Guild Wars 2

this might work

Hybrid phantasm/shatter/interrupt build. Open up by popping decoy > mirror images > cry of frustration > beserker > wave > swap weapons

Mind Stab should be easier to cast now so you might work that in as an opener before decoy.

Zumi.6384:

Since there’s no easy way to send a PM to everyone at once, I’ll just post here.

If you guys are interested in playing a few games before Wednesday, I’m going to do my best to be online Tuesday night by about 8-9pm EST tomorrow (Tuesday). If not, then we’ll just have to meet the hour before the tourney on Wednesday.

Also, Bas, I briefly spoke to Supcutie the other day, and he said he might not be coaching? Said I should ask you what the plan was. Thanks!

I sent an ingame mail to the other team members and got in touch with Corey and Esplen last weekend. Let’s meetup tonight at 7pm est (4pm pst). We’ll party up and jump on voip to meet and discuss mesmery stuff. Probably the most important topic will be the patch notes : /

I never cared for grinding CoF. After grinding a full set of, now retired, gear from it I now get all of my exotics from WvW badges. I’ve not tracked, it, but with the right profession and build I typically get at least 50 badges per night. A good night can net you upwards of 150 badges which is enough for one piece of gear.

Also, for getting gold outside of WvW, I like to run fractals on occasion since it at least has some variation and is a pathway toward the ascended backpiece.

Entropy.4732:

The way I see it, confusion used to be the main attraction. The ice cream cone. Now it’s like the sprinkles on the ice cream cone. You don’t really care that they are there, but it adds a slight diversion. Which sucks because confusion is supposed to be our main, signature condition. Sigh I need some ice cream.

The ice cream cone is a lie…

But you know what sucks most about all the nerfs is that I actually have to play other professions now to be effective yet be mindless while doing so. Necro for instance, one simply spams marks and epidemic everywhere and numbers suddenly appear on your screen reaffirming your usefulness. Guardian is worse (in wvw at least) where you simply spam 1 on your staff.

gah… it burns.

I didn’t notice this before and thanks to everyone for outlining its impact. It feels like the game designers are boxing us into their “perfect” mesmer playstyle.

I practiced with an interrupt build last night to get used to it just incase something like this happened. Ugh… I didn’t do so well and switched back to my phatasm build.

It certainly shows the effectiveness of a S/S shatter glassy build, especially against poor opponents who have little to no stun breaks. He flips back and forth between GS and Staff which makes me think he has neither traited so… perhaps something like a 10/30/0/0/30 build.

the issue with thieves is that you need to setup your build specifically to counter them. No one class should force others to spec just so they can stand a chance against them. Thanksfully, ANet has fixed thief-godmode so atleast we “lesser” classes stand a chance rather than have 10+ people running around in circles spamming aoe all the time.

Zumi.6384:

Do you guys want to get together sometime before the match and figure out some strats/builds we want to use?

sure. I should be on and available by 7pm est tonight.

Zumi.6384:

ATourist.8359:

If you’re looking for strong damage and in-combat survivability then go for sword OH. The sword trait will benefit both your mainhand and offhand. If you want more utility then go focus. Even without trait, it’s still useful with the speed buff, pull and projectile block.

And don’t forget the AoE cleanse from Warden + TC!

Yes, and when you dump TC on top of Warden it works nicely to pull people back into your Warden’s damage regardless of where they run to.

traited focus helps for disengaging fights. Toss it down and it blocks projectiles, cripples your pursuers, and you can pull them to buy even more time. Plus, without the Focus, you couldn’t have the epic battles with necros of who can force who off the cliff first.

Name: Sanakan Killy
Account Name: Helios.3598
Rank: 19

Not entirely sure what this is, but i’ve seen some tournaments on youtube and it looks fun. Like Zumi, I mostly play wvw, but dabble in pvp occasionally.

One thing to keep in mind with portals, especially in wvw, is portal placement. If you’ve the spare time, make an effort to place the portal where it’s harder for the enemy to see.

I’m not sure if it was mentioned, but deception portals are occasionally useful to disorient and stall an enemy a bit. For instance, an enemy zerg might back off a gate for a few seconds if you drop a portal behind them.

sorry for your loss… of karma or whatever it is you used to buy your gear. I have a full set of carrion and rabid gear collecting dust in my bank in hopes that one day confusion will rein terror upon the masses again.

As for buying new gear, I’ve found the quickest way for me is to simply collect badges from wvw. I usually collect enough badges for a new full exotic set once every three to four weeks (roughly 700 to 900 badges depending on what you need). I find this far more appealing than grinding one dungeon for a couple weeks.

Another, mostly unrelated, trick I recently learned is that pvp rewards unidentified dyes that are account bound. Hence, if you eventually want a legendary, you can simply save your unbound unidentified dyes and use the pvp bound ones.

I’m confused. Is Blurred Frenzy considered to be OP? I might agree if the warrior or guardian had it, but we mesmers are lightweights. For us to engage at point blank puts us at a huge disadvantage which offsets frenzy’s power.

First off, glamour confusion is dead. More specifically, it is hard to do enough damage with Confusing Enchantments + glamour to get many tags. I wish ANet would fix that…

Second, I’m skeptical of shatter vs zerg. I tried it with a hybrid build for a couple weeks and found my clones would die too quickly in a true zerg battle (rather than a pug mob fight). Perhaps Signet of Illusions would help in this. I may try this out again with the Signet because I like the versatility of the hybrid build. For reference, I’m on a T1 server so the zergs are often 60+ and well coordinated for zerg bursts. Then you’ve the pure, epic carnage of a 60v60v60 on the same battlefield. In those instances I clutch my Staff and hold on for dear life…

Currently, I get tags almost entirely from my GS. Most come from Beserker, but skills 2 and 3 help tag as well. Regarding Feedback, I kept it for a while, but without all the confusion goodness or blinds it just doesn’t make the cut anymore. Also, Feedback is very visible and smart opponents will tyipcally cease fire when they see it. This is less true for veil or warden.

no.

The mesmer’s uniqueness is intended. The mesmer profession is based on decieving or mesmerizing their opponent and it is able to do this by achieving the unexpected.

Yep. GS is a major liability in a 1vThief. I was roaming our borderlands and came across a high skilled, 25 stack thief. It was a fantastic battle that I lost. I got him down to 20%, post heal, but the GS held me back. The build worked well with every other engagement I’ve had that was remotely fair. I ’ve used it a lot in spvp and tpvp (solo join). It works nicely in both.

I simply can’t run wvw without a GS due to the awesome performance of the Berserker Phantasm and range. I know it’s bugged, but a buffed Berserker can do sooo much carnage to a zerg. I hit a group of 15 to 20 or so trying to get up to the third level of SM with the berserker doing roughly 60k+ damage with one spell.

I miss my Focus though… The Staff is such a one-trick-pony without condition damage whereas the Focus has amazing anti-zerg potential as well as other utility. Hmmm… I wonder if a GS + Scepter/Focus build could ever work in wvw and still do okay verse thieves. Perhaps something like this build possibly swapping to Runes of Air.

I continued using my Rabid 1400+ condition damage confusion/glamour build in WvW (and spvp) for well over a month after the confusion nerf. I can tell you with certainty that confusion is dead in wvw. I wasn’t even doing enough damage for bag tagging with Confusing Enchantments.

I’ve since switched to a phantasm build with Knight gear and am much happier. Regardless of what you go with though, always stick with the Staff. It’s by far our most powerful weapon in wvw/pvp. The amount of mobility I get with Staff and Decoy is amazing.

Just make sure to run Staff and don’t invest in condition damage.

BlackDevil.9268:

Wait… what? You guys run with 1600-1800 toughness? I run 1400 vit/tough with a shatter spec while running with the frontline 50% of the time which is more than enough.

Then you’re playing against baddies.

Ethics.4519:

The difference is 50% uptime with centaur vs no swiftness with boon duration if you choose to not go focus.

Base centaur uptime is 80% with Mirror heal. My build has 20 in Chaos which gives me 93% uptime. Also, centaur swiftness stacks while focus does not. Take Mender’s Purity and you are constantly rolling heal, reflection, cleanse, and aoe swiftness. How is that not godly?

Profano.9514:

How much toughness you suggest Helios?

1800 or more and maxed Siege Bunker wxp upgrade. I’m assuming you’re locked into your gear. If you’re having suitability issues though, a couple small changes would be to make sure to switch to your staff when taking damage (or buy a Knight GS) or take the Protected Mantras trait.

To hit 1800+ you’d need to trait your Staff with 20 in Chaos, but that would push you out of your mantra or phantasm build. Perhaps just move the 20 from Dueling to Chaos, take Mirror healing, and swap Mantra of Pain for Mantra of Concentration.

toughness and cleanse are a bit low, but otherwise it looks like a solid zerg support build.

for pve it looks fine. I’m not so sure about wvw. If blink is on CD and you get stunned you’re done. That and forget about running with a zerg. I suggest running Staff and Decoy in WvW. Also, Null Field is fairly weak these days with the confusion nerf in wvw. Melandru and Leek food works well enough along with one cleanse sigil or Mender’s Purity trait.

To run GW2 WvW, all you need is a decent ivy bridge cpu (or Haswell which is new) and a halfway decent gpu. If you’re dropping coin on Alienware you might check if you’re getting Haswell. Just a thought.

I just picked up Runes of the Centaur, as I mentioned in another thread, and it provides and AOE swiftness! It’s great for wvw. I’m not a fan of mantra heals due to the radius of the heal and the awkwardness of the spell.

If you’re looking to support your wvw team, play to your strengths and run ports, veils, and TW. On that note, the only glamour trait i’d suggest is the CD reduction one. If you’re dying to lay down some epic WoW’esque heals then run Ele.

Reflection from Focus and Feedback is also nice. Just make sure you are still getting bags…

I went celestial. Ascended amulets are expensive and ascended trinkets in general take a while to get. Also, the “celestial” amulets and accessories have a large point difference compared to non-celestial trinkets. The extra vit and toughness you get adds a nice balance to one’s build. If you feel you need to increase a specific attribute you can always do that with a new set of gear, upgrades, and traits.

This build is what I eventually came up with. It has worked nicely in spvp and wvw so far. It stands up to thieves well, is mobile, durable, and does a ton of damage both for single target and aoe when needed.

Thanks for all the insight and suggestions so far. It sounds like Runes of the Centaur are something I should look into. I was hoping I could go with Melandru Runes. I’ll play round with it from that point in spvp to test these suggestions out. I mainly play wvw, so I playtest my builds in spvp before investing in them. I’ll start with GS + Staff and stick with a pure phantasm build rather than a hybrid. If that doesn’t work well I’ll probably try GS + Sword/Pistol.

I must say, it’ll be tough to lose all the reflection and utility I get with the focus. Therefore, I may initially try tweaking my current build first by swapping sword for scepter and changing up my utility spells a bit.

My old Staff + Scepter/Focus, glamour, confusion build had little problem with thieves. I would just phase retreat, chaos armor, block, pull, and stack confusion on them until they killed thierself or ran away. I’ve since switched to a GS + Sword/Focus phantasm build and find I’ve an exceedingly tough time with melee thieves. In spvp I’ve 1700 toughness and in wvw I’ve 1800. I also typically run with decoy and defender, yet it seems to make little difference.

My question is mainly, is there a way to beat thieves without using a staff? Would swapping out my sword for a scepter help (to gain the block)? I recently dropped DE for more phantasmal power. Should I pick it back up again for a hybrid build? What about adding some daze and intterupt?

I tried running with a GS + Staff build in WvW. It was terrible and slow, so I’d rather not do that. I don’t feel I can do without the GS in WvW though, so I have to have that.

Mesmer is an excellent choice for WvW. The focus pull is awesome. Honestly, I never tire of how ridiculous it is to be able to yank five people, from a zerg, off a cliff from range when they are charging. Then, pop a portal, jump into their zerg, knock five more off with your GS, and port back up. You’ve lots of utility to help allies out. Portals are essential to any successful golem rush. TW is still useful occasionally (the nerf really hurt it though). Phantasmal Beserker is fun (even bugged) against zergs. If you spec for 1700+ toughness and have one or two stun breaks you shouldn’t have too much trouble against thieves. With traited focus you can get around pretty quickly if you want to solo camps, solo yaks, or just do some scouting. There’s also lots of good build for wvw to keep things interesting.

Mesmer in pvp is also very good and have a high potential cap based on one’s skill. Phantasms are very powerful (HP was buffed a while back). I like to run with 1600 toughness in pvp, but glass cannon works well too if run properly. I suggested traiting into the +15% damage for illusions and +15% damage for phantasms. Also, Sharper Images isn’t as beneficial now that condition damage isn’t as useful for mesmer these days.

LumAnth.5124:

Absoliutlrt (for me).

My guild requires me to be a portal and veil mesmer. It’s not fun and sometimes I get yelled at. But even when I’m not on my mesmer, I get scolded to go on my mesmer soon enough.

It’s not just glamours too. Shatter mesmers (most of them) rely heavily on Mirror Images, Decoy.

Even my tanky Phantasm build relies on Decoy, Signet of Illusions and Illusionary Defender.

easy fix there… leave your guild. You’re granting them the privilege to use your mesmer on occasion. That they demand you to use him doesn’t sound fun and if it were me I’d leave.

As for glamours in general, they are worthless to trait these days unless you’re running golems. Even then I only temporarily trait it.

it took me eight months, but I finally leveled up a second toon, which was a guardian actually. I did it mainly to help my guild in WvW, but it’s also my second favorite profession. I had the same problem you did where I simply got bored playing other professions. I tried to level a necro and a engineer, but neither are as fun so far as the mesmer.

Pyroatheist.9031:

You only got to level 5. If you think that you can fully experience the nature and feel of a class in the first 5 levels, you’ve got another thing coming. Get it to level 40, then take another look at it.

This. Also, while leveling, go with GS and sword/x with power/crit/toughness and phantasms.

I assume this
http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fgAQNAsaWl0zyqHTzoGb9ICqHYH49dkK0alewbXYuB-jkDBYLCiUEQkFAEBgJPCjpPoJQJqipIasabYaXBVDDRFLymxp2UeIaA-w
is what Osicat was talking about which I found on chapter 30 of http://osicat.weebly.com/guide.html …

Anyhoo, personally, I prefer higher toughness. Throw 20 into the Chaos tree and pickup the Staff trait (chaotic dampening). I also would suggest you take some kind of permanent cleansing. Even a sigil of purity might be enough, but I prefer at least arcane thievery or null field depending on whether I’m traited for glamour or manipulation.

I love trolling with this pull. Last night I was scouting at the highest point at of the entrance to Faithleap from Bay keep. I stood there still, as though I had gone afk, as one of the red dudes miling around down there came up to gank me. I let him get real close, blocked his first shot with my scepter, and then yanked him forward off the cliff to his doom all while several of his buddies stood in the camp watching it happen.

My goodness… That’s a long explaination that could simply be summed up by saying: for any Mesmer reflection build, just trait Warden’s Feedback and use a Focus weapon.

That’s it. I personally prefer to run with the Mirror heal and Feedback in WvW or sPvP as well so I can roll four reflection spells for the duration of a fight. I also think the Illusions tree is a dead tree unless your build is totally dependent on shattering for damage and burst. Even then I’d not put more than 10 points in it.

My build used to be 0/0/10/30/30, but I’ve adjusted it due to this patch to 0/20/20/30/0. I also am using Restorative Mantras + Mantra of Pain with decent success. It comes in handy verse the insane damage Arrow Carts put out. I’ll probably tweak the build as I go though and still need to replace my armor…. sigh

ExZee.8109:

Ilthuain.5634:

ExZee.8109:

Sebrent.3625:

It’s not the “condition mesmer” that’s dead … it’s the really easy “confusion mesmer” that is dead. Combine conditions.

The actual condition mesmer is a slow build-up but powerful once built up. As such, it is forced to be survivable. Staff, our best condition weapon, is slow … but x4 it is quite quick on condition per second. Add in 100% bleed per crit on 3 of those hits and you have something.

Think about it.

If you’d actually played a condition Mesmer you wouldn’t be telling others to think about it because you’d actually know.

But you don’t.

I play a condition mesmer and I have since beta weekend 1.

I agree with Sebrent. This nerf reduces the efficiency of a specific playstyle of the condition mesmer build, but there are still many ways to kill with a condition mesmer.

Ok, I can play this too.

I’ve played nothing but condition Mesmers and not only is Sebrent’s argument a huge piece of theoretical BS because 1. good luck “building up” bleed stacks on any decent opponent, especially thieves that stealth and remove bleeds and burns 2. good luck getting 3 staff clones up, implying that he’s not weapon swapping, not using any phantasm skills, and not shattering for confusion pressure. In fact, go hit a lone dolyak and see how many bleed stacks you can get (you should’ve bought a lottery ticket if you can “stack” burns for over 2 seconds, too). Oh and see how LONG it takes while you’re at it.

I find both of you to be hilarious pretending to know what you’re talking about because the absolute CORE of any variation of a condition Mesmer build is Illusionary Retribution + Master of Misdirection. I’d love to see either of you run a viable condition build without these traits.

Agreed. The notion that a mesmer can specialize in other conditions is ridiculous. Due to scaling, if you’ve ANY points in condition damage now for a mesmer they are WASTED points. What’s worse is that Retaliation was nerfed too. Mesmers weren’t known for ret as much as guardians, but it was a decent strategy to combine confusion with retaliation. Honestly, all we have left is clones and reflection and you could agrue that other classes have clone-like abilities so there’s little that makes us unique anymore.

you kill people with pink butterflies

I run 0/0/10/30/30 for the reflection. This also makes it easier to switch to mantra heals quickly if you want.

glam is what I run with. Glamour works well in wvw and condition damage matches well with toughness. Additionally, I run reflection with glamour.

I’ve tried similar builds in the past. I must suck at them or don’t know how to play them because I get stomped by everyone. The build is too squishy to melee verse other melee, it has little defense verse range, and little defense verse conditions. Yes, you do some awesome damage and can typically do alright 1v1, but 1v2 and it’s over. Your so often attempting to stealth or avoid damage that you barely have time to get off any shots.

I always end up going back to my glamour/reflection 0/0/20/20/30 build with staff/scepter/focus which allows me to kite everyone. It’s extremely strong verse range and can handle warriors, guardians, and range thieves. It can 1v1 melee thieves and 1v2 most everything else.

Pyroatheist.9031:

Confusion is generally useless in pve. You can try to make it work, but it will just be worse than almost any other build you can think of.

Pretty much that. Confusion damage is dependent on how fast the target casts or attacks. NPC targets attack slowly most of the time whereas players spam skills. Go with crit and some toughness or just roll a warrior for pve.

were I to regear my mesmer for strictly pve rather than wvw I’d probably go with something like this:
http://www.gw2build.com/builds/mesmer-best-pve-build-high-damage-fractal-critical-mesmer-9677.html
Translating that to pve (from spvp) you’d just look for mainly Valkyrie gear with some Berserker gear.

Steer clear of confusion if you mainly want to do pve.

so you went with confusion on blind, but not blind on glamour?

Minibiskit.6158:

This might sound silly, but have you checked on the headset to see if there is a switch to change the audio setting from stereo to surround? I just got my G930 headset and it has a manual switch just below the power button that turns on surround.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your headset!

Wow… that was it… You’ve my thanks.

@tulisin: no one should be forced to fight an enemy who can stealth 95% of the time.

Yet several thieves still think soloing 10 people in wvw is solely due to their skill and not an over powered and exploited class.

Here’s my idea. Remove the timer, but still wipe them on reset. Allow the guild that placed a seige to be able to self-destruct it. Slightly reduce a seige’s HP per use. Allow people to repair a siege with supply once every minute.

Daecollo.9578:

Thieves can’t be hit when they are stealth, which buff or trait is that?

Four out of five attack spells require you to target the opponent to actually attack him. You might as well throw AOE spells in there too since you need to see your target to know where to put the aoe. Tell me, which trait or buff can I take to target a stealthed thief?

Moogster.6207:

The real problem for me is the pistol thief. I really don’t know how to fight them.

Reflection

MHE Tiger.4875:

I’ll try and sum this up as easily as I can….

Thieves, when traited to deal insane damage, are not traited to take ANY damage. I, on my lvl 80 thief, have been easily destroyed in seconds by virtually every class. They are not overpowered. Once you learn to catch one, it’s game over for that thief. Guardian greatsword skill 2 will take a GC thief down pretty nicely and many of the other classes’ skills will as well. Just saying, the thieves that you believe are so overpowered are not. The player behind the keyboard and mouse just knows how to play one. They get in, slash some stuff out, and if they are good, get their rear end out of there and stealth. Though like I said, if you catch one, it’s really no longer a fight.

Sylosi.6503 sums this one up pretty much perfectly.

In response to Tiger.4875, every class can go with a glass cannon build and have the same survivability issue you define. However, the extreme difference is that thieves can’t be hit when they chain-stealth. Hence, they practically have the survivability of a tanked guardian, the escapability of an elementalist, and the spike damage of a burst warrior.

I’ve I mentioned before, this gets somewhat balanced out in spvp because thieves are forced to hold points to win and therefore have to stand in a defined place over a period of time allowing aoe to have some effect.