A Better Illusionary Warrior Build

Ok, so I've been playing as an illusionary weapons user for a long time. In fact, I have a character named Illusionary Warrior, after the build itself. I've done enough tinkering in areana and with PvE set ups to build, I think, the best mesmer/warrior I could. Here's what I've got.

Illusionary Warrior's Versatile I-Weaponeer

Attributes:

Fast Casting: 4 (3 + 1 mesmer rune of minor fast casting)
Illusion: 16 (12 + 3 mesmer rune of superior illusion + 1 costume mask)
Domination: 8 (7 + 1 mesmer rune of minor domination)
Tactics: 8

Gear:

Rogue's full set (Droknar's) 60AL (+10AL vs physical attacks)
Feiry Dragon Sword of Defense (+4AL) (15-22 damage)
Tall Shield: 16AL (8 tactics)

Skills:

Flurry
Clumsiness
Empathy
Arcane Conundrum
Power Spike
Illusionary Weaponry
Illusion of Weakness
Healing Signet

From here we can see that this is a versatile character. The idea is to maximize the power of illusionary weaponry by putting as much focus into illusion as possible. This pays off for us well, and here is why: With a 16 in illusion, illusionary weaponry will deal 42 damage per melee attack. That damage will not be affected by armor in any way, so that much damage per attack is already on par, if not superior to the amount of damage a primary warrior is putting out. Flurry is the logical capitalization of that advantage and it can be cast repeatedly every 5 seconds. It has a 5 second cooldown and I've notice that's about exactly how much energy I regenerate every 5 seconds as well, so I can cast it non-stop while illusionary weaponry is going. I typically want to focus on doing so once I do cast illusionary weaponry. However, illusionary weaponry is not the first skill I usually open up with.

Before combat begins I try to leave myself time to cast illusion of weakness and heal myself. With 16 points in illusion that gives me a buffer of more than 250 health points once my health drops below 25%. This is excellent for me because as you can see, I'm focusing on taking out the casters and rangers of the enemy team. Casters and rangers will probably be in the back, behind the tanks. That means that I'll be going in deep and I probably wont have monk heal support, and other characters like our team's tanks will need that anyway. So illusion of pain lets me live a little long than normal and survive the cooldown time for Illusionary Weaponry.

Ah the cooldown time. This is where you have to catch the learning curve of a proper illusionary warrior build. For 10 seconds, every 30 seconds, your character suddenly loses the power to dish out more damage than a primary warrior and becomes a caster. So this reason, I usually have a backup weapon like a cane with max damage and armor bonus. For ten seconds I try to pull back, and hopefully I will lure someone to follow me. As I backpedal for ten seconds, I have two ways to disrupt the enemy, and I can disrupt both warriors/rangers and casters/healers. This same disruption is what I will usually begin with, before I cast illusionary weaponry on myself.

As the combat round begins, while I'm buffering health and healing, I'm looking at the enemy team to find their healers, casters, and rangers - usually in that order. If I've picked a healer or a caster, I'll open with arcane conundrum and wait for them to cast so I can follow with a power spike. Here is the beauty of the synergy between both of those skills. With a 16 in illusion, arcane conundrum will double the casting time of any spells the enemy casts for the next 16 seconds. That gives me plenty of time to cast power spike while they're casting and pop them for 64 damage. But even supposing they're smart and wait to cast a spell, I've locked them down - denied them the ability to play their strongest opening moves long enough for me to kill them with illusionary weaponry. Done effeciently, nobody on the enemy team can stop it unless their entire team diverted and attacked me simultaneously. Otherwise, I will remove at least one of their support characters before they catch on or do anything to slow me down, and possibly even two.

But supposing that they dont have heavy caster support, or instead of a nuker they have a ranger or two. This is where the second disruptive aspect of this character comes into play. Empathy at domination of 8 will last for 14 seconds and the attacker will take 21 damage everytime they attack. I usually throw culmsiness ontop of that, and if I do, they dare not attack for 8 seconds. With illusion at 16 clumsiness will last for 8 seconds and will deal 97 damage to the attacker - as well as interrupt their attack - and if they are under the affect of empathy, that stacks with the other 21 damage for a whopping 118 damage. That's a hell of a lot of damage for a ten second interval while my illusionary weaponry cools down, or for an opening combo against an enemy ranger I've targeted for an illusionary weaponry assassination.

The energy curve takes getting used to. You dont have alot because of the rogue's set, but I felt that the bonus to armor against physical attacks was essential to this build. Most of the skills this build fields are in the ten spot, and that's not hard to sustain. As long as you always leave yourself 10 or 15 energy to cast or re-cast illusionary weaponry, you'll never have to worry.

If you wanted you could play with this build as well. If you wanted to drop the empathy/clumsiness combo, you could replace either of those two skills with sprint, or imaginary burden. You could also drop the caster disruption from the conundrum/spike combo if you wanted. Ultimately, however, the build hinges on the incredible effectiveness of illusionary weaponry, so you'll always want to bring that and flurry/frenzy. Personally, I prefer flurry because illusionary weaponry ignores the drop in damage from flurry, and also because with this skill set-up, I dont have an effective defensive stances. That might be another consideration for skill choice if you wanted to drop the empathy/clumsiness or the conundrum/spike combos.

However, the importance of having those two combos is in the fact that without illusionary weaponry up you're just a mesmer again. That's why I bring both combos. If, by some fluke of logic on their behalf, they decide to pop my illusionary weaponry enchantment, they'll probably pop my illusion of weakness enchantment instead. But, assuming THAT has already been popped, then I'll be stuck without illusionary weaponry for awhile. So that's why I keep both combos to fall back on as opposed to other skills. With the kind of mesmer synergy between those four skills happening, it's almost impossible to ignore them.

If you bring a perfect "of enchanting" mod for your sword you will have 6 seconds extra on IW effectively making the downtime only 4 seconds

Ñaz

yep. and allthough this looks a very nice IW, it has a problem: it uses Illusionary Weaponry. The second i see an IW, i'll try to disenchant. and that leaves you in a somewhat problematic situation. looking at your skillchoices, i think this one is build for random arena, where enchant removal is still 'tech'. but people will take more and more an enchantment removal to disrupt.

the build IW is just fragile on its own, centering around one skill.

granted, this build has some tricks still going, but having half of dominations max power won't compensate that.

you forgot blind, cripple

Blackout seems godly on any warriorish character.

Well, if you've noticed, the build doesn't really rely on illusionary weaponry.

Really, if the enemy drops my illusionary weaponry that only means that flurry becomes useless to me for awhile. I can still hang back and hex away with my cane.

I dont use illusionary weaponry as an opening move, as I think I said. I use it as a surprise move. Something you dont expect. When you see me casting hexes and acting like a normal mesmer, you probably aren't expecting that I'll suddenly whip out a sword and slice some vulnerable character to ribbons.

If you notice, this build, although tweaked to make illusionary weaponry as effective as it can be, does not RELY on illusionary weaponry for its effectiveness. Illusionary weaponry is merely a part of this build. The high score I have put into illusion magic is something I would invest in anyway, since the illusion skills are, in my opinion, highly desirable above most of the domination skills anyway. With the exception of possibly one or two good interrupts in the domination tree, I dont really need much that it has to offer me. Honestly, in all the matches I've been in using this build, which has been somewheres around 23 now (I'm always trying new things), I've always accomplished my goal of disrupting the enemy team's support by killing off their healer or caster faster than they can stop me.

EVEN IF they were able to remove my illusionary weaponry the very moment I cast it - which requires that they remove my illusion of weakness first - you have to understand that that is the very reason why I put arcane conundrum/spike in the build. I'm not going to cast illusionary weaponry on myself until I've hexed their mesmer or enchantment removal with arcane conundrum, which will make their spell take twice as long to cast, giving me PLENTY of time to pop it with a spike. I'd really have to suck not to be able to stop a mesmer from casting enchantment removal on myself when it takes them twice as long to do it. The whole concept of this build is speed-kill.

Anyway, that said, I totaly agree that most illusionary weaponry builds are shitty because they focus so totaly on using IW to disrupt the enemy. That's why I tried something different.

Isn't the Rogue's Armor a dead giveaway? Or do you switch to a different set when you go to your cane and focus?

Actually, as I said in the beginning, the very name of my character is a dead giveaway. The character is named Illusionary Warrior.

So I'm not using stealth to duck enchantment removal. I just built the character to be able to deal with it in case it happens.

And yes, I bring a secondary set of armor for casting. If I find that they have strong removal and using illusionary weaponry isn't going to help much I dont even bother to use it at all. I just hex and disrupt the enemy team from a safe distance and switch to a second set of armor.

You might argue that it would be a good idea to start with different armor on, but like I said, the character's name tells you what the build does, so that would be pretty irrelevant, unless I decided to build a completely different character and rely on my name to confuse them.

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