IW R/Mes

I played a Mes/W this beta and found that I couldn't handle the damage unless I had a quality monk along with me. This is my R/Mes a more defensive IW build.

Illusion 12
Inspiration 8
Expertise 12 (+1/+1)

Dodge
Lightning Reflexes
Whirling Defense
IW-E
Illusion of Haste
Conjure Phantasm
Sympathetic Visage
Physical Resistance

The damage output is cut down, but this guy definitely has staying power. It will have 75% chance to evade/block for most of the fight and with Sympathetic you shouldn't have any problems with Warriors ganging up on you.

What I don't like is the loss of a nice disrupt that one would get playing a Mes/W. However, with the elite tag now on Hundred Blades there won't be too big a difference between R/Mes and Mes/W.

I didn't really know whether to go with Physical Resistance or not, but I wanted to have a theme to the build so I went with it anyway. I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Edit* I know this is a stance heavy build but remember you will never need to use all these stances at once.

Trading a few points of expertise for some points in beast mastery so you could use tigers fury might be a good idea because of the shorter recharge time.

You can drop down to 9 expertise and it would only cost you 1 more energy for your skills check the expertise table out

Actually, Expertise doesn't affect the energy cost of any of the skills in that build. walder has pumped Expertise solely because it improves the skills Lightning Reflexes and Whirling Defense. Dropping the Expertise down would cost some duration on those two stances.

It is still worth considering, however, as the accelerated attack speed of Tiger's Fury would work well with IW. Then again, if you're going to go down that road I would personally return to a Mes/War or War/Mes build - Flurry is a better option than Tiger's Fury on an IW build, and the Warrior skill line has some defensive stances that can take the place of the Ranger ones.

problem is you no longer have any good shield skills, and a melee ranger without a shiled has little chance of survival, so you need the stances, and your still not killing as fast without the huge attack speed bonuses...so your opponent will survive your stances and tear you apart

I think you should play with Warrior/Mesmer instead, because your sacrificing a lot of armor for what benifit from the ranger? a little bit more energy?

Hmm ok well i belive you about expertise it was just that the table/guide said...

Quote: Expertise reduces the costs of all Attack Skills, Preparations, Traps, Stances, Rituals, Glyphs, and Shouts by 4% per attribute level. So I assumed that was true at some point but is probably out of date now. I'm no ranger expert . This also makes me wonder what kind of skills tigers fury disables when its active.

Expertise still does reduce the cost of Attack skills, however I use no Attack skills in my build. So the table is correct but it just doesn't apply. I was seriously considering using Tigers Fury in this build but I thought the energy cost was too high for the effects.

I will probably hang on to this one just to test it out but I definitely agree that the Mes/W is a better option due to the offense boosts and the Tactics line to get close to the Ranger stances.

Does final thrust double IW dmg? someone should test that out.

I think it would be interesting to do a Warrior/Mesmer build. Im deffinatly gonna see what i can do next BWE.

Quote: Originally Posted by Kyraith Mentara

What if your getting your adrenaline from say Balthazar's Spirit?

Quote: Originally Posted by walder What if your getting your adrenaline from say Balthazar's Spirit? It doesn't matter if you manage to get adrenaline because you don't get the damage bonus of final thrust when using IW. If people are looking for information on IW mesmers than I suggest reading this thread.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=198

It's a long read but it contains several IW builds in addition to an extremely detailed description of how IW works by Saus.

For those of you not willing to read the whole thing (which is very understandable it's pretty long) ... I've taken out the one sentence which pretty much sums up how IW works

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sausaletus Rex In short, all that happens with skills when using IW is that their (the skills) damage is replaced by that of IW. No matter what you do or what would otherwise happen you only get IW damage. All other secondary effects still happen. (Note you have to go about halfway through to get to the IW build reviews)

Take a minute and read the skill description for IW

Quote: For 30 seconds, you deal no damage in melee, but whenever you attack in melee, target foe takes 8-34 damage. No damage in melee literaly means you do no damage with melee attacks of any kind. Some skill descriptions aren't accurate but this isn't one of them. The only way to increase the damage out put of IW is to increase your attack speed. You can use arcane mimicry to grab 100 blades from an ally and that will work with IW because it attacks twice but i dont belive its worth all that effort.

Edit: aw someone beat me to it!