Averax.8617

Mirage is fun and it makes me feel safe... like a warm blanket But i only do open world/solo stuff so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I remember reading a thread once where someone was sad that there was no staff that looked like the ones the phantasmal warlocks use. But today i found the staff, from the ascended weapon chest from the wizard's vault. Couldn't find the thread but i figured i'd share it here because it looks nice. https://i.imgur.com/KpXOHPU.png

It feels like there should be but i haven't found anything that anybody has come up with, at least for open world stuff. I've been toying around with it myself since i noticed that the ambushes provide a lot of stacks of bleed and torment very very fast, and it's pretty bursty for relatively little effort. The playstyle is fun to boot. I know there's power mirage builds out there that utilize the dagger and are mostly used for open world builds, but i feel like they don't really take advantage of the potential condition damage. /shrug I'm sure it's a case of "why do this when you could do virtuoso for better effect", but I'd still like to hear thoughts.

i'm not an experienced player by any means but i find them fun as reaper. I've been yearning for a good ranged power weapon set that cleaves since i picked up the spec. Love dipping in and out of melee now. The staff exists in a weird place, and the axe was single target only, but the swords feel great on reaper The dash may be a dps loss but it's great for coming in and using your shouts.

I figure i should update this one last time. Yes i did figure out how to effectively use mesmer, including virtuoso. But i wasn't having very much fun with any of the elite specializations. Mirage was okay, if a bit bland. However the most fun i had playing mesmer was with the core setup with my greatsword, which is probably not going to cut it if i choose to do anything more than open world content. Virtuoso was kind of fun, and i learned how to survive while playing that, but it was starting to hurt my hands with how often i was using bladesongs. Didn't give much thought to Chronomancer because all the guides and videos on it kept saying it was very complex, and that doesn't interest me. I feel like virtuoso might be great for a controller setup. I might try that later after i figure out how to map the controller like people do for the steamdeck. For the meanwhile, i've gone back to my necromancer. Reaper go brrrrrr.... Seriously, it's nice to have pets out that don't go away when i've killed something, and not even need them to take hits to the face.

Going back to core was the correct direction for my survivability. And from there, learning how to play mirage was pretty fun. Cloak is pretty amazing

Thank you all for the advice. I think i'll switch back to core mesmer and start working on mirage. I was actually torn between mirage and virtuoso when i was chosing an elite spec, because both looked fun, i went with virtuoso because a bunch of videos said it was really good. I'm guessing that's more of a gear thing.g

I had a few boosts from purchasing expansions I used the first on my necromancer, and did all of the main personal story on that. Bulldozed that with my army of minions. Just barely unlocked reaper by the end. I switched to Mesmer for Living World S1+2 and HoT, and i noticed things started getting progressively more difficult to stay alive through that. It's now to the point where it's virtually guaranteed that i get downed several times in story instances. Mostly just dying to chip damage and sometimes randomly being 1-shot by something. Now that i'm in maguuma i can't really seem to solo very much anymore. Am i doing something wrong or the class just a glass cannon until you can get more points into your elite specs? I'm a little way into Virtuoso and am really feeling the absence of my clones now. I thought it would be more useful to be able to bank those charges out of combat but now i'm not so sure.