Ever wondered how bad elementalists feel when they drop at least 4 unavoidable and unkillable aoes that ignore LoS on someone’s sieges?
Not bad at all, lol.
No, it was enough a disaster in spvp against only 3 people who just got pushed away, swaped to ranged and killed me before I could even get close to anybody else. I wonder how it could possibly work better against 30 people… Video, please?
Unfortunately, my PC isn’t strong enough to handle recording without severe lag, but tornado there works really nice with hammer warriors.
Illusionary persona and signet of illusions is way to go, but you’ll need to know exact spawn locations of mobs. Outcome will still be subpar and require lot of work.
On the bright side, shatter build is really nice in dungeons.
And on a side note: why are people constantly comparing the AoE with an Elementalist? Look at the kitten Necromancer! Staff + wider marks + 3 wells + ground targeting = 7 massively huge AoE skills. I can literally cover my whole screen in AoE
And they damage mobs even before they appear! I feel like jelly when I see trap ranger or necromancer.
Why so? I saw Illusionary Duelist one day and it was k.
And last I heard, they haven’t banned llll, lllll, illl and others from that awesome quintet of asuran mesmers.
Ele elites aren’t weak. Greatsword for instance, can crit up to 10000, ice elemental heals and has wonderfully low cd(other attunement elementals have their uses too, fire helps in tagging and aoe, earth works like pocket tank, air looks cool and give swiftness!), tornado is relatively weak in pve, but rocks in pvp\www. And whirlpool is just nice to have, good damage.
Interesting question indeed.
If you focus on conditions and have around 30-40% crit chance, bleed on crit will help greatly.
If you use staff mainly as defensive weapon, then Hydromancy, Energy, Purity. Hydromancy in particular is highly effective against any melee.
Good old Fire works good too, adding more aoe potential to staff.
Rune of Air is valid choice too, with mirror heal and traited foci. And it leaves 2 armor slots free.
But that really doesn’t justify single fact: while others maintain decent swiftness uptime without giving up on damage or survivability those 6slot and 4slot runesets offer, we need those runes.
Well, if you ever see someone complaining just about anything but Orr DE as mesmer, know that this person either acting as northern mythical character, either undergeared as hell and traited badly.
Not an issue for me.. keep focus in off hand and you are fine.
With short recast.. No clue what your issue is.
Even traited, focus doesn’t provide enough swiftness uptime.
Any other source of swiftness will conflict with foci swiftness.
Some people like 2handers or other off-handers. Switching focus to off-hand sword is pain!
That leaves us with either playing Illusionary Snail, either rune up with something like centaur or air.
It’s definitely hideous skill to use.
Clone won’t spawn if out of range, and that… range is tricky.
Best bet is to get little closer to target than description suggests, wait for clone to jump and then swap. Note, that it won’t let you swap if clone is still jumping.
You have a point about the extension thing but I guess it just bugs me about how short the boon duration is. I dont think It’d be OP if it lasted a few seconds more.
Ah, I forgot about the vulnerability. I don’t combo projectiles out of frost fields very often. I’ll remember that.
While auramancer’s mass frost armor will be much more efficient, this combo is free for any build with blasts. Well, not so free, most of the time it’s better to either 3blast water field, either 3blast fire field.
Eles don’t have that much reliable projectile finishers, but lightning and frost combo works miracle with something like unload thief, rangers, etc.
I like dropping those near pack of ranged classes while doing champion abomination, almost guaranteed 25stack of vulnerability on it or chill.
With these above in mind, we should always look into possibility of other profession’s combo finishers before dropping our fields.
Blasting your water field, or asking thief or warrior to blast your fire field will lend your party 25 stacks of might or much needed heal.
This will require good coordination, but totally worth it.
Think of frozen armor as extension of frozen ground itself, blasting right before it goes off will lend more chills.
And lightning field is still rocking vulnerability.
I think they still guessing what actual on fall effect they should give to those who command 5 elements. Be it something related to earth, would surely kitten off those who prefer air, etc.
Consider this as compliment to profession’s variety of tools.
Because ultimately we’d need the Phantasms to have their (direct) damage removed (and the Clones too, even indirect one), and be made into actual living hexes.
Like mage and disenchanter in their current state? :P
We avoided solo bug with this:
One joins, stays.
Others manually go through portal(appearing solo there), go out and hit “join now” which pops right after they leave their solo dungeon.
Damage, damage and damage!
Remember, we have tons of survival.
Therefore, I’d work on full berserker. 6x valkyrie orbs in armor if you feel like squishy.
Works good anywhere – dungeons, general pve, www.
Meanwhile, a Mesmer’s Stealth breaks targets (don’t know if pets follow them or not, but the break target is essential to avoid channeling) and they can summon illusions in the process.
Ileap isn’t even an option. Mainly because of cast time and clone leap time(often long – mobs are already dead when you finish it).
That leaves us with tagging 40-50% of wave in dedicated farming party once in 30 seconds.
Surely, tag rate can be improved if you know exact spawn locations.
But I won’t spend a single silver for retraiting each time I feel like plinx farm.
Second, a lot of people fail to realize that with illusionary persona simply running into a pack of mobs and pressing f1 and f2 will tag most if not all of the mobs.
You don’t have time to run in orrian DE’s. Most of that pack will be dead before you even get there.
CS was never offensive but it was (and, sadly, still is) mesmer’s best defensive ability. On a 35 sec c/d. To put this in perspective, guardian has 10% flat dmg reduction, heavy armor, passive health regen and chain blind. Granted, guardians are usually melee as their ranged weapons aren’t that good. But they can survive nearly anything in melee and they still can opt for ranged if they want.
Guardian’s ranged is mediocre. Staff is mid-range aoe and scepter projectiles are actually so slow that they are effective only under immobilize. Guardians work better in melee, that’s why they get their fancy heavy armor and other stuff.
As for us, our best defensive is not CS, rather then combination of timed distortions, frenzy, comboed chaos armors… and meatshield ilusions.
Imoa ppl who spend days farm same events in ore missed the point with this game
It’s just about easy gold
On my ele I got ~36g in two days just by running plinx and selling everything that dropped. Can’t find similar sources for mesmer except rarely occurring guild-run explorers(everyone know that random explorers are gamble of humiliation and repair).
I cry each time I log in my ele just to farm plinx chain and get more loots solo than my mesmer with IP gets in full-packed prohardcore grind party .
No kidding. The mesmer is really really bad in pve. People that say that illusionary berserker and chaos storm is large aoe damage are in denial. Playing a mesmer in pve is a great way to be broke all the time.
Illusionary berserker is large aoe damage. But it has some issues:
a) targeted, casted
b) nearly unpredictable spin direction and bugged attack delay
c) relatively long cd
All above make it okay and even good when you don’t have any competitors, but fail to grant mesmers reliable tag source in zerg events. Same road goes warden.
And chaos storm was never offensive.
People who say otherwise are in denial no doubt!
It would be a buff but it would be broken from the get go. Look at illusions as a warriors adrenaline. Do you think it would be fair for them to start a fight charged and ready to burst, because they can’t build it against a thief who is hiding? That’s what having illusions out means to a Mesmer.
In fact, MB is simply devastating in short range. Also 6-12 stacks of might(even without elasticity). Also free instant shatter, because of clone spawned right next to target.
