Why are there so few mesmers around in PvE?

For the fire island chain missions, I resorted to changing my Me secondary to Ele and created a 16 fast casting nuker in order to squeeze my way into groups. XD *cries*

There are a number of reasons mesmers are unpopular in PvE.

First off, they are weak with henchmen. If you take an all henchmen group when you can't get a part it is a real pain in the rear. A mesmer is best off target hopping, shutting down multiple targets, spreading degen, ect. The henchman AI goes berserk if you don't baby sit it and they all have such poor damage output that they can't kill anything without focus firing it very heavily. So when you hench you can only function at 10% of your potention, or function at 100% while the henchmen do nothing.

Second, PvE players do not understand mesmers at all. There are very few memser enemies in the game. The most they run into is conjur spammers. A.net knows how a well designed mob with a mesmer would absolutely decimate most groups. Thus when the AI plays mesmer they do it extremely inefficiently. They have never felt what a mesmer can really do. When one of my guild mates plays a mesmer and a spike is incoming. He can use cry of frustration to interrupt 2-3 characters and then swap over to another guy and nail him with powerleak before the spike goes off. He has single handedly diffused entire spikes. Most PvE players don't understand anything other than damage or healing.

Third, PvE mob design is very poor and against mesmers for the most part. For a large portion of the game mixed mobs are rare and you are usually just thrown against 10 monsters of the same type trying to kill you. Brute force works very well vs these styles of mobs. Mobs that cater to something other than brute force don't even begin to appear until the desert missions.

Fourth, Mesmers never get credit for their work. A mesmer can solo many of those impossible to kill mursaat bosses (the ones your warriors spend forever wailing on fruitlessly.) There are some great examples of this, I used to echo shatter hex (back before it got the nerf and GoR got buffed) in Fissure. I would churn out a large 300 damage armor ignoring spike before the fire ele's meteors ever landed. The fire ele got the credit. In ascension missions I will run a glyph dom memser. The casters fall over without doing much and the last group (with the monk boss) is easy because I prevent the monk boss from doing anything (divert orison and word on that guy and everything suddenly becomes really easy.) The warriors get all the credit for killing everything. This further leads to the belief that mesmers don't do much and discourages people from playing them.

Most PvE players are ignorant and suck pretty bad. They run cookie cutter builds because that is all they can run.

Mesmers are very situational, and most situations just dont require one. You cant blame groups for picking the best damage dealing classes, tanks and monks when that is the most efficient set up to mow through AI.

They're not as bad as most people think, but you never need one either. Rangers can interrupt and bring a lot more to the team.

W/ N/ and Mo/ are the main pve classes

W/ Mo/ Me/ and R/ are the pvp classes

IW mes tanks in PvE FTW!

Although it's not looked upon with favor, it's fun...

I play two characters. One's a Ranger and the other's a Mesmer, and I use both in PvE AND PvP.

All I've got to say to the "Rangers bring more to the team" statement is... Bull. Any more explanation of something so obvious would probably just be a waste of space.

I will say that Warskull is right; You CANNOT play a Mesmer with a party full of henchmen. It's just sad.

It is, but not for long. Once every mob starts stripping enchantments it's useless.

I respect every high level PvE primary mesmer because it probably requires the most skill to play properly from all professions. Newbie mesmers just use Empathy, Backfire and Conjure Phantasm all the time, get bored and delete it. However, in my opinion mesmers are very useful against level +20 monsters because they can produce so much armor ignoring damage and drain energy from annoying bosses or casters. Typical strategy against casters is heavy healing and damage output. Mesmers just disable them and you don't have to be so offensive or defensive. It needs more attention to disable opponents and therefore offers more challenge.

PvE has usually more opponents against your party than in PvP but one mesmer cannot control them all just like one monk can't keep whole party alive.

My 3rd character was a mesmer and I played most of PvE as degen, but stopped once the frag/virulence nerf came about.

Going away from the profession and playing the other classes in the meantime has allowed me to better appreciate the role of the mesmer in the game ecosystem as I return.

However, it is not helping much with getting the rust out of my hinges.

I've only played my Mesmer in PvE, as I know that I'm only 30% capable of the skill level required for this class in PvP. Yet, at the same time, I know that the unique challenge of PvE vs PvP is that the sheer number of targets in PvE makes the use of quick, spammable spells more useful than full, heavy hitting spells. The fact that the two arenas are so completely different keeps me from bridging that gap.

To the OP comment, look at the population of mesmers in pre-searing. There's quite a few. Then look again in LA. Somewhere they disappear. My guess is that about the time that Conjure Phantasm fails to kill a monster outright, that's where the majority of mesmers "retire".

While the cycling thru targets can present some probs working with hench is usually better than working with humans. I had far less probs(playing my Mez) using hench than playing with ppl that's for sure. I actually prefer hench. I think it's just a matter of skill at hench control.

While I would generally agree with this statement I would say there are a few... a very few that do appreciate Mesmers. Sadly most of them are Mez themselves.

Again in agreement. If monster Mesmers would have even half the skill(if it can be called that) of thier non-mez monster counterparts 99.9999999% of players would not be able to beat them.

Indeed. It always the Warrior/Ele/Monk that gets thanked. Never the Mez.

One could say the same thing about PvP players. In fact I find more cookie cutters in PvP than I do in PvE.

Really, for PvE?

I also have a ranger and mesmer, and I've played all 6 classes through the game. My ranger is my favourite PvE character, mesmer my least favourite but I've kept it for PvP. Even if you play your mesmer very well, I dont see how you can say they bring more to a group than rangers.

I have to agree here, I was not to be found playing my mesmer through the PvE, because I found it very easy with henchmen. Call target, jump around and spread some Mesmer love, re-call that target, give some more love out. This is far easier than calling targets for hench and trying to heal them.

I will admit, that Abadon's mouth presented a problem with Hench, but I got the skills I needed for that character to PvP with and moved into PvP with that character.

I've said this sort of thing before, so here it goes.

When you are picking up players for a group, you are not looking for, nor should you expect, to get top-notch players. The chances of any given pickup understanding his skillbar, or what he's supposed to do in a mission, is arbitrarily close to zero. If you aren't looking for a well-known and commonly understood archtype, good or not, odds are a random pickup is going to be a random player with a random assortment of skills and equipment that very likely will not make any sense whatsoever.

Your goal when picking up players is to find people who will perform better than the henchman he would be replacing. That is not trivial. That's why people look for the established, well-known character archtypes, because people who make cookie-cutters have a minimal understanding of what they're doing.

I generally will not touch a random mesmer pickup. Why? Because mesmers require the most skill in PvE. That does not mean that an average mesmer player has more skill than a player of any other profession by any stretch of the imagination. In fact because there's no cookie-cutter role he is very likely to be worse than an average player of a given profession. Bad players plus complex characters make for trainwrecks. Invite only if you enjoy watching them.

Peace,
-CxE

I didn't. I said that Rangers don't bring more to a group than Mesmers. ^_^

But yeah, with my Mesmer(/N) and a guild buddy as hammer warrior, the two of us can handle most of Snake Dance. Trying the same thing with my Ranger is pretty ugly.

Sadly, Ensign is probably right. I'll admit that any opinions I might have are based entirely on non-pickup groups. That would be because I never have, and never intend to, play with a group of random strangers. Bleah!

In my opinion Mesmer is the most complicated caster class in the game (i have completed the game with the 4 caster professions). You have to cycle through enemies and cast an occasional hex remove/sv on your allies, but your effectiveness is mostly behind the scenes. Oh look, cute butterflies around that warrior
Moreover it's lacking passive energy management like Divine Favor, Soul Reaping or the Elemental Attunements, thus forcing you to spend points and skill slots into Inspiration. Domination-Illusion combinations use up energy pretty fast and are better used with Elementalist primary (can we pretty pls have domination/illusion-attunement?).
Finally some skills that should be in Domination ended up in Curses:
-Spiteful Spirit is the Elite Empathy
-Desecrate Enchantments outdamages the Elite Energy Surge in most cases
And why is Mantra of Persistence for illusion hexes only?

For me Mesmer is the ultimate swiss army knife secondary profession, but has some design flaws while being played as primary.

i think its cause mesmers are the hardest class to play well, too many people only using skills like backfire and empathy and conjure phantasm and not enough interupts or dibilitators
i llove having GOOD mesmers in my group, but the chances that the mesmer wont be horrid is minimal

Desecrate Enchantments does no damage to the target, but rather the caster takes damage for each monk enchantment removed.

that's Rend Enchantments



cast it on a double enchanted ele and you do more damage than 16dom Energy Surge (ok, ES has a larger area effect)

Mesmers take a brain to play well and most of the GW community is not all that intelligent. Groups of dancing warriors anyone? 'Nuff said.

i personally love playing mesmer pve thats why shes my main character and i beat game and all that blah blah blah. Mesmers dont get the pve respect they deserve.