Blind based invis build.
Personally I would rather choose seize the moment instead of chronophantasma. You don’t really have powerful phantasm, you rely more on blindness than on stealth with no Pu and you can apply much more conditions and damages with sword and staff since you already have deceptive evasion. Furthermore I would put out veil and choose portal to better support you team since the more time you spend being stealthed the less likely you will be able to cap
I thought a lot about seize the moment, but I felt it was less useful with invisibility to hide the animations. Chronophantasm helps keep clone production up, and the burning phantasm is actually decent.
I’ve also switched the staff out for a scepter/shield bar (i may shift the weapons around a bit yet, so it may end up being sw/sh & sc/t) What you lose in mobility, you gain in tankiness, more alacrity, and more reliable blinds
As far as veil and portal go, I’d replace mimic with portal first. Veil and decoy are on there to reduce the CD of torch skills, while providing more ways to escape. Torch skills are your only form of condi cleanse in this build, so that’s fairly important.
So what exactly have you been using this build for?
sPvP.
In conquest I’ll work with the team to control mid, and try to be a nuisance on far with decaps. Teamfights are usually won with lots of blinds helping to cover the team and slow down the enemy’s damage, or using Moa with invisibility to cover the animation. The hard part is not getting too predictable about that.
In Defense of the Lord, I’ll usually try to disrupt the enemy’s supply and chain of archers/doorbreakers. But I really have no clue what I’m doing in DotL.
The only things I really have trouble with are bunker type builds if Moa is down. Everything else I can get a reasonable amount of burst and condi pressure on, while preventing them from dealing damage to me or teammates.
So I can’t really see a good reason to use this build over the more standard meta build. It doesn’t really offer anything unique and has some glaring weaknesses.
You don’t have any access to blind that’s particularly special. If you take dueling over inspiration in a normal condie shatter, you get almost identical access to blinds. The only difference is the torch blind, but that’s on such a long cooldown (especially compared to the shatters) that it’s mostly negligible.
The torch and the pledge provide some additional condition removal not available in the standard build. Unfortunately, this is so weak it’s not worth taking torch for. 1 condition removed on a 30 second cooldown is really bad. Additionally, the recharge portion of the pledge is totally worthless in conquest. You could get away with sitting in stealth for cooldowns in WvW, but doing that in conquest just means you either lose a point or end up taking a break during a team fight that can’t afford to lose a member. Lastly, stealth is a very unreliable defense when you consider how available aoe reveal is now.
The standard build takes shield instead of torch. Shield offers very potent defense from the blocks that doesn’t rely on stealth, which makes it far more useful and powerful in conquest. The shield phantasms are obviously far better, and the shield wall is an incredible group fight ability that really gives a lot of aoe control presence that’s otherwise lacking.
For utilities, the most notable change is taking veil instead of portal. This is probably the single worst possible change that could be made in terms of relative impact of utilities. You’re giving up the immense map presence and playmaking ability of portal for 2 seconds of stealth that simultaneously tells the enemy exactly where you are. Veil is just flat out awful and it has zero redeeming qualities. Even if you have your heart set on putting stealth in that spot, you’d be better off taking mimic to double up on decoy instead. You’d get almost the same cooldown, longer stealth, an extra stunbreak, and you wouldn’t broadcast your location to the enemy team.
Ultimately I really don’t think this is good. You’re heavily lacking in condition removal, so necros will probably eat you. Half of your mechanics already exist in the standard build, and the other half rely on you temporarily not contributing to fights, on top of your defense being heavily linked to an easily hardcountered mechanic. Unless I’m massively missing something, there’s absolutely nothing this build does that’s notably better than the standard build, and there’s a lot of things that it does worse.
(edited by Fay.2357)