Curse

red orc · Dec 03, 2007, 11:12 AM // 11:12

Can some high level mesmer describe what is his job in GVG.
How do you select targets ? When and how do you play defense or offense ?

Lets take a standard Dom Mes:

Energy Surge, Energy burn, diversion, shutter enhance, inspired enhance, power leak, power drain, res chant

dies like fish · Dec 03, 2007, 12:07 PM // 12:07

I don't play Mesmer but we tell Orchid to shut down whoever has Ward Against Melee. Once he gets that down he can tab through and do whatever he wants.

RotteN · Dec 03, 2007, 12:52 PM // 12:52

Depends on what you need / what's bugging you most.

if you play heavy pressure, pdraining party heals or disabling party wide defenses (aegis, wards) are the way to go to strengthen your offense. With spikes, you would want to disable the infuser or anything else that might save your target.

However, if your monks are crumbling under enemy mesmers, or your frontline blind all the time, you might just want to go on that mesmer/blindbot ...

all in all, a mesmer's job is realy situational, and depends on your team's ability, on the build you're running, the build you're facing, ...

JR · Dec 03, 2007, 01:27 PM // 13:27

Quote:

Originally Posted by RotteN

Depends on what you need / what's bugging you most.

if you play heavy pressure, pdraining party heals or disabling party wide defenses (aegis, wards) are the way to go to strengthen your offense. With spikes, you would want to disable the infuser or anything else that might save your target.

However, if your monks are crumbling under enemy mesmers, or your frontline blind all the time, you might just want to go on that mesmer/blindbot ...

all in all, a mesmer's job is realy situational, and depends on your team's ability, on the build you're running, the build you're facing, ...

That true as far as your Diversions and Power Leaks etc, what I like to call the reactive dom. They usually make up about half of your bar, the rest being proactive dom that you should already know the purpose of.

If you have Surge and Burn you will obviously want to be using them on Monks where possible for obvious reasons. The same goes for almost any other straight forward e-denial. However, you may also will want to contribute on spikes with burn or surge where necessary. Hex Eater Vortex is for your front liners, obviously, and is fairly straight forward: See a pink arrow, blast it off.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Dec 03, 2007, 01:30 PM // 13:30

Post ended up being longer than I intended, oh well.

First off I want to make clear that any guide regarding competitive play of a certain profession isn’t set in stone, as the best way to play a certain character (especially a midliner such as mesmers and ranger) depends largely on the team build and a guild’s general playstyle as well as on other midliners that might have slightly overlapping roles (e.g. mesmer and ranger interrupts)

However this does not mean that there aren’t any basic ‘guidelines’ or key objectives you should focus on, I will try to elaborate on this further in a bit.

Basics:

It is of vital importance that a mesmer has good ping and reactions, he should be able to interrupt .75s cast times without much effort and with fairly high consistency, as well as know recharges/cast times/cast animations of important spells (everyone should really know this but it’s especially important to mesmers and rangers).

Also a very important part of playing Mesmer is battlefield awareness, mainly regarding positioning. As it is very common for mesmers to carry a hard res they will often be a primary spike target. Because of this you always need to pay attention to the battle field, so you can instantly spot it when a warrior comes running for you and take measures accordingly (e.g. pre-kite, swap to shield set, move into a ward if you weren’t already in it) This is a little less important for Me/E with melee wards as they are a somewhat less attractive target since they will be in a ward most of the time and can more easily use this to protect themselves if they need to push forward to shut something down.

Build specific roles:

Gimmick builds aside there’s 3 ‘dominant’ party builds in the metagame atm:

Standard ‘euro balanced’, 2 Warriors (usually with shock) Cripshot Ranger or Paragon, Dom Mesmer, Bsurge Ele, 2 Monks, Rit or Monk runner.

'DFesque physical pressure’, 2 Warriors (1 with hard res 1 with shock or rend touch) Cripshot Ranger, Paragon/Mesmer, Mesmer/Ele with ward, 2 Monks, Monk or Rit runner.

‘Vz esque condition pressure’ 2 Warriors (1 sword 1 axe, usually both have shock), Magebane Ranger with screaming/deb shot, Water ele with ward and death pact, Surge Mesmer (with or without flesh), 2 monks, Rit runner (sometimes a monk)

These builds differ quite a bit in how they are executed, the first build pretty much requires clear spikes to get any kills in 8v8 (or 7v7) combat, whereas the other 2 can outpressure a team and use spikes to finish off low targets when necessary.

A Mesmer's role in spikish builds:

As a Mesmer you can’t really do much on your own, you rely on other people to cast spells to accomplish anything, a diversion is useless if you don’t give someone an incentive to cast through it (be it by pressure or by spike) and interrupts are useless if no one is casting for obvious reasons. Keeping this in mind, in standard euro balanced your primary objectives will be to time diversions (on defensive characters like monks/bsurge eles) with spikes as well as using enchantment removal and surge/burn on the spike target and in between spikes you work together with the ranger to get down the static defense (e.g. wards/aegis/DA) whoever gets what is mainly up to preference, just communicate with your ranger and notify your team if you landed a key interrupt.

Keep in mind that good teams will use glyph of lesser energy to fake cast key spells like aegis and wards to bait interrupts and/or wait for a fast cast, if this is the case your ranger will have an easier time getting stuff down because of the recharge and energy cost of his interrupts plus the fact that teams tend to pay less attention to ranger interrupts than Mesmer ones.

Key skills to divert in a spikish build would be: BSurge, Spirit Bond, Shield of Deflection and to a lesser extent Prot Spirit, Infuse Health (if you run into a Healer’s Boon monk, try and divert his healer’s boon or continuously bother him with enchantment removal)

Key skills to interrupt: Ward Against Melee, Defensive Anthem, Aegis (this can be dealt with by using strips.

A Mesmer's Role in a pressure based build:

If you’re playing against a build like DF’s you will have to primarily focus on shutting down monks as the only real defense they have are the monks and the ward on the Mesmer, although it’s definitely to interrupt a fast cast melee ward, especially since MoR fell out of favor and people started running less fast casting, against a good Mesmer you won’t be able to reliably interrupt it, so leave it to your ranger.

Another thing you need to pay attention to is the P/Me which usually has PReturn or PSpike/Web and he will mostly be using those on your diversions. Pay attention to the paragon when casting diversion and fake it if you have to, this will make coordinating it with spikes a lot harder but versus this builds there’s less of a need to.

Against Vz’s build again focus mainly on monks and try and PLeak skills on the water ele and divert his trident when your flagger is getting owned by it, if you know or expect to face this build, Hex Eater Vortex is a much better elite choice than Energy Surge.

If you’re playing Mesmer in a pressure build like Vz’s or DF’s you will have a much easier time timing your diversions with people casting spells because if you put out pressure people will have to cast, your focus should be on shutting down stuff that prevents you from pressuring (mainly wards, DA, Aegis), as well as PLeaking defensive characters to threaten their energy level and looking for opportunities to assist your warriors with surge/burn, basically your role in a build like this has much more freedom but at the same time requires you to play a lot more aggressive to maximize your success.

A Mesmer's Contributions to defense:

Now this was all mainly about what to focus on offensively, but can definitely also contribute defensively. An easy thing that can really help your defense, is an occasional PLeak on Diversion, coordinate it with your ranger as it’s generally better to DShot diversions.

If your team is suffering from heavy pressure and getting pushed back, you should focus on shutting down their offense to give your backline time to recover or the opportunity to retreat. Your role in this is obviously quite limited, but disrupting skills like LBolt, EBurn, ESurge, Gale etc can help your team greatly.

If you’re making a full retreat and the other team has a cripshot throw a diversion on him (since attack skills cant be cancelled Cripshot is a really easy target for diversion) or if they have a water ele throw a diversion on him or keep him selected while you retreat and interrupt his snares, the same of course applies when you’re trying to push a flag in and your flagger gets snared repeatedly.

These were basically the main things you should focus on as Mesmer, I hope this is of help to anyone, though I imagine that anyone that plays competitively already knows (most of) it.

Some tips:

If you put diversion on a monk and he’s not casting, don’t wait to see if he does, but switch to the other monk and interrupt their hex removal.

On a push pay close attention to monks getting knocked down, and don’t be afraid to time a PLeak with them getting back on their feet.

Make sure you hotkey your weapon switches and key spells like interrupts so you can quickly change sets and/or interrupt a spell.

Watch the battlefield and click on targets for interrupts, DO NOT tab through them.

Div · Dec 03, 2007, 01:35 PM // 13:35

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

If you have Surge and Burn you will obviously want to be using them on Monks where possible for obvious reasons. The same goes for almost any other straight forward e-denial.

This is very true, and often distinguishes a top notch mesmer from a mediocre one. Top mesmers will use these skills to e-deny opposing monks at the right times, and apply damage to spikes in the right situation as well. Legends say Korean mesmers were able to tell exactly how much energy you had in your energy pool (including when a monk switches to a higher set), and makes it very easy for them to decide if it's worth casting a surge/burn on you. I've seen countless bad mesmers that hit me with back to back esurge/eburn even though it already registered -0 on the first hit due to hitting my low set, or mediocre mesmers that randomly surge me for -0 without knowing my set or energy situation.

Mitch has a pretty nice overview of a mesmer, and my points are just some additional stuff from the perspective of a monk. And I'd suggest to be a good shutdown mesmer, you play some monk as well. That way you'll know what it is about mesmers that is so annoying to monks :P

IMMORTAlMITCH · Dec 03, 2007, 01:49 PM // 13:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by holymasamune

And I'd suggest to be a good shutdown mesmer, you play some monk as well. That way you'll know what it is about mesmers that is so annoying to monks :P

Bsurge ele tbh, though really you should have played all roles to REALLY know how they work, what shuts them down and what you can do to prevent it or prevent them from preventing it.

I've actually played monk quite a lot lately and the thing that bothered me the most wasnt mesmers but knockdowns on spikes, be it gale, shock or a hammer warrior (though of course the latter 2 are easier to avoid)

wuzzman · Dec 03, 2007, 05:08 PM // 17:08

mesmers are a bit neutered but mitch hit it on the head pretty much. My ping however makes interupting ftl, well except defense stuff. A good mesmer makes the other team yell on vent about you ^_^. It doesn't feel like I'm doing as much as I used to, at times though, in the old days reasons why not to bring a 3 monk backline in gvg is cause the other team mesmer, good I missed those days, would dismantle it alone.

Byron · Dec 03, 2007, 05:44 PM // 17:44

Never forget that your ultimate purpose is to keep the warriors happy.

Thom Bangalter · Dec 03, 2007, 06:52 PM // 18:52

get down their ward and then start diverting things.

Iotan · Dec 03, 2007, 07:10 PM // 19:10

Pretty much most of what you need to do is coordinate with your ranger to shutdown the opposing offense. Ranger gets all Aegises and Diversion and ward if he's good, mesmer gets ward and harasses monks. Of course if you're losing then you try to shutdown the other team's offense until your monks get it under control or die... Shatter or burn on a frenzy war can make him stop attacking monks and Rush away and a Burn or Surge on a crip shot is usually pretty annoying. Stripping Air atune (usually needing both enchant strips) is great and along with Pleak can annoy a bsurge enough to stop him from spamming.

Of course playing a mesmer is more complicated than this but a lot of the skill in playing a mesmer won't be gotten by reading stuff on a forum. A mesmer is virtually always the spike target so a large part of playing a mesmer is not dying. Prekiting is necessary as is knowing where your ward is. Knowing the recharge of skills is obviously important but really the things that separate ok and good mesmers come down to communication with your front/mid/backline and experience. Once you've got the basics then you're best off just playing since you're going to need to learn how the other team plays while you're playing against them, not while you're reading stuff in a forum.

seekjy · Dec 03, 2007, 09:31 PM // 21:31

Quote:

Watch the battlefield and click on targets for interrupts, DO NOT tab through them.

This is situational. Your tab order does not change unless you press 'c', at which point the tab list is reordered based on distance. Understanding this will make you far more efficient than trying to click tiny name tags all the time.

Your position in the enemy tab tree does not change when you retarget someone with a mouse click. For instance, say your tab order is 3,6,1,2,5,4,7,8, and you currently have #1 selected. Tabbing will move you down the list (#2 is next), and shift-tab will move you back up the list (#6). If you select an ally, then press tab, you will immediately target #2. This list will remain constant until you press 'c'. If you try to target someone who is out of radar, you will simply skip to the next person in the list.

Knowing this, you can use your mouse to click on any target, then press tab, then shift-tab, and you will be back on whatever target you had selected before you clicked on something else. A good use of both click targeting and tab targeting is vastly more efficient than exclusive use of either one.

icedwhitemocha · Dec 03, 2007, 10:49 PM // 22:49

Quote:

Originally Posted by seekjy

Your position in the enemy tab tree does not change when you retarget someone with a mouse click. For instance, say your tab order is 3,6,1,2,5,4,7,8, and you currently have #1 selected. Tabbing will move you down the list (#2 is next), and shift-tab will move you back up the list (#6). If you select an ally, then press tab, you will immediately target #2. This list will remain constant until you press 'c'. If you try to target someone who is out of radar, you will simply skip to the next person in the list.

Knowing this, you can use your mouse to click on any target, then press tab, then shift-tab, and you will be back on whatever target you had selected before you clicked on something else.

Wow, not sure how this got by me for two years. Thanks for the heads up.

TheOneMephisto · Dec 03, 2007, 11:00 PM // 23:00

Having the thumb buttons assigned to tab and shift-tab makes playing GW easier, and it's extremely easy to tab back and forth.

And tab+space makes the leetest way of picking up flags.

Lord Sojar · Dec 04, 2007, 10:33 AM // 10:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by holymasamune

This is very true, and often distinguishes a top notch mesmer from a mediocre one. Top mesmers will use these skills to e-deny opposing monks at the right times, and apply damage to spikes in the right situation as well. Legends say Korean mesmers were able to tell exactly how much energy you had in your energy pool (including when a monk switches to a higher set), and makes it very easy for them to decide if it's worth casting a surge/burn on you. I've seen countless bad mesmers that hit me with back to back esurge/eburn even though it already registered -0 on the first hit due to hitting my low set, or mediocre mesmers that randomly surge me for -0 without knowing my set or energy situation.

Mitch has a pretty nice overview of a mesmer, and my points are just some additional stuff from the perspective of a monk. And I'd suggest to be a good shutdown mesmer, you play some monk as well. That way you'll know what it is about mesmers that is so annoying to monks :P

You hit it on the head. Playing a Mesmer is challenging primarily because you just have to know your opponent. The finesse of playing correctly is why the class is shunned by many. Any person can play a Mesmer, but only a few can properly gauge their target. Granted, you make mistakes, and you kick yourself for them (I cast shame on an ele the other day being an rtard, as well as eburned for 12 damage) But these mistakes on a very good mesmer are few and far between.

I think a great quote is the GvG Mesmer's creed: "Know thy enemy." You have to know that monk, you have to watch timings, watch energy sets, memorize their play style, and you have to do this within the first 45 secs - 1 min of being at the flag stand. If you fail to accomplish this, your failing your extremely important role as the teams Mesmer.

@ Ward of Melee: yep, we guested Farcry and Hapa the other day, and those were the first words to me. I immediately responded "Of course, we wouldn't want our spikes missing due to those annoying wards would we? *snicker*"

Mesmers really do have free reign. Granted, throwing a eburn on the spike is nice, or that all important shatter on 1, but that is such a small part of the job. Tabbing through targets, getting rid of WAM etc, steadily draining monks energy and timing diversions to be efficient, all important to a mesmer. Of course, watching skill timing is a rather lovely thing to do, especially when your team is laying a huge amount of pressure forcing a RoF spam. Time it right and Power Leak (rigged to spacebar) a RoF to really make a monk have a bad day.

Barbie goes guru · Dec 04, 2007, 02:01 PM // 14:01

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rahja the Thief

Time it right and Power Leak (rigged to spacebar) a RoF to really make a monk have a bad day.

how many powerleaks do you waste? if any mesmer attempted to pleak rof id assume it was a twitch mistake. the mere fact that you TRY to actively pleak rof speaks volumes, specifically speaks volumes about how you shouldn't have posted.

pah01 · Dec 04, 2007, 05:18 PM // 17:18

lol so true.

pleak 3/4 sec spells on reflex if you want to but really you should be saving your interrupts for priority spells. However nothing wrong with ninja powerleaking targets getting back up from the ground.

Joe

Thomas.knbk · Dec 04, 2007, 09:43 PM // 21:43

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rahja the Thief

Time it right and Power Leak (rigged to spacebar) a RoF to really make a monk have a bad day.

Why the hell would you ever want to power leak an RoF when there's a perfectly fine RC, WoH, Veil or HP to aim for? srsly..

Lord Sojar · Dec 04, 2007, 11:17 PM // 23:17

WHoa whoa, I didn't say I repeatably try and get RoF on a monk with Power Leak. Just pointing out timing as an example....whoa calm down. I prefer Aegis or Heal Party due to mass energy loss obviously. The only time I have ever actually tried to interrupt RoF was with Migraine and Frustration on a monk, using Leech sig, and that was in silly RA. Power leak is 10 energy, it would be silly to waste it trying to catch RoF. Calm down.

Farin · Dec 05, 2007, 01:06 AM // 01:06

Yeah ofc it would be silly, don't bring it up.

Whoever said mesmers are there to make warriors happy is right.