Mesmer Difficulty?

Well, I preorded at a good time. The day after the last beta event.
I've been reading over the classes, and Mesmer definitly sounds like the class I'd be most interested in playing. But everytime I see a guide or information, it's also spammed with "Warning: Advanced Class." Is this true? Would being a mesmer be over the top for a GW newbie or can I sludge it through?

I think it's the general idea that Mesmer is harder because it really only does indirect damage and requires fast timing. But it isn't really that much harder. It'll just take a slight bit more practice, but otherwise it's fine.

It also might be a bit better if you tried out something else first, then went onto Mesmer

--Ginko

The Mesmer works best when you know how to layer their skills. I wouldn't call them "difficult," but they are harder to play than other classes. I suggest getting a feel for the game with another character for three or so hours first.

hmmmmm... Mesmer was my first class that I ever played when I was a noob... I don't really understand how Mesmer is considered more advanced than others... When it is just as advanced as a warrior in terms of interruption and hexing and what not.. I mean the way the skills are.. You can either make a completely "advanced build" that requires you to do a lot of things and concentrate a lot... or just a simple mesmer build that requires you to just spam energy stealing and what not.. It all depends on what you mean advanced.. though, but since I am used to mesmer skills If you throw in a type of warrior melee build it would seem advanced to me... lol heh

I actually agree that Mesmer is an advanced class and that a warning is a very good idea.

The main reason why is that in order to get much out of Fast Casting, you have to know exactly what you are doing.

Even if you like the Mesmer skills, it can be argued that going Elementalist or even Necro main (for PvE) will keep your mana up much better and make you more useful; probably a lot more useful.

Fast Casting is really only worth the point (IMO) when playing in PvP and when you REALLY must get your counter off in time in critical situations.

Note that most counters are pretty fast in any case and the extra half a second or so that Fast Casting will buy you is usually more insurance to be sure you get it off than a necessity.

As for the one Elite skill that Fast Casting offers... I've yet to see a build that is really worth using that at all.

Mesmer looks cool and I'd like to play one based on looks, but except for either a Ranger Secondary for full interupt or a Warrior Secondary for IW (and in these cases it is not Fast Casting but getting access to the better energy regen and the needed skills that makes it worth it), I can't see playing one unless my goal was a heavy Domination PvP character where that 0.5 seconds could be barely worth it.

As for using it as a secondary class, they are simply excellent.

I think mesmer is the worst class ever, they suck.

But that's my opinion.

I've yet to experiance the elite skill in fast casting, but It could work well with a Mesmer/elementalist that involves really quick casting for those really long casting damage spells and then with inspiration energy management whilst having that elite skill to recharge those high damaging long casting spells... neh it could work

I tried to make a build like that, and I tried hard. The problem is that by the time you've wasted 12 points in Fast Casting just to make the Elite work for long enough to be useful, you've not only lost the chance to get 12 in Energy Storage with Aura of Restoration, but then you have to pay extra for every spell cast which wipes out the leeching advantage.

If I wanted to go with a lot of big Elementalists spells, I'd just go with a few Energy Glyph sorts of things 12 Storage, and still have plenty of room for huge spells. Enough to not have to worry much about recharge time.

The mesmer is considered an advanced class because you need to know a lot about how the game flows and exactly how other classes work to run one effectively. It's also hard to put together a coherent Mesmer skill bar that doesn't get cluttered with redundancy and nub skills that actually inhibit each other. You need to have a pretty good knowledge of about every spell in the game so you know which to spend an interrupt on, and which you're just going to miss. You don't want to waste a power block trying to hit Reversal of Fortune. You also generally need to be focussing on about 3 different targets at once, making sure you stay off the primary target, and are shutting down the right people at the right time. There's a lot more multi-tasking involved than with most other classes. Add to that the fact you'll have a harder time than most in PvE, you'll generally be better off taking another class while you get into the game.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of "difficulty" per se, but it's a lot harder to judge how effective you're being as a mesmer than it is with other classes. I mean, the warrior/ranger/elementalist gets that instant gratification of seeing their opponents health bar drop. The healer monk gets the same instant feedback of their helpfulness seeing their allies health bars rise. For the mesmer, it's not so easy. Even when you can tell that the effects you're hitting your opponent with are working, it's often hard to judge just how much of an impact this is having on the battle. If you shutdown an enemy caster, for example, you're preventing a bunch of damage to your team, but you don't see a rise in their HP or anything, you just don't see the enemy casting their nukes now that you've backfired them and robbed all their energy. It's just a lot easier for most other characters to tell immediately and exactly how effective their actions are, and more satisfying for a lot of people, too.

I played an Enchanter in EQ for years and years and really see myself as an enchanter-style player. That is, I see my job as making sure the enemies are working at less-than-optimal levels, and my side is working at more-than-standard levels. I love knowing that a team is a better team because of my help, and that the enemy is going to get messed up by me. I'm not as interested in actually damaging the enemy as in making it a lot easier for my friends to damage the enemy.

I suspect that mindset translates well to a GW Mesmer, but we'll see. I plan to give it a try doing PvE as well...we'll see how it works out.

Starflower

I found that a good way to get a feel for the Mesmer class is to take a secondary Mesmer (mine was primary Warrior, this works well). That lets you get a bit more familiar with the skills you need to use, and how the Mesmer works in general. Then, once you feel you've got the hang of it, start a primary Mesmer.

The way not to do it, I've found, is to start a PvP-only Mesmer primary, and dive straight in to the high-end PvP arenas. You'll get your ass kicked so unbelievably hard that you'll reconsider ever playing a Mesmer again. Work through the PvE game first, it will help you a lot.

It seems like Necro is more like EQ Enchanter in a lot of ways. The main job for EQ Enchanter was handing out crack and then, yes, some mezzing sorts of spells.

Necro has the crack in GW and most of the spells that make damage easier and such.

Mesmer is more about stopping them from doing things to start with along with draining energy which doesn't have much of an equivalent in EQ I think.

Like Pharalon said very well above, that is why it is an advanced class. To play Mesmer as main is to anticipate what is about to happen which means very quick analysis of the situation along with knowing the casting time on all of the spells you might face so as not to waste counters.

To play Mesmer as Secondary is a different story though. There are many spells like Conjure Phantasm, Energy Drain, Inspired Hex, Phantom Pain and such that didn't need Fast Casting and don't require preemptive strikes aka they don't require advanced knowledge of nearly every spell in the game to be used effectively. These are also very powerful in PvE whereas shutdown is more situational in PvE but very powerful in PvP.

The types of skills you use from the mesmer class can also make a difference in how much experience you need in the game to be effective. Casting hexes on opposing players doesn't generally take too much knowledge, and you can do fairly good with energy denial. The place where experience really comes into play is with interrupts and multiple-target shutdown. To be effective with interrupts, you need to know what skills to interrupt, and which not to try or not waste your interrupt on. If you're having to read the skill description(or often even the entire name of the skill) to know whether or not to interrupt a skill, you'll be too late to interrupt- you'll want to be able to recognize the skill as soon as it pops up and know whether or not it's a skill you want to interrupt, and if it's possible to interrupt.... if they're casting Reversal of Fortune, your interrupt will be wasted- similarly you won't want to power block a remove hex or an aura of restoration.

Switching between targets to keep 2-3 casters shut down is also not a task that you'll be any good at without quite a bit of experience in the game. Basically, the illusion line is fine if you're not experienced, and inspiration can be useful for every class(though stay away from the interrupts there unless you know what you're doing). Domination is really where you're going to need to have a good knowledge of the game to be worthwhile- though that's where a lot of the great skills are linked to.

If you're wanting to play a mesmer, feel free to try it out, though it could be more helpful to take a mesmer secondary and just use some mesmer skills with a different profession until you get more comfortable with the game.

I think it's a bit of both and that's why I agree with Freyas, but I have a different view on this.

Before I started playing, I spent a lot of time reading all the sites and fora discussing the different professions and all the different combinations. I also read (and learned) a lot from the builds on GWGuru. After reading, asking and reading more, I decided to play a Elementalist/Mesmer for obvious reasons. Elementalist for the energy and Mesmer for the skills.After rolling into my first BWE, I noticed how fairly easy it was to "play" a mesmer: do some DOT's while spamming Flare killed most of the monsters in PreSear. In PostSear, I learned more about the shutdown/blocking abilities and had a lot of fun (not always though) practising the different spells on the Charr-monks/casters. This leads me to what I think about Mesmers.

In my opinion, you have two types of Mesmer-players:
1. the former Caster / "I do damage too!" / Newb-Mesmer
I'm one of those. I cast some Conjure Phantasm in combination with Meteor Shower / Phantom Pain and some Energy Stealing. An occasional Backfire, Migraine or Chaos Storm will be used to see what it actually does. This way a Mesmer is doing damage, it will be noticeable, but you won't be a Killing Machine that can take out any object fast. It's a nice way of practising all the different spells you have as a Mesmer, while still feeling like a usefull Teammember.

2. the Real Mesmer / Advanced Mesmer
This type of player knows the skillbook by heart. He knows what to expect in a mission or pvp-situation and knows what spells to bring that will aid his team. He knows when to block, what skill to block and who to block. Not only block, but also drain victims of their energy and know when to cast a DOT-spell. This type can only be played with experience, like Freyas said. Also, most of the Type 1-Mesmers will turn out to be Type 2, if they play long enough. At least, I'll hope to be one after some months/weeks.

If it were so Guild Wars would be unbalanced, and Mesmer's power would be increased until it was as good as all other professions.

And anyways it's simply wrong. Some of the best guilds in the world use Mesmers, it may not fit your playstyle or taste but Mesmer is not the worst profession. They can screw up multiple casters and fast.

--Ginko

I think one of the points here is, however, that if you aren't playing the sort of Mesmer that either needs Fast Casting (e.g. a "real" Mesmer), or a special build that needs certain skills e.g. Warrior Secondary for IW, then it is a better build, generally, to go for Elementalist Primary and then use the Mesmer skills as needed.

This might sound harsh, but for PvE, my LAST pick would generally be a Mesmer Primary. Maybe it is just me, but the worst players I saw in Beta in PvE were Mesmer Primaries who were trying to be damage dealers. Conjure Phantasm is a very nice spell, but sacrificing my mana pool to cast it .5 seconds faster is just not a good build. AoE is really helpful in PvE which is also why Elementalist is a great Primary for Mesmer skills.

That is why it is good they put the warning on it in my own opinion: indeed, if you don't know what you are doing, it is best to not play it unless you don't mind being gimped for the look. (and I do LOVE the look!)

I've played in two BWE's as a Mesmer/Monk, and only got up to level 10, so I'm not what you'd call an "expert". But Me/Mo was the first character I ever played in GW, and the only character I really played in Post-Searing. So I can speak to it from a newbie perspective ... and I've also played exclusively PvE up to this point.

Basically what people have already said here is true from what I can tell. If you can get used to the fact that the benefits you bring to your team, and the detriment you can bring to the monsters/opponents, are not obvious, then you can enjoy being a Mesmer. The only thing "in-your-face" about them is the uniform ... they are most effective when they are subtle, keeping the balance of power on the side of their team in such a way that a truly good Mesmer would probably never be noticed.

I played a Paladin in EQ and I loved stunning, because I found that making it impossible to hit me was a better way to tank than just standing there and needing heals. The Mesmer brings some of that to GW ... you will be focusing on keeping the other side from doing what they do best. There is also some of the EQ Enchanter in the Mesmer, but not as much as I thought at first ... as someone else said, they don't have the crack or the group haste, nor is their primary function "mesmerizing" in any EQ-familiar sense.

Like I said, I'm not the expert on the class, but I took to the Mesmer pretty quickly and I think pretty well. It wasn't hard at all, once I got into the Post-Searing and really started to learn what I could do well and what I couldn't. I'm probably still a "type 1" right now, but I'm studying to be a "type 2" ... and when I reach that point I expect to be a valuable addition to teams for PvP and PvE.

With that said, I think PvE is a great training ground for the Mesmer, since most of the monsters (as far as I got at least) are pretty much 2- or 3-trick ponies and have limited repertoires to learn how to counter against ... as opposed to jumping into PvP and having to figure out how to counter 8 skills you've never seen before.

My 2 cents. My suggestion is, if you're interested in a Mesmer, give it a shot! I didn't see nearly enough of us in the BWE's ...

I'm going to agree with most here. I also am the "newb mesmer" as I played a Mes/Nec last BWE. I only had time to play for ~5hrs, and have only played GW in total for maybe ~17hrs. Anyway, I thought that my character was very easy to play, and really led me along in a very slow, instructive way to introduce me to some of the benefits and timing issues involved with the mesmer. Now, that could have been due to the pre-searing content and skill selection that the dev's made working out well for this class combination. Maybe once pre-sear is over (I was only in post sear for about 20 min) the learning needs to be much more purposeful. But the skills I learned in pre-sear stacked up very well. And yes, I did stack hexes at that point, but they all stack very well with soul barbs. I didn't feel like I was ever having trouble, besides playing the north of the wall mission at lvl 6 with an elementalist ranger, where we were having trouble with groups of 3 or more Charr. We could take 2, and I could take 1 by myself. Anyway, I think that you can play as mesmer, as long as you take your time, and get into some of the more difficult spots in pre-sear just to learn how to use the few skills you have effectively. Once you begin to dump new skills on your character without really learning how to use them you may have a problem, but I don't think it's necessarily something to stay away from. Just play as what you want and have fun.

Keep in mind, though, that if you do have a bad experience with one character type, come back to it at some point in the future when you know the game much better. You may just need to focus your character differently. And also remember that a design may work great in PvE and not at all in PvP, but you have refund points for a reason

See you out there,

Matt

The last BWE was the first time I played Guild Wars, and I didn't really know much about it. The character I played was a mesmer/monk, and I got to about level 11 and ended up at around Yak's bend.

For the most part, I was generally the major damge dealer throughout missions and quests. Mesmer has some really nice skills, and by setting up a combination of various hexes and spells, its pretty easy to plow through most of the monsters in the game (except the Charr though, those are hard to solo in packs of more than 3).