Mesmer Guide

Basics

General

While it is well known that knowing your enemy as well as yourself is the path to victory, it is particularly true for mesmers, whose primary function is often to mess with their foes' actions.

So you're a Primary Mesmer

As a primary mesmer, you have access to Fast Casting, mesmer armor and mesmer runes.

Fast Casting:
Enables you to cast spells much quicker than any other profession. This makes your interrupts easier, enemy interrupts on you more difficult, and allows you to cast more spells in a set amount of time.

Classic Mistake:
Most beginner mesmers forget that Fast Casting applies to any spells, and any spell-oriented profession (monk, elementalist, necromancer and to a lesser extent, ritualist, assassin and dervish) will synergize well with it as a second profession.

Mesmer runes & headgear:
Enables you to have up to 4 more ranks in a mesmer attribute than secondary mesmers. The advantages should be obvious.

Managing Energy

The mesmer profession gives you all the tools needed to manage your energy level appropriately.
Conveniently, almost all of these are part of the Inspiration Magic line (minus some exceptions like Shame and Ethereal Burden) and will usually give back energy as well as performing another useful task.
Learning to use those skills is one of the things that differentiate normal mesmers and those that perform exceptionally well for long fights.

PvE

Being a mesmer in PvE is mostly around leveraging the faults of the AI:
- They ignore self-damaging hexes
- Always flee DoT AoE
- Always remove hexes, whenever possible

Domination Magic
Backfire is the crux of a anti-caster PvE Domination mesmer. The AI won't stop casting until doing so would be fatal.
Empathy applies in the same way to physical attackers: warriors, rangers and, even more so, assassins. Unlike Backfire, however, the monster will not stop attacking while under this hex.
Use Chaos Storm to apply pressure to casters or to disperse monsters due to the AoE damage it does.
Wastrel's Worry is a disabling dominator's friend. The skill is unique in that it punishes the target who uses skills infrequently, either because they are still recharging or because you have disabled them. Most of the AI in the game does not specifically activate skills to remove it, making it an invaluable hex to bring along. Timing is everything. Power Block (elite), Arcane Thievery/Larceny, Diversion, Psychic Distraction(elite), and Blackout all disable skills, which prevents the target from ending Wastrel's Worry.
When playing a mesmer in Prophecies or Nightfall, bring Wastrel's Worry along to kill enemy bosses. In these expansion campaigns, bosses have Natural resistance, which causes a hex to last only 50% of their indicated duration. This means that instead of getting damage from Wastrel's Worry after 3 seconds, the boss gets the damage after 1.5 seconds.

Illusion Magic
Use mobs equipped with hex removal skills to your advantage, by casting Phantom Pain on targets with low health, for they will always try to remove it, triggering the Deep Wound.
AI controlled opponents will always attack in-between skills, therefore, Images of Remorse will often do its conditional damage, making it a cheap damage dealer skill and a quickly recharging cover hex.
Distortion is a good defensive stance that can allow a mesmer to survive attacks long enough to shutdown or kill the foe.
There aren't many other Illusion Magic tips that are PvE specific, just apply standard degeneration or anti-physical tactics, as needed.

Inspiration Magic
Most AI controlled enemies will use physical attacks in between skills. Use this to your advantage with Spirit Shackles to shut down energy users. Consider throwing a little Mind Wrack on top. This is extremely effective against Rangers and Assassins.
Often, you'll know what kind of enemies you're going to encounter in advance. When dealing with elemental damage, you should always consider taking the corresponding protection mantra: Earth, Flame, Frost or Lightning. Which to take is often easily predictable by locations: in the Shiverpeaks it is clearly best to take Mantra of Frost, while in Charr-heavy areas Mantra of Flame is most useful.
The same applies, to a lesser degree, to Physical and Elemental damage.

PvP

Interrupting

Interrupting is a task that mesmers can do very well in different ways, having a lot of skills to do it.

Interruption skills are always coupled with side effects: for example, causing damage, increased recharge, energy gain, and energy denial. Choosing which one you bring with you can be figured out by some questions:

1. What do you want to interrupt (skills or spells)?
2. How often do you want to do it (based on recharge time, do you want to bring more than one interrupt skill)?
3. What side effect do you want to cause (what does your build do)?

Interrupting is really a science in and of itself, you can theoretically learn the basics, but you'll only become good at it with experience.

Here's a couple of tips:

- When under physical attacks, Boon Protectors will practically always cast Guardian. With its 1s casting time, this is probably the only spell they use you can interrupt while being one they often need for self defense.

- When a foe dies, quickly scan for the signet usage animation or tab through enemies, watching the skill monitor. You won't have a lot of time, but interrupting a resurrection is always useful and often a turning point.

- Foes who are enchanted will usually recast their enchantments after you remove them. Remove and Interrupt.

- Watch out for skills timing and fire your interrupt skill right when your foe will use his.
* This technique is hard to pull off because it requires you to learn and recognize patterns in your opponents skill usage.
* For example, a Touch Ranger's life stealing skills have a two second recharge, so when they fire one, count two second and kill them off with Psychic Distraction.

There's basically two interrupting strategies:
- Shutdown: Concentrate on a foe and prevent him from using any spells/skills.
* When a single opponent represents a sizable chunk of their strength (often elementalists or monks)

- Harass: Cycle between foes and interrupt important skills here and there.
* People are sometimes reluctant to use skills right after being interrupted: harassing opponents uses that fear to reduce their effectively by slowing down their skill usage.

Shutting Down

With any shutdown, Wastrel's Worry can be used to punish a player for not using their skills. Casting every 3 seconds, this can often equal or exceed damage caused by Backfire or Empathy, if the target tries to wait it out.

Casual Casters
Casual casters are primary physical attackers using spells as support. Like the infamous Wammos, most assassins and some rangers (rarely).
Arcane Thievery/Larceny are your best tools against those, as they will rarely carry more than one or two spells.

Slow Casters
Most people think three seconds is a long casting time. Double the pain with Migraine and or Arcane Conundrum. Don't forget to cover those up with quick casting/long lasting hexes.
For fun, you can throw in Overload while they waste an eternity casting their Meteor Shower.

Spammers
- Diversion is your best friend against spammers of all sorts (Touch Rangers etc.)
- Blackout is also a viable option.
- Backfire can be used effectively against spellcasters which rely on casting a lot of spells in a short space of time, such as spikers.

Melee Attackers
Sympathetic Visage/Ancestor's Visage or Soothing Images to deal with Adrenaline-based attackers.
- Empathy for generic harassment.
- Spirit Shackles with Mind Wrack.
* Warriors will often ignore it (until Mind Wrack hits)
* Assassins will lose a lot of attack power since it effectively cancels the energy gained through Critical Strike and then some.
* Rangers (using bow attacks) will lose a lot of the energy needed for their attack skills.
- Use any of the slow down hexes and kite.

Degenerating
Degeneration is a very potent way to deal with enemies for the following reasons:
- Degeneration is not damage and not affected by damage prevention (the whole Protection Prayers line)
- Mass degeneration will often cause people to panic:
* Melee attackers retreat to apparent safety (although will sometimes stay to try to finish off a wounded foe).
* If confronted with a mass of hexes they can't deal with, healers over-heal, wasting precious energy.

Illusion Magic is ideal for dealing life degeneration. Builds are usually build around spammable hexes like Conjure Phantasm and Images of Remorse. The rest are picked from various utilitarian skills that cause degeneration with added effects:
- Crippling Anguish (elite) - Slow down
- Illusion of Pain - Massive degeneration but heals when the hex ends
- Recurring Insecurity (elite) - Renewed when foe is hexed
- Phantom Pain - Cause a deep wound when the hex ends
- Migraine (elite) - Double spell casting times
Since degeneration is based solely on Illusion Magic hexes, it is a good idea to invest points in Inspiration Magic to be able to use Mantra of Persistence with some efficacy, rendering your hexes a lot more potent.