Guild Wars 2

Yeah, staff clones are the only clones that can do consistently good damage but only if used in a condition build. They are the only clones that do actual condition damage without the SI trait. If you are PvE staff is potentially along with the Greatsword the best condition damage weapons you can have. In PvE confusion is worthless as mobs attack too slow, so you need burning and bleeding and a side from the SI trait, only torch does any condition damage and that is situational at best. If you check in Fay’s builds thread like Ironvos mentioned you will find several condition PvE build that use staff. Now if you want an sPvP or WvW build there are several again that use the staff. In fact I wouldn’t use the staff unless I was playing a condition build or using exclusively for its defensive capabilities.

Laugh all you want, here is my Norn mesmer. I just wanted a look that would be as unique as I could put together, and while it is not the taste of many here, I get plenty of comments and compliments on my unique fashion sense. These are my two different looks.

But why would a Charr or Norn or Asura or Sylvari look like a thespian. Sorry, as ANet explained, mesmer is not because they are thespians, it is that most found the call of a thespian natural given their talents. Norn would have been called to be Skalds, and Charr would have joined the Ash Legion most likely. Ash are skulks, and Skalds live in the unforgiving Shiverpeaks, you would not catch them dressing like dilly dally actors.

The build list by Fay, stickied at the top of the forums has several Staff/GS/Scepter PvE builds listed.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/List-Find-your-Mesmer-Build-Guides

There is a bad link on Akkichan’s Boon Dispenser build, it goes to Pyro’s Phantasm support build instead.

Oh that, yeah you can’t use it to down a whole zerg, but it still works great for skirmishing.

What retaliation nerf?

Khenzy.9348:

How do you deal with full condition damage mesmers? Those absulutely destroy everyone 1v1 with the exception of necros me thinks? Also, how do you deal against minion master power necros? Their minions alone rip your retaliation in no time, have very decent ‘tankability’ and high AoE preassure meaning your illusions don’t last long at all. I think you don’t stand much of a chance against a full condi boon stripping necro, so that’s besides MMs.

Guess you didn’t read the build?

Conditions aren’t a real problem thanks to the -60% duration on them, so less then 2 seconds and the condition does no damage(Burn), less than 5 seconds and no more than one to two ticks(A lot of bleeds, confusion, etc.) The only long lasting condition is poison.

As to the minion/power necro, I guess you don’t understand how retaliation works. His minions will be dead after one or two hits and most minions have fairly long recharge times. Necro power builds rely on dagger for most of their damage as well, and this is a fast attack that will chew them up with retaliation.

Now to boon stripping, I will leave that to Pyro to answer, as I don’t have any experience against a serious boon stripper aside from Mesmer who are far and away the best boon stripping profession with Arcane Thievery, Null Field, Phan Disenchanter, Sword #1, and strip on Shatter trait.

Kylia and Pyro, two mesmers who are fonts of information and ideas. I love and look forward to it.

AC has been racheted up, and is no longer a cakewalk. HotW path 1 can be complete in 15-20 minutes with a decent group doing a speed run. If you have multiple level 80’s each can run the dungeon once to get the 60 tokens.

Anacopoulus.1539:

I got a question would grabbing (Chaotic Transference) +5% toughness converted to cond damage be worth dropping the (Confusing Cry) cry of frustration grants retaliation trait?

Seeing as the key to the damage the build does comes largely from retaliation, I doubt that would be a good choice. The main damage dealer for this build is retaliation and it being up 100% of the time. If you drop Confusing cry, you drop nearly half your damage output for a small gain in condition damage. Don’t confuse this for a confusion build.

Just a question about the iLeap with TC.

Do you ever have problems landing this against a kiting build as it has a short range?

Nearly have all the gear, and will be taking my new Immortal build into W3 this weekend.

Also have you looked at the active on those 25% speed boost signets. They all basically suck, so you can waste a utility slot on that or spend time after every fight putting it back on the bar, and hoping not to get caught in combat with it still up or you can do some of the measures that we have to do to keep up speed. Really only the d/d thief and ele and engi have easy methods of keeping their up on speed with out a crappy signet, and oh yeah Warriors all use Signet of Rage anyway, so they get a pretty consistent boost to their speed regularly. Necro is in a world of hurt without that speed boost signet, much worse than us, and I think it is the same for Ranger.

I just find it odd you are all willing to give up a utility slot for more speed. I personally wish they would remove all the speed buffs and simply just increase our out of combat speed movement for everyone.

Don’t forget though, that with 15 points into Chaos, you get 3 sec of protection when regen procs on a 15 second cooldown. That is a fair amount of protection you will still be getting from the leap through field Chaos Armor.

It is not so much a DPS issue as it is an AoE issue. He needs to be hitting multiple targets. Wrack/CoF and IZerker are our best methods, just so happens that they tend to benefit more from a power/precision build but I think a precision/toughness or a P/V/T build should also be effective for the tagging. The key is just damaging everything.

It always has. Blurred Frenzy is a channeled root, so any action during the channeling cancels out, and any movement at all cancels the distortion even if the channel is done. It has always been like this, so if it worked any other way for you it was a bug.

Jelle.2807:

Furthermore your choices ingame will influence personality so it can still change should you chose actions befitting another persona.
I’d say both charm and dignity befit a mesmer. Mesmers are sophisticated, not ferocious like boorish thugs.

Sorry but mine in 50/50 Charm/Ferocity which equals Roguish and I certainly think of the Don Juan, and Count of Monte Cristo as our type of personality. I can certainly see the Robin Hood personality for a Norn which I happen to be. So I disagree, but it also doesn’t make us a thug, but a charming rogue.

Iruwen.3164:

Most annoying things for me now are that the scepter autoattack still doesn’t cause confusion as the tooltip says and that temporal curtain swiftness still doesn’t stack with anything. I’ve basically given up hope this will ever be fixed.

They removed confusion from Scepter #1 during beta as they determined it to be too strong, so it is working as intended. They just need to fix the tooltip. That said, I think they haven’t fixed it, because they are considering putting it back in, they are just trying to figure out a balanced way. That last part is just a guess on my part.

Norn Male Mesmer: Pahldus Mindblade

Pahldus is my main online gaming handle, and Mindblade seemed an appropriate second name for a mesmer.

The Fractal Hammer doesn’t even look like a Hammer, it looks like a staff and so does the legendary for that matter. In my opinion they both look stupid.

Pistol works fine sometimes even better. Most people use the focus for the added benefit of the speed boost from Focus#4. But if you don’t mind move slowly around, which based on your current set up that is not a concern then I say go with pistol if it is more comfortable to you.

You can’t guest for W3, but if you were wanting to do things like an all mesmer dungeon run, or a mesmer zerg in Orr or things like outfit contests etc, then an all mesmer guild could work as a sidebar thing. We would just guest for the special events and such. Everyone could stay in their main guilds that way, and we could still have community all mesmer events. Admittedly, the guild wouldn’t have a lot of benefits, but over time if we rotate where we did the all mesmer events or if we all guested to one server eventually the guild would have some decent benefits.

mattenator.4328:

This is mine, still a WIP

I’m not sure about the boots/gloves/shoulders, which is why I came in here for inspiration

Also: Please ignore the staff! Haha

Please do tell what pieces those are and what your color scheme is. I really like it, I might try a variation of it on my elementalist as my mesmer is a male.

GS Shatter builds are our biggest damage build, that said, keeping the sword/x will help for when enemies get too close. Sword has good defensive capabilities and synergizes well with the high power damage build of GW. For a purely ranged build though I would go GS/Staff, this works very well in W3, check out Osicat’s Shattercat builds pinned at the top of this thread. He specifically deals with W3 and shatter builds.

Personally Vision of the Mists looks far far better than either legendary, and will only cost about 200g. No matter what way you approach it, a legendary weapon requires tons of effort and money and time. They just are too hideous for me to waste my resources.

Ohoni, one issue I think most people have with learning the mesmer is that this profession is like no other class from any game. Thus there is a learning curve that doesn’t exist with the other professions.

Second, people need to quit thinking of the phantasms as anything other than a DoT. That is what they are, they are damage over time, but instead of using condition removal to get rid of them, they need to be damaged. Phantasms are simply spells.

Also you compare the AoE to that of one of the best AoE classes. Between Wells, Marks from the Staff, Axe #3, Dagger #5, and the ultimate AoE Epidemic it is not really fair to compare necro AoE to any other class.

As to our core mechanic, learning to use shatters properly and how to time them, that is the key to ease of leveling. Also this is the most proactive profession, you must constantly be juggling targets in order to dominate large groups. That is a playstyle, some people want to play a fire and forget it profession, while others need things to keep them active at all times.

I struggled with the mesmer back when the game launched, but like you I was resisting the core mechanic. I too wanted to keep my phantasms up. But once I decided to learn the mechanic and how to make it really work, it became super easy. I just finished leveling my mesmer 1-80 in a months time. I did struggle with large groups from time to time, but only when I would fall back into bad habits. Also, I am skill wise a below average player in every sense of the word. My eye hand coordination is not the best and I tend to get tunnel vision. But in order to play the mesmer correctly and efficiently, I had to break those tendencies and really focus on retraining myself. This is just a different playstyle, but once you master the style, it is hard to go back. Those who tell you things get easier after level 40 aren’t lying, they just go from normal to ridiculously easy. Deceptive Evasion makes Champions into chumps basically. It may simply be that this play style is not something you want to adapt to, or like me it might be counter intuitive, but if you really want to succeed with your mesmer, you need to really look at how the profession is intended to be played.

As to you thinking it is bad design for ANet to design the professions to have different learning curves, well that is your opinion. I happen to disagree. I do know that this was intentional. Mesmer, Engineer, and Elementalist were meant to be a steeper learning curve, while Necro, Warrior and Thief were meant to be out of the box ready to go professions. This was mentioned several times during the build up to the release. This is intentional and not ever going away.

He complains we have no AoE, yet we probably have the best AoE of any profession thanks to our profession mechanic. That is why our weapons have only a small amount of AoE.

Obviously this guy must be playing Warrior or Ele … right? Wait what no, he is playing necromancer. I play both and I clearly have more options as a Mesmer. Hammer, I would suggest if you feel this way stick to Necro, because you clearly have no understanding of the core of this profession.

How about:

Undertakers For Hire
Grave Diggers
Dead Men Walking(or to not be sexist Dead Things Walking)
Minion Warranty Insurance Group(I love that quote by Asura necros when a minion dies "These should really come with a warranty)

Experiment with all the weapons, and find the ones that work best for you. Only scepter is generally regarded as a bad weapon, but even it in the right situations has its uses. Greatsword is the direct damage weapon, and Staff is the great defensive weapon.

For utility skills, it is really a matter of preference. Most will used null field, mirror images and deception, but all of them have uses. Mantras are really best if you plan to build a mantra only type build and take awhile to really come into their own.

Practice shattering alot to really get the hang of it and the timing. It is our core mechanic and very useful.

Once you can get trait points, put the first 5 points into Illusion in order to get the minor trait. It gives a 20% cooldown to all clone and phantasm summoning skills, both weapon and utility. Probably the best trait in the whole game in my opinion.

As to the rest there are several good guides in this forum. Do a search and find one that sounds good to you.

He is probably mixing up that with the 20% swiftness duration boost, Centaur is up 12 with a cooldown of 15, Air is up 6 with a cooldown of 10.

I would recommend LazyKai’s guide. I just leveled 1-80 in just under a month’s time using his guide. I varied off it a little bit when I was running into certain issues in PvE, but on the whole it made leveling very easy. I zoomed through the “difficult” levels of 1-40 and had few if any problems. I did no crafting to bypass any levels either.

Saturn.6591:

Gallrvaghn.4921:

Also scepters. Maybe adjusting the attack speed of these weapons so that it doesn’t stack a bajillion stack of confusion with infinite duration when 3 clones are up and attacking one target.

Wait, what? Please show me how to do that with a scepter. As far as I know, scepter can only inflict 5 stacks of confusion every 18 seconds (15 seconds cooldown + 3 seconds casttime); provided that the target doesn’t get the idea to just dodge or interrupt your cast. I mean, you are probably refering to the trident like it was before the patch (I guess), but then you say “also scepters” and continue talking in plural. So again… how would you possibly do that with a scepter? If it would be possible, I’d actually use one, cause then it wouldn’t be completely useless anymore. ^^

Back in beta, the scepter granted one stack of confusion on chain 3 as it created a clone. I would prefer they got rid of the clone and just gave us confusion even if it was only on the third attack like the clone is now. If you go to the wiki it still shows the scepter description as it was in beta.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Scepter

I just want to agree with the above poster. You can break off combat without needing to straightline outrun your opponent. This is the thinking man’s profession and it is not easy to master, but once you do you will often feel invincible.

Yeah, that was in the last patch a few weeks ago. Hashed and rehashed. But glad you noticed it.

Male Norn: Pahldus Mindblade

HeatBlast.9346:

I’ve just made a mesmer and I can’t seem to kill anybody. I’m know I’m not doing it right, are you able to tell me how to do it. Do you create loads of illusions first or somethin

You said you were interested in a great sword mesmer correct? Then I would suggest reading through this guide, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Lazy-Kai-s-Guide-to-PvE-Leveling-Guide

It helped me a ton, and now less than a month later I am 73, and likely to hit 80 by Wednesday. The class really shines after level 40, but with this guide I was able to fly through the first 40 levels without too much issue.

Need more info than this!

Had you been downed a few times before this?

Every time you are downed in rapid succession, the downed state starts with lower and lower health until you are finally instagibbed. Never had this happen on my warrior, but on some the squishier professions I have seen this happen.

So any more details you can give us?

Hidyman.1956:

Rok.5260:

I’m surprised not a lot of other necromancer players are concerned about this and voicing out their opinions more…

This has been covered before, but I also agree there should be more control of the minions.
If you don’t think Necromancers are about minions, look up the definition of Necromancy.

Funny, your source mentions virtually nothing of controlling undead minions, but instead equates necromancy to divining by summoning dead spirits to foretell the future. Don’t know how that supports your argument, might try reading your source before using it. On top of that, people who site wikipedia as a source lose most of their credibility instantly.

Second these are brainless dead minions, what makes you think we can control them.

Third, they are meant to be a source of extra damage for a necromancer.

Fourth, controlling their pets, is a core mechanic for the ranger. Each class has their own core mechanic, ours in a second health bar for survival. We are very difficult to kill if we are played properly. Also, remember that a ranger can only have one pet out at a time, we can have multiple minions. Giving us more control would make it overpowered in many cases.

What the minions truly need is more durability so they are not one shot by every AoE. That is all I want for the minions.

All that aside, I despise the minions in this game, they clutter up the screen and just utterly annoy me.

Also if we get to control our minions, then they would likely have to allow mesmers to control their clones and phantasms more. Do we really want that?

Asura is the only race I can think of for whom the racial skills could even in the slightest be useful. Overall, our utility skills are far better for us than any racial skill is.

I would recommend going 5 points into illusion first to get the cooldown on all your illusions then going full on power/precision. I am leveling using this guide more or less but that universal cooldown is massive in the scheme of things and since most gear is power in the early levels it won’t hurt your dps that much.

Brutalistik.6473:

Heh 8/10 not bad :P and the fact you wasn’t aware of the bleach character name Grimjoww I’ll make it 9/10

My Ranger charr name is Bagi Natureclaw and her pet name is Ryo.

I will give it a 7/10. Something about Nature that just doesn’t feel right to me even though you are a ranger. Otherwise I would have given it a 9/10.

Here is mine:
Donner Steelclaw – Donner’s father borrowed the name from a fallen Norn comrade and found it quite fitting when he learned the name meant “thunder”. Donner was accepted into the Steel clan when he used his claws to rip out the throat of a Flame Legion sympathizer, thus earning him the clan name of Steelclaw. He kept the warband name as Steel even after dispatching the former legionairre, Urvan Steelbane. He felt the Steel name fit him and his clan as they were prone to using their steel to fashion victory for the Blood Legion. He was eventually drafted into the Vigil and continued his savage and brutal methods of dispatching his foes. Eventually, he was partnered up with Trahearne aka Kindling to take down Zhaitan.

Norn don’t dwell on the past. Legends are made by accomplishing great deeds in the here and now. No Norn pines for the past like humans and Charr do. A Norn’s only interest in the past is knowing what kinds of feats they must accomplish to make their own legend.

The reason Rangers might not be getting the fixes they want also, is that the developers are testing the fixes and running into even more problems, so rather than break the profession further they are leaving as is til they can fix it correctly and balanced. It might not be the fix we want, but at least we know they tested and believe it will fix the issue. It is then up to us to figure out how to adapt. We will never get things exactly the way we want them.

The difference between the thief’s Dagger Storm and the warrior’s Whirling Axes is that they do nothing against ranged attacks and Dagger Storm is an elite with a 90 sec cooldown. Do you want to give up the projectile reflection for movement or the cooldown for more damage? Do you really want that?

Nice I have been building a well AoE power build, this will make a good compliment for attacking champions.

Ironvos.9014:

They can also just move sideways instead of backwards and still hit you

Oh and they can’t do this to all the other AoEs? That is simply not a valid argument in the least.

The just recently changed the skill, and they still need to update the tooltips. Whoever updates the tooltips for ANet is either ill-informed or lazy and needs to be replaced.

What he is saying that we apply so many new bleeds, that if we get to the cap with long duration bleeds then we don’t get to apply anymore bleeds and as bleeds are the major source of our damage, we need to be able to keep applying new one. Thus if we focus on maximizing condition damage first and foremost we will see the most benefits as we really don’t have many problems reaching the bleed cap on stacks even without longer durations.

Looking forward to these, as I am only level 37 with my necro right now, those will come in handy when I start running the FotM.

Not to mention the Guardian has regen as long as they have the Virtue of Resolve is in passive form.