Mesmer
Originally Published by THX
Mesmers have a reputation as an “advanced” profession. One that’s not suited for the newcomer as they’re difficult to both understand and play well. That’s a mischaracterization. It is true that Mesmers are startlingly deep and complex but you can say the same for each and every profession in the game. Mesmers are no more difficult to master than Elementalists or Monks. And no harder to learn to play, as well.
Where that undeserved reputation comes from is most likely the fact that Mesmers do not fit under the easy umbrella of “they causes damage” or “they heal others”. Mesmers are subtle, insidious characters. Characters that can turn another profession’s strengths into weaknesses. What Mesmers do, with all the grace that a Ranger plucks a bow or a Monk delivers protection, is counter.
Mesmers are the masters of the counter. Whatever another character does they have a way of countering it. Of preventing it, of ignoring it, of reducing or eliminating it. Depending on their skills and their inclination Mesmers can ruin absolutely anyone’s day by preventing them from doing what it is they want to do.
They can do this in a wide variety of ways from siphoning away energy to locking the skills that might be used but the main reason they can do so is because Mesmers are the arcane profession. While other professions are concerned with the effects of magic Mesmers are concerned with the workings of it. They have the knowledge and understanding of the mystical and ethereal that allows them to manipulate, push, prod, pull, and bend the very fabric of reality as well as the minds of their fellow man to their whims. Take, for example, the Mesmer’s primary attribute Fast Casting, as indicative of their fundamental understanding of just how things magical work.
Mesmer’s arcane mastery can also be seen in their control over the flows of the very ether that powers magic. In short, one of the defining characteristics of a Mesmer is energy sapping. Using their skills a Mesmer can steal energy from other characters or just drain that energy away into the void.
One thing a Mesmer needs in order to be effective is a good sense of timing. Mesmers use many techniques to counter but they all revolve around both sensing and reacting to their opponent’s moves. Many Mesmers use interrupts that call for watching a target and waiting for them to use a certain skill. And even those that don’t benefit from knowing when and where to cast a spell for the maximum benefit as well as how to switch from one target to another in due.
Make no mistake; there is a learning curve to becoming proficient with a Mesmer. It’s a profession that rewards finesse and skillful play over brute force and luck. And many of the lessons a successful Mesmer needs to learn can only be gained through experience and familiarity. But, as the character whose mystical powers enable them to shut down an opponent, the rewards of learning to play a Mesmer are certainly worth it.
Armor
Mesmers start with 5AL armor and will eventually come to acquire armor around a rating of 60AL. That armor comes with an extra 10 energy and 2 energy regeneration for a starting energy pool of 30 energy with 4 regeneration. Also, any Mesmer will have access to masks, which will give a bonus to any of their attributes.60AL armor is the baseline for all casters and the main difference is the sort of added protection each set of armor provides. Mesmer armors have a good selection of those armor modifiers. Rogue’s and Enchanter’s sets have a bonus of +10AL versus Physical and Elemental damage respectively, making Rogue’s the suit of choice if you expect to face a lot of Warriors and Rangers and Enchanter’s if you expect to face Elementalists and other casters. Compare that to an Elementalist’s choice of armors, which offers either 50AL +24 versus Elemental for a total of 64AL. Or with the Monk’s choice in armors which offers a base of 55AL with +15AL versus Physical. The protection against Physical is the same at 70AL but the universal protection is 5AL less. Also, The Regal set has an increase of 5AL for a universal 65AL while also carrying a –15AL penalty against Earth damage. But Earth damage isn’t all that common and several Earth damaging skills ignore armor so that vulnerability of having only 50AL against Earth is easy to accept. Another interesting set is the Virtuoso’s set, which adds 15AL whenever the wearer is casting a spell. That would give you an effective AL of 75 whenever you’re casting very handy if you’re going to be casting frequently.
With that 30/4 energy pool, also standard issue for the four caster professions, gives a character plenty of energy to cast with. Mesmers also have a lot more flexibility with their energy than other characters. Unlike Elementalists and Necromancers who can influence their energy pools with their attributes Mesmers can best play with their energy through their skills. Many Mesmer skills, such as Energy Tap, steal energy from their target and give it directly to the caster. And many more that don’t steal energy instead gain energy creating it out of thin air for the Mesmer, such as Power Drain. So, when their energy runs low a Mesmer is capable of reaching out and producing more. As long as there are still targets around, of course.
Overall, Mesmers have excellent armor for a caster profession. They don’t have the raw protection of a Ranger or a Warrior but they do have the advantage over those professions in their increased energy. But they do have sets of armor available which offer more protection and fewer vulnerabilities than other caster armors.
Attributes
Mesmers have four attributes all of which revolve around their command and control of magic and of others. Their primary attribute is Fast Casting and the other three are Domination Magic, Illusion Magic, and Inspiration Magic. Fast Casting is linked to a single skill while the others have full skill lines. Having only three attribute lines means that the skill lines of a Mesmer are larger in comparison to other professions so there’s a lot more diversity in terms of the skills to pick from even though they have no more actual skills than anyone else. Fast Casting, the Mesmer’s primary attribute, affects the way a Mesmer will cast their skills. As you might imagine it makes them cast faster. The increased casting speed only affects those skills, which are classified as spells. Fast Casting is a difficult attribute to see the immediate effects of due to the way casting times work – something complicated enough to leave to a more detailed article – and the fact that Fast Casting doesn’t scale as cleanly as other attributes but, in general, it’s worth about 3% faster cast spells. Fast Casting is helps a Mesmer to get a counter in. their spells will land first and take effect first letting them win a duel with another caster. The attribute is also linked to the sole skill of Mantra of Recovery, an elite and extremely useful skill.
Domination Magic is an attribute linked to skills. Domination skill are skills that force your opponent into certain actions either by denying them the ability or punishing them for taking that action. Especially if that action is casting a spell. As a line, Domination offers a lot to those who are looking to stop casters from sapping energy to preventing spell casting to locking skills. It’s also a line that offers some good opportunities for conditional damage letting a Mesmer punish a foe if they catch them in the right circumstance.
Illusion Magic is another attribute linked to skills. The skills in Illusion magic are a mixed bunch. There are skills like Arcane Echo, which copies the next spell you cast for a brief time, that allow the Mesmer to circumvent the game’s normal rules – in this case that you can only have one of each skill on your skill bar at a time. And there are skills like Conjure Phantasm, which causes your target to suffer health degeneration, that let the Mesmer, cause some damage. Its skills work mostly indirectly, slowing an opponent or causing them to lose health over time or otherwise weakening them or strengthening the caster. Overall, if Domination is the anti-caster line, then Illusion is the anti-melee line as it includes both ways of slowing foes to prevent them from closing to melee range as well as ways of avoiding damage once they actually do.
Inspiration Magic is another attribute linked to skills. Of the three Mesmer attribute lines, Inspiration is the most inward looking. Inspiration skills are the ones most concerned with boosting and protecting the Mesmer rather than affecting their opponent. It’s also the line that includes the most efficient and powerful energy tapping skills in a Mesmer’s arsenal as Inspiration energy affecting skills often not only take energy away from the target but give it to the caster as well.
Mesmers have several types of skills to pick, which include Spells, Enchantments, Hexes, Signets, and Stances. Spells, Enchantments, and Hexes – both from the Mesmer list and the Mesmer’s secondary profession’s list, too - are all affected by the Mesmer’s primary attribute Fast Casting as they’re all spells. As such they’re influenced by the various methods of spell countering and removal that a Mesmer tends to excel at. Often, a big threat to a Mesmer is another Mesmer. Mesmers also specialize in Signets having a wide variety of signets as well as several meta-skills that affect signets directly or indirectly. These no energy cost skills can be of great use both in managing energy and avoiding most obvious counter measures aimed at a caster. A Mesmer’s Stances – a sort of personal non-magical enchantment of which you can only have one at a time - are also known as Mantras and are instant cast skills with no set duration. They last until you win, die, or replace the Mantra with another stance.
Building a Mesmer
Mesmers are the master of the counter and, naturally, very disruptive characters. They lack the outright damage that other professions can find easily, the skills on their list that cause damage do so conditionally or over time or very inefficiently, meaning that a Mesmer out to kill another character outright is one looking to their secondary profession. But, while damage might be hard to come by with Mesmer skills, disruption isn’t. Disruption is an attempt to get around normal defenses and remove a character or two, or at the very least their abilities, from the game long enough to gain an advantage. The goal isn’t to make a target drop but to prevent them from doing anything worthwhile. It creates windows of opportunity for a team to exploit. The best advantage of this would be to cast a skill like Arcane Conundrum, which increases casting time, on an opponent’s healer, keeping them from delivering healing in a timely manner, messing up their timing, and letting those on the caster’s team get in a few more seconds of uncontested damage. Damage, then, is a bonus for the disrupter. Nice to have but it can be left up to other characters as long as disruption is capable of tilting the playing field for those brief moments. But there are as many ways of causing disruption as there are of dealing damage, if not more. What Mesmers are best at is disruption the way a Warrior is best at swinging a weapon but just how they go about it is the real question.
Because Mesmer skills are generally linked in such a way that maxing out the relevant attribute isn’t as important as it is to other professions Mesmers also tend to have more attributes raised than most other professions so they can pick and choose from even more skill lines. A Mesmer doesn’t necessarily want a 12 or higher in their attributes – for example, with the skill Diversion, which locks the next skill the target casts for a certain amount of time, a rank of 12 in Domination means that skill lock will last for 43 seconds, but that’s an incredibly long time during a battle and with such a skill you can keep Domination lower, settle for “only” locking a skill for 30 odd seconds, and use those spare attribute points elsewhere. While a healer is going to want to focus in on two attributes Mesmers often have three, four, or more attributes at significant ranks. It’s not uncommon to see Mesmers investing in an attribute for only one or two skills, the advantage they give the character outweighing pushing another attribute higher yet. Having a wider base of attribute on which to draw on means that Mesmer builds can be very well-rounded as they can “dip” into this attribute or that to pick up something interesting and useful.
You can then break down Mesmer builds by what they hate. Hate means shutting something down, basically. A Mesmer with caster-hate is a headache for any caster that comes into their crosshairs. And the same is true for melee-hate and Ranger-hate and Monk-hate and so on. Mesmers are set up to cut certain strategies off at the knees, it’s just a matter of how much and how completely. There’s, broadly, caster-hate and fighter-hate. Casters are those who use spells, the Elementalists, Monks, Necromancers, and, yes, Mesmers of the game world. And fighters are those who rely on weapons to cause physical damage, the Warriors and Rangers.
Caster-hating Mesmers are extremely popular owing in no small part to the number of casters out there but more specifically to the fact that the most valuable target of disruption in almost any battle is going to be a caster : the Monk. Mesmers make excellent “Monk hunters” because they can keep a Monk disrupted and away from healing their party while the Mesmer’s party decimates the now useless healer’s team. Many battles hinge on who can eliminate the healing base of the other team first and Mesmers can play a huge role in that.
Most Mesmers carry around more than one type of caster-hate. A good source for such skills is the Domination line although Inspiration and Illusion both have ways of messing up casters as well. In hunting casters one of the biggest weapons available is one of the specialties of the Mesmer, energy sapping skill. Denying a character energy is an easy way to keep them from casting any skills that cost energy to cast, after all, and spells are generally the biggest drains on someone’s energy pool, so it’s especially hurtful to casters. Energy denial comes from skills like Energy Tap which steals a sum of energy from the target and gives it to the caster, or from things like Energy Burn, which causes the target to lose energy and damages them for every point lose. Energy grows back over time, though, if the target is left alone. Other skills can cause a character to lose energy whenever they perform an action, such as Guilt or Shame, which cause the target to lose energy when they cast an offensive or defensive skill respectively. Those skills are examples of Punitative skills, such skills set up a devil’s choice, you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t by creating a cost for a character’s action – one they’ll have to pay to, say, use a skill, or will have to avoid by, say, not using any skills – which can be very effective in keeping someone from casting any spells. A skill like Backfire will cause a caster to take a large amount of damage any time they cast a spell meaning they’ll need to stop casting, exactly the Mesmer’s aim, or dig themselves into the grave, which will stop them from casting, too. That solution isn’t always the best, however, as it leaves the decision about whether or not to cast still in the target’s hands. If they can bear the cost of the Punitative skill then they can keep on casting. Another way to go is with an Interrupt, which is a skill which will stop a character from performing an action, and Mesmers have a large number of interrupts that can blow up spells in their casters faces. The target will lose both the energy it took to cast as well as need to wait for that skill to recharge before using it again in addition to anything else the interrupt might do. An example of this would be the skill Power Spike which if it’s cast on a target casting a spell will interrupt that spell and cause a good amount of damage. Interrupts require a caster to pay attention to their target, though, as they only work in those set moments – if Power Spike hits a target while they’re using a Signet, for instance, it’s wasted – and they work only against a single moment after which they’ll need to recharge themselves. Planning to completely shut someone down with interrupts means you’ll need to include more than one interrupt or another way of making sure that your interrupt is readily available. A way to get around this “baby sitting” is with Skill Locks. A Lock creates a new recharge time for a skill, which must elapse before a skill can become useable. Such skills prevent someone from casting spells by the simple expedient of their not being able to cast that spell until it’s unlocked. The aforementioned Diversion is an example of such a skill. Other Locks don’t actually lock skills but affect the casting time, such as Arcane Conundrum, which lengthens the casting time of any skill, making it that much more easy to interrupt or otherwise avoid or prevent.
Fighter-hate is much the same, although it breaks down a bit more depending on whether you’re more concerned about Warriors or about Rangers. Energy denial works much the same on a Ranger as it does on a caster, for instance, but against a Warrior adrenal skills – they cost no energy to cast and have no recharge timer instead charging as a character lands hits through skills or weapons in combat - which avoid energy altogether mean that sapping a Warrior’s energy away isn’t going to necessarily incapacitate them. However, Locks are especially effective against adrenal skills due to the fact that while a skill is locked it’s not gaining adrenaline. Mesmers also have ways of preventing a character from gaining adrenaline to help in shutting down Warriors. Obviously, you’ll want skills like Empathy, which hurts a character every time they attack, rather than Guilt, which works on spells alone, but the general principles of disruption remain much the same. One thing that becomes more important when hunting fighters as opposed to casters is the fact that fighters are often much more durable than casters and capable of dishing out a lot of punishment. Most Mesmer skills that cause damage ignore armor making the well-armored Rangers and Warriors easy targets but the real problem is in surviving if a Mesmer manages to annoy a fighter enough to become a target. A Mesmer has nice armor but armor that’s not going to hold up against a concerted assault from a fighter. That’s where a Mesmer’s defensive skills come into play. Mantras can be very good for avoiding damage long enough to drain away the energy or adrenaline or lock enough skills to stay out of harm’s way. As can some other Mesmer enchantments, such as Sympathetic Visage, an enchantment that cause nearby attacks to lose both adrenaline and energy.
Beyond straight hate, Mesmers also can provide a valuable service in a defensive role, as well. Mesmers have excellent disruption, which is the art of countering something before it happens but Mesmers can also counter things after they happen through removal. A Mesmer can use skills like Shatter Enchantment or Inspired Hex to remove enchantments and hexes. Concentrating on such a task places a Mesmer more in a support role as they’ll either be defending their teammates from the debilitating effects of hexes or softening opponents for the final blow.
Mesmers, by virtue of their many attributes and deep skill lines can include some or all of these many roles within the same build. Although most Mesmers tend to specialize – those that hate casters tend to hate casters very well rather than hate casters and remove enchantments – not through their attributes but through their skill selection. Still, the possibility exists to take a Mesmer in a variety of rewarding directions.
Combinations
Mesmer/Elementalist
Mesmer/Monk
Mesmer/Necromancer
Mesmer/Ranger
Mesmer/Warrior
Tips and Tactics
-Learn to swap targets quickly. There are hotkeys for selecting targets. Get to know them and get used to them. The best Mesmers are not the ones that can concentrate on a single target but the ones that can flip back and forth between several keeping them all knocked out of the game.
-Learn to time things. Timing is crucial for a Mesmer. You’ll want to land your interrupts before a spell goes off. You’ll want to hit the right skill with Diversion. You’ll want to grab the right enchantment with Inspired Enchantment. Fast Casting helps in this regard but you really need to get a sense for how other profession’s skills are cast and used. Know what you’re countering in order to counter it.
-Tap that en. One of the big advantages about playing a Mesmer is the ability to reach out and grab ahold of some energy when you need it. Whether it’s Power Drain or Energy Tap or Channeling, don’t overlook the fact that a Mesmer’s energy can easily be refilled in the right circumstances.
-To babysit or not to babysit? Babysitting is something a Mesmer will have to do a bit of. You’re going to be selecting targets and just waiting for them to make a mistake to pounce on. But you don’t want to get tunnel vision and concentrate on that one target to the exclusion of everything else. Watch them like a hawk but spare some attention for what’s going on around you at the same time. Also, you don’t want to babysit a target that’s been effectively disrupted, you want to be moving on to the next best target. You don’t want to bury someone in the sand and then spend the rest of the fight sitting on their head, you want to put as many of the other side into the sand as possible and then smack anyone who tries to dig themselves out in a hurry.
MMO Guru Network
