Guild Wars 2

@kazhiel: That’s a good idea.

@ExZee: That thread is a good idea with bad implementation. What we need is a thread where the op is updated with links to the various builds and short descriptions to go along with those links. In that thread, people were trying to squish builds into a few posts each, and ended up making the thread cluttered, difficult to navigate, and difficult to extract any useful information out of.

The correct build for you really depends on what you are looking for. The seven mirror build can be adapted to be a bit tanky, and focuses more on condition damage. Osicat’s heavy build can take some punishment, but still has the capacity for a powerful burst. If you simply want to go maximum tank as a Mesmer, you will want to try out my immortal Mesmer build, found here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Guide-The-Immortal-Mesmer-Build/first

I would encourage you to try out a few of these builds to figure out which one works best for you.

@Zileve: That looks like a really interesting build. It would suffer greatly from damage, but that’s no different from the original build of course. You would lose some toughness for sure, but you would actually gain some hp.

This build would have massive group utility. You would be the group healer, the group might stacker, the group fury provider, and could function as the group damage soak as well. If you took illusionary elasticity and sat around in staff, you could provide a lot of fury to people from the staff autos as well.

Overall, you wouldn’t lose a whole lot. This build wouldn’t need the high recharge rate for the retaliation stacking, and shattered strength would be more than compensated by the runes of altruism. This would be an amazing PvE support build.

There is one thing that should be mentioned. The runes of altruism have a 10 second internal cooldown of course. I can tell you from experience that without some sort of external timer, it will be very difficult to hit that 10 second recharge with the heal mantra. You could possibly use some sort of program that would do a little beep every 10 seconds to help you stay on time.

Arale.4207:

I can’t find the PvE part of Cat’s guides. Every video that I’ve watched has been WvWvW based. :/

The videos are wvw based, but the playstyle and build can be used in both. Npcs are just really dumb humans. If you read the build and guide sections, those should help you out.

You should take a look at osicat’s shattercat build. It is stickied in these forums. There are a ton of helpful tips and strategies that can be found in that thread, too many to repeat here.

It seems to me that there are quite a few threads in this forum that ought to be sticked, but aren’t. Osicat’s shattercat build recently got that recognition, but only after having 600+ replies and over 60 thousand views. This seems to be a quite absurd requirement for stickying.

I don’t actually know who is in charge of stickying, whether there are specific forum mods per each section, or whether it takes some arenanet employee casually browsing the forums to make the decision, but this should be cleared up as soon as possible.

Post your thoughts about this here in this thread, as well as naming and linking to any threads that you count as sticky-worthy.

1. This problem only affects dodge clones. Mirror images works fine, you just have the wrong thing targeted, or you may have had no target at all and it autotargeted something.

2. Some of our phantasms are buggy, but the warlock is not one of them. It works quite fine. Try making sure you have a target selected before using the skill.

3. This effect only occurs during dynamic events, and I highly highly doubt that clones affect it (though I have not tested this). What you were encountering in that area was just an absurdly high spawnrate, and you will find that in various areas of the game (Orr anyone?).

However, staff + gs is a great solo pve weapon combo. Try abusing the berserker as much as you can while kiting to clear out groups of mobs like in that tunnel you described.

Hookerjack.4798:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Another reason is that there are no particularly desireable traits in the other traitlines. The 25 and 30 traits from chaos are not great in this build. The 25 from inspiration is also not very good in the build. I have considered going to 30 in inspiration because of the shatter healing or shatter condition removal, but it would make my traits have a bit of an identity crisis, as taking those traits would fully identify it as a shatter build, based strongly on shatters for healing or condie removal, but at the same time having removed points from illusions, be less effective as a shatter

Hi pyro. What about removing 10 from chaos into inspiration. Would that be feasible or losing out on the extra protection and staff cool down is too much?

I’ve actually been considering that change, and I’ll probably try it out pretty soon. It has potential, but the problem is that the staff has a massive amount of utility. The protection from the trait is minimal, ever since the nerf, but the staff is my only source of protection other than that trait. Activating chaos armor gives 5 seconds of protection, and that would increase in cooldown. Phase retreat through chaos storm gives chaos armor, and while that doesn’t give the 5 seconds like the skill does, being hit in chaos armor has a chance to give protection. Losing the cooldowns on staff would mean significantly less chaos armor from the storm and phase retreat, and chaos storm already has a cooldown that seems too long sometimes.

However, you’ll never improve if you don’t try and change, so I will test out this trait modification.

Hi all, thanks for the views. I’ll try to answer a few questions for you here.

@shaktiboi: This was partially answered by Delofakitten and Macha, but I’ll elaborate a bit. I go 30 into shatters for illusionary persona of course. This allows me to have emergency dazes of course, but more importantly on-demand distortion. This allows me to get a lot of stomps that I would otherwise miss (very important in a 1vMany situation). Shattered strength is a nice bonus that comes along with that, and it does make a difference during some bursts. Lastly, 30 points into illusions lowers my shatter cooldowns. Since a lot of my retaliation is based on cry of frustration, I want this shatter to have as low a cooldown as possible, and the more shatters of distortion I can get, the more stomps I can land with surety.

Another reason is that there are no particularly desireable traits in the other traitlines. The 25 and 30 traits from chaos are not great in this build. The 25 from inspiration is also not very good in the build. I have considered going to 30 in inspiration because of the shatter healing or shatter condition removal, but it would make my traits have a bit of an identity crisis, as taking those traits would fully identify it as a shatter build, based strongly on shatters for healing or condie removal, but at the same time having removed points from illusions, be less effective as a shatter build.

@Macha: I’m glad you find it effective. It is always quite fun to have a warrior do a hasted bullsrush→HB→whirlwind into 2 phants and a defender, and come out at 10% hp without you having pressed a button.

@Windwalker: It is a very fun build to mess around with in sPvP. People don’t expect this sort of thing from a mesmer at all, and depending on how they play, you can hold off surprisingly large numbers of people at a point that you just turtle down on.

@shaktiboi

Well, your analysis is flawed on a bit of a basic level. It is not a bad analysis, you just make a few basic assumptions that put it on a completely wrong track. Ill go through it and try to answer as many of your questions as I can.

Firstly, you are making the assumption that this is a shatter build. It is not. I use shatters as a utility skill, as opposed to a basic component of my build. The only other use for my shatters is just a quick burst to finish someone off. I am not trying to do my main damage from shatters.

With this in mind, lets take a look at the rest of your analysis.

Giving up:
1. Since this build is not a shatter based build, the clone/phantasm generation from my utilities and weapon skills is enough for the occasional shatter, and a quick burst. Deceptive evsaion is nice, but not at all necessary in this build.
2. This is definitely a loss, no argument here.
3. This build is not based on crits, in any way, shape, or form. My crit chance is usually 4% unless I get fury from my staff autos.
4. See number 3.
5. Not an issue. My damage relies on getting hit, stealths are reserved for emergency defense.

Gaining:
1. Phants have retal, and I almost always have 2 phants up at all times.
2. Phants proc aoe regen, and with smart play, you EASILY have 100% regen uptime due to this trait.
3. Due to the 100% regen uptime, you always have the condition cleanse every 10 seconds, because that food procs every time you gain health, not every time regen is reapplied. You also get another condition cleanse every time you use your main heal skill from inspiration IV.
4. The extra retaliation is vital to this build, as it revolves around retaliation damage for my main damage source.
5. Temporal curtain AND the wardens reflect projectiles. This is huge and can not be emphasized enough.
6. My build uses different gear. 2k more hp is gained from traits, but when you consider all of my gear and food, I usually run with between 8k-10k more hp than the other builds.
7. My heals actually aren’t particularly larger. I don’t have much healing power in the build, other than the token 200 from inspiration.

The what I lose is directly pointed at what this build does not use, and what I gain is everything my build revolves around. This is a tank build, a build that does damage by doing damage. If someone attacks me, they kill themselves, and I facilitate that by having retaliation, bursting confusion for the last bit of damage, and staying alive with regeneration and ether feast. The difference in survivability between this build and other tanky builds is massive, between condition removal, more healing, and massive damage mitigation from multiple sources that other builds simply don’t have.

I appreciate the criticism though, thinking critically about builds like this is the only way we can improve them.

New Video up focusing on fighting multiple people:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWl92k63C9k

Osicat.4139:

@Pyroatheist, Hi. Im wery impressed how you combined the traits and overall build to synergice with eachother. Its obious you can follow a ability and how it get affected or affect al other parts of te build in a posetive way. I alos like the fact you combine passive survival (gear, boons) with acctive survival (staff, sword, 2 stealths and shatters).

Two questions, have you tested to add Vigorous Revalation in inspiration for more energy?

How do the spec work vs boon stackers, do it become 2 healing paladins in a end of days wow duel?

Also about the Link, if you want to get the build link to work for clickers get rid of the need to explain for somone every day how to compy / pastle the build you can use:

http://tinyurl.com/

This recreate a working and shorter link that work on A-nets forum. Its Mark Katzbach A-net dev who mentioned this about build links.

/Cheers Osicat

Hi Osi, good to see you dropping by at last. Thanks for the tip to using tinyurl. I generally stay away from that because a lot of forums don’t allow link shorteners like it.

With my build vs a boom stacking build, my build will win. If it is a guardian, they still probably will have a greatsword, and that means I can burst them down in an amusing fashion. Also, if the boons get out of hand, I just drop three sword clones and go to work. If they really are that boom focused, I have nothing to fear from their offense, and 15 seconds of auto attacking with 3 clones will strip far more boons than any class can apply.

As for the vigor on shatters, it would be nice, but has no place in the build. I would be forced to drop either the focus trait or the condie removal on healing trait. Focus is essential, and this build really needs strong condie removal because I tank damage to do damage.

Also, I have a new video up! This video focuses on fighting against multiple opponents. It is one of at least 2 videos that I’ll produce with this focus, because this type of fight takes so long, I can’t fit too many fights into the same video.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UWl92k63C9k

jeeshadow.7624:

hey Pyro,

I’d like to try this build out, but the link doesn’t seem to go anywhere atm.

I just turned lvl60 and was wondering if this would work well while leveling, seems like it was be pretty easy. Which traits would you recommend having first, at lvl60?

Hi jee. Links not working is a common problem on these forums, and easily fixed by simply copying and pasting the link URL into your address bar.

As far as using the build for leveling goes, you are certainly welcome to try. It is certainly a very resilient build. The problem is that it lacks some damage in pve. What I would recommend instead is a phantasm focused build. That way, you don’t have to worry about getting close to things to kill them. The full traits would be 10/10/0/30/20, using greatsword and staff mainly, but carrying a sword and focus just in case. You would get 5 points in illusions first, then the 10 in Dom and dueling, taking 15% increased illusion damage and granting fury to phantasms. Then put your traits all into inspiration, and finally last into illusions.

For the insp traits, I usually take condie removal on heal, 20% increased illusion hp, and mantra heals, which I swap out for the focus trait or glamours depending on the situation. It is a highl versatile build, and really fantastic in pve.

Kusa.6438:

I looked at that Pyro and tried it, For some reason it won’t put two stacks of confusion on… I guess it’s bugged. So I Figured I would go with the guaranteed confusion.

The glamour causing confusion trait is still far better. The blind trait causes blind when the glamour is first cast. This means you get 1 chance to put blind on a limited number of enemies.

The confusing glamours trait, on the other hand, causes confusion whenever someone enters the glamour area. This means that you can actually cause multiple stacks of confusion from the one glamour.

If you want to focus on having a massive confusion spread using glamours, your points would be much better spent getting confusing enchantments from domination 20, causing all of your glamours to cause confusion to any enemies that enter or exit the area. If you manage to stack that with the glamours causing blind and blinds causing confusion, then all the better.

Alrighty, here are the foods that I use. Normally, I run with Loaves of omnomberry bread. This gives 100 vitality and 70 toughness, which is a great complement to my build.

If I start to get into a sticky situation however, I will switch to a Bowl of saffron-scented poultry soup. This is +70 healing, but the other effect is much more important. The effect is removing a condition every time you use a healing skill, with a 10 second cooldown. It just so turns out that this is not limited to your main heal skill. As a matter of fact, this will proc on EVERY bit of healing you get, whether it be from regeneration, restorative mantras, restorative illusions, anything. At its most basic level, this allows your main heal skill to remove 2 conditions at once, due to the trait inspiration IV. Other than that, it allows a static 1 condition removal per 10 seconds based on just the regeneration that you will have active at all times.

There are other useful foods out there, but these are the two that I switch between.

influx.5372:

Hey Pyro, great build thanks for sharing. Quick question, I know you use tuning crystals but whats the food? Thanks again!

Actually, I use sharpening stones. Retaliation scales off of raw power, and so I aim to maximize that.

As for my other food, I have no idea of the names, so ill get back to you with them as soon as I can hop ingame.

AVHero.7382:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Any projectiles that have been reflected one can not be reflected or blocked a second time.

Just wanted to say this is not entirely true. In FOTM, the Jade Colossi reflect projectiles. As a scepter user, I have frequently used my 1 to launch a projectile at them, and hit 2 immediately. When the projectile I launched is reflected back at me, I then block it with my 2, and a clone is summoned as well as the jade Colossus taking damage. So reflected projectiles CAN be blocked. I’m not sure if this is always the case, but it is in this situation.

I should have been a bit more clear. A reflected projectile can no longer be blocked or reflected as a projectile. It still can be blocked by aegis-style effects. I have not tested whether or not a projectile destruction field like swirling winds will destroy it.

To everyone else in this thread spreading that incorrect scrap of info that projectile=anything with a projectile finisher: Stop. You are all completely wrong. Any attack that moves through the air is considered a projectile for the purposes of a reflect. That is it.

As far as reflecting agony goes, you can reflect the attack, such as at the flame shaman or mossman, but the agony doesn’t seem to tick. You can see the condition icon for a split second before it disappears.

Alright. Keep in mind, I updated the wiki a while ago with this information as well, so always remember to check the wiki if you need information.

Mimic: take full damage and any conditions or cc attached to the first projectile attack you receive. All subsequent projectile attacks for the duration of the channel will be reflected in full, and any melee attacks received will be completely blocked. I have not tested the blocks with retaliation on block trait.

After the channel finishes, the icon will be replaced with a different one called echo, and this allows you to throw the first projectile attack you received back at a target of your choice.

Skyro.3108:

Yeah mantras aren’t very viable in tPvP.

Also I think you overestimate the effect of transferring bleeds to caltrops thieves since they have that cleanse in stealth trait.

Generally I don’t transfer a stack of bleeds to a thief with the intention of allowing them to easily leave and cleanse it. The bleed transfer would be the immediate prelude to a illusionary leap/swap + shatter burst.

You are right about mantras, it is just an interesting trait with a bit of synergy regarding the clone healing. Generally I take mantra of pain for the heal spam when I am using my fully phantasm focused fractals/pve build, because I can set up my phantasms, and then turn into the group healer.

There seems to be a bit of misinformation in this thread, I’ll clear it up.

Deceptive evasion only spawns clone in combat, and they aggro on the nearest enemy to you when you rolled.

Phase retreat (staff 2) is castable both with and without a target, and both in and out of combat. When casted with no target, it moves you backwards relative to your character’s direction. When casted with a target, it moves you away from your current target, and produces a clone. When casted with no target, but in combat, it will still produce a clone.

Illusionary leap+swap (sword 3) is not castable without a target. It is castable with a target and out of combat. However, if cast with a target, but out of RANGE, the clone will not spawn, you will not get the swap skill, and it will immediately go into cooldown.

I hope that cleared a few things up.

A projectile attack is any attack that moves through the air towards its final position. Most ground targeted woes are no projectiles, with a few exceptions like lupicus.

There are only 2 ranged weapons in the game that don’t count as projectiles, being Mesmer greatsword and necro axe. In the case of the greatsword, even mirror blade does not count as a projectile, despite the projectile combo finisher on it.

Barrage is a GTAoE, and not a projectile, and so will not be reflected.

Any projectiles that have been reflected one can not be reflected or blocked a second time.

Mimic works a bit differently, and I have explained that in depth multiple times, so go ahead and search for it if you want more info.

I have a few questions for you osicat.

What video editing software do you use for your videos, and what is your export format? I’ve been unable to successfully upload .avi videos to youtube, as they keep failing when it tries to process them. I eventually managed to get an mpeg4 video to upload properly, but despite exporting at 1080p resolution, youtube only displays it at 720.

Skyro.3108:

IIRC signet of illusions “pulses” its effect every 10s, so it’s not always 8-10 secs before it works. It still combos nicely with iDefender since it is so beefy it usually survives until the passive effect kicks in. Also the whole signet showing up in your buff bar is kind of moot. You’re going to have something there regardless (like your perma-retal), and there are many other ways to discern the real player anyway. It may fool some players but these are bad players. I don’t use Signet of Illusions simply because there’s just no room on my bar though.

Now I understand you’re mostly a WvWer, but I’ve adapted it your build for tPvP and I must say it shows potential.

For gear adjustments I’m using power/tough/heal power instead of power/tough/vit for more sustainability, and using runes of melandru for the tough + stun/condi duration reduction as conditions can be a big issue and remove 1 condition on heal trait is simply not enough. I generally slot null field in addition to this, though that slot that I change up depending on the comp I face. My utility bar is pretty tight as 2 of the slots are automatically taken by iDefender and Portal.

For trait adjustments I dropped 10 points from chaos and picked up restorative illusions. The synergy this has with illusionary persona is amazing as it simply tacks on an additional ~1.1K heal (w/ cleric’s ammy) onto each shatter (making for example a 1 clone shatter heal for ~2.5K). Then further combined with the shatter reset @ 50% health trait and you become quite the healing machine. While you do lose a bit of protection uptime you can still get good protection uptime because remember you basically tanking hits on the point so you are getting a lot of chaos armor procs, and I usually combo phase retreat with both chaos storm and null field for 10 addition seconds of chaos armor uptime.

All in all though very nice build! I was looking to make a bunker build due to all the various builds ppl are sending to harass the mesmer in tpvp nowadays (symbol guards, D/D eles, trap rangers, caltrop thieves, etc.) and it is kind of funny how people get confused when they realize they can’t kill me.

I understand the synergy with the the signet of illusions with the defender, but regardless of that, I had several more reasons as to why I wouldn’t take it.

At any rate, when I’m in tPvP, ill usually have a few amulets with me, one of which is shamans, depending on what I’m facing. Null field is a utility I common run with, but another favorite of mine is arcane thievery, especially against thieves. There are few things more fun than purposefully tanking a ton of caltrops hits, then politely handing over the 18 stack of bleed to the thief and watching them flip out.

When taking the shamans amulet, restorative illusions is definitely a really powerful trait. Another interesting one to fiddle with is the restorative mantras. This soaks up a utility unfortunately, but has the interesting effect of aoe healing all of your illusions as well, which can significantly help with sustain.

Reckless.6325:

Have you ever considered using that signet that give 50% extra health to all your illusions? Plus when activated it recharges all shatters. It would make sense i think because 50% more hp to Phantasmal defender means 50% more dmg you dont take.

Though i can only see anyone being able to swap decoy out for it… since the other two utilities are mandatory.

Well, the first and most major reason why I would never take this signet is because the passive effect is severely bugged. The hp bonus it is supposed to give to the illusions doesn’t actually kick in for 8-10 seconds after they have been summoned. This obviously makes it useless for the passive effect, and therefor not a viable part of the build.

However, let us just assume for a moment that it works properly. In this situation I still would not take the signet, and here is why:

Firstly, the way I play the Mesmer involves a massive amount of rapid location shifts and target drops. Between phase retreat, illusionary swap, mirror images, and decoy, I am warping around in puffs of butterflies or completely invisible a large amount of the time. This makes it difficult to immediately identify which Mesmer is the real one. To compound this effect, I attempt to keep any identifying features to a minimum. This means I stay away from mantras and signets, as those do not show up on clones. Food doesn’t either, but food buffs are too good to pass up. For that reason, I would not take the signet.

Assuming I got past my shyness for signets and took it, the utility it would replace would be mirror images. This is because decoy is too valuable as a target drop to pass up. The passive bonus would be lovely, but the active would be almost useless. This build does not have extremely high clone generation, and even with mirror images, I rarely find myself in a situation where I have more clones to shatter than shatters to use. Recharging the shatters while dropping mirror images would only make this problem worse.

I hope this helped explain my reasoning well enough, and I apologize for the wall of text.

Kazhiel.8194:

treborIRL.4521:

retaliation dmg is reflected with how much power you have – seeing as you have no points in the power trait line…i don’t think its that worth it.

You can get quite a bit of power thru gear choices.

I’m not entirely sure who you quoted in your post, but you are quite right. With power as a major stat on all the gear, I get very high power. In addition, since this build is focused on toughness and vitality, master sharpening stones are incredibly effective. I’m not ingame right now, but if I recall correctly, I usually have around 2200 power, and more when might stacking from shattered strength starts to kick in.

In general, retaliation does between 320 and 380 per hit.

Kazhiel.8194:

Pyro: any idea what gear he was using? IMO there’s several gear sets/rune sets a person can use with the build that changes the way damage is dealt in this build.

Daisy: I don’t think that would work as focus 4 seems to be integral to retaliation generation

I’m on a phone too, I just got the jump on ya =p.

If I recall correctly, he was using scepter+torch/staff. He seemed to be focused on condition damage. His utilities were decoy, veil, and I think blink, along with mass invisibility. Apart from that, I don’t know for sure. He was a bit undergeared, in mostly masterwork and rares as I found out later.

He didn’t pack a lot of punch to me, but he certainly took out one of the 2 really annoying pistol engineers I was fighting quickly enough, demonstrating of course the need for support with confusion damage, as opposed to relying on it alone.

DaisyRogers.6837:

I am attempting something similar, what are your thoughts of torch offhand with its phantasm applying confusion and retaliation?

While I accept that the torch may possibly be a somewhat viable weapon in a few super niche builds (/skeptical face), this would be a horrific replacement in this particular build. By taking the torch, you are presumably dropping the focus. Lets compare the two:

Torch
Invisibility with a burn and blind, also a blast finisher.
Phantasm applies 3 stacks of confusion for 3 seconds unaffected by cond duration to 1 target, and 3 seconds of retaliation to you, assuming it summons properly, as I have heard the attack range is bugged.

Focus
Temporal curtain: Ground targeted line skill that buffs swiftness, cripples enemies, reflects projectiles, and detonates to do an aoe pull. Also is a light combo field, allowing 14 seconds of retaliation with illusionary leap/swap, and condition removals with the warden whirl finisher.

Phantasm: Large aoe projectile reflecting bubble capable of bein a whirl finisher.

As you can see, there is really no comparison. Unless you wanted to go 20 points into Dom, you would have no torch cd trait, making the recharges on it massive. You lose 14 seconds of highly reliable retaliation for a possible 3 seconds based on a bouncing attack. You lose all the projectile reflections, you lose the swiftness, the cripple, the pull. Compared to the focus, the torch is nothing.

Kazhiel.8194:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Make sure you also use the tuning crystals, which will add an additional % of toughness and vitality as condition damage.

Yup, I have them. I’m running a 0/20/30/0/20 atm, like it real well, it’s pretty entertaining with all the stealths.

The full stealth mesmer build is certainly an interesting one. I fought a guy using it, it’ll be in my next video. Somewhat effective, but mainly just prolonged the fight as opposed to really winning it.

Gz on the sticky Osicat!

Kazhiel.8194:

Westibone, I think it’s possible to do that it would just take the right switching around of gear. I’m running runes of undead and have the chaos minor trait that combines for 10% of toughness as condition damage. I have all Knights armor now but a mix of weapons and rare rabid jewelry/accessories and I still have as much condition damage as when I ran all rabid but way higher power and toughness.

Make sure you also use the tuning crystals, which will add an additional % of toughness and vitality as condition damage.

The main reason I really don’t like condition damage mesmer is because we are horrific at applying any condition that isn’t confusion. Sharper images is currently our best way of stacking bleeds, and burn/poison is very difficult aside from lucky staff autos. If Anet gave us an on-land phantasm that was capable of doing condition focused damage, then I would consider running a condition damage setup again.

As I mentioned earlier, confusion is simply very weak by itself. It can be immensely powerful, but it needs support. In order to make confusion effective, you have to force your opponent to make tough choices, and that requires other sources of pressure, be it conditions or straight damage. Because condition is highly stackable in a burst situation, and does quite high base damage with enough stacks, I’ve migrated more to using it without any condition damage at all, because 10 stacks is still enough to hit for 1.5k every skill use, making it a very powerful damage source when you force your opponent to use skills or dodge roll.

Westibone.3985:

I am a big fan of this build. I used something just like this in sPvP, but it was condition based (shaman’s amulet), and I took the double bounce trait. I also took Signet of Inspiration so I could share my super long retaliation and might/regen buffs with the entire team. If you use it when you are clustered up with everyone, it makes a huge difference. I like this power based version, though, as you can really maximize retaliation dmg.

One NOTE: If you are using condition dmg, and you take the confusion on blind trait, chaos armor has a 66% chance to give confusion when struck (33% confusion chance, 33% blind), which really puts the stacks on thieves and anyone else who is hitting you very rapidly. Grab null field, and you can have chaos armor up quite a bit of the time.

I’ve used the double bounce trait in my build, but mainly when I am in a team. The problem is that the staff clones are not affected by that trait, which makes it far less effective than it should be. Signet of inspiration I will also often take when I am in a team, but when roaming solo it is not a good choice by any stretch of the imagination.

In my opinion, confusion is a horrible condition to base a build around. I have tried it in wvw, using full rabid gear, but it just doesn’t work as well as other builds. My success with confusion comes when using it as an auxiliary condition to another attack. In most cases, I will stack up confusion either during a large burst combo (glass cannon shatter build) or when they are lower on hp (primarily tank build). This forces them to either eat a ton of damage from a shatter combo, or eat a ton of damage from 12 stacks of confusion. Similarly, it forces them to avoid simple things like dodge rolling, or facing the damage from 10-12 stacks, and this allows me to force the confusion damage onto them, as opposed to getting a ton of stacks and watching them drip off with no consequence.

Luzano.6983:

Pyroatheist.9031:

The build is decent in sPvP, provided you have a decent team for helping you out. It is abysmal at roaming, for obvious reasons, but is fantastic for turtleing on a point, although you can get overwhelmed in sPvP.

In tPvP, however, the build performs fantastically, and the only major issue I have encountered is that a knockback engie will slowly take a point from me over the course of a few minutes, but that is easily solved with a bit of team support.

Hey Pyroatheist, great thread.

I think you were that Mesmer I dueled a couple of times last matchup (EB/Yaks/DB) with that [Taco] ele on the road near Centaurs. Super fun duels.

Will try out this build sometime but I guess I can’t give up the GS just yet haha.

Yep, I remember you. The last fight in my video was my first duel with that ele, before he figured out that dodging confusion meant staying alive.

As far as greatsword goes, its a fantastic weapon, but its also extremely offensive. It fits well into an offensive build for that reason, but in a fully defensive build like this on, staff is perfect. Staff also has a surprising amount of utility, even in a glassier build. The main wvw use I’ve been finding for my greatsword is just a keep defense/zerg running build that takes 20/30/0/0/20 with 4 mantras for pure maximum damage with those 3 lovely 1200 range non-reflectable attacks.

Soyboy.3548:

Pyroatheist.9031:

The build is decent in sPvP, provided you have a decent team for helping you out. It is abysmal at roaming, for obvious reasons, but is fantastic for turtleing on a point, although you can get overwhelmed in sPvP.

In tPvP, however, the build performs fantastically, and the only major issue I have encountered is that a knockback engie will slowly take a point from me over the course of a few minutes, but that is easily solved with a bit of team support.

I tried a confusion/retaliation build as well as a bunker build on my mesmer and got laughed (they had time to type at me too….)at as the guardian/engineer just promenades in, knocks you off the point, out damages you, out heals you, and eventually takes the point. If you get the interrupts/knockback/pulls in your build, you’re not as tanky either…and you won’t be doing damage. I find it a futile build in any sort of spvp or tpvp unless you just like to stubbornly survive without having any contribution to your team…

The only way you could possibly make it work is if you are so A+ at GW2 that you know how to time stability charges from mantra of concentration to counter the knockbacks. Good luck with that.

Since my build uses the focus, and has a lot of leaps/stunbreakers, it takes an engineer a VERY long time to take the point, and is not really possible for a guardian to, as they don’t have the stupid amount of knockbacks that an engineer does. I will kill any guardian that isn’t fully specced into heals, and if they are fully specced into heals, then they won’t be taking the point from me. Engineers are really the only weakness for the point bunkering, and it takes them a very long time even so.

The build is decent in sPvP, provided you have a decent team for helping you out. It is abysmal at roaming, for obvious reasons, but is fantastic for turtleing on a point, although you can get overwhelmed in sPvP.

In tPvP, however, the build performs fantastically, and the only major issue I have encountered is that a knockback engie will slowly take a point from me over the course of a few minutes, but that is easily solved with a bit of team support.

chichobits.3450:

I didn’t care that they were there. It was just weird. I’ve never seen an opposing server there before.

There are a few hills that you can easily jump up to get into the spawn area. It could be fixed with a minor landscape alteration, but no-one particularly cares due to the invulnerable buff + tons of guards inside.

Darx.9842:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Darx.9842:

Could you explain the retaliation leap combo?

I can’t get it to work. You said illusionary leap thru temporal curtain? It gives about 4 seconds of retaliation on the clone, but nothing to me. Is that right?

EDIT: I figured it out, you have to STAND on the temporal curtain line. Very weird.

Yep, that’s how you do it. You stand on top of the curtain, then do the leap + swap, for the double activation.

Yeah.. 14 seconds from the leap, and 15 seconds from the shatter. I don’t even think Guardian is capable of generating that amount of retaliation, and it’s supposed to be their signature boon. Odd.

It is somewhat odd. Even in a build completely designed to stack retaliation, guardians can’t even come close to what mesmers can do, especially considering you can drop curtain, and then swap to staff for phase retreat for ANOTHER leap combo into retaliation.

Darx.9842:

Could you explain the retaliation leap combo?

I can’t get it to work. You said illusionary leap thru temporal curtain? It gives about 4 seconds of retaliation on the clone, but nothing to me. Is that right?

EDIT: I figured it out, you have to STAND on the temporal curtain line. Very weird.

Yep, that’s how you do it. You stand on top of the curtain, then do the leap + swap, for the double activation.

Snoxx.7943:

You might try the Phantasmal Disenchanter instead of Mirror Images.

Ok ok I know it sounds stupid in the first moment but think about …

Pro:
- it provides even more Phantasmal Healing
- it removes conditions on you and boons on them
- very short cooldown

Contra:
- no stun breaking included (yeah Mirror Images breaks stun, but you can use staff Phase Retreat every 5 sec. anyway, so you don’t really need another stun breaker)
- only one instead of two illusions (but cooldown is only half!)
- longer cast time (doesn’t really matter for a slow-killing tank build like this)

I’ve used the disenchanter before. There are a few reasons that I take mirror images instead. Firstly, it is a stunbreaker, while disenchanter isnt. Disenchanter is also somewhat bugged right now, and sometimes will not spaw properly. I generally don’t need more condition removal than I have, but if I do, I will opt for arcane thievery due to the additional utility of it.

There is no need for more phantasmal healing procs, the phantasms put it up every 3 seconds, and I easily have more than 100% uptime. Back when the phantasms only did it 5 seconds every 10 seconds, I did run with the disenchanter, precisely for that reason.

Lastly, mirror images provides an instant 2 clones, and more often than using it as a stunbreaker, I use to burst confusion as the second half of a shatter combo, thereby allowing me to quickly and suddenly put a ton of stacks onto my target.

It isn’t a bad choice, by any means. It simply isn’t as strong as mirror images in most pvp situations. For pve it actually is definitely stronger than mirror images, because of the massive condie removal utility.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Pyroatheist.9031:

The scepter seems to be intended as the condition damage weapon, not the rapid clone generation weapon. Mesmers have rapid clone generation, and using the scepter is not necessary for that. However, scepter is the only weapon that applies confusion.

In keeping with this theme, the autoattacks should simply apply confusion. This used to be the case, and then was removed because mesmer + 3 clones applying confusion was too powerful. The obvious solution is to prevent the clones from applying confusion, and just have the mesmer apply it, on the second chain of the attack for example.

How can you consider a scepter as a pure condition weapon when its autos don’t even apply any condition? Skill 2 is for power/crit builds and skill three does more damage on a crit/power build than on a 100% rabid set. Scepter may be the only weapon that applies confusion but casting time/range is so bad that you need to attack an afk player to land 5 stacks of confusion.

What you have identified is exactly the problem. The scepter seems to be a condition damage weapon having an identity crisis. It can’t decide whether it wants to do condition damage or power damage, and ends up being absolutely horrendous and doing either one.

Updates as of 6/25 Patch

The only change that really hit this build was the change to vengeful images. This nerf massively reduces your dps potential. It also forces a somewhat different play style to utilize the paltry 5 seconds left. Instead of cycling phantasms, you’ll want to burst them out at the same time. Once all the cooldowns are up, you can burst them out again. This maximizes your damage potential if you lay them down at the proper time.

WvW
No recommended changes to the build.

s/tPvP
I was using a variant of 20/30/20 prior to the patch. This is no longer viable due to the IC nerf. 20/20/30 is definitely the only option. I was also using signet of illusions. Since the nerf to the signet, this is no longer such a game changer, so I do not use it. I recommend defender, mirror images, and disenchanter. In today’s condition heavy meta, the disenchanter is massively important to stay alive.

Summary
The survivability of this build is not impacted. The damage potential, however, is. This will take some getting used to, but it remains an extremely resilient and versatile tank.

7. Thief
Some thieves will simply kill themselves on your chaos armor and retaliation. P/D, S/P, death blossom thieves will all destroy themselves very quickly. However, a really well played backstab, D/P, or S/D thief can be a tough fight.

Thieves operate in a rhythm. Attack, stealth, pause, attack. Get used to this rhythm, and then act to counter it. Run around quickly to make it difficult to get an attack from behind. Activate chaos armor for the 5 seconds of protection. Use blurred frenzy to invuln through the first attack. Most importantly, stay with your Illusions. Be really careful about shattering, as it removes a lot of your passive defense. Keeping several phantasms up for the regen is a must, and if you can keep a defender up, all the better.

A useful trick to know is that if a thief stealth during the channel of a phantasm, the phantasm will be placed directly on top of the stealthed thief. This allows you to get a fast idea of where the thief is, and the direction they will have to take to get to your back.

The time to shatter is immediately after a thief attacks from stealth, when your phantasm cooldowns are ready. You can absorb some damage, but the thief really can’t, so bursting cry + mirror images + leap/swap + wrack during their attack will hurt them badly. If they are careless, that’s the fight over right there. Once you do the shatters, immediately summon a phantasm for defense once they stealth again.

Keep an eye out for shadow refuge. If temporal curtain is off cooldown, you can pull them out of it, making the thief extremely vulnerable for a few seconds, even more so if they were already low on hp.

8. Mesmer
Your hardest fights by far will come from other mesmers. Confusion mesmers really aren’t a problem in this build as long as you are careful. Confusion generally won’t last more than 2-4 seconds with all the condition duration it has, so a bit of caution nullifies any confusion bomb builds.

Shatter builds hurt. They output more damage than a thief, and can be more difficult to see coming. Against a shatter build, play offensively. Stick on top of the other Mesmer with leap/swap, curtain pulls, whatever you need to do. Shatter builds hate to be pressured, because it forces them to waste clones on defense. The more pressure you can apply, the less they will be able to set up the full burst combo.

Never be afraid to use blurred frenzy to dodge a shatter, even if you don’t actually do damage with it. The 2 second invuln is the most potent active defense you have, so use it when you need it.

If you can dodge or otherwise nullify the first few shatter bursts, the shatter build will be rather out of offensive options for a while, and putting on pressure is even more important.

The one build that is really difficult to handle is a well played phantasm build, especially with offhand sword. My experience with this build has been the Mesmer simply running in circles while the swordsmen chunk me, and I really have no counter to it. If you find yourself fighting someone like that, I suggest you put on your running shoes.

s/tPvP Modifications

In HotM, retaliation is bugged so that it does not scale with power on phantasms. While this lowers the damage output of the build, it allows you to make some interesting modifications.

Drop the soldier’s amulet in favor of the cleric’s amulet. While lowering your health, it will turbocharge your heal and regen, making you very difficult to kill.

Additionally, drop decoy and take phantasmal disenchanter. This provides amazing boon stripping against boon heavy classes like guardians, eles, and engineers, and also shores up the weaker condition defense that you have in HotM without being able to use the -40% food.

Additional Information

The temporal curtain light combo field will persist even after detonation with into the void, but invisibly. This means that you can pull people using the detonation, and then subsequently still trigger the double leap combo with the invisible combo field.

Class Specific Fighting Guide

1. Necromancer
2. Engineer
3. Guardian
4. Ranger
5. Warrior
6. Elementalist
7. Thief
8. Mesmer

1. Necromancer
Would you like your necro well done or extra crispy, sir?

2. Engineer
2.a Flamethrower Engineer
Flamethrowers do 5 hits per second in an aoe cone. Simply put up retaliation with a defender or another phantasm and the engineer will be dead in 10 seconds.
2.b Pistol/Other Weapons
Engineers are almost exclusively projectile based. This means they are extremely susceptible to projectile reflects. They can also put out a surprising amount of both direct and condition damage. To counter them, simply stay in sword/focus and hide behind temporal curtain and wardens. Once you have some illusions up and are feeling safe, you can switch to staff for the chaos armor and storm, but make sure you go back to sword/focus as quickly as possible.

3. Guardian
Guardians will fall into 2 main categories: those that use greatsword, and those that don’t. The fights will be a bit different, but the same. Make sure you have retaliation and the defender up at all times. Guardians have a lot of aoe damage, and will take a lot of retaliation damage from the defender.
Keeping chaos armor up is nice, but ultimately not necessary. More important is to have at least 1 sword clone always out in order to help strip boons.
The duration of the fight is where greatsword matters. With defender and 1 other phantasm, most guardians will take over 70% of their hp in retaliation from a single whirling wrath.

4. Ranger

There are a few different ranger builds you will encounter, but you deal with them all in the same way. Try to keep retaliation up without using cry as much as possible. When the ranger starts using a bow, switch to staff, use cry, and put up chaos armor. This quick combo will not only refresh the retaliation on you, but put confusion on the ranger. The small and fast hits of the bows are perfect for applying tons of boons and conditions from chaos armor, proccing tons of retaliation damage, and proccing tons of confusion damage.

If you happen to be low on hp, simply kite the ranger. If they swap to bow, drop temporal curtain and let them hit themselves, switching to the warden for reflects after letting temporal curtain stand for a few seconds. Once you have regained enough health, you can go back into attacking them.

5. Warrior

Warriors are one of the easier matchups, as they are so straight-forward. Warriors have absolutely nothing other than straight damage, or perhaps bleeds if they are condition specced. With the runes of melandru and -40% condition duration food, you can simply ignore any bleeds the warriors apply.

Keeping retaliation and 3 illusions up at all times is crucial in this fight. While warriors only have damage, they do have a lot of it, and so the damage reduction per illusion is very important, as is having the defender as much as possible. With a non-rifle warrior, it is best to stay in sword focus to keep retaliation up, and then switch to staff as soon as they try to combo you in order to activate chaos armor for the defensive protection proc. For a rifle warrior, just put up reflects and let them kill themselves. If they kneel down and stop moving, hide behind a reflect and watch them eat a 10k reflected kill shot.

6. Elementalist
6.a Staff Ele
The staff ele is a pretty relaxed fight. If they sit in water for a long time, you might not be able to kill them. However, staff also has almost 0 damage potential against this build. So many of their attacks are projectiles that they often end up hurting themselves, and the loads of aoe they output just results in tons of retaliation.
6.b D/D Ele
This is a harder fight. They have a ton of condition removal, and decent damage. If you are careful, you shouldn’t need to worry about being killed, but don’t underestimate the burst they can do. To actually kill a d/d ele, you need to let them get to around 50% from retaliation and normal attacks. Once they switch into and then out of water is the time you have to attack. Burst confusion and go as offensive as possible. With luck, they’ll die from confusion.
Ultimately, this fight is a waiting game, waiting for them to make a mistake. If they play perfectly, it will stalemate, but no one is perfect, and you can survive mistakes while they can’t.

The scepter seems to be intended as the condition damage weapon, not the rapid clone generation weapon. Mesmers have rapid clone generation, and using the scepter is not necessary for that. However, scepter is the only weapon that applies confusion.

In keeping with this theme, the autoattacks should simply apply confusion. This used to be the case, and then was removed because mesmer + 3 clones applying confusion was too powerful. The obvious solution is to prevent the clones from applying confusion, and just have the mesmer apply it, on the second chain of the attack for example.

Simonoly.4352:

Pyroatheist.9031:

Simonoly.4352:

*Illusion of Life – used in dungeons and fractals to allow downed players to get up, run away and self-res if it’s too risky for a party member to help when they initially go down. I also use it in WvW when defending keeps, to allow team mates who have been downed outside the keep to get up, run inside, fully res and help bolster the defences.

You are wrong with this. Illusion of life revives your allies for 15 seconds. If they kill something, they are fully revived, but if they do not, at the end of the 15 seconds, they completely die, they don’t go back to the downed state. It could be used in wvw, but you would be reviving a dead person, not a downed person.

Illuison of Life does not work like the Warrior downed skill “Vengeance”. When the 15 seconds are up they do not instantly die but instead go into a downed state again. I used it in WvW yesterday to allow two people in downed states to get up, run into the keep and then they both went into a downed state and I helped them rally.

It used to result in death if you did not get a kill in the 15 seconds, but it was changed sometime just after release so now when illusion of life wears off, you just enter a downed state again.

Perhaps it works differently in wvw than it does in normal pve. I have used it at lupicus before to allow people to get out from directly under the mob, and run to the side of the room for safer ressurection, but they always die after the time runs out.

Simonoly.4352:

*Illusion of Life – used in dungeons and fractals to allow downed players to get up, run away and self-res if it’s too risky for a party member to help when they initially go down. I also use it in WvW when defending keeps, to allow team mates who have been downed outside the keep to get up, run inside, fully res and help bolster the defences.

You are wrong with this. Illusion of life revives your allies for 15 seconds. If they kill something, they are fully revived, but if they do not, at the end of the 15 seconds, they completely die, they don’t go back to the downed state. It could be used in wvw, but you would be reviving a dead person, not a downed person.

Mimic is an interesting skill, due to blocking all attacks after eating one projectile. This is probably a bug though, but anet doesn’t care because it is simply outclassed by everything else.

iDisenchanter isn’t great, mainly because it is bugged. However, when it actually summons, it is a multitarget condition removing boom stripper on a 15ish second cooldown, which is potentially extremely powerful.

iDefender is extremely powerful in a bunker retal build, and that’s all ill say about that right now. Arcane thievey is fantastic. Not only does it remove 3 conditions, it also steals 3 boons, allowing interesting things like 30 seconds of stability if a necro uses an elite.

Illusion of life is interesting, but ultimately not great since it is a death sentence for whomever you use it on.

Signets are bad, unless you are fighting the jellyfish, and you take arcane thievey and signet of inspiration.

Mantras have really nitch uses. MoP is bad. Cond removal one can be really powerful, as it removes more conditions per minute than anything else, and also works as a stun break sometimes. Stability mantra can be good, but I wouldn’t use it. The daze mantra is generally restricted to a build making use of the grandmaster dueling trait for fury…which means you can’t use the trait that increases damage with charged mantras. Horrible design right there.

Skill number 5 on trident is interesting. The projectile reflect is annoying, but the skill itself is amazing.

The skill has near infinite range. All you need is a target. Line of sight is not necessary.

The skill hits through defiant, reliably disabling any underwater mob in the game. Additionally, casting the skill on a target that is on land will hardstun them for the duration.

The skill also hits (I believe) through blinds. This is an insanely strong (…bugged) skill, and now quit talking about it.

When specced for it, Mesmer has significantly more uptime and options for projectile reflects than any other class in the game. As stated by anet, the effect from blurred frenzy was never intended to function as a projectile reflect. Additionally, it would be an exceedingly strange incarnation of that effect. The blur from blurred frenzy is an active defense allowing you to safely chainsaw at something, not a purely defensive or utilitarian skill, and having projectile reflection piggyback onto all of the other utility that it has would be over-the-top.

Zenith.7301:

Why are people attacking your phantasm?

Phantasms in a phantasm build hurt very badly, as well as having very low hp. If you have the spike damage, it is extremely advisable to wipe them out quickly instead of letting them chew on you.

Edit: Also aoes/bouncing attacks will hit phantasms one way or another.