Curse

Soulmessiah · May 13, 2005, 10:10 AM // 10:10

I would put my R/ME against any warrior. Poor warriors do not have a chance. I do not care how they are speced. To tell the truth 1 on 1 I do not think there is a class that can handle my guy one on one. I have not found one yet anyways.

taion · May 13, 2005, 11:16 AM // 11:16

What's your R/Me? The right Mesmer and Necromancer builds can come close to unconditionally taking out any melee fighters (IW doesn't get around Empathy, and attack speed debuffs still reduce your dps significantly). Besides, the more you optimise for 1v1, the less useful you are in group combat.

Kadeton · May 13, 2005, 12:37 PM // 12:37

Quote:

Originally Posted by wingedcoyote

In my experience Warrior primaries don't have enough energy to pull it off.

Also, my Mes/Wa does have fast casting -- I didn't say anything about her build, just about the possible Ra/Mes build I'm considering.

Yeah, energy can be a bit of an issue. My War/Nec has 30 energy at the moment, using Gladiator's apart from the chest, and it's enough to use a fair number of 10-energy skills quite regularly. I still run into issues occasionally, though... how much energy does an IW build chew through?

I figured that Fast Casting wasn't important, since you were suggesting a Ra/Mes. All I was suggesting was that War/Mes would probably be superior to Ra/Mes as a stand-up fighter, although you could get away with using the Ranger aspect as a decoy for anti-Warrior types.

avnos · May 13, 2005, 04:51 PM // 16:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by Soulmessiah

I would put my R/ME against any warrior. Poor warriors do not have a chance. I do not care how they are speced. To tell the truth 1 on 1 I do not think there is a class that can handle my guy one on one. I have not found one yet anyways.

As the poster after you said, any build designed to take out a w/mo, will kill you quick... shatter the enchants, slow you, dot you, steal your energy....a regular mesmer could do that ;]. Its just there arent many around. I've messed with many variations of mes/w ranger/mes mes/ranger for IW builds and I havent found one that I like yet, im building a regular Mes for now in PVE but am starting to give up on IW. GL i hope someone hits the right combo with it.

taion · May 13, 2005, 10:58 PM // 22:58

R/Me isn't necessarily worse than W/Me for the stand-up fighting part, because the R part gives you defensive expertise stances that are, IMO, better than what warriors have available to them. Charging headlong into a group of melee fighters really isn't an incredibly huge risk, because you can essentially have 75% evade/block rate for 30 seconds or so out of every minute, which is very nice. What hurts you are stuff like empathy, health degen, and fraggers off to the side; warrior armour gives you no extra protection from the former two, and ranger armour is actually better against elemental damage.

R/Me lets you have a high expertise score, which alleviates a great many of the energy problems quite handily; you pay full price for the IW at 15, but everything else is half-price or so, and you won't be doing much other than recasting Tiger's Fury at 5–6 energy or so every 10 seconds, so the net cost of Serpent's Quickness -> IW -> Tiger's Fury x3 over the course of the span of IW being up is no more than 2–6 total points of energy; this is enough to toss in something else for fun like phantom pain, imagined burden, or whatever other 10–15 energy mesmer hex you fancy, and still be able to recast IW and sustain Tiger's Fury for another 30 seconds.

Frankly, though, you're still a melee fighter and a relatively fragile one. Short of getting a friendly monk to stack a load of enchantments on you, random shatter enchantments will neuter you; energy steal hurts slightly less because expertise lets you get by with a smaller pool; and DoT messes with just about everyone. There's nothing you can do about that, and IW in PvE is just not a winning proposition, because mobs like spamming enchantment hate, so half the time your build will gain you nothing over just a normal sword fighter.