Guild Wars 2

My biggest problem with mesmer is the amount of bugged weapon skills. I can deal with bugged/useless utilities, there’s usually a different choice that makes sense.

I CANNOT accept bugged/useless key weapon skills like the scepter AA or sword #3, which breaks the entire weapon and most builds centered on it.

Xaylin.1860:

Oh please, no more stealth skills.
Would be bad on Staff anyway (Bounces and Chaos Storm).

A point blanket area Daze/Stun would be awesome. But that would be pretty similar to Chaos Storm which we already have. And single target CC would be boring.

Not sure how stealth on the staff would be “bad”, since PU and staff traits are in the same tree, but it would probably be boring. But honestly, I’ll take just about anything over Chaos Armor, which is more or less built into staff #2 already if you’re doing things right.

I would LOVE a knockback, don’t even care if it’s single-target. I have enough skills for running away and dodging, I need more skills for messing with other people’s movement.

Huh, a moa mesmer? Old school. I haven’t seen anyone use that skill in ages, myself included… PU mesmer is the the current flavor right now, so most people just run MI to get some extra stealth.

Anyway, sounds pretty buggy that minions unsummon when moa’d, hope they fix that.

A basic cloak skill would offer some nice synergy with PU but PU builds are also somewhat overplayed. I’d rather have something more interesting like a pull or maybe a short melee stun or daze. I think the staff could really benefit from some sort of melee CC skill for when things get too close.

I want to see 50 giant mesmers rampaging across the battlefield smacking things with their hands, making siege golems look like toy robots.

Giant butterflies everywhere.

Mango has the right idea. PU is a very powerful survival tool (it’s a XII trait after all), but its main weakness is the fact that it’s a stealth-buffing trait on a class which isn’t really designed around stealth the way a thief is. This means too long cooldowns on stealth unless you run with a traited torch, which is what most (if not all) PU mesmers do.

Anyway, the main goal would be to get the mesmer to burn his stealth cooldowns as fast as possible. You should easily be able to keep up more stealth time than him and hopefully that will tip the scales in your favor. Also, MI – the mesmer elite stealth skill – has a long cast time and is therefore super vulnerable to interrupts.

Also, keep in mind that since mesmer stealth is not actually stealth but “cloaking” (different skill type), there is no stealth debuff and stealth skills can be chained. This sounds bad, but keep in mind those long cooldowns. If a mesmer chain-stealths that probably means he is trying to run away or doesn’t want to fight you for some reason. This could be a good time to strike.

Finally, PU mesmers tend to have low health but high toughness. This is because the PU trait line is tied to toughness and boon duration, and with another 20 points needed for the torch trait, there’s usually no room for stacking vitality without breaking the build somehow. This is the same survival stat distribution as a stealth-heavy thief, so think about your own weaknesses and how you would exploit them, especially when it comes to stealth.

hihey.1075:

Another thing: engis completely lack ranged weapons.

Wat.

Please show me an engineer melee weapon that is not part of a kit, because I obviously missed out on something.

I could never get into WvW shattering… everyone moves so kitten fast and there’s so much AoE flying around that clones tend to die before they reach their target. Buffing them up means buffing yourself which hurts your DPS. I highly prefer using them as minion bombs with clone death traits and spamming them via Deceptive Evasion.

I still don’t understand why they decided the clones had to run all the way to the target for the shatter. I understand the shatter skills would need adjustment to be an instant hit, but I’d prefer lower damage over praying every time that just a single clone will make it through the instant clone death AoE zone to its target.

Well, a few things… scepter/torch seems like an odd choice to me, you don’t have any traits or gear that supports stealth and/or conditions, and that’s what those two weapons do best. I’d go for GS since you have good power/precision.

Secondly, you’re stacking precision but not crit damage. That’s usually only done to take advantage of sharper images (15p dueling minor). Not sure what you’re trying to accomplish here.

Finally, mantras have the obvious disadvantage of super long cast times. This means that if the fight drags out or you get jumped unprepared, you’re probably going to die if all your utilities are mantras. After the buffs they got I usually run with one or even two mantras even though I don’t trait for them, but I wouldn’t want them taking up all my utility slots.

I think you’re perhaps looking at it the wrong way…. clones are not really meant to be a permanent distraction.
The second the clone gets hit and does not react like a normal player (i.e. move away, dodge etc.) the clone’s disguise is lost. The only way you can keep your opponents guessing is to keep spawning new clones in the spot you were a moment ago.

There are a number of ways to achieve this, but the easiest is stealth skills combined with deceptive evasion. If you time it right, your opponents will think the clone is you while you stealth away. This gives you a few seconds of free time to move away, reposition and maybe spawn another clone (or just run away). But bear in mind that any one clone will only fool an opponent for a few seconds.

It’s a confusion bomb and it does that well enough. The problem is confusion in general, which reflects poorly on this skill. But I agree that it could use a little more flexibility. Maybe an option to change its effect from confusion damage to cripple or daze or something?

Get used to using the focus. It’s the best tool you have for running and as long as you swap back to your main weapon/offhand in time it’s not a problem. Even if you do get jumped with the focus out, it’s also an excellent escape tool with the AoE knockdown/pull. It’s probably the offhand I use the most in WvW, because it involves so much running from place to place.

If you go full PVT gear, you’re going to have a huge health pool with those traits. That can be useful for some things, but you might want to mix it up with some zerker or assassin gear to get more crit change and damage. Critting isn’t much fun if you’re not buffing your crit damage too (in a power build anyway).

You don’t really have any chase tools, so you’re not going to be killing anyone who’s smart enough to back off once they start taking too much damage. Seems decent for holding a point, but only against one or two opponents…

Also, heavy condition builds are everywhere at the moment, so that’s not really a good thing to be weak against.

There’s nothing wrong with using GS/Staff as long as you use the Staff primarily for defensive purposes (5+2, 4) and set your gear up for direct damage, using the GS as your main weapon. In big fights with lots of people, the iWarlock also hits for decent damage in a power build, because lots of different conditions will be flying around all over the place.

Also, be aware that multiple cooldown reductions (any weapon CD trait + Illusionist’s Celerity) DO stack, but the tooltip only shows the reduction from one of them.

selan.8354:

calavel.6249:

Male mesmer + pink butterflies + Princess Wand = most fun I’ve ever had trolling people in a videogame.

now add a giant purple moustache to that and its perrrrrrfect!

Get me a makeover kit and it will become reality. :p

Male mesmer + pink butterflies + Princess Wand = most fun I’ve ever had trolling people in a videogame.

The biggest problem with confusion is that some of the best confusion-related traits are tied up in shatters/illusions. Personally, I think some of the more useless Chaos traits should be changed around to support confusion builds.

I’m not a huge fan of the GS. It’s got some fun skills and good DPS. but I hate the fact that any enemy can kitten the auto-attack just by staying close to you. Are there any other weapon skills in the game that have that restriction?

90% of the male human faces are recycled from GW1 as far as I can tell.
That game had a more “asian” flavor than this one (graphically, not economically :p)

It sounds like a fun build. I think you should test it a bit and see if something needs tweaking. I don’t really see much actual use for it though, unless you are very good at pulling specific classes away from a group.

A major change is a lot of shuffling traits around in the Illusion line. Some of them -especially minor traits – were in strange places and made it awkward to work this line into your build without traiting very deep.
Dueling is getting shuffled around too, but I’m not really sure what that’s going to do.
The rest is mostly buffs and reduced cooldowns on things, so it’s looking good for mesmers in the next patch.

- remove clone from #1 chain
- reduce damage on #1 chain
- add condition damage to #1 chain, either confusion or from a random pool like staff.

That would fix it for me.

Always condition. I think getting more than one set of gear is ridiculously grindy. At least if you want to play more than one class.

I like the idea, but the problem is that the fact that clones look like you serves an important purpose – no, most people are not fooled by them for more than a few seconds, but those seconds could be vital. In PvE, sure. In PvP/WvW, I need my clones as much for distraction as for damage.

The focus is nice when traited, but I only use it for the run buff. Even inexperienced people will move when they are taking massive stationary damage, so iWarden doesn’t work too well in WVW IMO, unless the enemy is distracted and/or immobilized. I’ve only done condition builds, so I’m not too sure what kind of gear/sigil/weapon combos work best for what you’re trying to do.

But if you want to shatter a lot, you’ll want to trait into illusions (20 points at least IMO) and pick up +crit on mind wrack trait and probably also the increased damage on Mind Wrack from Domination 10. That’s a pretty basic direct damage setup, but it doesn’t have a lot of flexibility. I personally find condition builds much more rewarding, because I think there is better synergy between the different lines when traiting for condition damage.

Do you want to zerg or roam in WvW? Are you using the focus for run buff or did you have some sort of plan with it? Are you planning to shatter offensively?

For utility, I think you should go for blink. Blink is a great skill for just about any mesmer build. It may seem like a very defensive skill, but you can also use it to confuse enemies, or even as a chase skill. It’s very versatile. I never play WvW without it.

You might want to max out dueling for the extra crit damage and precision. Dueling has a lot of good traits, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find something you want.

Oh goodie, more broken skills and traits that do not function with each other at all.
Been waiting 9 months for Temporal Curtain to get fixed so it doesn’t block you out of any other swiftness buff. Still waiting. You think they’re going to fix any of the – unavoidably many – bugs with these new skills and traits? I highly doubt it.

blutstein.2468:

I only focus on the Illusion line if I want a shatterspec or at least plan to shatter abit. At the moment I try a supportive lockdownbuild with heavy use of imbued diversion, but the awful CD of F3 even with 30 illusions is really annoying and not really reliable for a good lockdown build.
F1 is great, expecially with +20% dmg, but F2 sucks, F3 and F4 have more of a panicbutton, simply to long CD imho.

I trait Illusion for 2 main reasons: Shorter cooldown on F4 and extra confusion stacks/duration on any shatter. I like your build (and I stole a couple of things from it :o), but I prefer having more control over when and where I apply my conditions by using shatters rather than depend on enemies to kill the clones.

I tried the imbued diversion thing too, but I could never make it work. It’s fun to dump a huge stack of vulnerability and daze on a group and it certainly has its uses, but it doesn’t really do any damage on it own. You need some coordinated backup to make it shine, I think.

blutstein.2468:

calavel.6249:

Pretty similar gear to what I’m using but totally different focus… interesting.

I’m 0/20/20/0/30, using staff and scepter/sword (2 blocks+leap) and a mix of carrion and rabid gear. I’m more focused on survival, so I don’t really have any chase tools besides blink (it works pretty well though).

I use CoF often to stack confusion, so I like to have the lower shatter recharge rate rather than more crit damage or toughness. I’ve been on the fence with Phantasmal fury since it only affects a few of your clones, but I can definitly see how iDuelist can get some mileage out of it. I usually go for the retaliation on block trait instead, or the sword specialist one.

sure, 2 blocks are nice, but Sw offhand with Condiheavy build isn’t really good.

• phantasm entirely powerbased. Sure, you shatter it, but never the less dmg potential wasted.
• block entirely powerbased – yes, you block, but you hit like a wet noodle, aren’t you?

you would loose a block, but the pistol would be a much greater dmg source for your setup than sword…

Yeah, the sword skills aren’t too great for a condition build. I might give the pistol a try. Do you think it’ll still be better if I’m not in full rabid gear and focusing on the illusion line rather than dueling? The range increase from the pistol trait is nice, but Illusion 25 gives pretty much the same advantage otherwise.

Darius Glazkov.9750:

calavel.6249:

the curtain does not reflect projectiles properly when traiting focus

can’t say i’ve ever had this issue.

They may have fixed it, I haven’t checked in a while. It’s got something to do with terrain, if it’s too low compared to the shooter, it fails to reflect (and protect from) the shots.

Pretty similar gear to what I’m using but totally different focus… interesting.

I’m 0/20/20/0/30, using staff and scepter/sword (2 blocks+leap) and a mix of carrion and rabid gear. I’m more focused on survival, so I don’t really have any chase tools besides blink (it works pretty well though).

I use CoF often to stack confusion, so I like to have the lower shatter recharge rate rather than more crit damage or toughness. I’ve been on the fence with Phantasmal fury since it only affects a few of your clones, but I can definitly see how iDuelist can get some mileage out of it. I usually go for the retaliation on block trait instead, or the sword specialist one.

The focus is just generally broken. Swiftness from curtain doesn’t stack with any other swiftness buff including itself, the curtain does not reflect projectiles properly when traiting focus, and the phantasm is only useful as a defensive measure and only when traited.

But I’m stuck with it because it’s the only player-controlled swiftness skill we have…