GW2 a Mesmer's Role pt.2

Previously I went through a small history on Mesmers and Guild Wars so in part two of this Mesmer bonanza I'm going to look at the new Mesmer and how she fits into GW2 ecosystem.

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If you're part of the 13% of the Guild Wars 2 population who's already decided that a Mesmer is the class for you then that's awesome. I'm glad you're here. But maybe you're on the fence and haven't decided? Maybe you previously played a heavy class and are considering changing it up with a caster this time. Maybe you really love casters, but are put off by the complexity of a Mesmer? Worry not weary traveler by the end of this you'll have a better idea of what a Mesmer is and be fully capable of experiencing one of (IMHO) the most rewarding classes in GW2. So hang on to your butts kids because we're going for a ride.

Mesmers, an Introduction

Mesmers are casters and as such they aren't specifically designed to stand on the front lines and deal with their foes directly That being said, they sure do have plenty of ways to evade, redirect, interrupt, and avoid damage. I've even made an argument for their viability in melee before. But in their purest form Mesmers are actually unique form of hybrid support class. I feel that best way to put it is as follows.

The Mesmers' primary role is to prevent their foes from fighting effectively and to increase the effectiveness of their allies.

Though their support methods can be strange at times primarily Mesmers function to distribute boons, spread conditions, interrupt attacks, or trick foes into killing themselves. There's a number of different ways Mesmers can achieve this goal and Illusions are definitely one of my favorite.

These are not the Mesmers you're looking for

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Illusions are amazing. Illusions deal damage, cause conditions, and can buff your allies. They love distracting enemies, and they're more than willing to die in order to save you. Through traits Illusions can be augmented to do any number of awesome things. Some Illusions even tank damage for you. And the best part is you don't have to get your hands dirty to use them.

Say your party is getting annihilated by Ettins? A timed diversion will interrupt their attacks and prevent them from doing anything for another second. Plenty of time to send them to the grave. Or you could change it up and run for the hills while your Illusions act as a distraction to help you escape. OR you could start the fight entirely differently. Summon the Illusions first and then make your party invisible and sneak up on the Ettins. Kill em before they saw it coming! That'll show those pesky Ettins!

The options are endless. I love having options. The problem is, for a new Mesmer, understanding how to make sense of all this madness. There's currently 17 different skills that create Illusions. Many of them are bound to weapons, but plenty of them are utility skills? Mesmers have a TON of utility skills. Heck, you could fill your bar with just Illusions and still have some leftover. So how do you even make sense of all this?

Well here's a good rule of thumb I've developed.

Focus, Focus, Focus


Find a play style you like and focus on it. Despite what your mother always told you. Do put all your eggs in one basket. Don't diversify your portfolio. Specialize on one thing and do it right. If you're ok at everything, you'll be great at nothing. Be great, be amazing, be spectacular! As an example, if you find yourself always rushing headlong into fights then pick skills that work for you. Fit in skills that stun, stealth, interrupt, and daze. Make sure that your foes are attacking you for as little time as possible. That way you can stab them in the face without retaliation. Lovely!

And when in doubt. Turn it into a moa. Everyone loves roast moa for dinner!

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Originally I had only planned to make this a two part series, but in my writing, rewriting, and revising, I realized that I had enough different content to merit a third part! Lucky you! So stay tuned, next time I'll be looking at how to maximize your Mesmer and even give you some build suggestions as you level through Tyria.

GW and Mesmers. A short history pt.1

I've realized that I'm developing a common theme among my posts. It's definitely Guild Wars, and probably Mesmers. I don't want go and say that for sure all I'm going to write about is Mesmers, but given that's what I have the most direct experience with right now, I'm going to make the most of it and work towards developing this trend. So let's get started properly and work through a some lessons on Mesmers for those of you who are new to the Guild Wars universe, or for those of you who have been here a little while and are only just now considering rolling a Mesmer. In this first installment we're going to go back in time and take a brief look at Mesmer background and history and how they pertained to Guild Wars from the start.

First of all: What are Mesmers, exactly?

In as few words as possible the Mesmer is an Arcane Trickster, my single favorite class description of all time. It gets right to the point. They're not Elementalists, or Mages but they are magic users. At the same time they're also deceivers intent on causing confusion and misdirection. They do damage, but not directly. They have plenty of hexes, but usually the hex comes with a caveat. Something like, the hex will only work if your foe performs and action, or doesn't, or whatever. Though their amazing interrupts and energy denial made them a staple in the PvP format. You can, of course, make a Mesmer revolve around doing direct spike damage and that furthered their roles in structured PvP, but even the Mesmer spike relied on your target having energy to deal it's damage. If your target could hide their energy then most of the spike tended to fall short.

Mesmers: Tyria's Neglected Child.

All these factors served to increase the confusion of  "why bring a Mesmer" specifically in a PvE situation it didn't make sense to bring a character who could only deal damage under certain circumstances. Even with all their usefulness the Mesmer tended to be very contextual. Mesmers were a class that was complex by nature and the massive pool ArenaNet had developed with their skill system (1319 total skills to be exact, of which a player could use any 8 from 2 different professions. Giving them anywhere from 222 to 281 skills to pick from at any given them) only worked to compound this complexity. Furthermore there wasn't typically something that a Mesmer could do that another class couldn't also do. After all, with the secondary class system anyone could take a Mesmer skill if they wanted. And in PvE, when the goal is to kill mobs as quickly as possible, people usually just went for the damage. It just made more sense.

You tank the mob, you heal the tank, you kill the mob.

A Mesmer was a big question mark in that equation. On their own, were too niche to handily fit into the standard Holy Trinity template. They were great for soloing, and specific builds, but general PvE didn't have a place to fit them in. Mesmers were almost too specific of a class.


If you're interested in some deeper reading on the Mesmer's lack of a role in PvE I suggest this post, it's quite lengthy but it goes into great detail on the issue.

Introducing ... Hard Mode.

Turn the clocks forward to the Hard Mode update. The days of Normal Mode and mass nuking were over. Previously all that the party needed was tanking, healing, and damage. They could clump up the mobs and decimate them all in one swoop. Elementalists were great at that. The introduction of Hard Mode improved monster AI dramatically, and increased their health and damage. Packs of mobs no longer stayed clumped up under meteor storms. They would scatter and avoid damage. Nuking, in the old sense, was no now impossible.

The group now needed a way to control the mobs as well, mitigate damage, reduce their healing, and shut them down. So much so that if you're going to run any Hard Mode PvE content today you'll always want to consider including Mesmers. It turns out that the way most Mesmer abilities worked made them perfectly suited to exploit Hard Mode and the mobs' increased attack speed and altered AI. Since Mesmers had always done damage best whenever mobs performed actions, now that they were performing actions 33% faster it meant that the mobs were actually now killing themselves 33% faster as well. It became a perfect situation for Mesmers to flourish. Then take into account Mesmer's amazing interrupts, they became crucial to killing any mob that had a lot of healing potential. The Mesmer could shut down the healer and the rest of the group could do their job and finish off the pack.

That's where it turns out the Mesmer fit in after all, by controlling how and when their foes perform actions. When you can't act, you can't fight, and when you can't fight, you die.

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I hope you enjoyed this short lesson on Mesmers. In the next part I'll be looking at the new Mesmer and how she fits into the Guild Wars 2 universe.

GW2 A look back at Ascalon Catacombs

In case you've been living under a rock for the last couple years it might be worth pointing out that Guild Wars 2 has done a few things to the typical MMO party dynamic (you probably already knew that). But with the recent Beta Weekend Event, and Stress Test we've all finally gotten a first hand look on how these new dynamics actually affect the standard MMO structure, which for some of us couldn't have come soon enough. For the last 5 years I've been on the perpetual Guild Wars merry-go-round in wait for this foretold sequel. I definitely had my ups (finally completing a Vabbian armor set) and downs (solo vanquishing Cantha... definitely never doing that again) so this breath of fresh Tyrian air was a more than welcome change to the constant grind random arenas had to offer.

Fortunately enough for me not only did I have the entire weekend free, I managed to stumble into a beta guild with enough like minded (over zealous level grinders) to be able to test our might against the Ascalon Catacombs early on in the weekend and get an even deeper look at how party dynamics had been completely thrown upside down.

First of all our group consisted of: Necromancer, Necromancer, Mesmer (me), Engineer, Elementalist (I guess you could add Rytlock Brimstone, and Eir Stegalkin as well since they do help you out quite a bit) but the first thing you would probably notice is that we didn't have a tank. Not even remotely. Our heaviest armor was on the Engineer and he's a ranged support class. Also worth pointing out, the engineer, elementalist and I were all slightly under leveled for the Catacombs. It's a level 30 dungeon and we were 26, 27 and 28 respectively, but given that the necromancers were slightly over leveled (32, 33) we figured we'd give it a shot and see if we couldn't send some ghosts to their ultimate end.

And we did. Eventually.

The run started out a little rocky as everyone was trying to figure out their class and how to work as a proper team. The question was even brought up, before the first boss, if we should just abandon ship and try again some other time. We even wiped 3 times on the first staircase. So far things were not going smoothly.

I get the feeling that a lot of initial groups in Guild Wars 2 will run through the same problem. You see GW2 isn't the typical "tank and spank" that we've all gotten so used to, and the mobs often hit hard, like 2-shotting caster classes hard. You can't stand around and watch the pretty lightis. The priest is not going to heal you up, and the tank is not going to magically taunt the aggro off of you. At first glance it would appear that you have the distinct responsibility of looking after yourself, but eventually it becomes more than apparent that the best way to take care of yourself is, in fact, to look after everyone else instead.

And once the whole party realizes that everything just starts working.

This isn't some weird, hippie, everyone heals each other drum circle. It's a unique and dynamic control system where each of the classes uses their strengths in a way to complement the rest of the group. For instance, as a Mesmer, I figured that my strengths were in confusion, interruption, and misdirection. I could best support the party through my ability to stun, cripple, fear, and daze mobs. My primary goal, it turned out, was not to deal direct damage, but instead to prevent and redirect damage and Mirrored Feedback was a spectacular way to do that. Not only could I keep ranged mobs from hitting any of us I could actually redirect their arrows back and turn their attacks into our attacks. Then if they were still alive I could daze and stun them further preventing those pesky ghosts from doing much of anything.

I can't even recall when I came to this epiphany. It may have been lingering in the back of my head the whole time and I just needed the right moment to realize it, but it appeared that the rest of the party came to this realization at around the same time. The fights kept going better and better that by the time we got to Master Ranger Nente he was a total pushover. This dynamic is something distinct to GW2. The fights can be complete chaos, but at the same time there's a distinct and underlying level of control. It's this orchestrated chaos that made the Ascalon Catacombs the most stressful, dramatic, fun, and rewarding dungeon run I've ever had the chance to complete. Everyone in the party, without any instruction or communication, somehow begins to know exactly what they're supposed to be doing. And there's instances (I'm looking at you Lovers) where it feels like nothing goes right and still by what would seem to be some form of divine intervention the fight ends up in success.

We were dropping like flies, slowly chipping away at Vassar's health, getting pounded by Ralena's lightning storms and managing to just barely keep the party afloat by the slimmest of margins. Naturally though, with Vassar at a sliver of life, everyone drops dead. And we think, "Well this might just be the end of it. Good job team but let's throw in the towel." I can only hazzard a guess, it might have been Eir, or her dog, or maybe one of the necromancers managed to run back just in time to keep Vassar in combat, but by some miracle when I had returned to the fight Vassar was still on a sliver of life and dying rapidly. Everyone was alive again (you see you can revive at a waypoint and run back to the fight if you want) and in mere moments Vassar was dead and all that left was to clean up the vaporal body of Ralena. I think during the entire ordeal there was only one line of text written between the whole group.

"Res at the waypoint. Run back."

After that King Adelbern's death was all but written in stone. Our team had come together and even without a true tank there was no spirit in the Ascalon Catacombs that could defeat us.

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also, special thanks to Syp over at Bio Break for mentioning my blog in his NBI post today. The Newbie Blogger Initiative is a great system that he's developed and I'm delighted to be able to take part in it.