PvE illusion mesmer help?

ive been playing a PvE mesmer ( dom/inspir ) for a while...and was wondering if a illusion/? ( i like to stick to mes only cept for a rebirth or hard res ) is good?? anyone kno of some suggestions with good combo's or what not for PvE only? ive ran IW builds its fun, but boring after a bit...i wanna try out to be more "caster" like.....need some insight and help...ty!

For PvE illu, there are a few types. One is degen;

The rule of thumb for degen is because it is relatively weak and has a cap, you want to get it on as many enemies as possible to maximize it's effectiveness. Thus an elite like Mantra of Recovery is good (persistance isn't bad either), and the focus of your attack is images of remorse + conjure to keep 9 degen on all targets. 18d/s is quite low, but when on an entire pack of mobs it does sizeable amounts of damage especially to mobs that aren't targetted until later.

To complement that, arcane conundrum for caster mobs and power drain for energy management are good choices. Cry of frustration can be brought along for the interrupt (doesn't need dom points), but power drain should have a spot, and you should have 10~ points in insp or so. This also allows ether feast if you want a selfheal.

Tactic for this demi-build would be to keep degen on all enemies, while interrupting heals being thrown at them by mobs. This will shave away a good deal of the enemy mob hp before they are targetted by your main group damage dealers, making the whole group fall quicker.

Pure mesmer except for your res skill is fine and I would advise remaining that way.

If you don't like degen, you can go a more illu-damage way. Using ineptitude (with epidemic if you like), clumsiness, conundrum to mess up casters and warriors is a very powerful setup. You can bring SV or AV (same skill desc) to throw on your tank (if he's good enough to hold aggro) which helps alot as well. Distortion is supreme self-defence, since you don't have one of the mantras in the degen build there is no reason not to run it. You can easily run a secondary domination attribute as your energy req is lower (to not need insp), using skills such as shatter hex, empathy, and cry of frustration.

Quote: Originally Posted by Avarre

Yes, after ineptitude gives blindness, you spread the condition

Illusion Only:
Conjure Phantasm
Clumsiness/Ineptitdude(E)
Ethereal Burden
Illusionary Weakness
Phantom Pain
Arcane Conundrum
Ether Feast
Res Sig/Rebirth

Ether Feast is the only non-Illusion spell (required for healing only)
If you are a monk, then use better healing skills and put 0 points into Inspiration Magic.

I don't know Cantha's Mesmer skills, so I didn't list them.

You can also sub Arcane Conundrum and Ethereal Burden for Fragility and Signet of Midnight (e).

If you wanted also bring Epidemic and toss out Illusionary Weakness. The reason for Illusionary Weakness is for backup health. Fragility will do damage each time a person is inflicted or cured of a condition. Best to use Fragility then Phantom Pain. If Phantom Pain is removed, then it inflicts Deep Wounds. Once that happens, the target foe's max health is reduced by 20% and you do damage via Fragility. Epidemic will then transfer that to other foes near by. Signet of Midnight inflicts blidness for 15 seconds. Triggers Fragility and can be spread via epidemic. Blindness gives you 90% to not take damage. This is not counted as a Block or Evade.

Hope this helps.

I run an Illusion build with my Me/Mo. Looks something like this:

Fast Casting 11
Illusion 15
Inspiration 11

Ineptitude {E}
Clumsiness
Images or Remorse
Epidemic
Power Return
Power Drain (energy management)
Inspired Hex (energy management)
Ressurect

EDIT: spelling

Really not fond of illusion in pve.
Don't spam conjure phantasm.(if you are going to spam anything spam IoR)
Don't use IW in groups.(should be obvious)
Fevored dreams looks great on paper but never really works out (tme)
other than that...pretty much of anything else is semi-viable

Degen is great for softening up off-targets - a nice combo is Conjure Phantasm and Images of Remorse. You'll need some energy management to keep this up, I recommend Inspired Hex, Drain Enchantment and/or Power Drain for that.

Ineptitude and Clumsiness is another nice Illusion combo, doing a powerful armor-ignoring spike while preventing damage done to your party all in one.

My generic PvE Illusion build is pretty similar to azuresun's:

Me/X

FC: 9+1
Illu: 12+3+1
Insp: 9+1

Ineptitude (E)
Clumsiness
Images of Remorse
Conjure Phantasm/Distortion/Power Return
Power Drain
Inspired Hex
Drain Enchantment
Res of some sort

Problem with hp degen is that empathy is generally the better choice.
empathy every 30/1.2 dps
degen 2xpoint of degen=18 for IoR+phantasm

Empathy is generally cheaper, lasts longer, and does more damage. Degen may be a good choice on enemies who do not attack, but I would still go the domination route. Yet again, I'm domination biased so there is likely something I overlooked.

I used to do Phantom Pain/Shatter Del/Ineptitude/Epidemic in PvE, esp. Fissure. It worked well with decent Warriors who can control aggro well, and decent other team members who don't mess up with the W aggro control. In FoW, we would call a target, my buddies then would Concussion Shot it and throw whatever other conditions on it, meanwhile I'll do my combo, and by the time I hit with Epidemic, there will be AoE blindness, deep wound, and daze. It killed everything so fast. We would do that and then rangers would simply barrage, the poor mobs completely unable to do anything. Then I'd take some Domination support like Empathy (owns Shadow Rangers and the Skelleton Warriors) and Shatter Hex. Pretty good stuff.

Well, with IoR+Phantasm combo, you can put Accumulate Pain to inflict a Deep wound to your target and virtually remove 20% of HP. I'm like Avarre, I use Illusion for degen and Inspiration to interrupt at the same time (I love Power Leech).

In FoW(or any zone with controlled aggro really) you could hypothetically run 3 attributes without any main energy management (IE fast casting, domination, and illusion) solely due to the skill E.Bond. Have yet to try it; but as said I really dislike illusion in pve. Yet IoR is a very powerful skill as stated before, I keep my prejudices against conjure, but I am very interested in IoR.
-off topic-
Funny thing is I always expected conjure phantasm to be similar to the conjure "blank" skills in the elementalist line, spread hp degeneration/hit. Off topic but interesting nonetheless.

I've always run Fc/dom/illu in FoW/UW with no energy management whatsoever. The majority of my spells are hexes, so there isn't a need to spam skills or use energy unnecessarily.

sorry havent played my mesmer much whats IoR and E.Bond?

Images of Remorse

Essence Bond

Quote: Originally Posted by Emerald_Dream

I usually use both Essence Bond and Balthazar's Spirit.

Generally I bring no self heal since in most PvE its pretty easy to stay in the back and not get hit. If I'm ona mission where I think I might get hit frequently, I'd adjust that. I also may change my build slightly depending on party composition and other factors in the current mission, but usually I'll run something akin to this:

Image of Remorse
Phantom Pain
Clumsiness
Ineptitude {E}
Signet of Disruption
Energy Tap (or Drain Enchantment)
Power Drain (or Inspired Hex)
Res

FC: 9+1
Illu: 12+3+1
Insp: 9+1

or alternatively if you don't yet have an elite skill:

Image of Remorse
Phantasm
Accumulated Pain
Clumsiness
Signet of Disruption
Energy Tap (or Drain Enchantment, i prefer an on-demand method despite DE giving you a higher energy yield)
Power Drain (or Inspired Hex)
Res

Of course a good thing to keep in mind is what type of task you are planning to accomplish. Say a monk with E bond as his/her only energy management skills (nevermind your entire team with only ebond as energy management) will do very very poorly in a mission similar to dunes of dispair. In this mission aggro is less managable then FoW or UW, where you will be able to correctly place aggro every time. Dunes has less aggro management due to restraining factors, which would include the time limit, mesmers rushing in to blackout monk bosses, the entire team ignoring enamies to take down a priest, etc etc. So this is a key concept to keep in mind, while any build should be determined by the mission it moreso affects mesmers are they are a "pluck and counter" class. Your build will likely be different based on what you are running against. If they are bringing hexes, you better bring shatter hex. If they arn't using hexes you better leave that skill at home. Thus there is hardly a "cut and dry" mesmer build that will; mesmers are not a "one size fits all" class and it will be difficult for a build that attempts to do such to out-do a individually crafted build set for each scenario.

-changing topic-
Yes Ebond is a monk skill, great luck for us so are rebirth, and ressurect. Ebond is possibly the best energy management in the game for PvE purposes of course a certain scenario has to be met first (cover enchantments if there are disenchanters, spellbreaker if lack of cover enchantments, more than 4 enemies on tank so that the energy gain is more than E.prodigy, controlled aggro, etc.); yet most of these are easily obtainable.

I think AoE conditions or some form of spammable degen (maybe topped with Suffering) is about as good as it gets with Illusion. In PvE anyway. I don't think going anti-melee all the way is really worthwhile.