Of course, that'd be ridiculous if they counted the infinite tier layers, we'd all be rich! Like what I'm hearing, I look forward to the implementation.
Now then, Mesmer talk: So I was originally planning on a shatter build with GS and S/pistol or focus with traits at 20/20/0/0/30. I then by recommendation from someone in map chat watched the videos by Mr. Prometheus on youtube and I highly recommend it to all Mesmers, at least new ones. It's a lot to watch but you can skip through but he does a great job covering all the basics, skills, traits, combos you can self create, etc. with his own opinions and experience on it all. He also encourages you to come up with build theory rather than just recommending a specific build you can copy/paste to your character though he does recommend one for leveling. Some of it is before patches concerning skills, but he touches on updates each video he produces (currently 4 of them). Anyway, he convinced me to give the staff a chance and that it's heavily underrated offensively.
I've just recently applied the Master manual and am finding that I don't really shatter often (only to finish an enemy off) and that the minor traits really cater towards keeping my clones/phants on the board. I can stack bleeding on foes something fierce and allowing enemies to kill my clones rather than shattering them, cripples them which makes it easier for me to create space and generate another clone in it's place. When I get more skill points, I'll also unlock a minor trait for causing a random condition when they kill a clone. So as fun as shatter build probably is, I'm really considering a phantasm build which would probably have me go 20 20 0 25 5 (though I very well make take 5 off of the fourth trait line and put it on one of the other three, need to look at what I'd get again). I am rocking the staff with s/focus for running around maps and swapping the focus for pistol when I'm not in need of swiftness like in a story mission. I plan on equipping torch for dungeon runs when I expect to be playing in a party where I can do some serious support with condition removals and chaos armor all around. It's almost a shame to not use GS because it's a lot of fun but the staff has so much versatility and what REALLY makes it useful is your clones using the 1 attack which causes conditions on the foe and the 3 (phantasm) skill causes more damage the more conditions are stacked on the foe which between myself and my other two clones out, is quite a bit
my gear is in the mold of zerker (Power, Prec, Crit) and I have a sigil that gives me 30 percent chance to bleed on crit which my one skill has a chance of causing that regardless so I just really stack the bleeding and it makes my phantasm do lots of damage. It will only do more once I get that cause random condition on clone death trait
Thoughts? Suggestions?
