mesmers got this round….

“Skritt burglars are no longer affected by Polymorph Moa.”

Un-freakin-believable, mesmers get nerfed literally every single patch…it’s insane..

That is probably a bugfix that in all honestly affects more players than the iLeap fix.

Yeah, that’s probably true.
.
.
.
No. You’re wrong and looking more foolish by the day.

I put auto run on backspace. There’s no conceivable reason to have a convenience for long distances clogging up valuable real-estate around wasd.

ctrl+1-4 are my shatters. I use f1 for aoe loot though.

I use G for about face, that’s just a holdover from dragon nest, as is shift for dodge.

qert are my heal+utilities, just along the line.

x is my elite. It’s a little more out of the way, but still reachable when you need it.

Stow weapon isn’t really needed for most things. I have that as 9.

z an c are strafe left and right. I don’t usually end up using them for strafing, as a and d strafe when r-mouse is held, but it does happen.

shimmerless.4560:

Fay.2357:

Mystiq Angelic.8193:

-snip-

I wouldn’t worry too much about the devs taking poor advice from whiners on the forums. They don’t listen and act on that any more than they listen and act on our bug threads. I suppose that’s both a pro and a con.

I’m not sure this is completely accurate: remember the Temporal Curtain nerf?

I’d actually argue that it was a justified nerf. The case could be made that the current pause time is too long, but it was a nearly instantaneous 5 target aoe interrupt. That’s definitely a bit unbalanced.

Mystiq Angelic.8193:

-snip-

I wouldn’t worry too much about the devs taking poor advice from whiners on the forums. They don’t listen and act on that any more than they listen and act on our bug threads. I suppose that’s both a pro and a con.

EnderzShadow.2506:

@Pyro, do you embrace the slowness in WvW too?

Yep. I always have a focus though, so I’ll swap that constantly when I’m not in combat for swiftness. I also do constant phase retreat swaps to move faster, and 1200 blink helps too.

I didn’t say the spec sucks overall. Rampagers is actually somewhat viable in PvP, due to the vitality it has as opposed to the pure squishyness it is elsewhere. However, I am telling you that with 0 access to condie removals, any competent condie player will destroy it. In order to be viable against good players, it needs at least some form of condition removal.

Edit: or a team that can remove the conditions for you, like shatter mesmers will do.

Doubleedit: People calling me fay feels odd

zaxon.6819:

seems wierd that you say this will happen once in 50 times.. when ive actually played the spec and you have not. i understand the importance of condtion clear and when it would have saved me durring fights. if you were to use the spec you can put condi clear in it and play it in that style and i wouldnt make a once in 50 claim. ive played both ways and as for right now the stun works for me and im not getting punished that hard with condis. if i end up getting punished alot with condis i will put a cleanse in the place. at this point im not getting killed because of a lack of condi clear so the stun is a strong offesnive choice.

This is because you apparently aren’t playing against any competent condie players. The key is that condie builds are more tanky and survivable. They won’t crumple and die in your first little combo. They’ll pop a stunbreak, clear the bleeds, then go after you. The thing is that even with the bit of power from rampagers, your duelists still barely tickle, particularly to a tanky condie build. This means that your only pressure is bleeds (which are also weaker than normal).

Maybe if you can get them into a perfect lockdown it’ll hurt, but that’s nearly impossible to do. Signet is easy to dodge, magic bullet doesn’t last very long, and just up and casting confusing images is a great way to get your face pushed in with condies.

Now normally this wouldn’t be an issue. You’d hit a condie clear and continue applying pressure. With your build though, you’ll simply keel over and die when condies are applied. You have no way to remove them. Blinds will stay until you miss with something. Cripple and weakness will hamper your movement. Poison will hurt your healing, bleeds burning and torment will kill you.

I don’t need to play your build to know what will happen if you engage a competent player with no condition removal.

I use basically the same build in WvW as I do when I run it in PvP, except I do use perplexity runes and embrace the slowness.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-A-Mesmer-Guide-to-Solo-Queue/first#post4060868

I have my build linked in there, along with a somewhat comprehensive guide for how to use it.

zaxon.6819:

i can see a need for condi clear in alot of situations but 5 seconds of chainable stun is so strong.. starting out a fight with iduelest/stun/confusion beam/cover your duelest with block vs cleave damage/stun. this + chaos storm and stealths leave your target only having chances to attack while you have a block up.

This is a situation that will actually play out once in 50 times. Fights never go perfectly as planned, and having no condition removal will get you killed over and over. There’s simply so many ways that you could easily counter that. Say someone blinds the duelist cast, or reflects it (warrior sword block would be tough here). If everything doesn’t go perfect, you could end up eating a face-full of condies very rapidly.

The last mesmerized episode is finally up for those that missed the stream. It can be found here:

http://sittingonacouch.com/mesmerized-ep-25-guild-wars-2-mesmer-podcast/

Pyro, Shan, and Chaos meet for one last time to reminisce about the progress of the Mesmer over the years of Guild Wars 2. They cover the changes that the class has experienced as the game progressed, and examine the reasons behind the gradual decline. This is the last Mesmerized podcast for the near future, but they hope that they’ll eventually be motivated to once again play the game and bring more Mesmer discussion to SOAC.

Past episodes can be found here: http://sittingonacouch.com/podcast/guildwars2/mesmer-gw2/

klep.4165:

Fay.2357:

maha.7902:

if you go staff + sc/t PU you honestly don’t have many sharper images procs anyway so dire is fine

Not quite accurate. You still get a quite significant amount of condition pressure from sharper images even without something like the iDuelist. On top of that, crits provide you with vigor through critical infusion, which ofc gives you more dodges and more clones to explode.

Dire can work, but you’ll just have less pressure and less mobility due to lack of vigor.

Fay,

What would you think of dire with rabid accs and weapons and enough rampager mixed in with the dire armor to get Crit at about 50% for PU build….napalm cat type? I run dire, but crit in low 40% range, and wonder if not using Sharper Images to full extent?

Rampagers is pretty much worthless.

What I run is full rabid armor and weapons. All of my accessories are the rabid/dire ascended mix type. This brings me up to about 19k-20k hp, and I’m comfortable with that.

NICENIKESHOE.7128:

Just curious, how well do you guys feel about vitality vs toughness in PU? With standard PU builds you can usually maintain amazingly long duration of protection (lol) but with 2 utilities in stealth you have one slot left for condition cleansing. Thus require certain amount of hp to tank through conditions.

About the weapon choices, torch is great for continuous stealth but pistol certainly deal better damage/cc. Why not both though?

Don’t waste a utility on veil. That’s just foolish.

Take blink, decoy, and a condition cleanse. Either phantasmal disenchanter or the mantra will take care of any reasonable amount of conditions.

Morfedel.4165:

You know, I play mesmer as my main, and he is doing just fine, thank you. I only have a problem against thieves, and some hammer warriors. otherwise, I do pretty good, thank you very much.

Ok, I believe that you think you do pretty well.

What do you do pretty well at? Hotjoin? 1v1s? Enlighten us.

msalakka.4653:

The downside of using dungeon armor is the inability to salvage them to get the runes back, if you went with expensive runes and wanted to swap stats.

You mean to say the downside of using WvW armor. Dungeon armor is salvageable, WvW armor is not.

I highly recommend not getting gear from badges of honor.

Badges of honor gear can not be salvaged. This means that any runes you put into them are effectively lost forever.

maha.7902:

if you go staff + sc/t PU you honestly don’t have many sharper images procs anyway so dire is fine

Not quite accurate. You still get a quite significant amount of condition pressure from sharper images even without something like the iDuelist. On top of that, crits provide you with vigor through critical infusion, which ofc gives you more dodges and more clones to explode.

Dire can work, but you’ll just have less pressure and less mobility due to lack of vigor.

Darox.8069:

And firegrab hits for 900 or 1500 on burning targets.

Again: when it hits!!

Of course you can increase that damage with might and crit, but the base damage is very low especially considering its terribly designed mechanic and outrageously long cooldown.

wat

If your firegrab is only hitting for 1500 damage, you’ve made some enormous mistakes.

As an aside, you don’t understand how damage works in gw2. Base damage isn’t a concept. Look it up on the wiki.

Domzz.1260:

Jackums.3496:

Domzz.1260:

How about Necromancer in all of these points compared to Elementalist?

Ele > Necro in every category, though the Necro is still at least viable for all listed game types, but if you want to roam you’ll need a group because you’ll be a free kill solo.

Even for commanding?

Eh, both classes are very poor commanders.

As far as large group fights go, both ele and necro are standard and very important parts of a group composition. I wouldn’t put one above the other. Ele is better for everything else though.

Dawdler.8521:

And look at the bright side – if you do get an infraction of moderator notice about this post, that means moderators are looking at the Mesmer forums!

That’s not a good thing really, just a thing. Mods are mods, not devs. They don’t have any relation.