help with deciding between 2 spellcasters

not too long ago i asked for help to decide between necro and mesmer. i gave necro a try and it was very powerful... but i wasnt happy about the theme. im not a big fan of the heavy death theme it has. now id like to choose between mesmer and ele. i hadnt considered ele before because of the lack of weapons i could choose from. any input would help. i mostly play open world fractals and wvw. thank you in advance

@jhern.6097 said:not too long ago i asked for help to decide between necro and mesmer. i gave necro a try and it was very powerful... but i wasnt happy about the theme. im not a big fan of the heavy death theme it has. now id like to choose between mesmer and ele. i hadnt considered ele before because of the lack of weapons i could choose from. any input would help. i mostly play open world fractals and wvw. thank you in advance

Lack of weapons on elementalist? See it in this way. Elementalists have 4 sets of weapon skills for each weapon due to the element attunements. They have the most weapon skills of any class in the game. Requiring a good memmory for whats currently on cooldown, and the different combo+finishers you can make.

Ele is probably the best spellcaster, but it is also the one with the highest skilcap. So many combos and especially weaver attunement is not for everyone.

Go mesmer. Ele is potentially the stronger class, but requires a lot of PLAYER skill to use well. It has the lowest health of any class, and the most complex set of skills (each weapon has 4x the number of skills because of elemental attunement). Mesmers have a good health pool and some very strong builds for any application.

Elementalist is the most versatile. It has many builds that can do different things.

The caveat, is that Elementalist is more difficult to use. It relies more heavily on playing well to stay alive (If using a typical glass cannon build) and can have more complex skill usage due to the capability to swap "Weapons" via Attunements.

Mesmer is more straight forward and has more defence inherent in its skills, with evasion, target dropping and control as part of many of its skills.

So I'd suggest Elementalist if you can get through the overwhelming nature of Attunements giving access to 4 different sets of weapon skills (Generally, it boils down to just using 2 attunements most of the time: Fire and Air for Power builds, Fire and Earth for Condi builds, Air and Water for Support builds)

@"CaelestiaEmpyrea.2617" said:... It has the lowest health of any class,...

Just to clarify:

Warrior and necromancer have high health (19,212)Revenant, Engineer, Ranger and Mesmer have medium health (15,922)Guardian, Thief and Elementalist have low health (11,645)

Those are base level 80 numbers, so proportionally lower as leveling up. I have always assumed Engineer was planned to be high health so there would "be balance in the Force", but Anet dropped them to medium for balance reasons.

Guardian, Thief and Elementalist all have means of mitigating damage, so the low base health is all a part of the balance game.