Monster Energy

Well, the title pretty much says and asks it all. I was wondering on the mechanics of NPC enemies and their energy. Do they have the same regen and energy capacity as the PC counterparts, or are there special mechanics? I ask because I have a Mesmer and a lot of the skills I have so far have focused on removing, manipulating and hindering Energy, such as Mind Wrack.

Energy Denial in pve is worthless. Monsters have at least twice as big energy regen as players of same profession. You can look at Hard Mode Grawl Shamans spamming Heal Area, Heal Other without any energy loss at all.

I agree with above tbh. enemies can sit there spamming 10e spells all day seeminlly without runnin out of energy, use your e-denial skills in PvP they will probably be more useful there.

Non-boss monsters in normal mode seem to have comparable energy levels and regeneration to player characters of the same profession. It is possible to drain these monsters dry, if you want to focus on that (not recommended, as if you're playing a mesmer your primary self-heal relies on your target having some energy).

However, all boss monsters (normal and hard modes) and non-boss monsters in hard mode appear to have insanely high energy levels and regeneration. While it is still possible to drain them completely, to do so means devoting your entire bar to energy denial skills only, and even then you will only be realistically able to keep one target drained at most (if even that, and you'd have to be both extremely skilled and extremely lucky to pull it off). There are far more other useful things that a mesmer can do in the PvE environment. On the plus side though, this means that you can always expect to get the maximum possible damage out of Energy Burn and Energy Surge.

In short, if you want to go for energy denial in PvE, nobody's going to stop you. But realistically, it's not going to do much in the long run and there are other things you could be doing to aid the party dynamic. Energy denial is far more effective in PvP where every opponent has their energy situations more or less standarised; while you may not be able to totally dry out an opponent (due to intelligent opponents hiding energy or otherwise conserving and prioritising its use), you can still put a nice dent in their blue bars to make life more difficult for them.

decent e denial in pve is visage and spirit shackles

Thank you all kindly for this information. Now I know not to waste time with crap like Power Leak and Shackles and ilk in PvE. ^^

However, there is a PvE build using [skill=text]Famine[/skill], [skill=text]Spirit Shackles[/skill], and [skill=text]Mind Wrack[/skill] that's used to farm various bosses throughout the game. (Note that this build is generally used with Ranger primaries, but I would imagine Mesmers can use it too.)
While E denial is generally considered useless for ordinary play, there are ways it can be used to the advantage of clever players.

i say Powerblock would be better if you want to disable PvE casters. a Grawl Ulodyte will be rendered if you Powerblock/Diversion them. I would use more disable skills than e-drain skills :/

In general, all normal mode monsters have an additional +1 energy regeneration compared to us human players. An exceptional few have more than that, but they aren't common.

those bonders in echowald forest ao the grawl boss with unyielding aura don't have energy problems no matter how many enchantments they are keeping up.

at least energy surge will always deal full damage