Looking for builds to for commanding zergs in WvW as a Mesmer

I’ve been driving far a little while now with my Gaurd and my Soellbreaker as they are obvious choices for WvW META and offer a lot of survivabliy and in Gaurds case a lot of utility also.

I basically main my Mesmer in the rest of the game modes and would like to use her to Command for my guild. I’m a bit hesitant to do so. I figure I could use a support chrono build to keep my team healed, cleared and buffed or I could try perhaps a power Mirgage build for the mobility and all the evasion. Also if I can get intel on other servers commanders it would be fun as hell to Moa them all night.

Do you guys have experience with this? What builds do you use?

I was actually interested in this a while back as well though i never followed through with it. I think Mesmer would be great at commanding if you could find a proper built. It’d be so nice to be able to drop your own portals and veils and elite skills

Well you can try, the obvious choices most people run with for commanding are guardian, warrior or elementalist. Reason being the classes can be quite tanky, aren't to complex (well eli is) and provide good survivability and cleave.

Not sure mesmer is a good pick. Sure you can now place your own portals, veils, etc. but that's not what a good commander should be focusing on. As commander you are there to lead, decide how the battle goes and where you are needed and place markers during ZvZ fights so you don't get stomped by the enemy zerg. Starting to micro your own class while doing so is not the smartest idea.

I've seen people commanding as a mesmer before so it's definitely doable, unfortunately I have no idea what build they were running. I can see where Cyninja is coming from though, the more mentally taxing the profession the less mental energy you'd have spare for the actual commanding, and while it might have been my own imagination/bias I did feel a little like the mesmer commanders had a little less... stage presence, for want of a better term. A little more "I'm busy doing my thing, you do your thing" than "hey everyone let's do this thing" but that might have been due to other factors rather than a profession difference. (Maybe they weren't super saiyan neon charr haha!)

I'm fairly sure mesmer has everything you'd need, it'd just be a case of how easy it is to perform while doing other things.

It doesnt really matter what build you use - a mesmers defense is mostly active, ie teleport away or dodge away from damage etc. There is simply no way to stay up under frontline pressure in a zerg enviroment and believe me I've tried. Even in full nomads it gets squished like a bug if you try to facetank. Illusions doesnt exactly help either. It "works" if you are facerolling easy enemies sure but there even berserker wont take much damage. That's a bad benchmark. It's just plain suboptimal. If you want to try to make it work, just go fully defensive traits.

That said I think it's an excellent choice to lead a smaller groups of similar mobile ranged classes. The defense is mostly active - so is the offense. A mesmer can easily bypass a zerg carpet bomb and if you get just 5 people with you... oh boy. The backline wont like that. Quick in, wreck some havoc and quick out. You just opened a door for your zerg to push through.

This is the build I use for driving a comped group. I can't really speak to how well it'll work for pugmanding, but it should be pretty usable. People are saying how mesmer can't stay up in a frontline group, but they're just hilariously wrong. No class can actually facetank a full bomb from another group, and if you're doing that it means you're bad at the game. As the driver (and as a frontline player in general) you use positioning and movement to stay out of heavy pressure, active defense (like dodge and block) to get through (not sit in) pressure, and sustain to heal back up afterwards. Mesmer is extremely suited to this type of play.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQNAs+dn0nBVphFoBGpBEgilhjyMAWgG68CygQrOTD1TF-j1x/wAvUCCS5HkTAo+jwHAgrDSAA9CB2fIAACwP7zYcAX3n/8n/8n/8n/8n/sUA+NzC-w

You'll notice a distinct lack of veil and portal. I don't take veil because it's trash. I don't take portal because you can't really do portal plays as the driver. For the vast majority of portal plays, the mesmer needs to split from the group and get behind/around/etc the enemy group. Doing this as the driver makes things get really sketchy because people effectively lose their organizational pillar while you're positioning for the portal. As a mesmer you'll have a better understanding of where and when it's appropriate to make a portal play, but I highly recommend against trying to pull one off yourself.

The weapons are sword/shield+focus because sword is great, shield is great, and focus is great. Staff instead of focus is an option, but you have to be careful about using staff 2 as the driver. Any sort of teleport makes you harder to follow, so staff 2 can really screw people up sometimes. Focus also is just generally more powerful due to the pull and the immob, particularly in the current meta.

The utilities are heal mantra, stab mantra, cleanse mantra, inspiration signet, and gravity well. The mantras all synergize with healing power in your gear and the mantra AOE heal trait. The heal mantra is a pretty large hit of healing when you charge it, and the charges let you control when to drop the on-heal chaos storm. The stability mantra is incredible stab uptime and makes you the primary stability source of the party. The cleanse mantra is left uncharged and used as you engage to provide resistance that gets shared by the signet and signet proc. It then allows you to cleanse off any condies applied and be up again for the next push. The signet does boonshare, make sure you combo it with the cleanse mantra charge. Gravity well does...gravity well things.

The traits are basically designed around boon support and defense. The notable points are boons on shatter providing significant boon sustain for your group, so make sure you keep rolling through shatters during a fight. They also provide personal stability to keep you moving properly. You drop a pbaoe chaos storm on healing, so try to use that as you pass over downed enemies. The last big point is that casting a phantasm will proc a signet of inspiration, so make sure you use that appropriately.

So this build works, and it actually works pretty well. There are some downsides though. The build requires a lot of micro to perform correctly, and that can be hard to pull off while simultaneously driving. You also don't really have cooldowns on priority skills like stability or damage for the most part, so it can be challenging to keep track of how cooldowns are going in the rest of your group. Lastly (and this one is in direct contradiction to what other people have been absurdly claiming), this build will be by far the most survivable build in any group. You have more sustain, more defense, and more damage mitigation than anyone else by far. This is great for staying alive...but it makes it very easy to accidentally lead your group through a death zone without even realizing how hot it is. You'll have to really pay attention to the damage you take and remember that if you took 30% damage moving through an area, your guards squeezed through taking 60% and your eles are probably in downed state somewhere.

Thanks /Pyroatheist.9031 that’s pretty much what I was saying when I was suggesting maybe running a support chrono in my post. I’ve run something similar for zerging before and the survivability was great. I made this post to put out feelers and see if someone had some interesting ideas I never considered before. I’ll probably roll with this. Oh and for the staff, you should see how confused people get when someone drives on a hammer Rev. It looks like the tag is leaping into the enemy Zerg all the time it’s pretty funny.

As for the others yes like I said I usually drive on a guardian or warrior beciase it’s easy and effective but sometimes I want to be a special snowflake :P