Why Mesmer Heroes?

Hey, folks. I've been playing Guild Wars on and off for quite some time. I took a long break playing other things, and while I was out, some stuff happened.

It used to be that mesmer heroes were pretty trashy. Mesmer skills were occasionally nice, but generally stuffed onto necros, or onto monks or rits for e-management. I come back and all of a sudden I see threads talking about the benefits of a 3-mesmer hero team.

What happened? I know that ANet revised mesmer PvE and I went and read the patch notes. But I'm still not entirely sure why people are making Me/*s for their hero teams rather than N/Mes or Mo/Mes? Fast Casting's new effect of reducing cooldowns on skills is nice, but does it really match the benefits of Soul Reaping's massively imba energy flow?

SR got partly nerfed, and i guess most people have there necros already set doing necro things

Quote: Originally Posted by pingu666

SR got partly nerfed, and i guess most people have there necros already set doing necro things Well, yeah, but you can have 7 necros now without too much trouble. Why not do that?

Mesmer skills have long casttimes, so even if you ignore the benefits of the cooldown reduction (which you shouldnt!) the mesmer skills simply arent proficiently usable by other classes. And the right build will have quite good energy management too. Feel free to PM me ingame (Yuri Zahard) if you wanna check out a mes team.. I'm totally blown away by how fast it actually is

Ineptitude + Wandering Eye + Clumsiness + Signet of Clumsiness ... you can't run those on a Necro with efficiency/speed anywhere close to Mesmer primary.

Keystone signet + signet of clumsiness + Unnatural signet + 3 other signets + symbolic celerity + mantra of inscriptions

Psychic Instability @ 12 Fast cast + whatever

Panic @14 dom with 11 fast cast + Mistrust + cry of frustration

None of those are runnable on a necro.

Only nearby range on necro is defile enchantments/desecrate enchantments. Wandering eye/Mistrust have more utility and lower recharge (8ish).

Quote: Originally Posted by 9tails

Fast Casting's new effect of reducing cooldowns on skills is nice, but does it really match the benefits of Soul Reaping's massively imba energy flow? In short, yes.

Mesmers can only put a few good skills on any one bar, particularly elites. You're better off spamming those over and over with some inspiration skills, than an entire bar full of mediocre stuff powered by soul reaping.

Quote: Originally Posted by 9tails

Well, yeah, but you can have 7 necros now without too much trouble. Why not do that? Because energy is completely moot, to be blunt. You run any decently optimized build, and energy will not be a concern.

Well actually I used to not like mesmers but now I use 1-2 on my 7H team... and I gotta love esurge and panic @ 16 dom... esurge deals like 100+ AoE damage.. and Panic is super good at aoe rupting

Mesmers are the best in both shutdown and damage. A necro can provide.. energy. Sure, that's useful in it's regards, but the utility of it is lacking. A mesmer can provide massive energy regains in the form of interrupts, which from the AI are rather good. That more than matches the necro's energy gains, and in fact I run a mesmer healer instead of a necro nowadays.

Mesmers provide shutdown, massive armor ignoring AOE damage, and extremely fast recharges on extremely good elites. On top of the easy energy gain from the Inspiration line. There's not really any downsides, in fact, for a while, I was using a PI + Rit heals on a mesmer, combined with hex eater signet. Effective hex removal, condition removal (MBAS), powerful heals, and an AOE 4sec knockdown + interrupts. Downsides? I see few. Panic, E-Surge, and Ineptitude all work rather well together, which those are the mesmers I run with my girlfriend in our dual team.

Necro's are overrated. SS is not so great on heroes, they don't target properly with MoP or anything else like that, and Discord is way overrated. Who needs 100 damage on a single target when you can get it AOE?

I still need to try a keystone mesmer; maybe a few of them, 4 with my girlfriend. Could be an interesting group.

I used Mermer even with the 3 heroes limit. I used some type of uber interrupter, and it worked very well, reducing a LOT the damage of the enemy, so much that you could remove one healer, not joking.

Mesmers got a huge buff in the AoE department, and now, due to the nature of thier armor ignoring damage, they are in high demand. Not to mention the fact that they have skills like Panic, which is basically Cry of Frustration on steroids.

Quote: Originally Posted by LifeInfusion Ineptitude + Wandering Eye + Clumsiness + Signet of Clumsiness ... you can't run those on a Necro with efficiency/speed anywhere close to Mesmer primary.

Keystone signet + signet of clumsiness + Unnatural signet + 3 other signets + symbolic celerity + mantra of inscriptions

Psychic Instability @ 12 Fast cast + whatever

Panic @14 dom with 11 fast cast + Mistrust + cry of frustration These two in particular.

The big reason not to use Necro primaries is that most Necro skills are bad, and weaken in power dramatically once you start stacking them. The only primary Necro line with sufficiently many useful spells is Death Magic, and you can only run one MM. Curses has like 3 good spells and beyond that you're stuck with filler like Desecrate Enchantments (2s cast ftw), not enough to make an effective bar out of. Blood also has like 3 good spells, again not enough.

To make the Necro hero effective then you'll have to use the primary attribute (Soul Reaping) and combine with something from the secondary profession. The three most obvious things to use are prots, heals and Command shouts. You could use a N/Mo non-MM prot hero I guess if you can't slot the prots anywhere else. N/Rt healers are still around, but with the advent of SoS Rits and Panic Mesmers, you could easily slot heals on both bars and get better damage / shutdown in addition to having the heals. Command shouts work, but you could run a Paragon and get more damage out of the hero as well, not to mention Splinter Weapon triggers.

As for Monk heroes, they serve different purposes. The primary Mesmer specs higher into the Mesmer attributes and has Fast Casting. He can therefore use the Mesmer elites much better (Panic, PI, Ineptitude, Shared Burden ...). A primary Monk simply cannot use Mesmer spells nearly as well, save the interrupts of course. So if you're using a primary Monk, it's generally for Monk skills like UA, Smiter's Boon or Ray of Judgment. These are fundamentally different from the Mesmer spells. The heroes fill different niches and so aren't directly comparable.

In addition to all this, Mesmer skills received direct buffs some time ago. Although Mesmers are still generally inferior to Ritualists as heroes, they're better than the competition, and so that's why they're used.

Necro = mediocre (mostly single-target) damage with good energy management.

Mesmer = enemy shutdown + lolaoe damage with decent energy management.

Where the necro shines is the availability of second professions and 3-4 skills from that second profession. This was a great advantage with 3 heroes. Now with 7 heroes you can spread out more and it's less of an advantage.