Guild Wars 2

From the inception of the announcement of the professions, ANet said they released them in the order of difficulty to learn to play. Guess which was the first profession released and which was the last. From the outset we have known that Warrior was going to have an easier learning curve and Mesmer would have the steepest learning curve. I think this is dead on.

I leveled up a Warrior first, just to see if I was going to be skilled enough to play the game, and now I am leveling up every other class. Now I find that I prefer the steeping learning curve of the Mesmer, because it keeps me on my toes. At least with Mesmer though, I have not been frustrated to no end, like when I play a thief. I just can’t play that class effectively. Thief just requires a playstyle that I am not good at. I love engineer and mesmer, and have a pretty easy time with Necro and Ranger. All of this is from a PvE perspective as I am not huge PvP player.

Voodoo Tina.4180:

The biggest problem playing a tanky build as a Mesmer is that other players think you’re just bad. Mesmers can tank. We have as much HP as warriors, and if your trait and gear for it, more toughness than most soldiers. If they go all out they will have more, but not many do.

Warriors have a base 3k more HP than a mesmer, and the Warrior can rather easily hit over 2100 Toughness and even over 2200, and with their heavy armor this pushes them over 3400 Armor. Mesmers can’t hope to match those numbers.

Now I am not saying a mesmer can’t tank, unless someone is thinking along the lines of a WoW tank. No profession can tank like a WoW tank. But please when we make statements as facts, make sure they are accurate statements. How well a mesmer can tank at level 80 or in PvP I cannot tell you as I am still leveling my mesmer up, but I do have a 80 Warrior with around 25k health and the afforementioned 3400 armor. And I am still running 1800 power and a 36%/56% crit chance(56 is with perma fury) with just exotic armor and weapons and no runes on my armor yet.

LastShot.4762:

Not sure what your level now, but assuming start with level 1:

Step 1. get healing signet asap, again awesome early game.

Step 2. first 10 trait pts all into Arm, pick up Deep Strike, invest all skill pts gain in between this time to signets.

Step 3. next 10 trait pts into Strength, get Berserker’s Power.

Step 4. next 10 trait pts into Discipline, get Heightened Focus.

Step 5. after reseting, 15pt into defense, then repeat step 2- 4.

After that, start put points whereever you see fit.

This is leveling build I go for, not saying its good for late game, but works great up to 60, even with under level gears.

After that, I crafted all the way to 80 for my warrior, so not sure how last 20 levels go.

This is pretty much the method I used all the way to 80, but once I hit 80 I switched to a toughness/healing shouts build. I think it is viable from 60 on.

Well, honestly I don’t use the staff, and I should have added water when talking about survivalability. I have found staff only really good for WvW or large scale events. I normally run scepter/dagger.

I will trust you when you about water being more important on the staff, due to my not playing it all that much. But any way you slice it, eles have plenty of survivability even without a large HP pool.

I normally avoid saying things like l2p, but with this class as squishy as it is, it is really important that players learn about all the tools in their bag of tricks and when to use them. I know they said this is supposed to be the second easiest class to play according to ANet’s comments about the order they released them, but I largely disagree. Players coming in from other games really struggle with the squishy classes here. Those of us that played an elementalist in GW1 have a little better understanding as we played with water and earth before. We understand these are our defensive tools.

Elementalists have the highest damage output and 2nd highest burst damage, plus with earth available almost all the time(save for when it is on cooldown) they also have high survivability just in a different way.

Health is not the be all end all of survivability, and in my opinion having played both mesmer and elementalist, ele has a lot more survivability. Not saying mesmer are complete glass cannons, that actually goes to the thief. The thief gets stealth to mitigate that problem, just like the mesmer gets clones and the ele gets earth skills. Every class has their method of mitigating damage, you just need to play to those if you plan on doing much PvP. As to PvE, it is not hard to survive, just strafe and you will be fine. When I strafe I so rarely get hit in PvE at least until the higher levels it makes the game a little boring. So now I only strafe if I think there is a chance I might go down.

Warriors/Necros w/out gear at lvl. 80 — 18,372
Engineer/Ranger/Mesmer w/out gear at lvl. 80 — 15,082
Elementalist/Guardian/Thief w/out gear at lvl. 80 — 10,805

So yeah, ele’s are low man, but not the only one getting the shaft.

Life Force and your HP pools are completely separate. When you Life Force pool hits 0 you simply exit the Death Shroud. There is no damage carryover as your backstab did damage to the Life Force pool which is not tied to our HP pool. Just for your information while in DS, the necromancer cannot regenerate their HP pool even if they are out of combat. Your HP pool stays right where it was until such time as you exit DS. I have confirmed this in game.

Maybe you should read the Wiki.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Life_force

This is working exactly as intended. It is the necro version of stealth and avoid death.

I rode it all the way to 80, before switching to the shout build.

However 60 is probably a better level to look at changing out. At that point the precision you are getting from gear starts to heavily outweigh what you are getting from the signet bonus.

Plus you will want to use your elite signet often as a massive damage booster and a speed boost.

No need to switch out of the crit based role though til you hit the mid to high 70’s. Once you reach the mid 70’s I found myself needing more toughness and healing. Good luck, and enjoy the ride.

I would guess he was leveled down, as armor stats are not affected just the armor rating. Also, the Guardian might be able to stand there and soak up the damage, but his own damage output would have made that fight a real grind as their damage output is not that great. It tends to take them longer to kill things unless they go the glass cannon route, then they lose that survivability.

Umm, you do realize that not all risen are necromancers. Preservers are undead Guardians, and Corruptors are undead Elementalists.

Not saying you are wrong about us needing variety, but don’t just steal another professions animations and recolor them, which is exactly what they did for the Risen.

Guys the DR only kicks in for those that are running 10-15 minute dungeon clears, honestly the only way one can do that is using exploits or abusing their skills to bypass unwanted content. My guild ran AC twice last night back to back different paths and got the full amount of tokens at the end of each. We were efficient and cleared both dungeons in about 30 minutes each, the first was a little faster than that even. So if you are hitting all the content and not running the same path over and over, the DR really shouldn’t affect you. Now I do understand that there is a bug that might not make this true for everyone but I think what we encountered is the expected result.

Server: Jade Quarry
Map: Queensdale
Skill point right outside Caudecus’s Manor is not missing but is faceplanted in the dirt and unclickable.