Whats a good Anti-Touch build?

Just wonder what skills I should use to take these mofos down. Right now I have been using {E} Crippling Anguish, Ethereal Burden, Conjure Phantasm, Conjure Nightmare , Mantra of Persistence, Inspired Hex, Distortion.

16 in Illusion +3 rune
The rest in Inspiration and w/e is left in fast casting.

It's been working pretty good just wondering if there is something better and faster to kill off Touch rangers in AB for a mesmer.

You can always PP/SD them for a deep wound.

Diversion is nice vs TRs

Diversion is but i'd rather keep my skill points out of Dom

Could an IW Mesmer take down a Touchy? Not sure..

As long as you can keep them away from touching you [aka: anti-warrior tactics], you'll be fine.

A touch type is just another type of warrior, one that feeds off of energy and armor ignorance...

Just keep them low on energy and NOT near you and I don't see the problem...

My warrior has a tendency to eat these players for dinner... [hard to heal yourself when I skill lock 3 of your touches off the bat... yay disrupting chop!]

Your build seems like you're doing too much degen. Really, unless you're planning on taking on three at a time, Conjure Nightmare is overkill. You only really need to do snare one while you pick off the other and make sure you kite properly.

Besides, if you get three people on you as a mesmer in any PvP, you're in trouble and probably need your team to help bail you out.

Here's something similar to what I use in ABs, since that seems to be the main touch ranger hotspot. It seems to do well against touch rangers.

Illusion: 12+3+1
Inspiration: 9+1
Fast Casting: 6+1

Crippling Anguish (E)
Conjure Phantasm
Images of Remorse
Distortion
Spirit of Failure
-
Illusion of Weakness
Drain Enchantment
Ethereal Burden

The last three slots are flexible to whatever your playstyle is and are just my suggestions. I'd include Spirit of Failure though, because Warriors, Rangers, and especially Assassins will make a point to single you out even in a touch ranger-less game, and getting an energy boost of 3 or 4 for every time they whiff is a huge benefit.

Well the only reason I am using Inspired Hex is cause sometimes the R/N's use {E} Life transfer so it helps A LOT. Anyways thanks for all the input =)

Diversion is the number one skill to beat them, since they rely on spamming in order to be effective, and they really only have 1-2 spam attacks. Even diverting one of their vamp skills will cut their damage and healing in half. If you can get both, they are useless. Energy drain/damage skills might also help, but many of them having emanagement from OoB or a pet skill.

Snares help also, but they tend to be expensive and not used much for other purposes, since you already have Distortion to help against melee attackers. So your best bet is to just put Diversion in your build, if it wasn't already there.

If you want to stick to Illusion and Inspiration, I'd recommend taking one of the following: Crippling Anguish, Etherial Burden, Kutah's Burden. But again, Illusion and Inspiration don't really have good anti-Touch solutions. All the good stuff is in Domination.

It is true, the only thing you can do to a toucher in Illusion is degen them, Which is not bad but you are better off stopping their stupid spamming than waiting for them to die. It seems to me that if you take Illusion to counter a toucher you are using most of your skill bar to combat one type of enemy but if you use Dom you can do it with 2 skills.

Try using Diversion for the touches and I really like using Arcane Theivery since they usually only run with 1 spell. If you steal their OoB they are really screwed, and if you run a Me/N and have points in blood you can use that extra elite e-mgmt spell to your advantage (I wouldn't bank on always getting OoB everytime you use Arcane T, but if your build happens to use blood it is a happy side effect of going against a TR).

A toucher that diverted even one of his/her touch skills and has lost OoB is less than worthless to their team. All they can do is wand stuff and throw off an occasional touch, which will get diverted eventually.

EDIT:

on a side note, does anyone know the effects of echo'ing Arcane Thievery? most notably, after 20 seconds when echo returns to echo does the opponent get their spell back or is it still disabled? I know the chance of catching the same spell, but was just wondering if anyone had any definitive knowledge on that other part of it.

Blackout!!!

Crippleshot with interupts works well. Even if they start plague touching, you can always start spamming interupts to shut them down. Distracting Shot FTW!

*edit* Doh! just realized that I'm on a mesmer forum. >.<

CS ranger is good at countering touchers, but as you might have noticed this is the mesmer forum.

Ok first of all take Conjure Nightmare of your skill bar, It is a bad skil.

And Diversion works good on touchers, or just slow them down and degen to death, since they have no self heal besides touching

Honestly, i love domination, and diversion/blackout, even though it disables ur skills, coupled with a slow down skill pwn those annoying kurzick touchies (not trying to make kurzicks mad, but its true that they use touchies more that luxons )



-Dean

As an Me/Rt I use binding chains/bloodsong, echo, degen and two interrupts.
I know binding chains seems out of place since I am using illusion for the degen and illusion has it's own slow down skills, but I like binding chains 'anti-attack' hex that doesn't break on degen or life stealing. It helps to shut down any ranger attacks as well as making kiting easier.

I think the OP had a pretty good build in place for his/hers particular request and that is to keep it withing Illusion/Inspiration/Non-attribute.

I love taking down touch rangers in AB.

I never enter an alliance battle without two things, a good interupt and a snare. If you can't slow the touch ranger (or warrior) down, no matter how many time you black them out, they will eventually catch up to you. Crippling anguish is a good skill though.

Ethereal Burden (15 energy, 3 sec cast) and Imagined Burden(15 energy, 1 sec cast) take too long to cast and cost too much energy when I do alliance battles. I want to slow something down as fast as possible and for the lowest cost when I'm getting targeted by touch rangers.

I usually run an ele secondary. I take something like grasping earth (you don't need high earth attributes for it to be effective). It'll give you and your teammates time to get away to start the damage. Grasping earth is also a good skill if two warriors decide to team up on you.

Grasping Earth
Hex Spell. For 8...18 seconds, all nearby foes move 50% slower but have +24 armor against physical damage.

Energy: 5
Cast time: 3/4 of a second (really fast with fast-casting)
Recharge: 30 sec

Damage is up to you at this point. I try to take things that will knock down, or disrupt once I get away.

counter to touch

1. snare, movement slowing spells
2. heavy degen
3. shutdown
4. spike damage
5. e-denial

for the illusion mesmer build, i would bring some e denial stuff for the kicks.