Guild Wars 2

Hey there!

I am very busy in RL and for now, I won’t do any other Lazy Kai guides for other classes, sorry. I still play Guild Wars 2 from time to time though and update this guide if needed.

I still think that going power and GS/Sword, Focus for leveling is the best way and that the Lazy Kai build is working great for PvE.

I am happy if the guide helps you out there to enjoy playing the mesmer. To be honest, I have no idea why the leveling guide never made it in Fay’s list but maybe someone should simply ask for it. So feel free and let Fay know if the guide helped you on your sometimes rocky way to 80. ^^

I don’t understand all the fuzz…

You can level with every combination and trait setup, the following has to be considered though:

If you like seeing things die, condition gear and the staff is your choice.
If you like to see things dead instantly, go power gear, equip a GS and a sword.

Honestly, if you don’t care about efficiency, you could level without gear and just a starter weapon from start to finish. If you do care though, you will go with the power GS/sword route.

While I am fairly quiet on the forums lately, my leveling guide is up-to-date. Feel free to give it a try (link is in the signature).

Feel free to check my leveling guide in my signature.

Feel free to use my Lazy Kai’s Guide to PvE and my leveling guide for your compendium if you want.

As name for the guide: Me, Myself and I – The All For One Mesmer Guide.

I see what you did there… ^^

Updated the leveling guide in regards to the latest trait changes. There might now be a slight gamplay change felt at the transition to level 60 (as you will miss the shorter GS cooldowns) but overall you will do fine.

Still reflecting on how to adapt the Go Go Power Ranger build.

Btw, I’m planning to update the leveling guide today as some things have changed in the recent patch. This might come in handy… ^^

Hey there, I’m still alive.

On the builds after this mess of a patch:

- Lazy Kai should be working as intended, even better than before with bouncing and zerker fix + zerker hp.

- Leveling guide needs some updates, works sort of though.

- Go Go Power Ranger build needs a slight update.

Look here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Lazy-Kai-s-Guide-to-PvE-Leveling-Guide/first#post850721

Might have some advice you could use…

Both builds look very familiar. Looks like Lazy Kai and Go Go Power Ranger build to me… ^^

To be honest, if you go with a mantra build, use mantras. If you want max dps in PvE, go with Sword as main weapon. I still prefer GS though, as most things are dead till you are close anyway.

My guides are in the sig.

The guide got a bit lost in time and might be a bit hard to find (espcecially the leveling guide), time for a push. ^^

This might help:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Lazy-Kai-s-Guide-to-PvE-Leveling-Guide/first#post850721

Thx for 50k+ views, I think I should celebrate this with some giveaway…
Can I send stuff to players on other servers and between NA and EU?

And patch day just around the corner, as always, I appreciate help to adapt to new circumstances afterwards.

Look here:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Lazy-Kai-s-Guide-to-PvE-Leveling-Guide/first#post850721

You are welcome, as is any critic…

The playstyle obviously changes post 40, which is reflected in my leveling guide.
But leveling itself means using what you get and being effective with what you got. That’s more or less what’s my guide about.

So efficiency with the tools available at time = fun? That’s how I see it… ^^

If you have trouble leveling you mesmer, you can always try my leveling guide:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Lazy-Kai-s-Guide-to-PvE-Leveling-Guide/first#post850721

Even if you have no troubles, you can still give it a look, might have some information you can use to improve your gameplay… ^^

Kontrolle.3514:

GS on Mesmer is a noob weapon, for baddies that just want to press 2+4 on CD for success. Oh and how they cried after this ridicoulus phantasm got balanced, all those tears

Staff FTW and i dont get people that dont play Staff in PvE or group based WvW.
Chaosstorm is one of the most powerful abilitys in this game.

I understand that you like the staff. It is by far the easiest weapon to handle.
One attack that works at any range (better in mid to short range), one clone generator, one single target damage phantasm that stays at range.
Two defensive abilities with a long cooldowns (even traited), with one being a combo field – combined with the clone generator you get the same effect as the other defensive ability.
Sure, you can use chaos storm as an offensive tool, but there is not much more to the staff than this. It is the easiest weapon of them all, but it is just too slow to get anything done in PvE. Why would you use it?

Looks like you do not understand the GS. It is for the fearless, the coordinated. You mess up, you might die, you know how to dodge and get out of range, you will succeed. Every single skill on the GS has it’s uses.
Don’t get me wrong, I wrote the Lazy Kai guide. It might sound noobish, but it is just the first step into an aggressive playstyle with a lot of awareness needed. If you use sword/focus as off-hand like me, there is a lot of buttons to push on the right time, or you will get eaten alive. On the other hand, if you know what you do, it can be very satisfying to take down whole groups of enemies in a matter of seconds.

Sure, you can do this with a staff too, it will just take forever and you will feel a bit more safe. If you think that is less noobish, all the power to you.

Most of the more experienced mesmers have over 1000h on the profession (me too), and most of them have realized that every weapon has its reason to exist even if some need some love.

Grats! That’s the spirit, the Mesmer will only get better as further you climb on the level scale.
Soloing champions is for sure a very satisfying thing. Keep going, and the game will reward you.

Good luck!

There have been some statements in the two posts above, I want to give some feedback:

If you feel fine leveling a mesmer (or even easy), simply skip my leveling guide. I highly disagree that the fun to play a mesmer starts at level 40. It gets easier for sure, but even before, the profession works fine.

You do not have to shatter, in fact you probably can level a mesmer by just using auto attack. But why wouldn’t you utilize a mechanic, that offers a great damage boost and utility every time it is off cooldown, unless the mob will be dead without it in a heartbeat. If you still run 30/30/0/0/10 and do not shatter when you have clones up and F1 off cool-down, than you do not play very efficently (at least in PvE), you will just waste a lot of dps potential.

You can level any class in this game pretty fast (even without crafting). There are many ways to earn experience. If it took you longer to level a ranger than a mesmer, you have probably just not played as efficiently with that class.

If it is easy for you does not mean, that it is easy for everyone else. It is easy for me to read Japanese literature – so it is easy for everyone else. Nice, so I won’t have to translate all that lines. Makes sense to you? No.
Saying it is really easy (caps lock) doesn’t make it true for everyone does it. Think about it.

Some GS buffs and shatter nerfs on the horizon. While I obviously appreciate any buff made to GS #1, shatter nerfs won’t be helpful in PvE at all… ^^

Hopefully this builds will still be viable after the next patch(es)…

You could have a look at the guides in my signature. They work well with a GS/staff combo (some adjustments needed for the leveling guide rotation, sure).

Be aware that playing a mesmer might result in giving up your ranger as main though, as it can be so much more fun… ^^

Foosnark.1784:

Thanks for this guide, Kai. I had been playing a condition/boon bouncy staff build, but it just felt so sloooow to take out a single target. This is so much easier. I wish I’d been using it all along instead of waiting until level 73 to switch :P

Well, I leveled my first mesmer with a staff + condition build, before the GS buff (back than, GS was not a real option) and change around level 75 to a more DD build. At this time there weren’t too many guides around though and as it was my first character, I didn’t mind it to take some time (as I had no comparsion to other classes).

Everyone who leveled another profession before the mesmer would not understand how one can level a character like this. Gladly things have changed a bit… ^^

If mesmers have learnt one thing, than fearing the next patch day.
As a PvE mesmer, patch days often result in painful nerfs, as a result of the kitten PvP whiners. Not that mesmers were a strong PvE class at any time to begin with.
Now PvE mesmers are limited to very few working trait/weapon setups, but honestly, variety looks different…

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_elementalist_skills
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_warrior_skills

Elementalists have far more weapon skills than warriors. Giving Elementalists more weapons multiplies these weapons skills by 4.
Elementalist have more than enough flexibility with what they got, I don’t get the point of this thread…

I had no problems since patch with DEs, nor did they feel easier, but I didn’t play too much lately.
Having a staff in your bags is always a good decision, especially for dragons and co.

On the other hand, the Rune of Air procc is not so useful if you avoid most damage (in PvE).

Sigil of Air is a procc on critical, Rune of Air proccs when you get hit. So both work well together.

This build looks familiar… ^^

I have a hard time without centaur runes. It feels like going places takes forever. While air is nice, the duration is too short.
I’ve seen a fair amount of bashing on the centaur runes, but imho, they offer a good allround package.

If you do not care too much about the runbuff, go with one of the other runes.

Got 10 or so out of black lion chests. That was ages ago though. Might have been removed from the loottable.

Rune of the Centaur + focus will give you a 100% speed buff uptime.
If you want you can throw in Signet of Inspiration, it can procc the speed buff too.

While the focus speed buff will not stack, every other speed buff stacks on the focus one. So a bit of timing might help.

People whining about Greatsword. Greatsword getting buffed.

One can dream. For PvE, GS is one of the strongest weapons, if not the strongest (depending on what kind of encounter you are running).
For DEs and open world stuff, it is clearly the best choice (for me). Combined with a sword/focus off-set, there is not much left, you can’t solo out there..

Hey!

Sorry, I have been afk for some days (and enjoyed it at least as much as playing GW2). Thank you for your feedback on the leveling guide. Actually, this is exactly the way I wanted my guide to be seen. Might have worked out… ^^

Fun fact: I started another Mesmer, just to go through the process of leveling again. I will probably refine some parts and make an additional post with alternative ways to approach situations and setups to face especially challenging encounters.

Yeah, I wanted to support your statement in your previous post. No reason to keep them alive, unless you want them as distraction.

Hey there!

Who ever says Mesmer is a weak PvE profession, never leveled it to a meaningful stage. It is true that Mesmers are tough in the beginning without traits, especially if you have no experience with the profession. That’s why I actually wrote my leveling guide, to get players to levels, where the Mesmer starts to shine.

Normally you do not want to keep your clones alive in solo PvE. Mind Wrack (F1) will do a ton of damage, why waste this potential. If you solo elites or tough veterans, keeping three illusions up as distraction is perfectly viable, even as a shatter build.

The Lazy Kai guide was written especially with solo PvE players in mind, you might want to give it a try. It covers most situations you will encounter in open world PvE and works fine even with fairly crowded DEs (should be even better since patch).

I hope you will have countless hours of fun to come with this amazing profession.

Got that thing on my 80. The stats are horrible, I think it is just wrongly labeled as level 80 item.

Yeah, ever since Signet of Inspiration got buffed to work out of combat, it was on my third utility skill slot. I have mentioned it several times in this thread and others, but I still hesitate to change my guide from Feedback to the signet.
The reason is that I expect people anyway to adapt the utility skills to their preferences and if they level with my guide, they will know that Signet of Inspiration is a great addition.

We will see, maybe I will change it in one of the next updates though, but people with less experience might have a hard time with ranged mobs without Feedback.

For everyone who plays the “MMOs in the past” card, just don’t. The market has changed over the 15 years I have been playing MMOs, changed a lot. If you want people to play your game, be ready to pump out content, it’s that easy nowadays.

I just don’t understand, why ANet is not delivering more personal story missions. No new missions half a year? No need to break them up for different factions, just add some missions, give us some story telling, give us NPCs we like or hate, but at least give us some emotion.
Make story missions replay available, and you would make me and a lot of people happy.

NightfallRob.3762:

This is genius. It’s been a huge help for me leveling as a new Mesmer. They ought to stick this thread for others to use.

Thank you very much. I think it would already help, if Fay put up the leveling guide on the Mesmer list. If builds get stickied, it results in monopolization, which I am not a big fan of.

No bigger changes will be done to my guides for this patch, as not much has changed.
I will keep an eye on the following changes though:

- Changed the way monsters react to players using stealth.
- Using stealth no longer resets NPC aggression tables.

I’d go with a 10/30/0/0/30 build. Might be a bit fragile but should have a lot of punch.
If you want a tankier build, you might find something in the list.

Try my Lazy Kai Build. Switch Feedback for Signet of Inspiration (you should adapt your support skills to the situation anyway).
Run around and do stuff.

What is the point of choice again, if you get more without a choice?

And I thought the new daily concept was easy to grasp, oh well…

Go Mesmer!
On second thought, choose something else… Ranger/Warrior/Guardian are easy going.

But a meh story is just not really enough for a game that was built (promoted) around a personal story. This is my story! Ah kitten, let’s go back to grind mode.

Still cannot see, how this update combined with next month will be “the conent worth an expansion”… For now, it has to be the worst story expansion ever since the invention of asia grinders…

Hey there.
As others have mentioned, you could give my leveling guide a go. The guide is fairly straight forward and focuses on your offense.
If you feel uncomfortable with this, feel free to adapt. The staff is a very versatile defensive tool. Using it might slow you down a bit, but everything is faster than to die and respawn.
Good luck and have fun.

Hey, I have defeated Zhaitan and cleansed Orr.
But the real challenge is to kick some Dredges between the legs. Ah, and kittens, there are never enough kittens.

Destiny’s Edge had how many members?

Ok, this might only be me, but as a Norn, I was waiting one month to see, what my fellow Norns are running away from.
They did not talk, and I thought – the horrors might have been to terrible to describe.

Now I have realized that my fellow Norns have been silent out of shame. Being defeated by some lousy Dredge and Kittens? What has become of our once proud race…

There is no epicness in this story, it is slow, tedious and at least uninspired. We have kicked Dredges and Charrs backs a hundred times already, and now they are a threat?

I was waiting for some combined forces of Destroyers and Svanir, that would have been still ok, but what we got is just a failure in story telling. Maybe it is a joke by ANet, but well, I couldn’t laugh…

Ireniicus.2167:

I recall ANet promising an expansions worth of content in Q1 2013. We got almost nothing in January as it was ‘setting the scene’. That is cool.

So with just today and March update to come and then recall what Moria gave to LOTRO or Burning Crusade to WoW we can anticipate a huge amount of new content, features and mechanics.

Then I woke up.

I still have no idea who in the PR department thought that stating this would be a good idea.
Total fiasco, this will be a running gag for ever in GW2…

Expecting the first half of the so called amount of content of an expansion.

But in the end, there is no way that ANet could ever deliver what they have promised. To be more realistic, I expect some PvE fixes, together with some fluff stuff like most of the guild content. After one month of living story (not much living in this story though), we hopefully get some more stuff to do than 45min worth of clicking things…