by Lego on 01 Oct 2007, 13:33
I will write until I'm bored with myself. Anyways, I will assume you are talking about a dom mesmer so I will go from there. The first thing you should be concerned with is kiting since you are probably the number one target of the opposing team. This is for one reason not only because you are instrumental in your team's offense, but a large part of your team's defense as well (more on this later). Be aware of the type of damage your opponent will be dealing, this should be determined quickly at the beginning of a match. Remember that although a 40/40 set is a mesmer's best friend, it can also be your biggest enemy as there is a good chance you are likely to be hard res and dp on hard res is baaaaaaad. Even if your party's health is not being pressured, be aware of when a spike is coming so that you can pre-swap to a spike set if you are able to see it coming. Always have your spike set be a shield vs. damage and a + armor weapon, an argument can be made for swapping to all health if you were not quick enough on your swap as an oshitset before damage lands, but in general on low armored targets extra armor > extra health. When kiting damage be aware of what knockdowns are coming, prekiting can be very valuable in throwing off the timing vs. a shock warrior, but if it is bull's strike you are worried about you may have to attempt countering that in your movement as well. One of your priority interrupts should always be big damage caster spells, ie. lighting orb, esurge, eburn. Its always fun to stop to make a warrior miss bull's while interrupting an orb when you stop. I primarily run all health armor with occasional +10 vs. physical on chest and legs depending on what we will be facing in an AT.
Elites:
MoR - MoR ward seems to be a very popular combo in the current meta. Allows people to get away with dropping a bsurger without comprimising an extreme amount of defense. The huge advantage of this bar is being able to perma-maintain a ward while being fairly uninterruptable, although the timing and order of usage makes it fairly predictable for diversion and it can actually be interrupted with some practice and with good ping. I am constantly asked to run this when guesting and despise it for the fact that by hurting this character's energy you can very effectively shutdown a large part of both their defense and their offense forcing the memser to play either offensively or wait for energy to ward. Having glyph on your bar helps to alleviate this problem somewhat but forces you to drop a skill on an already tight bar. Running MoR ward with res sig makes me want to punch babies. Since most mesmer skill usage is timing based anyways, I don't find the extra recharge on skills maximally effective. Situations are not that common where you will be interrupting so much on a non-MoR bar that you will be starved for interrupts and begging for quicker recharge, however, if you are allowed to shame/diversion spam with MoR it is absolutely devastating. The problem is, in high level gvg, teams won't allow this to happen with wild throw/wild blow being very prevalant. If there are multiple annoying stances in your build, ie. hexbreaker, trapper stances, etc, you have a greater chance of being able to get away with keeping it up. Keep in mind that if your diversion/shame is interrupted you won't get the MoR bonus on recharge. You would have to physically abuse me through vent somehow to not allow shame with diversion on an MoR bar because the biggest downfall of shame is its recharge.
Hex Eater Vortex - So I've run a few two billion or so matches with this elite on my bar so I'm obviously a strong proponent of this skill's power. Most mesmers don't find it being a very "sexy" elite as tabbing back and forth between your own party bar and opponent's bars can be difficult and annoying for some. While it is true that you may miss an interrupt or two because of this, I find it no less annoying than the aftercast on a mesmer with melee ward bar. Versus balanced with just a water ele for hexes you can create tremendous pressure simply by being quick on your hex removal with this skill. If you remove blurred vision as soon as it lands, their runner is doing much more harm than help and your frontline will love you for it. Pulling freezing gust off even for pressure can be great as well, simply because the skill is huge damage and the enchant removal is great as well. Always try to coordinate your removal with monks so that they don't take off single front line hexes and let them know if you are mid-diversion that you will be removing hex. If you begin to build a trust with your monks you should only need to let them know when you can't pull a hex off your frontline. Versus hexes you should still save your hexeaters only for frontline as often times the concern with hexes is simply not having enough damage to kill. Hex Eater does alot to solve this problem and it shouldn't be used to pull backline hexes except in the instance of a migrained defensive character when you are heavily pressured. You would have to argue pretty hard with me to convince me to ever leave my 40/40 set when fighting a heavy hex build because fast recharge is just too good. Sometimes you can pull a diversion from a midliner and catch frenzied warriors with it, but this tactic is pretty meh unless you are under big pressure or just starved to use your elite for lack of other hexes. I would only hold an HeV on a hexed warrior if your team was spiking offensively in the very near future. Someone made the comment that i pleaked a parabond in obs chat when we fought vD's hex build in the tourney and although you will notice I focus on key interrupts overall, I would rather hurt someone's energy if I have an interrupt available just before my HeV recharges then not use one at all. If you are playing the bar properly you wanna spam the shit outta HeV while trying to get important interrupts in between. Its not worth sitting around waiting for a skill to be casted when you could be HeVing though vs. heavy hexes. You can prioritize waiting for a melee ward over removing blurred vision vs. balanced because that creates more overall pressure, but in that instance you should communicate with your monks on vent that you wont be removing the hex straight away.
Energy Surge - Probably the only other common elite I would worry about wasting finger energy on discussing in this post. Can be really devastating on certain maps such as Nomad's where the fight will be forced to a small area. This skill should pretty much be used on recharge, but know that you should actively search for balled targets with 8 or more energy unless you are holding for a spike when you don't have an available shatter on an unprotted target. I think you can pressure more effectively by using it for damage/e-denial if your energy is in a situation such that you are forced to choose b/w surging on spike or holding shatter for a prot. I would go with this elite over HeV if the opposing team will not be running any hexes outside of general dom spam. Some would argue that if you run HeV over this the other team will just not hex so its not worth having HeV but imo at least you are keeping your warriors clean unless you have a good way of keeping their e/mo off stand and away from your melee. I should mention that esurge and HeV rape alot of faces at vod in comparison to an MoR mesmer. See Reno vs. rawr from the august championship if you need proof.
Some General Discussion integrating non-elite skills and tactics:
Power Leak is your best friend. It is possibly the strongest mesmer skill in the game, elite or non-elite. It should be used as close to recharge as possible. Know when and why you are power leaking certain skills as well. It is not effective to pleak flaggers who are leaving the stand as they will regen energy soon thereafter. It can be devestating to pleak an lod when the opposing team is already pressured, especially if you can get more than one in a row, however, pleaking lod without pressure is like pissing in the wind.
Power Drain is your other best friend. You want to be as spammy as possible on mesmer and the greatest single energy management skill in the world is how you do this. I cry every time I hear someone say they pdraineded a prot spirit or an infuse or something because they "knew the monk was going to cast". Its not worth blowing your primary energy management skill on an interrupt that has a very minimal chance of actually interrupting, at the cost of not being able to cast other skills on your bar.
Power Lock is a great skill and I was more excited about it when gwen first came out, but it is really hard to argue having it over pleak or pdrain. I think the best argument for it is in some heavy condy or degen build where plocking lod can be devestating. In the September Monthly AT, you saw Be Team and vZ exploit its power for shutting down LoD because its basically an uninterruptable Humility Signet and an easier to land dshot, it just needs to be utilized in the proper build where skill usage denial can wipe a team faster than energy denial.
It can be frustrating to play on intercontinental servers with lag issues at times where catching 1 second casts suddenly becomes a twitch reflex as opposed to a routine interrupt. As a mesmer in high level gvg, being able to twitch a 3/4 second cast is a necessity imo, or you arn't doing any favors to your guild. If you take one lesson home, its don't throw out random interrupts on mesmer because you think you can predict cast times, you are only doing yourself a disservice, save that kind of silly behavior for rangers. You can, however try to get quick casts after knockdowns, but I wouldn't do it when 8v8, save it for SoR runners on splits and things of that nature. If you get one you can pat yourself on the back and /flex emote in game if you want.
The reason I said earlier you are a hugely defensive and offensive character is because of your interrupts and diversion. People may not consider a mesmer defensive but pleaking an opponents mesmer can be terrible for them. A team shouldn't really be able to kill if you are pleaking diversion, unless they are a huge pressure build, in which case you should probably be interrupting diversion/shame as much as possible anyways. I don't think I ever remember a match where two teams fought 8v8 with no map movement until vod with no deaths occuring so you can actually interrupt diversion shame until your pressure mounts enough to score kills. If you have a ranger/preturn paragon or some other character that can stop dom spam on your team this should make your job easier and let you focus more on other things, but don't discount the importance of interrupting diversion. If you want to peel enough layers of defense off in the current meta vs. blockway balanced, you need to prioritize your interrupts. Melee ward is the number one interrupt you need to try to get in order to score kills unless you have huge aoe in your build, bsurge should be second as pleaking bsurge is a really strong move. You don't need to divert bsurge to mount pressure, if you can simply hurt a bsurgers energy by pleaking/stripping attune, orbs, wards, and bsurges enough to allow them only to blind 4-5 times per minute you have essentially removed that character from the game if you can keep their ward down. Large priority interrupts offensively as well are aegis and defensive anthem, followed by LoD when the team is pressured. Much of playing mesmer is based off of feel for the match. You are the number one character that controls the flow of the match based off of your interrupts and ability to manipulate energy. When you feel its a good time to push you need to know when to go all out offensive, but don't ignore your duty to protect defensively. Know the build you are facing and the capabilities of the one you are running and decide whether it is important to decrease pressure or increase yours. Too many times I see teams wipe because they get some pressure on a team or score a kill and their mesmer goes crazy offensive and ignores everything else going on. Many times you can gauge how to pressure based off of what has been diverted. If you divert something important, that light in your head should go off to push a little harder. I can't stress how important it is to use your diversion as a gauge for your interrupts. Know that diversions on skills with fast recharges are generally more important on skills with long recharges. Diverting aegis can be good, but you are probably just fine with a pdrain. Interrupting DA is more important than aegis from a mesmer perspective because it is block that cannot be removed while aegis can be mirrored/shattered. Generally, leave aegis interrupts for a ranger while assisting when you can. Also try to constantly keep an internal clock going at all times when trying to divert or interrupt important skills. You can at first do this by watching the game clock, but it will become more second nature as you play more.
Shatter enchant is a pretty godly mesmer skill, but your timing is the deciding factor upon how effective you can be with enchant removal. With a heavy fast cast prot meta, stripping SoD/SoR/spirit bond quickly earns gold stars and makes Pandas happy. A good shatter is kind of an art in the sense that you will sometimes need to cast it when the damage would either result in a kill unprotted or give you immediate removal on a prot that would come. This becomes a win/win situation as the worst case scenario results in you burning a auto-target shatter on another character because that character died. I prefer to play with auto targeting on because I would rather have a shatter go off on some rando target than to hold the skill and burn the energy on a fizzle skill that doesn't go off. Just personal preferance.
Mirror of disenchantment should be used to get primarily to get global enchants such as aegis/tainted flesh, teams with dual fire attune eles, retards running dual conjure warriors with the same conjure, etc. I would only use this as a single target remove in an EXTREME emergency for a kill because of its energy cost.
For skill interrupts on mesmer i prefer web of disruption over others because of its energy cost vs. cry of frustration, recharge in accordance with other skills being used in the game, and ability to reinterrupt when it pops. A strong argument can be made for complicate as a skill interrupt vs. a few builds but you won't see alot of mesmer bars with skill interrupts because pleak/pdrain are so good and 3 interrupt bars are generally bad. There just arn't enough things to interrupt where you need 3 skills to do so and effectively use your other skills as well.
Eburn is kinda a spikey skill that I prefer energy to be spent on other skills instead of using it, but it goes well with Esurge. Most good monks can handle surge/burn spam well by focus swapping, but the two can be used to drop someone's energy pool fairly quickly without having to land a pleak. Many SoD monks run all quick prot and one of the best ways to hurt their energy is by interrupting glyph (not possible w/o skill interrupt) or by draining divine spirit. Because of the nature of an sod monk's bar, surge burn is one of the better ways to attack this monk's bar as opposed to the easily exposed lod monk's bar.
I prefer Inspired/revealed enchantment over drain enchantment because the energy return is better over the long run because of the fact that it is uninterruptable. You can make an argument for drain enchant on an MoR bar because the recharge is unaffected on inspired/revealed. Many mesmers will drain conjure warriors at the start of a match and then sort of forget about them after a couple of minutes.
Positioning is just as important if not more important from mesmer as it is on any other character. You should be more on top of the flow of a match and what skills are being used on an opposing team than any other character in a match save for possibly a ranger. Be aware of any positioning interrupts that are needed as well, such as a water ele moving controlling your runner, or diverting crip shot. Various key setups are used for various players, but get used to kiting/moving while hovering over your interrupt button so that you can do both effectively. I find mouse clicking on mesmer while moving when trying to interrupt is easiest, however, i don't like mouseclicking overall on mesmer, whereas I am constantly doing it on warrior. If you are playing with a warder or your own self ward, force your backline to move with you and the ward because protecting yourself while being able to reach the opposing team's backline with casts is more important that warding your monks. Think of it as your backline can push to you, but theirs won't.
Tabbing is your best friend when looking for interrupts, I find that clicking for interrupts is highly inefficient and takes you out of the flow of a match, however, I will do it for fast locating hard res, sometimes in a lord room or at vod around several npc's, or against poop & thump (or heavy spirit builds). I have been in several matches where a hard res going off has made the difference in the match, so make sure you don't allow this to happen. You don't want to be responsible for a loss because a hard res got off. Against good teams you will have to locate and interrupt a hard res character immediately after scoring a kill so know at the beginning of the match who you will be responsible for interrupting.
All in all I hope even the most experienced mesmers can take something home from this post. The most important thing is to play alot and learn the meta. The more you play the better you become!
Last edited by
Lego on 01 Oct 2007, 19:24, edited 1 time in total.
'. I got to know more and more about them and began to do this on a competitive level with my guild. NOW I got the feeling I could learn much more then I already know, so coudl you guys give me some tips? 
you could always make it to a 'guide to mesmering' ;p
Since pleak and pdrain are so powerful (especially since patch) its hard to justify runniing another interrupt. However, I won't deny the fact that this elite is powerful and can wipe teams if used well. I just don't like it as a top choice because 1. the duration isn't quite strong enough, 2. being an interrupt the usage is somewhat inconsistant. However, the more 3/4 and 1 second skills a prot monk runs, the stronger this elite becomes, and with more rc monks running guardian, its power is improved.
