Guild Wars 2

combos great with runes of altruism, keeps aoe frenzy up about half the time, and between 3-6 stacks of might always. It’s also trivial to get more buffs by using staff and sword’focus. see the chaos maestro build for more info.

yup, i play a build that gives retaliation to others, but I only get credit for the damage that my retaliation does. you should still be able to tag some guys in that sort of build. until Arenanet fixes this, altruistic builds will have to just relly on smug satisfaction that the team needs you, rather than loot and experience to keep them going.

evilapprentice.6379:

I’m going to start this off by saying that you’re obviously a good player, and the below isn’t a personal attack.

That being said, what’s so impressive about this? As far as I can tell, this is what happens when you take a giant open space and fight in the middle of it rather than being forced to fight around objectives. Teleporting around a giant map where your escape vector is “any direction away from my opponent” rather than limited by map design and overall small size seems like common sense. The fact that you don’t have some point where you “have to be” (IE, a capture point) means your free to engage and disengage at will. The people chasing you (rather than splitting up between where you are and where your return circle is) are just wasting their time. There’s no penalty associated with spending 20s out of every minute running away so as to let your skills Cool down.

What it boils down to is you’re baiting people. They’re more interested in “not letting you get away” then playing intelligently. Like I said earlier, you’re clearly good at it, but it seems like anything a competent PvP S/D thief could pick up in an hour.

I think your issue is more with wvw roaming, as a playstyle…as in what’s the point? Rather than a criticism of the OP, or the build. I think that’s fine, it is kind of just random killing for fun…kind of like pve, but more challenging. There are also objectives in wvw, and a build/playstyle like this can be used in furtherance of those objectives.

For example, one might use it in order to peel off parts of a huge group (aka zerg) of players attacking a keep. Harrass a few, get 5-10 to split off and follow you, meanwhile your team whipes up the disorganized group…It’s a playstyle that works well for thieves in general in wvw. Of course, disciplined wvw groups will stay together, but there are always a few random people in there who can be distracted and lured away.

Also, while roaming itself may seem pointless, it does help keep players from catching up to the bigger groups, so it can help the whole server to have a few good roamers out there, even if they aren’t machine-gun killing enemies…just tying them up is almost as good.

So back to that question; whats so impressive about teleporting around an open space and using your superior mobility to fluster and harrass the enemy? Just compare it to the current meta – using infinite cloaks to fluster and harrass the enemy…it is riskier, and more interesting. It will help create variety, and give Arenanet a new direction to wave that nerf stick.

yup, i’m a fan of iDefender too…especially with high power/retaliation…when i swap out mantra healing, i like putting in idefender and sig of illusions for damage mitigation. you’re right though, taking out blink hurts.

just played my variation of this last night, using runes of altruism, staff, sword-focus-retaliation and signet of inspiration….as the op noted, almost any build can achieve similar results. aside from a very smooth fractal run. I got comments like ‘wow’ and ‘keep that fury coming please.’ I forgot to pop time warp in a boss fight and people were still noticing how fast the fight went.

i run mostly pvt and rabid gear (just what I have), which makes me very tanky, damage is also respectable partly due to might stacking. i still do mantra healing (which gives a strong heal even without full clerics gear), but I alternate between that and focus-reflects. as is, I see my party nearly at full health most of the time. For me, I dont think adding healing power would help much as downs come from burst damage, and the one thing this build cant do well is reaction healing on allies(since mantras are slow)

yup, until you hit 40, you dont really get to have a build…its more like a hint of a flavor.

I have some similar comments. first the 15 pts in illusions seems odd for a phantasm build, you won’t be shattering much, so buffing shatters goes against your phantasm concept.

If you did want to shatter, a lot, deceptive evasion is too good to pass up.

your build is good at single target DPS, which can make for a good PvP dueling build.

In pve, aoe is very powerful…focus, great sword and staff really can help here. Sword main hand is ok for this, but blurred frenzy is only available some of the time.

phantasms are good DPS once they get going, but it takes a bit of time to get them going. Compare this to high single target DPS builds in other professions and you’ll find yourself underperforming on trash mobs. On bosses, you’ll do well, but you’re basically making a one trick pony, and the trick is only moderately useful in pve.

All that said, constructive feedback would be to take 10 pts from illusions and put them anywhere else.

consider a different weapon for at least one set. Staff could round this out by giving you some aoe support/dmg and defense, GS will give good DPS and a bit of aoe, focus offhand will give some versatility and aoe-but as someone else noticed, you’d be waiting a lot for sword cool downs if you do s/s and s/f.

good luck!

DrixTrix.7168:

we should have ‘’chaos speed’’ signet OoC you have a 25% increase like every other class while an animation that leaves a trail of butterflies behind you

Its funny…on my thief, I always have that signet up. On mesmer, I would never use it. I’m happy to trade sword offhand for focus, but focus is so versatile. What utility would you leave out for a perma speed-boost? Would you lose blink? Would you drop decoy? How about feedback? There are so many amazing utilities that it is hard to pick just 3, a signet speed boost would never see play in my builds. I suppose you could make a glass-cannon build that focuses exclusively on mobility. And then people would complain about the OPness…aside from that one example, it wouldnt see much play, so why bother?

it’s saying bad link….ii’m assuming s/p and s/s refer to sword and not scepter. I think both sword/sword and sword/pistol can be very good, looking forward to seeing what you’re doing with them.

^I agree…
I’ll take it one step further. OP, you are a newb. you admitted it in your post…you just started playing in those settings. So what’s wrong with being a newb. If other people think that the only measure of worth is how many hours you’ve put into a specific video game, let them. you are enjoying yourself and that’s what counts. if the build is OP’d it’s Arenanet’s job to fix it, and not ours to self-police and self-limit. if a specific player has an issue with game balance, they can always try a different game -if they can handle being a newb for a while.

I like the utility of mirror in getting out of combat in wvw. The reflect helps avoid a lot of snares/stuns/dazes that people always seem so keen on applying once they have an advantage…as others mentioned, loads of damage mitigation means I’m not usually taking a lot of damage…unless I’m being focused on by a group…in that situation, I need to bail more than I need a strong heal..I’m not an amazing player though, so I’m sure it’s different for others.

yup…totally disagree, copying is a great starting place, and its a good way to get to know the meta, and get to know intricacies of combos…I didn’t personally come up with 3 heart seekers through blinding powder, but I use it when running d/p.

I also agree that copying a build is a poor ending place…after copying a bit you should learn stuff about your own play-style. When looking at other builds, you may then start to adapt them iimmediately to your own preferences. The posted builds are then really about combo ideas and play styles.

Builds are not trivial to develop and test in this game. Except, to some extent in pvp. In wvw, though people who are new to the game may read around about survivability then decide to invest everything they have into clerics gear…only then do they realize that its not really a sound investment on a thief. The premade build helps get started, before tweaking.

I think its great that you are constantly trying to develop new things, but you also have to understand that people enjoy different aspects of the game. Personally theory crafting and strategizing are my favorite aspects of the game…which is why I loved gw1 and recommend you try it, if you like that aspect of the game-it was much better for that). Other people are twitch gamers, who just want to get out there and start killing stuff. they will be at a disadvantage if they don’t fully understand their builds, like a race driver who knows nothing about cars. I suppose you’re right, that those people aren’t being creative. But sharing and discussing builds is IMO part of a creative process too.

I think the word you’re looking for is kittens;). And I get some of that frustration, but it also has to do with the fact that certain thief builds are just sooo much better than others, and so it almost forces people to play those cookie cutters. In either case, s/d is certainly not a fotm, so I think your criticism is misplaced here.

I’m not sure who that is meant to criticize, but I think that copying someone else’s build can be a good starting place that leads to individualization and tweaking, which is a creative process, and ultimately leads to separate builds. Being creative doesn’t have to mean reinventing the wheel. People in other fields follow this same model, which is why we don’t see a lot of modern cave art…we start by copying, then we change things.

As to the originality of the s/d build posted here, I don’t know…I’m assuming the poster wasnt trying to rip someone else off. Even if they may have done so unintentionally or accidentally created a very similar build to another popular build…

I’ve taken a few portals for JPs before, and no one has ever asked for money. but I’ve sent them a few silver as a tip. I dont know why someone would stand at the end of a jumping puzzle advertising portals on map chat and dropping them every 5—10 minutes if they didnt expect a few donations. It is considered gauche to demand them, though….it’s also probably kind of rude to hop a portal and not donate anything.

along those lines, I’ve been thinking about wvw…should we be tipping good commanders? they’re running around leading us, using their own siege blueprints…isnt a tip in order?

Thanks for the build. I’very been thinking about trying something like this. I may give it a shot. I also agree with you about the whiners being annoying. I post on the mesmer forums a lot, and I noticed that people over there tend to be very thoughtful and creative. Even after the major confusion nerf, people were upset for 2 days, then they were making new build.

I appreciate the same sort of optimism and creativity on here.

One other thing that portalling serves as a counterplay to…turtling defense. Excessive use of arrowcarts and chokepoints when assaulting a keep are very problematic. I just had the situation where a group of us whiped while going for citadel after breaching both gates. One mesmer got through, and managed to stay alive a little while. If he had succeeded in portaling us in, it would have been a fun (for both sides) and appropriate counter to an otherwise very boring tactic of building arrow-carts and waiting for people to run into the necessary chokepoints.

This just occurred to me, on this topic…

I recently ninja’d Bay with a single golem and about 6 guildmates. The Bay was completely undefended, and it was fun to take it and drain supply.

After the massive zerg came by and took it back, we were accused of hacking, which I found funny…but speaks to your point about – is this game mechanic fun for the opposing team.

So is it fun for one server that plays by having a massive zerg roam around and annihilate everything, to have to deal with smaller groups causing havoc (whether through portaling or ninja-rushes)? I’d say it’s probably less fun than just winning, but it does force them to make important and interesting decisions about splitting forces. Or they can continue to steamroll everything in their path, while losing everything behind them. Maybe that, as their strategy – all offense and no defense, is fun for them.

So I guess what I’m getting at here is that Portaling can be seen as a form of counterplay, in that it counters the dominant strategy of having one massive zerg fight another massive zerg…it makes that strategy pay off less then strategies that involve coordination between smaller groups. Ultimately, I think that the massive zerg vs zerg fights are the most boring part of the game, because as a non-commander, my impact on the fight can be relatively minimal.

When you consider portalling keeps in a vacuum, I can see how it would seem like a poor game decision from that counterplay perspective. But when you see it as just another way for a smaller, clever and nimble force to prevail against a bigger and slower force; it actually makes the game more interesting.

Ralathar.7236:

I did, Crossplay made a post on how to potentially sweep more effectively, though it would take a bit more time. SurburbanLion did an overview on where portaling fits in as a tactic. Bobross did a look at perspectives on how people view portals. Dracatis did a comparison of the rewards/loss of losing the players hiding for portaling.

While these are interesting and good perspectives they are not saying any additional counters. So it is still sweep or lose as Saturn suggested. Scouts are a good safety net that should always be in place as he also suggested and they can stop an outer portal from resulting in a keep take with a quicker defender response, but an inner portal will still be an instant loss without a defending zerg.

good summary so far…
So you’re really asking for a debate regarding this counterplay suggestion. I guess it comes down to does Stealth (or sneakiness in general) allow for interesting counterplay in this game?

and the issue that you point out is that sweeping is the main (or only?) counter-tactic.

So maybe we should list viable counter-tactics and talk about how fun they are to play.

Sweeping – done it a few times, kind of boring, but also kind of nice to survey the keep that I just helped take.

Scouting – boring for the scouts if there is nothing out there to deal with, very fun if you get involved in little skirmishes. Fun for the commander, assembling bits of info from various scouts. It potentially does two things for you: lets you know where enemy zerg is / where it’s headed, and may spot the actual portaling mesmer before they come in.

Trapping – if you know the portal is coming, you can pull off some of the tricks suggested by others, such as aoes on the portal.

Mobility – if your zerg is quick enough, you can rush back to the keep in time to defend.

Offensive Might – if you’re not quick enough, you can enjoy taking back a keep. Also keeping pressure on the opposing side by taking other towers / keeps makes them have to worry about defense. They then have to choose how to devote their zerg, to countering your offense or taking back the things that you have not defended well.

The real problem we come to is that the game does reward sneakiness, and the strongest counter to sneakiness is caution. Caution can be boring in game-play when it is unwarranted (wasting time looking for something that is not there), but it can be very fun, when it pays off. The sweeper that finds the hiding mesmer can enjoy informing the commander and getting in the first few hits, or they can enjoy watching them from afar and setting a trap for the enemy zerg.

The cost of caution, however is not just potential boredom, it is also mobility. So it is not just a no-brainer decision for a commander whether to sweep, it is also an issue of, is sweeping worth it to lose time and mobility, or is it better to press an offensive advantage and continue to attack. Likewise the enemy has to choose between taking back a paper keep that they already lost, or stopping the invaders from continuing to attack other sites.

I’d suggest you give the “immortal” or some other bunker build a shot in pvp, then try a full glass cannon, (like “shattercat”) build in pvp, then see if there’s a sweet spot between them that suits your playstyle and skill level.

Karolis.4261:

bobross.5034:

also p/d offers perma stealth…which is the best “bunkering” thieves have access to.

BEEEEEP. Wrong. If P/D offers perma stealth means D/D and S/D allso offers perma stealth which is false. D/P offers perma stealth through blackpowder+hs if traited right.

Yup…typo, wasn’t paying attention, relax…meant to say d/p

so if I used runes of altruism, battle sigil and signet of inspiration to give myself 6 stacks of might and all allies 9 stacks of might, my phantasms would have an effective 15 stacks. If I got up to 25 – i.e. with a guardian, phantasms go up to effectively 50?

^well there already are the new stealth reveal traps…that’s sort of going for this, no?

I think there are various ways to look at this:
1 – is mesmer stealth / portaling into keeps consistent with the flavor of the world – I’d argue, yes. In a world full of magic, there have to be alternative ways around stone walls right?
2 – is mesmer stealth / portaling overpowered in such a way that it is the only viable tactic – not at all, it’s a fragile and gimicky tactic that has a viable counter-strategy. Also other tactics are more viable for taking a tower, including a golem rush.
3 – is mesmer stealth / portaling strategy trivial in it’s execution, thereby making it so common and annoying that it ruins the game for others? – no, it takes a lot of effort on the part of the mesmer and coordination with a team to do it right.
4 – are the consequences of this so extreme that they excessively punish the other team for not being cautious? No, if they take the keep, you can always take it back. The whole reason the mesmer was hiding there was because they were outmanned, and overpowered to begin with. if they try to rush the keep immediately after you take it, they won’t be able to defend long…if they wait patiently for hours, keeping stealthed and avoiding getting disconnected for being afk, then either they have a bot, which gets them banned, or they have invested a lot of time into a tiny victory and they deserve the tiny victory.

So in total, I don’t see a reason to nerf this, at least not with a hard nerf. I can imagine more stealth reveals, or maybe even an aoe one time damage burst throughout a keep that could be activated via upgrade, while the keep was not contested, or somesuch…but I really don’t think this should be a priority.

Not just an engie bug, happened 3 times in a row to my thief. Tried logging / re-entering, but not at all available to the thief. The skills are available if I join as my mesmer.

also p/d offers perma stealth…which is the best “bunkering” thieves have access to.

As embolism said, Individual mantras have their uses. Additionally, a mantra healing build is viable.

Also, check out the support builds listed in the build post…You can set it up so that even without extra healing power, you can heal your party for 2.6k every time you channel mantra of pain. That’s some useful spammable party healing. It does kill your dps pretty quick, so I’d save it for when it is needed, and not just mindlessly spam it. I wouldn’t bother with the trait giving you 3 mantra casts though…not really worth it in that sort of build anyway.

The pvp mantra builds that use mantras to do extra damage dont seem like a great idea…although, I guess if you’re in a situation where you don’t really use utilities that often, you could have mantras be your utilities, and use the fact that they’re charged to up your dps.

Certain classes have a real problem with thieves, and this gives them a (costly) answer. It doesn’t kill thieves outright, but forces them to react. Thieves are still very mobile as well, so if they get caught by this trap, they should be able to get away for 30 seconds, and then start over.

The trap can’t really be used as a reaction to a trolling thief anyway, as the thief can see a person use it. This means the thief can avoid the trap, unless they are careless, and then who’s fault is that?

Within a zerg, a revealed thief can wait for 30 seconds and use short bow, not a big deal…this does offer options to prevent portal bombing, which just enhances strategic elements of the game…laying down extra resources to protect an exposed treb…not a big deal really.

Crossplay.2067:

You know what would be nice? If the devs put up a webpage that showed how all the sigil cooldowns interacted with each other instead of the players having to do all this ridiculous testing to find out. I can understand them hiding jumping puzzles for the allure and excitement of discovery but this is a convoluted mess that gets in the way of optimization.

I agree – though I think certain games can get away with obscuring game mechanics behind vague descriptive language. GW2’s tooltips are specific enough that one may think they understand what is happening, but then it turns out it doesn’t work that way.

yup, try doing the two shatters in quick succession, it’s very powerful. I think that shattercat build and guide is definitely some advanced stuff, especially the blinking, which I am just starting to play with now.

I suggest just picking one or two of the techniques and playing around with it to encorporate into your build. Don’t worry about getting the same numbers – ESPECIALLY if you are new to the game.

The reason I say that is because the shatter cat build is a sort of glass cannon build that relies a lot on player skill for damage mitigation. If you don’t have the skills yet, you should try a less demanding build to start. I’d suggest the immortal build, or a similar bunker-ish build. These can still do some of those same tricks (albeit not as spectacularly), and they are also more forgiving, so you can get away with 5-10 mistakes in a battle, rather than one and you’re dead.

edit: sorry, been a while since I looked at shatter cat – there are variations on it, including a “heavy” version, which may be a bit more forgiving for a beginner.

I havent played a lot with this in wvw, but the other thing to keep in mind is you dont get bags for party buffs, and your build has the added bonus of being decent offensively. the other thing to keep in mind when using signet of inspiration is that other classes will be spreading might around too, so passing that along with signet turns 13 stacks of might on you into 25 on your allies…which is the cap. having a build that focuses solely on might will therefore quickly yield dimminishing returns when running with a random group. so it’s good to have multiple roles. for mine it’s healing/reflecting and tanking. for you it’ll probably be shatter aoes.

I run a build giving might, but I use altruism runes. they trigger any time you use the heal skill, and have a 15 second cooldown, so this is perfect with one of your heals, or you can use the mantra heal if you’re doing mantra healing. My default is 0/20/20/20/5 with 5 points to play with.

Altruism gives 3 stacks of aoe might, and gives it to me + vigor. I usually also play a chaos field on me and allies. Then I swap weapons, for sigil of battle, and get 3 more stacks. If winds of chaos is working, with clones, I may have a few extra stacks now, but conservatively thats 6 + fury + chaos storm boons. Then I pop signet of inspiration and now everyone in my party has 9 stacks of might, 6 on a 15 minute cooldown + other boons. The regular heals mean that I can keep up 6 stacks of might in aoe around me indefinitely (3 from sigil of battle, since it has a long duration).

This has happened to me twice running AC path 3 with my Asura thief, carrying pistol/dagger and shortbow. When I transform into a ghost, I lose my utility skills. Instead a locked icon is displayed in front of them. Additionally, a button allowing me to transform back is present, but clicking it does nothing. The result is that for the final boss battle, I have no utilities, no heals and no elite skills, and only have access to my weapon skills. Please fix!

Ron, you are somewhat misinformed…try playing mesmer for a bit in pvp, and you’ll get a better sense of the limitations and weaknesses. as a general rule, if you don’t know what is happening in pvp, you’ll probably make mistakes and lose. Take some time, take a step back and try to figure out how to tell the mesmer apart from the clones and try to figure out which ones are damaging you. For example, you imply that clones -the exact copies- do a lot of damage. In fact the only damage they really do is either causing conditions or shattering….and you can dodge the shatter. the damage can come from phantasms, which are not identical, they look like ghosts, and you can stop them by dodging them, killing them as soon as they’re cast with 1-2 hits, or preventing the mesmer from finishing long cast time stuff.

Knackyknave-that was a bug and got fixed in the last patch. most mesers were too upset about the confusion nerf to notice it.

Ross, my alt is a thief…guess it’s the thing I miss when playing mesmer.

I’m with Godmoney…once you get the flexible, creative and practical mindset, you can be very useful and dangerous. If you take a brute force, single combo spamming approach, you’ll probably be dissappointed, as other classes do that better.

I was playing Caudecus Manor earlier with my meser, for the first time. While people were explaining how important it was to dodge into all the rooms etc. I just swapped out a trait, and used my focus skills to face-tank the guys that everyone else was hiding from. Everyone was so surprised at how easy everything was. That’s the sort of thing mesmers bring to the table…base stats and damage bubbles are nice too, but it’s that sort of simple, on-the-fly problem solving that really makes mesmers shine.

Not a fan of shield, stylistically, as a duelist class, shield seems too standard soldier… Frankly, I think it’d make more sense for there to be a main-hand sword only option, with additional skills, as most duels are fought that way.

As far as other mainhands, people have suggested main hand pistol, which could be neat. If there were a mainhand pistol, it might be neat to have it mirror the greatsword, by being an amazing melee/tanking weapon. But not sure how that’d fly.

I think mesmers could be fleshed out more with a weapon that focuses on speed an mobility at the cost of power and overt defense. Daggers work for this, but it may not work with the flavor of mesmer either. In either case, if more weapons were added, I’d like to see one that makes me juke all over the place, and can drop a mediocre phantasm quickly….then again, maybe that would be overpowered with glass-cannon shatter builds.

to the OP; I like the suggestions, but lets be clear…the only bug here is on illusionary elasticity, and it’s probably more of a tooltip bug than a real bug. The other stuff, making clones have frenzy…this is a nice idea in theory, but can easily get overpowered, asking for both at once, you are essentially asking for twice or three times the bleeding damage.

you also say that this would make staff worth using…it already is worth using, and as noted in several other threads, is many people’s favorite weapon already. As much as I’d like to see those sorts of changes, I’m not going to kid myself and say that I’m underpowered now, when I really don’t feel that way, when playing. Staff is a mix of defense and offense, and an all around very solid weapon. There should not be an automatic assumption that it can outdamage a greatsword power build, since gs is a purely offensive weapon, and staff has some great defense built in as well.

I think the other point you were trying to make is that a condition build is not viable for mesmer, and this would make it so. I’ll have to disagree there too…while certainly less optimal as a damage dealing build, conditions are still viable.

I’ve been playing a mantra healing variation on boon tank/support. It definitely plays a useful role in pve, and seems good in wvw too. I can see why some would be frustrated with the build, due to the lack of big damage, but the combination of tanking, boons and healing allows for really enhancing party survivability and damage. Also, II notice that the mantra heals are decent even without clerics gear…which makes pvt gear make more sense for a more versatile build. It’s all down to style.

I imagine, seeing the camp empty when you came to recap with a few arrow carts built was confusing at first…we had already moved on, and being only like 6 people got whiped by the FA zerg that had been trebbing the whole time.

Thanks for the advice Bredin! What about the easy pet heals…dont know much, but doesnt that make killing pets somewhat tough?

also, my impression of rangers was that pet builds could be very strong 1v1, but very quickly lose value in larger fights, so a wvw ranger speccd for his pet is probably going to feel pretty useless at other times…when not in duels. Am I right?

along those lines, I see some positives with the positions of some traits. I agree with you that some don’t make much sense. Still most of the best traits are available at 20 points in a trait line. This lets mesmer builds be more spread out among the trait lines. It also lets you swap out a few traits on the fly to completely change your build without respeccing. I kind of like that.

haven’t really tried extensively in pvp, but I can imagine some usefulness in group battles and on a tanky/phantasm build. If you have phantasmal defender out with maxed hp, you get double retaliation when you are hit. If you have signet of inspiration, you give retaliation to your teammates. If the whole group gets hit by aoe, that’s a huge hit to the caster. Either way, it does make a difference over time. Probably not worth counting on as your only source of damage, but in a build designed to exploit this combo, you will also have high power, and you will be using blade-frenzy, and probably iwarden…it all adds up

Also, I’m thinking of synergy with my thief character, and it’s very straightforward by comparison. While spammable blast finishers work well with fields dropped by other classes, most of thief play focuses on positioning and spamming a few skills. For example d/d builds will either spam 3 -if they do condition damage, or never touch 3…so it is either useless or central to a build. even when there is a combo like pistol 5 with dagger 2 for stealth…it is like the one combo in the build. Mesmer is much more flexible by comparison. And on my mesmer, there is rarely an unuses skill on my bar.

I totally disagree regarding synergy. While you may be right about world boss strategies being sort of boring…that probably goes for every class…stay ranged, stay alive. finish.

When you talk about other types of fights, the synergies really shine (though I’d say less so for GS- which is a simple damage weapon). for example:

Sword/focus-

Focus synergizes with traits to reflect projectiles
5 goes with 4 to cure conditions
3 goes with 4 to get lots of retaliation
2 goes with 3 to get immobilized target for blurred frenzy
1 goes with everything to remove buffs (also clones)
all of these synergize with shatters.

Staff
2 goes with 3, to dodge during long cast time
2 goes with 3 to spam conditions, so 3 does more damage
2 goes with 5 to give chaos shield
1 goes with 2+3 to add conditions / damage from 3
4 gives bonus tankiness, which synergizes with kiting via 2, which synergizes with occasional speed bursts/buffs and cripples from 5
clones / illusions synergize with shatters.

these all synergize well with traits that make you better at dodging, and add extra abilities to clones / phantasms – so the same weapon can work very differently depending on the traits selected.

I haven’t even gotten into utilities.

Probably just a playstyle thing…go with what you love, I say. I play mostly support with my mesmer, and personally don’t find it boring at all. I find the variable utility really neat, and I like tweaking the build mid-dungeon or in wvw, depending on the situation. But I also like playing my thief to change things up a bit…live on the edge and do tons of damage…they engage different interests of mine.

So the goal is minimal pink effects? Maybe Sword / pistol and Greatsword? You’re going to have to be ok with butterflies. Alternatively, you can run an all signet build, and not use your weapons at all.

!No need for more speed. the game is about difficult choices….also focus is great and between plentiful stuns, cripples, stealth, burst damage, clones, teleports and good range damage, we have access to a lot of ways to deal with hit and run tactics, as well as getting out of tough situations…any mesmer build will have access to at least a few of these options, so no need to complain…we are better off than other classes in this regard.

Neat idea! I love how the mesmer community just rolls with nerfs!