Guild Wars 2

Gosh, this thread is so refreshing. Usually it starts out with someone grousing, and then everyone grousing along with them, while in this thread, the first reply was a well thought out post detailing precisely how wrong the initial grouser was.

PvE in this game is a joke, end of story. If you complain about it being difficult, you’re doing it wrong. Simply take signet of malice and use some skills that do multihits. Yes, this means you won’t be able to run your 1-shot backstab build in PvE….what a shame.

Drop caltrops (even if you have no condition damage) because the multiple hits from caltrops will heal a ton. Spam cluster bomb. Autoattack on shortbow. Use death blossom. Stealth attack on mainhand pistol. Trait for applying regen with stealth. Trait for regen in stealth. Congratulations, you should never die again.

Thieves already have great damage.

Thieves don’t have the support utility of a mesmer or guardian. No one does, go grouse with rangers about that or something. You bring high damage and excellent survivability to a party, with a couple important niche utility tools like group stealthing and bask venom for instant interrupts through defiant.

tl;dr
No. Read it.

>1000 damage dealt to the walls or door in a 1m period is a silly measure. You can easily make that much damage to a door by having 1 player sit there autoattacking.

A much more effective way to gauge an actual attack would be something akin to >5000 damage dealt to a wall or door in 1 hit. This requires siege. You can make the assumption that without siege, there is no real attack occurring, and so making the event occur by this measure forces the attacking group to actually make an attack on the keep to contest the waypoint.

Zepidel.5349:

Pyroatheist.9031:

@Zepidel: First, in any mesmer build, you need 5 points in illusions. In a PHANTASM build, a build that is completely built around summoning illusions for damage….if you don’t have 5 points in illusions, its a wonder your build works in even the slightest way.

Now, having 5 points in illusions and the cooldown traits for your weapons means that the phantasm cooldown should be around 12 seconds. Having the cooldowns that low means that losing a phantasm from an overwrite will hurt far less.

Additionally, in a phantasm build, the idefender is not usually necessary. The reason being that you should be able to kite hard enough to avoid most damage, and you’ll be able to resummon the phantasms faster than they can effectively kill them anyway. Try taking signet of illusions to beef up your phantasms a bit more, and then blink and decoy for defensive escapes. With that sort of setup, you should never really encounter a situation where you’ll be overwriting a vital phantasm with a clone.

I rarely need to resummon due to signet of illusions making them tanks, or the situations that i do find myself needing that 3rd phantasm because 1 died something is off cooldown (I dont see a reason to recast a phantasm if there is already 3 up when i could be using another ability during that cast time) (which was my reasoning for not grabbing that passive, ontop of condition damage and shatter cd does pretty much nothing for me). blink is nice, decoy will kill one of your phantasms and running a build w.o. condition removal is a very bad practice.

The 5 points in illusions allows you to play with your game a bit more, rather than being more locked into summoning illusions and hoping they don’t die. It allows you to shatter more frequently (not due to shatter cooldown) because you’ll have more chances to shatter based on your phantasm cooldowns. Shatters, of course, can either be geared towards bursting the rest of the hp off of that thief, or using distortion when it’s necessary while still being able to maintain your damage output by resummoning your phantasms quickly.

You have 25 points in inspiration, so take mender’s purity for condition removal. Since you are (I think) aiming to use this for tPvP, null field would be a smart choice to take over either blink or decoy. Decoy overwriting a phantasm is another reason why 5 points in illusions is so important, because it allows you to use decoy (one of our most potent defensive utilities) without worrying about hurting your damage significantly.

@Zepidel: First, in any mesmer build, you need 5 points in illusions. In a PHANTASM build, a build that is completely built around summoning illusions for damage….if you don’t have 5 points in illusions, its a wonder your build works in even the slightest way.

Now, having 5 points in illusions and the cooldown traits for your weapons means that the phantasm cooldown should be around 12 seconds. Having the cooldowns that low means that losing a phantasm from an overwrite will hurt far less.

Additionally, in a phantasm build, the idefender is not usually necessary. The reason being that you should be able to kite hard enough to avoid most damage, and you’ll be able to resummon the phantasms faster than they can effectively kill them anyway. Try taking signet of illusions to beef up your phantasms a bit more, and then blink and decoy for defensive escapes. With that sort of setup, you should never really encounter a situation where you’ll be overwriting a vital phantasm with a clone.

Ok, pvp phantasm build. Heres the deal:

Mesmer, no matter what spec, is a hyperactive playstyle. You aren’t going to have nearly enough time to actually get 3 phantasms out on one target unless they’re afk. You’re going to be constantly spawning new ones, doing leap/swaps, and shattering for some burst. The ONLY time you will run into a situation where you have to decide between phantasms and clones is in pve, where you can actually have a chance of stacking up 3 phantasms on one target.

Since you can only spawn 2 damaging phantasms quickly, that’s the normal number you will end up with. The 2 phantasms will go down, and you’ll continue juking around with your other various skills while you let your phantasms do the work. Once your phantasm skills come up again, you can shatter your existing ones, and drop new ones. This also means you’ll never run into the problem of overwriting a phantasm with a clone. Additionally, if you somehow do manage to get 3 phantasms up on one target, overwriting one with a clone for an active combo like leap/swap/blurred frenzy will never be a bad thing to do.

With regards to defiant, I’m fairly certain that interrupt traits will proc through defiant, as long as you cast the potential interrupt during a skill channel.

Before I give an in-depth response, I need to know if you are talking pve or pvp.

A lot of people do give up phantasmal haste. I take it, because the utility it provides with iWardens in some situations is too massive to lose. The dps increase it provides is nice as well, but the main thing is allowing 100% projectile reflect uptime with only 2 wardens, instead of requiring 3.

gnarkiller.1862:

salluks.6017:

playandchill.3908:

I ll go full canon to one shoot glass thieves roaming around Sm

They say better use for canon, not more damage.. am guessing it will be like u wont take AOE damage while using canon for 1 minute or so.

but u will require to have canon in the first place to even use it, compared to supply capacity, which is pretty OP in my opinion.

I don’t even bother with the cannons anymore. within two seconds of getting on one I am pulled off it and off the wall and killed.

If you get pulled off the wall entirely when on a cannon, you’re doing something horribly wrong.

The amusing thing is that tsym claims they’re leaving because its boring and not fun, due to the fact that no one fights them. Unfortunately, by moving to a winning server (as they’re doing) it becomes abundantly clear that they’re only moving because they don’t like to lose, and they aren’t willing to actually put in the work it takes to win. I’m still surprised they stayed this long, and I’m just glad they aren’t transferring to DB…we don’t need guilds like you here.

Yeah, when they removed the double blast finisher, Anet seriously screwed up the skill’s functionality.

The problem is that with most long channeling combo finishers (i.e. churning earth) the combo is “stored” at the start of the skill, and released when the channel finishes. With the prestige, for some reason, it does 2 checks, one at the start, and one at the end. If you aren’t in a combo field both at the start of the duration AND the end, you will get no finisher.

Velkyn.5168:

Pyroatheist.9031:

It sorta depends on what you’re trying to do. If you are going for absolute pure condition damage, then rabid is better, because tuning crystals scale at 6% per toughness and 4% per vitality.

Other than that, carrion is actually a bit better for overall damage, since it does add power. It really depends on your personal preference. As I mentioned, I’m using carrion weapons and rabid everything else, it really doesn’t make an enormous difference.

Sorry, I should have clarified more. My main concern at the moment is survivability in WvW, specifically not dying in the AoE in zerg battles. ^^
And I’m not sure if just loads of toughness will help me more there, even if that means very few hitpoints, or if I should go for both vitality and toughness.

Ah. Now we cross from the realm of condition damage to the realm of effective hp.

There’s no easy answer to that question. Toughness helps more against straight damage. Vitality helps more against condition damage. Vitality also helps (a bit) to not instakill yourself when you drop feedback into a zerg (which I’ve done multiple times) due to retaliation damage.

Ultimately, it really doesn’t make a big difference for this particular build. The playstyle of a glamour mesmer really involves juking into 1200 range to drop feedback, null field, maybe chaos storm, and then running back and watching the pretty purple numbers. With smart play, you shouldn’t get hit that much.

Richard Nixon.6573:

morrolan.9608:

Richard Nixon.6573:

coronbale.3894:

…one that might actually stay and fight!

Scumbag Tsym- Complains you won’t stay and fight, transfers servers so they don’t have to stay and fight.

You realise that doesn’t actually make sense.

Leader of Tysm posts saying how awful the zerging is and how they won’t stay and fight when confronted.

Tsym was originally on DB, but when we lost two matches in a row, they left. Now that SoS has to lose a few matches, they are leaving. Tsym isn’t staying in SoS and fighting.

What isn’t there to understand?

Surrounding text with asterisks (* ) will make it bold.

Velkyn.5168:

I have a question – why exactly is rabid gear (prec/tough/cond) better than carrion (pow/vita/cond)?

I’ve also recently switched to a glamour build ankittenrying to collect proper gear for that build now, and these two condi damage stat combos confuse me because both seem to have a rather “useless” stat each.. conditions can’t crit from what I understand.

I suppose I do want both vitaliy and toughness? Or really just toughness and not so much vitality and that’s the reason for rabid gear?

It sorta depends on what you’re trying to do. If you are going for absolute pure condition damage, then rabid is better, because tuning crystals scale at 6% per toughness and 4% per vitality.

Other than that, carrion is actually a bit better for overall damage, since it does add power. It really depends on your personal preference. As I mentioned, I’m using carrion weapons and rabid everything else, it really doesn’t make an enormous difference.

Velkyn.5168:

I’m wondering, if a mesmer is wielding the legendary Bifrost, will the clones all leave the rainbowy footprints, too? Because otherwise I guess you’d be giving yourself away automatically..
I’ve been looking for gameplay videos of Bifrost-mesmers sporting clones on youtube, but no luck so far… so it would be great if someone could answer this.
Thank you!

Never seen a mesmer with bifrost, but all the clones retain footprints when using sunrise, so I assume it holds true for all legendaries.

EnRohbi.2187:

coronbale.3894:

TSYM a fun target?

In the first 5 days we were in T3 I wracked up an amazing 8300 kills. Both YB and DB threw everything they had at us. It was fun, it was exciting, and it was definitely challenging.

In the last 7 days we wracked up about 430 kills. Rather than face the first challenge your tier gets in who knows how long, you chose to avoid us, and hit our homeland whenever we left it. Any time we took the field you scattered like roaches with the kitchen light turned on, and hit us where we weren’t. The ONLY decent challenge we had last match week was when BP was hammering us with everything they had while YB hit our hills the instant crossed swords showed. It was about 3 hours of run, wiping golems, defending massively one sided fights, and seeing great combat movements. The instant they took bay they moved, and joined in with the “dodge TSYM like we owe them money” initiative.

You had a solid chance to improve your team by facing mine. So yes, you can go back to your talentless ZvZ brawls, and BP I’m sure can go back to farming uncoordinated masses like its zombie land. Well go in search of a higher caliber of competition, one that might actually stay and fight!

Most people get less defensive when someone says they’re a fun opponent.
I’ll be sure to not do that next time we meet

The great thing about tsym, is that they’re a fun target in multiple ways. First, they’re fun to smear across the floor of wvw, because they actually have coordination and put up a good fight, making the final smearing an accomplishment.

Second, they’re fun, because after you’re finished with the smearing, they come on the forums and complain, and you get to bask in the rage.

It’s still a little unclear to me why you are stacking boon duration. I’m not sure it particularly benefits this build much.

As far as condition duration food goes, I guarantee it would help tremendously, especially in a fight like against that engie. The -40% condition duration produces an approximate condition damage reduction of 50% or higher. Any condition lasting less than about 1.8 seconds will do 0 damage, and the damage of other conditions is almost always cut in half. That’s like having protection permanently, except even more.

For the record, I find it so amusing how some people attempt to defend the iMage in threads for the torch sometimes, but the moment someone mentions putting it on the staff…..the true colors of that skill shine through.

Yeah, that build is very very similar to my pve phantasm build: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-PvE-Supporting-Phantasm-Build

One thing to note about a build like this is weapon swapping. In my build, I have on me 2 swords, a focus, a greatsword, a staff, and a pistol. I use them all in different situations. Always remember that your current weaponset might not be the best one for the situation, so change it up. If you’re in the jade maw fractal, pistol is horrible, and staff is horrible, so take greatsword and sword/focus. On the final boss of the ascalonian fractal, greatsword hurts from retaliation damage, so go for staff. Constantly modifying your build to optimize it for every situation you come across is what makes a phantasm build like this so awesome for pve.

kittenos Vant.4182:

@Pyroatheist- Thank you for your response. The vigor makes sense. I’ve been playing this build, but thanks to my time playing your Immortal build, I am having a really hard time giving up the sword/focus.
So this will all likely be moot as I head back to a power based build, just swapping GS/Staff depending on Ranged/Melee.

I’m thinking you should have a look at my pve phantasm build, as it is somewhat similar to this, though more focused on defense than offense. You might be able to make a nice variant.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-PvE-Supporting-Phantasm-Build

Wow, I feel like I just watched a slideshow…

At any rate, you’ve got 2 on-crit sigils in the same weaponset. This isn’t very efficient, especially when one of them is generosity, and having that go off properly is really important for condition removal in a build like this. I’d replace the bleeding one with possibly bleed on weapon swap, or something else on weapon swap.

I’m not really sure that veil fits your playstyle very well. Grimms uses veil to great effect, but he plays much more defensively and evasively with bursts of offense, while you play a bit more like a shatter mesmer, and veil doesn’t fit that quite as well. You might want to reconsider that one.

I’m confused as to why you took 2 water runes. They don’t seem to serve a purpose at all.

You’re not using ascended accessories. As much as it would be nice, you should probably update that build to have exotic accessories.

You’re using a sword, so drop desperate decoy and take blade training. The cooldown on blurred frenzy provides far more defense than an uncontrollable stealthing trait ever can.

I’m unconvinced that the torch is worth it for you. The prestige is very nice, but the phantasm is really useless. To capitalize on sharper images, you might want to take the pistol, which also provides some more cc. You could try taking a focus as well, but without the focus trait, it loses a lot of viability. OH sword is also an option, and actually synergizes tremendously with blade training, but it has less bleeding potential from sharper images.

Edit: Just watched some more of the video. When running away, switch to staff, target someone chasing you, and use phase retreat.
Edit 2: Before using MI, switch to sword, otherwise (as happened) you’ll reveal yourself half the time because of the stupid winds of chaos bouncing around.
Edit 3: 7:26. Isn’t it lovely when illusionary leap works?
Edit 4: You have trouble with conditions sometimes, since you don’t have a super reliable method of removal. Consider using the -40% duration food as a large chunk of innate condition defense.

While the iMage concept makes more sense with the staff, being a condition damage phantasm for a condition damage weapon, right now having the iMage on a weapon means that weapon is crippled because the iMage is the worst skill in the entire game, a topic I’ve been over several times.

Switching the phantasms around wouldn’t change anything significant, other than be a swift kick to the balls for a lot of staff builds.

For this build, I’d put the 5 points into dueling, for vigor on crits.

Retaliation in phantasms is nice, but it’s not really necessary in pve. Wastrels punishment is probably the worst trait in the entire game, and you should never ever go just 25 points into domination for that reason.

I looked into them a bit more…keep the runes. Most shatter builds use either runes of air or runes of centaur, for the movement and/or crit damage. As it turns out, divinity provides more crit damage while also adding a large amount of other stats as well. The only actual downside is that they don’t have the capability of providing swiftness, but that isn’t a true deal breaker.

If you really want to salvage them though, transmute them into non-cultural armor, I think that works.

GuildWarsPlayer.5608:

What stats do you focus on as far as weapons and armor ? meaning power precision vitality condition damage etc.

Well, are you talking solo roaming in wvw, or solo leveling in pve? Those are two extremely different questions.

Divinity runes are a good choice for everything. Quite honestly though, I’d get some black lion kits and sell those buggers….but if you choose to keep them, you’ll definitely be fine.

Dhampyr.2104:

Thanks, Kaz, but that confuses me even more – damage per auto attack doesn’t have a time component. Therefore, condition duration wouldn’t apply at all.

I guess the whole point is that attempting to model condition dmg vs duration for confusion in an excel spreadsheet seems to be borderline worthless. IMHO, play preferences are more important. Do you want to kill ppl with confusion? Condi dmg is prob your best bet. Do you want to control good players (who stop using skills when confusion is on them)? Condi duration is the way to go.

Saying that you’re going to get “x” more damage for confusion out of increased condi duration just doesn’t make sense. For a normal condition (bleeds, burns, etc) I get it, but confusion obviously doesn’t follow the same pattern.

That spreadsheet is ONLY ONLY ONLY applicable for confusion damage.

It assumes an average autoattack speed to calculate total damage. This only matters (obviously) for confusion. Confusion is also the only condition where incremental increases in duration can have a large effect.

For all other damage conditions, damage occurs once every second. For this reason, condition duration only matters in increments of 1 second (whatever % increase this is, as it varies per skill and condition). If you have 30% increased duration, but the base duration is 1 second (staff burning) then you have 0% increased damage. 100% increased duration, on the other hand, would double the damage in this case. The longer the base duration, the more effective the % increases are, which also means that condition duration is highly effective on staff bleeds, which have a long base duration.

I’m really not invested enough in this sort of build to do the math for it, but if you want to, you simply need to calculate the duration increases for the different conditions the staff applies—while keeping in mind that these will be 0 for clones—in order to get total damage increase per % condition duration increase as compared to total damage increase per point of condition damage.

The Brigadier.3847:

I don’t think feedback works on the boss because he is to big but I may be wrong.

The purple projectiles spread out along the ground, so it ends up working fine. The only projectile he uses is the purple knockdown attack.

Ross Biddle.2367:

I’m not really sure these vids show the effectiveness of your build, except to say it’s effective in the JP. But the JP scenario is different than what I’d consider “WvW”. You’d actually be coming up against other roamers, or havok groups, at which point we’d see what you’re really made of.

Get out of the JP, and show us anything other than what amounts to straight up gankfests, and it’d be a huge improvement.

I’d like to highlight this post. This post demonstrates the proper way to make a good point without sounding like a massive kittenwad.

Nikked.7365:

Pandabro.8743:

Why so many complaints about Staff? It’s pretty much our best weapon. Why don’t we complain more about freaking scepter?

It’s the QQ of the Week! We’ve beaten the scepter to death already. Variety is the spice of life, and I’m kitten tired of booning my clones.

I can see where buffing Johnny McCool is still helping the fight we’re engaged in (despite our lack of asking for it). So, we could argue that either way. Stacking might/fury on clones is absolutely pointless. Sure, the phantasms might be able to use it, but there are already traits for that in place.

I’m fairly positive that the bounce will never bounce to a clone, for any reason. If no valid targets are in range (phantasm, human, or enemy) no bounce will occur.

That being said, this is absolutely correct. The bounce needs to have priority on returning to the mesmer, as do all of the bounces from the clones.

Vollendung.5163:

Nice Video. You always (80%) fight with 2 players vs 1 oppoment. It must be very difficult to win against 1 enemy at an advantageous position . Like that progaming a lot. More of that. 2 Glasscaonnon mesmers vs one victim. Like it so much.

First of all, you’re absolutely wrong. Second of all, my snark-o-meter is going off the charts. Completely unnecessary.

@OP: The speed on your videos makes it a bit difficult to see what’s going on sometimes. I know that Grimms actually slows down his videos because mesmer gameplay is already high speed. The narration is also….a bit unnecessary.

That being said, juking around a jumping puzzle with a greatsword and focus is a lot of fun, and you did it well.

Daemonne.5018:

Pyro, don’t know if i missed this question anywhere in here but, with the Melandru x6 and food buff, how attached are you to Mender’s Purity in Inspiration?

I’ve never experimented with removing it. The trait you would switch to would be vigor on shatter of course. It’s entirely possible that the condition removal isn’t necessary. I’ll have to try it out.

Schroedingercat.7065:

Pyroatheist.9031:

As far as dungeons go, this build works fine in dungeons. I ran fotm up to around 15 with it, and I’ve done many dungeons with it. I just feel that it really lacks the oomph in dungeon pve to be a great choice. You won’t die ever, but sometimes it’s difficult to maintain aggro on things you want, and your damage really is horrifically low. For pve, I prefer using my phantasm build, because that one can do damage while still being durable and providing healing/Mesmer support.

dont know if anyone else asked, but what is your phantasm build?

My phantasm build can be found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-PvE-Supporting-Phantasm-Build/first#post1505805

Called support phantasm build in Fay’s build list.

For a glamour build, as you’ll discover if you look at Kylias builds, you actually want runes of the nightmare, for increased condition duration. In my build, I actually went full on into it with 30/0/0/10/30 for 1700 cd and confusion stacks that last 10+ seconds. All of my armor and trinkets are rabid.

As for an offhand, torch is ok, but you’re going to want to be sitting at or near 1200 range most of the time. Focus is far better for ranged combat, the curtain detonation can pull people through your fields, and the warden spin can apply even more confusion.

Awesome detective work Leo. It figures that after lots of research and testing, it turns out to be rangers that are broken, not mesmers >_<.

Incurafy is correct. Serjical, you are simply experiencing a reaffirmation of what you think happens by thieves hitting you for a lot, but you simply are totally wrong, there’s no way around it.

Toughness mitigates backstab damage like everything else. I don’t think I’ve seen a backstab over around 6k on my mesmer in tank form for a long time. Additionally, protection will reduce the damage by another 33%, obviously being a huge factor in how much damage you will do.

Rezzet.3614:

April.4765:

Extremely amazing fights in SoS BL, especially with the SoS in Hills. 3 ways fight at the start and DB finally got hills after a long and hard battle. Good fight, everyone.

As for SoS, can you ask your scout to back off from us? She had been following us everywhere like a dog and we can’t shake her off!

Funny SoS and DB been kissing each other’s rears for hours again taking YB

What can we say…when you guys don’t defend your land, it’s sorta just a race to see who can take the free points first.

@Kavia: You’re pretty much 100% wrong. Arcane thievery is completely different from decoy, and the one does not replace the other.

@OP: Against thieves, you seem to know their timing reasonably well, so use it better. Dodge as they’re about to attack out of stealth, or use blurred frenzy to invuln it.

Make sure you don’t swap out of staff without popping chaos armor, that’s a powerful defensive tool that you don’t want to avoid using.

Against something like a necro, remember the condition cleansing wonder combo of the focus. Drop the warden, and drop the curtain under it. Standing near it cleanses a ton of conditions from the cleansing bolts whirl finisher.

I’ve experimented with soi boon bouncing, and it just doesn’t work as well as you would expect. There seems to be strange interactions with how durations stack, or how high they can stack. Either way, I finished my testing very unsatisfied with how that worked.

As far as confusion on kohler goes, I’ve never tried it. I just use feedback and a focus and let him interrupt himself every single time. It seems unlikely that he would take mass confusion from the spin attack…but I’ve been wrong before, so go test it out.

As far as decoy portals go, it won’t work if they have a halfway competent commander. Still an interesting idea, just unlikely to work. Much more fun is being a glamour Mesmer, and dropping portals in a choke along with the other 2. That ends up producing 8 stacks of confusion on every single person that walks by, which is absurdly deadly.

Kabuki.9103:

Just went kittens deep into this build and got me back into playing mesmer in WvW. Put my thief on the bench for now.

I was a full exotic berserker gs/s+s build but managed to get a full soldier set for under 500k karma and some badges of honor. @Grenth I got head/chest/feet/accessories/rings/amulet, @tempest wp in malchor got shoulder/hands. For badges I got legs, staff, sword, focus.

I’m starting to get used to the build and already having some fun with it. Hitting cry with 3 clones and got the illusionary leap + swap on the temporal curtain going for retaliation. I’m a little lost on keeping phantasms up for extra retatiliation damage and healing. How close to the phantasms do I need to get for these effects? How important is the timing of cry for fights? I usually hit it right away to get retal up. Am I better off trying to anticipate my opponents burst?

Maybe some simple skill rotations to get a noob started would help. Trying to get better at playing this build although already having a lot of fun.

Great to hear you’re having fun.

Phantasms always have retaliation on them. No range on that, if they get hit, they return damage. The iDefender is the one that needs to be sorta close. I’m not really sure of the exact range, but it seems to be around 600-900ish when it casts its skill, so that’s not usually too hard to arrange. For the regen, you have to be fairly close, within around 300. However, you also get tons of regen from chaos armor and chaos storm, the phantasms are only 1 of the sources.

I generally use a 3 (4) clone cry at the start of a fight. This bursts up a nice duration of retaliation, and also will catch anyone that feels like opening with a quickness combo or something similar. The cooldown on cry is only about 20 seconds, which isn’t too long. However, I will often hold out on a second cry for a while, keeping retaliation up through chaos storm and the leap combo as much as possible. Once people start getting lower, they get desperate. If you can utilize a 3 clone mind wrack into a 3 clone cry (blowing mirror images and decoy to do this) on someone that is below 40%ish hp, they will often instakill themselves on the resulting 12 stacks of confusion as they press buttons to try to get away.

Vol.5241:

Pyroatheist.9031:

The one thing that can definitely be said about maguuma, is that not in any of the weeks that we fought them did 1 person ever complain about nightcapping. Yak’s folks just don’t seem to understand how wvw works unfortunately.

You’re gonna need more experience in WvW if you want to throw out statements like that and expect to have any credibility.

If you care to examine my experience in wvw, I have several quite popular videos of wvw gameplay using my build that I designed specifically to be effective in wvw. Go ahead and look at the link in my signature.

Regardless of my experience, anyone that complains about nightcapping doesn’t understand how wvw works. This is a 24 hour game. Anet is not going to make special server tiers just so you guys get to fight just whenever you want to. Wvw never ends, and spotty coverage is part of the game. When we were fighting TC and FA, they had overwhelming map control/presence during the vast majority of the day. We didn’t complain, we just did the best we could and kept on trying. 24 hour dynamics is one of the most appealing characteristics of wvw, and I can guarantee you that anet will never change it.

Yeah, as some people have said, a phantasm heavy build is what will do a lot of damage with a staff. Warlocks hit decently hard base damage, and scale 10% damage per unique condition on the target, meaning they hit like a fully loaded 18 wheeler on bosses (think 8k and higher per hit).

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.

The hybrid build mentioned in this thread does look pretty good. A bit of advice for that build though: swap out deceptive evasion for phantasmal fury. Also don’t use focus offhand unless you need the utility, otherwise use a pistol or offhand sword. When not using the focus, untrait it and get phantasm hp or mantra healing, and equip mantra of pain for team heals. Also, have a greatsword with you, as there are times when the non-reflectable ranged attack come in handy.

(Dungeons are pve too)

At any rate, leveling a Mesmer (or most classes) doesn’t give you a lot of choices in terms of durability. You probably won’t have level appropriate gear most of the time, and that’s ok, though try to keep your weapons at a reasonable level. Until you have more traits, you also can’t really design a build.

At this point, just mess around with different playstyles and see what you like. Staff and greatsword is a strong and safe combo for pve, especially leveling. As you get higher, you’ll probably start to specialize a bit more. At any level, though, a lot of your defense is from not getting hit. Use phase retreat to escape attacks, or distortion shatters when you get in a tough spot.

As far as dungeons go, this build works fine in dungeons. I ran fotm up to around 15 with it, and I’ve done many dungeons with it. I just feel that it really lacks the oomph in dungeon pve to be a great choice. You won’t die ever, but sometimes it’s difficult to maintain aggro on things you want, and your damage really is horrifically low. For pve, I prefer using my phantasm build, because that one can do damage while still being durable and providing healing/Mesmer support.

With regards to condition mesmers, there’s actually 2 key things that make the fight vey easy. First is the innate condition resistance. However, a condition Mesmer uses staff, and staff is projectiles. With enough use of the focus, they’ll end up hitting themselves more than they hit you.

Minion master necros are laughably easy. Minions have low hp, extremely low damage, and minimal utility. When traited, they have a 10% chance to remove a boon on hit, and since they don’t really attack fast, this is nothing more than a minor annoyance. Once dead, they have a long cooldown time. Also, power necros in general are weak against this build, because they rely on flat non-crit damage the majority of the time. This simply won’t do enough damage to hurt. Daggers do a lot of hits and proc retal and chaos armor a lot.
Necros can spec for some boon stripping, but they can’t do it regularly. They can manipulate boons and conditions more than a Mesmer can, but nothing even aproaches what a Mesmer can do for boon stripping. A boon stripping necro is no more than a minor annoyance.

The speed of the attack is fine. The actual speed of the bolt itself is a bit too slow. The staff sorta gets away with it because the bolts are fully homing. The problem is that this often results in the bolt chasing someone around, only to say out of range even if they stayed in range the whole time.

The one thing that can definitely be said about maguuma, is that not in any of the weeks that we fought them did 1 person ever complain about nightcapping. Yak’s folks just don’t seem to understand how wvw works unfortunately.

In high level fractals, agony will kill you, healing or no. This forgets that agony attacks are rather rare in fractals. Normal mobs hit like trucks too, but a consistent moderately large heal from MoP spamming is extremely beneficial in many situations, particularly during boss fights where people need to recover from what hit them as quickly as possible.

Cygnus.6903:

I didnt think the speed was going to be a problem as youre saying. But the elementalist obviously has more damaging aoe which might be more helpful in zerg v zerg.

@Pyro; nice build in your link! How does that work for you in wvw?

That’s actually my immortal build that someone mentioned earlier in this thread. I designed it particularly for wvw, and it handles just about any situation possible in wvw very well.

Having a Mesmer as a commander is really nice, because it does mean you have a lot of Mesmer utility when you need it. Portal bombs, however, aren’t usually possible if you are a commander, just because you really want to be on one end of the portal to gather people up, as opposed to being in the middle of wherever that portal goes.

That being said, you can still do portal bombs, just takes a bit of creativity. You do have veil for zerg stealthing and all the other utility of a Mesmer.

Speed isn’t really an issue. You’ll have other people around you, and in any group of at least 5ish people, permanent swiftness should not be difficult.