Razah - Ritualist or Mesmer?

i run melee usually, so two rits/two mes/and 3 necro is perfect for me. razah is build as a st/defensive/offensive rit, and his shelter and union and displacement are extremely useful if my minions die to nukes. i am sure to micro them with soul twisting, so they last forever combined with unfeeling. plus, anguish and pain stack with xandras spirits, so more dps. two mesmers is more than enough imo (panic and ineptitude). also, by speccing razah as st, xandra can sos and bring soh and smite hex, uber buffing me. that allows me to bring a curses/heal necro, which boosts my damage even more.

Not sure why people are so ecstatic over mesmer primaries.

You can run mesmer elites on secondaries pretty well, sure you're missing 4 attribute points but you gain more utility.

I say do whichever makes you feel more comfortable. I do a lot of experimental testing and switch my builds about once every day - and I've found personally that Energy-surge caps out its utility at 2 copies, although that might because I run more secondary Area of Effect damage than the usual Mesway. This is more an AI issue because Heroes do not tend to use Energy Surge the instant it is off the recharge and prefer to wait until it can hit multiple targets before they bump its priority. (AI Issues also hinder the utility of Chaos Storm in PvE)

Instead I find myself needing more "cleanup" single target damage-per-second (clumps aren't an issue). Recently, I've been experimenting with a strict SpiritMes build for areas where you can't depend on large clusters of enemies (Partly due to curiosity piqued by a comment by Jeydra about the speed of Spiritways) and I can say that if you're using Energy-surge strictly for the damage, it is often inferior to Wandering Eye, which is nearly identical as far as utility is concerned except that Wandering Eye requires the enemy to attack, recharges faster, and does more damage. (Energy Surge has the advantage of being in Domination, but Illusion isn't too shabby either.)

Here's an example of my current testing build which I've been using for WiK today - AoE damagewise, I really can't tell the difference between it and 4 ESurges.



Note that this is purely an AI testing build on the vanquish caravan from hell, so many things don't make sense (for example, I forgot to remove Dwayna's Sorrow from the Monk when I kicked out my necromancer) and the apparent redundancy of Protective Spirit and Aegis on the Soul Twisting rit. As far as your question is concerned though, Signet of Ghostly Might does a hell of a lot more dps than a single Mesmer (especially with painful bond) but it's not Area of Effect.

A lot of people will tell you that Blood is Power is bad, but as far as I'm concerned, with regards to Mesmers, that opinion is full of poo. There are very very few skills that basically give 20 energy to target other party member over 12 seconds for the cost of 1 energy and a bit of health. It opens up so many possibilities and flexibility on hero bars because you don't need to glut them down with E-management.

edit: And in reply to majoho, you do have a point that much of what they can do isn't all that exclusive, but the main focus is for Fast Casting. If Energy Surge was a 99 damage nuke every 15 seconds, it'd be kind of ugh. With the potential of casting it every 11 seconds instead, it becomes better. Also, a significant amount of the strong Mesmer skills have semi-long casting times (2 seconds or so) and this is counterproductive when trying to spike the enemy before they get a chance to recover (or do damage to you).

SoGM rit can ball, but it will remain single target, so there's no added benefit to balling (other than applying Painful Bond to multiple targets).

The 100 foes with fire eles is just an exaggeration, but the 3-5 enemies with ESurge is very realistic.

@Above stuff with fire ele's - mistrust + e-surge + CoF will blow away SF's damage output in hard mode with fast casting included.

I'm currently wanting to explore the potential of a 5-6 mesmer team with an Ineptitude, Fevered Dreams, Extend Conditions + rit healing (could be played as a rit, too), 2 E-surges, and possibly a panic. I'm considering dropping the panic for a BiP healer necro, so I could sub out energy skills on the least intensive of the mesmers and add in prot skills.

Theorycraft so far.

I may attempt running a 3 mesmer build, dropping the extend conditions, panic, and an energy surge (and keeping Fevered Dreams + Ineptitude + one E-surge). Basically a 3 mesmer fragway that shuts down through daze and blind.

My opinions of panic are that it's now overrated. With multiple mesmers you can provide the shutdown to a group that you need just through energy management skills and others like CoF and Mistrust. More shutdown is wasted - I'd want to take a more useful elite at this point (in using smaller amounts of mesmers, I'd vouch for it's usefulness though).

Problem with SoGM is that it takes 10s (estimate) to set up. That means you either wait for 10s before a battle or it takes 10s during the battle before you can get to full DPS. I'll handle these separately.

If a group without SoGM runs straight in while you are camping around setting up spirits, you don't just have to out DPS the mesmer, you have to out DPS the mesmer to the point where the difference equals the entirety of the damage the team with the mesmer put out for those 10s. Assuming battles last 30s on average, that means you have to put out on the order of 5x the DPS of the mesmer. This is clearly impossible.

If you run straight in with SoGM and start casting, you lose a lot of things. First off, you can't use AoU and affect them all. Your spirits can't tank any more. Your spirits' attacks will not be focused like they would if you used summon spirits and/or precast the spirits. That means Painful Bond is increasingly unreliable the more enemies you get. Furthermore, you still lose DPS just as above (though less). Ignoring the problem of painful bond not working, you miss out on about 7s of damage effectively (5s worth because only half your spirits are up on average, x1.5 because you can't cast SoGM until the end). So we are almost as badly off as we were before anyways!

Note: all this goes away as soon as you place summon spirits on your bar. Every battle other than the first for an area will have 0 wasted time and you can directly compare the DPS between a SoGM and Mesmer builds. Pity heroes can't use PvE skills. Personally, I still would prefer the mesmer for most areas, though player-run SoGM builds certainly show their strengths against smaller numbers or as a way to quickly spike dangerous melee enemies with armor ignoring damage while also body blocking them.