This. THIS THIS THIS, but not just for feedback, but for ALL AOE abilities across all classes. Can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve tried to drag a friendly thief out of his shadow refuge… >.<
Uh, enemy shadow refuge has the red ring… No red ring = ally.
Pretty sure enemy chaos storm and feedback have red rings as well, or at least I wasn’t having any trouble yesterday seeing which stuff belonged to the enemy’s glamour Mesmer and which belonged to the glamour Mesmer in my pt. I know for sure temporal curtain has a red line around it.
I’ve found this to be a very fun match so far! Have had some really great group battles as well as some fun roaming. Met a thief in EBG yesterday from food guild that neither one of us could kill the other even tho I know I made several mistakes, it was a long long battle. It got ended when some other guy from that server showed up, the group of yaks that were standing up on the hill watching us stepped in to down that guy and then went back up on the hill, but thief left. I think it would have been a continuing stale mate anyway xD
From your original description I’d definitely say mesmer over theif. I started out playing mesmer ranged with gs and staff but after lvling have switched to a much more close and personally attack style moving in and out of range and have ditched gs altogether.
I’m currently using the ascended Triforge, but I will switch it out for the collar, power/tough/+Crit damage.
Why main stat toughness rather than say, power? Because you switched out some stats on armor and now want to add toughness back? For myself I was leaning more toward the one that is main stat power, then prec and crit damage.
I kind of agree with the op.
Most builds and posts are for level 80 and without searching through a whole bundle of crap its hard to find a good noob guide.I’m sure some exist but the topics at the top like shatter cat and show your mesmer ,aren’t going to help a new player.
Try looking at the one stickied at the top called “[List] Find your Mesmer Build & Guides!” there are lvling guides in it.
Aww, well… if you decide to give it another go, please realize that mesmers for most people are annoying at first, but are a lot of fun once they get used to their flow of the class..
scyld, he wasn’t talking about the char he was talking about deleting a reply he made to me.
Kazhiel, I deleted it. It annoyed me. I appreciate the forum is filled with these (a lot of them I have read) but I also know that people like to share their experience, and I am very grateful. I am keen to get as much info as I can and people, generally, are happy to help.
Also, it’s not compulsory for you to reply. If it is that tiring then don’t bother reading it, definitely don’t bother writing in it. Seems very contradictory.
Thanks to the rest of you for being helpful.
Oh I’m happy to help which is why I directed you to the place where you can answer your own questions and why I’m still here writing. Just seems pretty silly to make a post asking the same generic question as other posts you’re saying you’ve read. Mesmer is one of the most complicated classes to play, there are so many little things you can do with traits and weapon combos that would make absolutely no sense to you as a new player and if a person tried to detail them here would turn into an epic novel of gibberish. You’re better off just going to the guide section and reading Lazy Kai’s guide to lvling and Mr Prometheus complete Mesmer guide. The traits you use lvling will probably be completely different than what you use at end game bordering on not making much difference because lvling in this game is so easy. I was lvl 80 long before I ever made it into the lvl 80 maps. Besides most of the 75-80 maps are full of icky undead things and not real pleasant to visit anyway lol. Just go play your char and explore the maps, try out the different weapons and get a feel for how the game works. If you’re on Yak’s holler and I can tour you around some time, I have several alts I’m lvling.
Tons of guides are in the build list at the top of the page. Some of them are for lvling and some of them are end game. For the most part you can get by in over with pretty much anything. My traits while lvling were such a random mishmash and my gear was crap. It’s very easy to lvl in this game so for the most part you can save your monies toward end game gear. It wasn’t until after getting to 80 and getting some different gears to try out that I decided on a play style that suited me. Until I got there I had thought I wanted to play Osi’s shatter cat (back when his guide was one build, some of the newer ones would have suited me better) but I tried and it just didn’t mesh with me at all.
Easymode, I think Fay has a section in there for lvling that includes a number of guides including Mr Prometheus and Kai’s lvling guides.
Wesz, lol I saw that before it got deleted. If you’d actually take the time to browse the forum before making a post you’d see that several other people the past couple days have made posts exactly like yours. Your questions are asked on here usually a couple times a week. Call me a prick if you want but it’s way easier for me to just tell you to go read the guides rather than writing out some long explanation that I’d have to repeat again two days from now for someone else. Helping lazy people gets pretty tiring.
Uh, how about reading the forum? Build and guide lists are stickied in a thread at the top. Pretty much all you’d ever need to know about lvling and playing a mesmer can be found in the guides there.
Dess has good advice for you, just try different things to find what you like. Staff is a very defensive weapon but you can be defensive with other weapons too. Scepter has block/blind, and confuse, main hand sword has invulnerability thru blurred frenzy, off hand sword has block/daze, focus you can cripple and pull enemies and block or reflect (if traited) projectiles. Torch has stealth, blind, and a phantasm that causes confusion and retaliation. Torch, main and offhand sword, and focus can be comboed with various fields for different effects including chaos armor and condition cleanse.
Both have their places. I have sets of armor with each. Right now I’m running a build that doesn’t use focus and doesn’t have blink traited (tho I still use blink! love that skill) so I have centaur runes on my armor. When using a different build with blink traited and off hand focus (traited or not) I have no use for centaur runes and have no trouble keeping up with groups in wvw or even out running them lol so I have more flexibility to add in whatever rune bonus I want. Honestly, even just having focus traited and not using blink, swiftness up time isn’t bad and in a group in wvw there are always other people who can give aoe swiftness.
I’m running a hybrid phantasm build atm, or well I have up to the 15% damage trait in inspiration and a few other traits for phantasms so I’ve actually been paying more attention to the phantasms rather than total shatter fodder. All of the phantasms have their place and some do some pretty dang neat stuff. Used to really love zerker but I think a lot of that was the instant gratification of all the numbers popping above people’s heads. Now tho I don’t even use greatsword any more and in fact extracted mine for ectos haha I think swordsman is really cool and warden, tho warden looks pretty silly as a human waving her arms around, both can be used on fields to great effect. Mage is awesome if you can get two or three of them out but is a little lacking as a single phantasm because of the slow attack speed. I like the duelist but I just hardly ever used it and so my pistol got turned into ectos also. The two underwater phantasms are both pretty nice and I rarely shatter them.
Focus, or centaur runes, or air runes, or I often just trait blink to 1200. It doesn’t help you with jumping puzzles but it’s helpful for traveling across maps.
- length of confusion > confusion damage. (As per the spreadsheet 10% length is worth 150-200 condition damage
Yeah, this, which was why I was thinking it might be better in the long run to leave off the glamours cause blind but keep the blind causes confusion and use it with scepter and torch and basically extend the total amount of time during a fight that you can keep the enemy confused. Then use the other trait points to either pick up phantasm damage or de. I’ll do some testing with it tonight when I have a chance to play and then I’ll make a new thread so we quit cluttering play’s build thread with other theory crafting xD
Part of playing well is managing your skill usage. If everything is on cd you’re probably a random button masher and not thinking about and planning what you’re doing vs the enemy.
That is true, planning ahead is required. It sounds stupid but in GW2 you have to save your best skills for the moment when in other MMOs you’d have won already – the moment when your opponent lies in the dust.
I actually really like the added care and planning required because of the down state.
The problem with most of the suggestions here is:
In a 1vs2 fight you probably need all the suggested skills to down one of them, but when it’s time to stomp him you have no cooldowns ready.
Time Warp + stomp sounds cool, but if you can down a player in a 1vsX fight without using Time Warp, you’re fighting against noobs. Doesn’t work against smart ones.
Part of playing well is managing your skill usage. If everything is on cd you’re probably a random button masher and not thinking about and planning what you’re doing vs the enemy. I also disagree about time warp… I almost never have tw slotted and rarely have trouble facing or downing multiple opponents without it.
Some of the names people have come up with are pretty funny! Kinda makes me wish I’d tried for something witty. My char’s name is the result of some random keyboard mashing then trying to make it pronounceable.
Well, you can’t always count on your enemy to be a noob or that you’ll always be facing a zerg who isn’t going to be paying attention. My goal for a build in wvw isn’t to farm badges like the original poster’s is haha
Seems kinda wasteful when if you didn’t take the glamour causes blind or the glamours last longer (adds like 1-2 sec?) you could use those twenty trait points for a lot more versatile things.
So pros and cons of having glamours traited to do both?
The way I have always used confusion is more of a control skill to keep an enemy from attacking me, or punishing them if they do, and not counting on it doing a whole lot of damage. if someone is smart they aren’t going to go willy nilly swinging thru it and if they do that’s just a little bonus damage added to what my shatters/regular hits/or phantasms are doing.
Well the description on the trait says it causes 5 seconds. Well, you said they were independent of each other but if they are different durations how does that work ever getting effect from both of them? So does it put one stack of 5 seconds on them and a stack of 4 seconds over top of that so you have 4 secs of two stacks and 1 sec of one stack?
Blind on glamour trait actually only occurs when you first place the glamour. You get 1 hit of blindness this way. With the confusion on blind trait, this provides 1 stack of confusion for 5 seconds. The confusion on glamour fields trait causes 1 stack of 4s confusion every time someone enters or exits the area. These effects are applied independently of one another.
Thought that confusion on glamour trait caused 5 secs of confusion. So what you’re saying is having both traited to confuse would cause 9 seconds of confusion? I played glamour mesmer using kylia’s build for a while but that’s been a long time ago, it doesn’t seem like I remember people getting confusion lasting that long.
Question: If you’re going to trait for glamours cause confusion why also trait for glamours cause blinds and blinds cause confusion? Confusion or blind only happens on entry of the glamour field right? Almost seems like one would negate the other or does the confusion from glamour and the confusion from the blind stack intensity or help the duration?
Maybe some different stated gear/armor would be better. I’m pretty sleepy at the moment, this might all look different in the morning. Hopefully I got the links right xD
But more important : Veil is not a glamour skill. So it wont work here
lol look again, veil is most certainly a glamour and one that has multiple uses. Not only if traited will cause blind/confuse but it also gives you two stealths and you can combo it for chaos armor.
One question though. You say you use food to offset lack of condition removal, but it looks like you have Mender’s Purity. Do you find that is not enough? Seem like another food would be more valuable, and you can always go MoRecovery w/RM in a clutch.
I’m not Dank but while running his build last night I never felt like I needed more condition removal. When I was solo and small group roaming I used his build as he stated but I used precision food and oil, utilities were mirror images, veil, and blink. The stealths gave me time to let conditions fall off that it didn’t seem problematic, I also have sigil of generosity on one of my swords. I’m used to running with no reliable condition removal so it didn’t bother me. Later when I was participating in defending bay against enemy Zerg I swapped in null field in replace of blink for a little added team support.
Thanks Seven and Dank for speaking up here about the usefulness of the weapons a lot of people seem to want to hate on lol I like scepter, I like torch, I like all the mesmer weapons really, they all have a role to play.
Dank, what kind of build are you running?
I’m currently using 0, 20 II-X, 20 IV-VII, 25 VI IV, 5.. Using a mix of Knights/Valk with a few pvt thrown in to basically keep at least 45% + crit chance and have 40% crit damage (which I’m saving gold to change out some gear to raise that in trade for toughness).. Atm with that setup I have 21.5k hp with 2850ish armor.. The one stat which lacks is power sitting at about 2900 attack atm but I use bloodlust to offset that.. Oh btw I have to use master maint oils in this setup to get my crit % where I want it. I use Lemongrass poultry to offset the lack of condition removal..
I have guildies who use the same weapons in a full PVT setup with a drastically different trait build and they also have great success..
Been running your build this evening in wvw but with knights gear, mix of rabid, soldiers, and berserker weapons, most accessories are soldiers. Works pretty nice, I did use II in inspiration for faster glamour recharge and used veil and null field for combo fields. Mirror Images for third utility and Mass Invis for elite. I don’t really understand why veil gives chaos armor when the tooltip says it’s a light field, doesn’t light field give retaliation? Ethereal field gives chaos armor? o.o But I’m not going to complain. Attached is my stats with the precision food and maintenance oil.
Thanks Seven and Dank for speaking up here about the usefulness of the weapons a lot of people seem to want to hate on lol I like scepter, I like torch, I like all the mesmer weapons really, they all have a role to play.
At which time he immediately uses great sword 5 to knock my neatly gathered foes half way across the battlefield an out of range of my flailing asuran arms. Doh!
I hatehate when this happens. And it’s not just other mesmers, but other classes with knock backs too -.-
this build does not work for me :| retaliation never comes up and I die in like 3.2 seconds
lol the only way I can figure is that you don’t have the right traits selected, or wrong gear, or aren’t standing on temporal curtain when you leap/swap, or a combination of. I don’t quite have all the right accessories, and therefore not quite as much hp as Pyro, and this build still rocks for me. My weapons, armor, runes are all correct as per the build. I am flat out a tank in WvW. The build also works fine for me gathering in Orr and such things, lower lvl dungeons it’s also fine, higher lvl dungeons the mobs just hit so hard it doesn’t work lol
