Guild Wars 2

DaShi.1368:

Gravity Well is definitely an improvement that can make it worth taking over Moa for PvP, and useful for open world PvE. However, the float is really fun. How about making the third pull a float instead?

I agree that the float was really fun. And if you are worried about three pulls being OP, why not make it a 3 second float, one instance, and have it pulse a condition such as slow, crippled, chill, or something similar? that way they can use one stun breaker, which fixes that problem, but you still get some other effect. Maybe a small damage pulse going on as well?

The float is really fun and cool looking. I’d love to keep it

EDIT: never tested it, when the target is floating do they end up out of melee range?

Morfedel.4165:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I really think Alacrity is still a bit undertuned in general, but I can understand the worry about how powerful it could be. Also, I think I see this side of Chronophantasma now, although it really does suck that they get dazed in melee range of the enemy you attack (makes them prime for a quick cleave).

I’m strongly opposed to the Illusionary Reversion nerf. I think just a short ICD to prevent rolling the F-keys is far better than this nerf. I would recommend a 3 second ICD; that’d be sufficient here. I also still think the cast times for the utility wells are too long and should be shorter and that some traits need a little bit of work, but otherwise Chronomancer is in a great place.

Also, I personally like the listed change to Gravity Well, but if it’s too weak or something we can always provide that feedback in the next BWE.

Thanks for the hard work, Robert!

You know, I’m wondering, if the illusions are resummoned, do they benefit from the trait Protected Phantasms? If so that may be enough to give them a chance to make their attack. Particularly if you add on Persisting Images and Signet of Illusions.

They do. They also gain Retaliation from Persisting Images.

Although both traits are still really weak IMO. Phantasms are so paper-thin you’ll need buffs on the scale of bugged Signet of Illusions (+200% health) to make those traits worth taking.

Toeofdoom.6152:

All that looks reasonable to me. The alacrity changes are very similar to what I suggested elsewhere

I feel it’s really important to have an alternative to DE so the only thing to keep an eye on is illusionary reversion. In small fights I expect the new one stacks up just fine, but in larger fights… illusions die very fast. That’s particularly important when you consider chronomancer is making bunker/brawler type builds much more plausible. I’d be more comfortable with an ICD as it treats both large and small fights equally – still, we’ll see if this one works fine in the next test

You could also alter the trigger to be 1 phantasm OR 2 clones, that would prevent chaining too.

You know, you could do what they did with Chronophantasma: remove the restrictions you have now and have each new clone summoned is stunned, IE cant move to shatter for that brief stunned period.

Just an idea.

I’m pretty sure Chronophantasma’d Phantasms can be Shattered immediately, they just can’t attack immediately.

Embolism.8106:

Morfedel.4165:

Rising Dusk.2408:

I really think Alacrity is still a bit undertuned in general, but I can understand the worry about how powerful it could be. Also, I think I see this side of Chronophantasma now, although it really does suck that they get dazed in melee range of the enemy you attack (makes them prime for a quick cleave).

I’m strongly opposed to the Illusionary Reversion nerf. I think just a short ICD to prevent rolling the F-keys is far better than this nerf. I would recommend a 3 second ICD; that’d be sufficient here. I also still think the cast times for the utility wells are too long and should be shorter and that some traits need a little bit of work, but otherwise Chronomancer is in a great place.

Also, I personally like the listed change to Gravity Well, but if it’s too weak or something we can always provide that feedback in the next BWE.

Thanks for the hard work, Robert!

You know, I’m wondering, if the illusions are resummoned, do they benefit from the trait Protected Phantasms? If so that may be enough to give them a chance to make their attack. Particularly if you add on Persisting Images and Signet of Illusions.

They do. They also gain Retaliation from Persisting Images.

Although both traits are still really weak IMO. Phantasms are so paper-thin you’ll need buffs on the scale of bugged Signet of Illusions (+200% health) to make those traits worth taking.

Wait, is that a bug signet of illusions has NOW?!

EDIT: If not, well, I find that if you want your phantasms to survive beyond their first attack, taking those two traits and SoI is worthy. I’ve had them survive at least a couple of attacks on everything shy of serious AOE saturation or massively hard hitting champions.

And I think its fine if they die after two or three attacks because they are illusions, not minions or pets. If they get three attacks in i’m more than happy.

Embolism.8106:

I’m pretty sure Chronophantasma’d Phantasms can be Shattered immediately, they just can’t attack immediately.

Ah well, too bad, that would have been decent.

hm, what about maybe crippling the clones for a second or two? The idea here is it would be harder for them to spam-shatter unless you are point blank on the target?

Chronophantasma gives Phantasms a Daze, not a Stun, so they can move to shatter even if they can’t attack. iReversion putting a 1s Stun (or even Immobilise) on the summoned clone would be an interesting approach.

“Chronophantasma: Increased Daze duration from 1s to 1.5s
Did anyone try spamming Illusionary Berserkers with Continuum Shift and Chronophantasma? This specific combo isn’t the only reason we are adjusting this trait, but we are watching the types of spikes that are coming from Chronomancer in general.”

Shh don’t tell people about this.

Meanwhile over in Guardian land

Dragon’s Maw: Increased the maw trapping duration from 4 seconds to 6 seconds. Damage increased by 20%.

Edit: cutting down on the wall of words.

Crossposting from the other thread, a more involved suggestion for rebalancing IR, DE, clone generation in general, and fixing a few other problems as a side benefit!

This is spurred by an idea from Curunen, suggesting that rather than DE being a special snowflake all-important clone-generating trait, why don’t we put a thematic clone trait in each specialization line? Alongside that, ensure that each of them has a meaningful tradeoff, so that choosing the clone trait is a real sacrifice.
That’s one of the problems with DE right now: Harmonious Mantras is not competitive right now and Mistrust sucks so bad even interrupt-based condi builds don’t take it, so going dueling means taking Deceptive Evasion without any meaningful loss to doing so.
But if DE had to compete with Power Block and Mental Anguish? Or Chaotic Interruption and Bountiful Disillusionment? Or Ineptitude? It wouldn’t show up as much, and you’d be losing power by taking it.

At the same time, though, encouraging us to shatter more really means we need more shatter food than the original mesmer design calls for. IR and Chronophantasma are great concepts, and were clearly designed with this shortcoming in mind.

So, my suggestions, based on Curunen’s:

Domination:

• Replace Rending Shatter with Shattered Concentration
• Replace Shattered Concentration with Imagined Burden (nerfed slightly if necessary).
• Replace Imagined Burden with the trait: “Create a clone when you daze or interrupt an enemy” with a 2s icd.

Dueling:

• Replace Mistrust with a modified version of Confusing Combatants: “You and your illusions inflict 1 stack of confusion for 3 seconds on critical hit (50% chance)”
• Change Harmonious Mantras buff to affect your phantasms’ damage.

Chaos

• Replace Mirror of Anguish with Prismatic Understanding. Lower PU’s stealth grant to 2s (or 1s), raise the base stealth of MI to 6s, and raise the base stealth of Veil to 3s.
• Replace Prismatic Understanding with a new trait: “Every time you use a skill, you have a 15% chance to generate a new clone”, or “Every time you gain new boon in combat, create a clone; 4s icd”

Illusions

• Replace Shattered Strength with Malicious Sorcery. Replace the attack speed on Malicious Sorcery with the effect of Shattered Strength.
• Replace Malicious Sorcery with a new trait: “when you use a skill to summon a clone, summon a second clone” or “when you use an illusion-summoning skill, you have a 50% chance to also summon a clone” (only do the second one if you stop clones from overwriting phantasms)

Inspiration

• Inspiration is fine as it is. Mental Defense is an illusion generator, it’s a very different kind of trait line from the others anyway (defensive vs offensive), and there’s nothing in Inspiration that I could see anyone willing to give up.

Chronomancer

• Replace Seize the Moment with Illusionary Reversion, unnerf Illusionary Reversion.
• Replace Illusionary Reversion with Seize the Moment.

And while you guys are happy to have the nerf bat hit heavily on the Chrono, the Tempest get another boost on almost everything, and not by small numbers…..

•Cyclone – Increased damage by 20%.
•Sand Squall – Now a blast finisher.
•Lightning Orb – Increased damage by 36%.
•Wildfire – Increased damage by 32%.
•Overload Air – Increased damage by 30% and increased the radius of effect from 240 to 360.
•Overload Earth – Increased damage by 50% and increased the immobilize upon end from 3 seconds to 4 seconds.
•Overload Fire – Increased the damage by 20% and increased the duration of burning applied per pulse from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.
•Overload Water – Increased the amount that healing power affects pulsed healing by 400%. Increased the final heal value by 50%.

Enjoy your nerfs, for me the Mesmer is now an even more useless class than it was before.

Good work Mr. Gee. What will be next nerf on us? I wish Irenio CalmonHuang would be put in charge of mesmers….

Well, the Tempest was crap, so it’s not surprising it got buffed. Should we act all shocked that Reaper got buffs as well?

Chrono was fine, and we honestly didn’t see any serious nerfs apart from Illusionary Reversion. (Alacrity got net buffs, you just have to actually trait into it now. And the new All’s Well provides a PvE group support option in Chronomancer that we were lacking before.)

Blanche Neige.7241:

And while you guys are happy to have the nerf bat hit heavily on the Chrono, the Tempest get another boost on almost everything, and not by small numbers…..

•Cyclone – Increased damage by 20%.
•Sand Squall – Now a blast finisher.
•Lightning Orb – Increased damage by 36%.
•Wildfire – Increased damage by 32%.
•Overload Air – Increased damage by 30% and increased the radius of effect from 240 to 360.
•Overload Earth – Increased damage by 50% and increased the immobilize upon end from 3 seconds to 4 seconds.
•Overload Fire – Increased the damage by 20% and increased the duration of burning applied per pulse from 2 seconds to 3 seconds.
•Overload Water – Increased the amount that healing power affects pulsed healing by 400%. Increased the final heal value by 50%.

Enjoy your nerfs, for me the Mesmer is now an even more useless class than it was before.

Good work Mr. Gee. What will be next nerf on us? I wish Irenio CalmonHuang would be put in charge of mesmers….

Hey know, Tempest forced the Eles to chose between damage and utility, we can’t have that! Those kind of choices are for the lesser classes like Mesmer.

Blanche Neige.7241:

And while you guys are happy to have the nerf bat hit heavily on the Chrono, the Tempest get another boost on almost everything, and not by small numbers…..

Er you really should read the Ele forum.

tobascodagama.2961:

Alacrity got net buffs, you just have to actually trait into it now.

Que?
Before change: 1s per illusion, 1.33s with Improved Alacrity.
After change: .75s per illusion, 1.125s with Improved Alacrity.

Traiting into Improved Alacrity still gets you less alacrity than taking Improved Alacrity before the change.

The well trait boosted alacrity from 10% aoe uptime to nearly 100%.

I think that’s sort of a challenge – “how broken could it possibly be anyway?”

I didn’t get to play in the beta weekend so I can’t really comment on the changes to alacrity and the effect they have. But I really like the change to Gravity Well. I love the idea of multiple aoe pulls and honestly that’d be enough for me to pick it as my elite in a number of situations both PvE and PvP. So I don’t really mind that the final effect is stability, but yeah I can imagine how fun a float would have been. I’m just excited for more CC.

Toeofdoom.6152:

The well trait boosted alacrity from 10% aoe uptime to nearly 100%.

Right, the Flow of Time nerf is tiny, but All’s Well is a really significant buff to the amount of Alacrity we can provide to a group.

@Alpha – I just thought, the Chaos trait could be summoning an iDisenchanter instead of a clone (I just feel the iDisenchanter fits with the boon/condition theme of that line).

Anyway, seems the other thread got deleted and unfortunately it’s kind of offtopic in here.

tobascodagama.2961:

It was possible for a Chronomancer Condi Shatter with the old IR to do F5 -> F1-4 -> F5 -> F1-4 and get 16+ stacks of Torment and Confusion with no setup required. The new IR requires setup at the beginning of the shatter chain and some work to sustain it, which means enemies have the opportunity to actually play around it instead of just eating all those Condi stacks within a second or two (most likely while stunned by CS).

That was definitely not as easily possible as you claim, due to the .25s CD between shatters. So most likely we’re talking about first getting at least 1 illusion up to even have the time to get 4 shatters off in a row before F5 resets the time-line.

Secondly, in order to stun with CS you need to have Domination. In order to stack Torment & Confusion you obviously need Illusions, and of course to get F5 you need Chronomancer. This build would be heavily flawed as Domination is pretty useless for a Condie-focused build. You would be missing out on everything Dueling has to offer, literally to get a 1.25s stun on your F3. Not likely… So the Stun part is a bit far fetched.

Remember also that MtD was just heavily nerfed by 50%, and it’s now pretty plain why they nerfed it; Chronomancy. Kinda sad as they chose to destroy build diversity, forcing you into Chrono + Illusions to play Condie Shatter…and now the nerfs keep rolling in anyway, not because MtD was/is OPd it never was before not even with 2x Torment, but rather because Chronomancy in conjunction with MtD is maybe too much. (IMO this is hardly proven by a single BW with people playing new builds to test stuff, and as is generally the case ATM not focusing enough on Condition Cleansing.)

Sadly, this is exactly what I expected, and is par for the course for Mesmer balancing decisions.

Especially with the IR nerf, you will absolutely have to have DE for any Shatter build once again, which is basically all builds now more so than ever. This means Condition shatter has exactly one viable spec, Duel/Ill/Chrono. Hands up for build diversity! GG!

Compared to Burn Guards/Eles/Engies even the BW1 Condie Shatter Chronomancer was at best competitive. You’d have to be AFK to eat 8 shatters in a row, that’s a full 2s minimum execution time, and each Shatter individually does very very little outside of F2. It’s just 1 Torment and 1 Confusion for F1, F3, and F4. Compare that to every one of the above professions/builds hitting you with 5+ stacks of Burning quickly and pretty much ad nauseum.

Once this supposedly OPd BW1 Condie Chronomancer dumped his F5 load, he’s got a long wait before he can do that burst again! Especially now that self Alacrity is also nerfed!

It’s once again looking like we’re heading for being over adjusted, as multiple things are nerfed in the same iteration, without any reasonable amount of testing going into it. So far we’ve really never seen an “un-nerf” that I can think of. Also, as usual, the nerfs roll in faster then you can say “nerf!” and of course only for Mesmers.

It’s not the 5k+ Burning ticks that have ANet riled, it’s the Mesmer Torment and Confusion! lol! Nevermind that BOTH of these Conditions have innate counters to cut damage by at least 50% without doing anything at all, totally UNLIKE Burn, and yet we’re always rushing to nerf the Mesmer without giving anyone chance to adjust to an emerging meta with huge counter-options available.

Never mind that all 3 of the Burn-oriented professions are much tankier in nature, and can all 3 “abuse” Celestial to do both strong Condition & Direct Damage, due to their high sustain and ability to stack Might. The Condition Shatter Mesmer is totally pigeonholed into a single specialization that leaves him quite vulnerable. (No realistic hope of using Celestial for a decent mix of survivability and damage, when factoring high levels of Might, which you basically can not achieve in that build. Also no Stealth/PU is possible, and no tanky Chaos either…not without giving up DE, which with IR will be absolutely necessary for Condie Shatter.)

Sorry this turned into a rant, but the more I put 2 and 2 together, the more it irks me where this is headed for Condie Shatter and Mesmers in general.

morrolan.9608:

Blanche Neige.7241:

And while you guys are happy to have the nerf bat hit heavily on the Chrono, the Tempest get another boost on almost everything, and not by small numbers…..

Er you really should read the Ele forum.

Ele are always going to be unhappy.

I mean, how farther up can you go after sitting tightly on god tier for pve, spvp, and wvw all at once.

I mean, if we introduced a specialization that improved on ele, it would have made the number one class in the game skyroicket into its own supreme league of power.

I really loved the float. It was so much fun! Please bring it back!

.

Danger Time should get an additional effect. This could be:

• Increases your damage against slowed enemies.
• Increases your critical hit damage against slowed enemies.
• Slowed enemies take a random condition from all your spells: Bleeding, Burning, Poison, Confusion, Pain.

.

Lost Time should get an additional effect. This could be:

• Gain Ferocity based on your Precision.

.

Echo of Memory: The Shield and the Phantasm should be summoned simultaneously. There shouldn’t be a delay.

.

Chaotic Transference is a great trait.
But useless for those like me, using these stats:
Condition Damage, Power, Precision.

Chaotic Dampening on the other hand feels very weak.
So why not add this to Chaotic Dampening:

„Gain Condition Damage based on your Precision.“
or
„Gain Ferocity based on your Condition Damage.“

.

Winds of Chaos:
The speed of the Orb is way too slow.
This was stated so many times before.

In addition to that, this skill feels kind of to random to me.
If Vulnerability procs too often you can lose your Bleeding or Burning stacks.
So why not change it like this:

„Winds of Chaos causes Bleeding.
Critical hits additional cause Burning.
There is a chance of X% to additional cause Vulnerability.“
or
„Winds of Chaos causes Bleeding or Burning.
Critical hits additional cause Confusion.
There is a chance of X% to additional cause Vulnerability.“

.

Ether Clone: Summoning a Clone with the first skill? I never liked this game mechanics. Get rid of this chain-function and just let us use Ether Bolt.
Or exchange the Clone for an additional condition.
At least make the Clone to be summoned at the position of the Mesmer. It happens so often (especially in big fights) that the clone is summoned and instantly dies.
Pain could be changed to Bleeding or Burning, as it is the weakest condition.

.

Illusionary Counter: When using this skill, the clone should be summoned and Torment should be applied to the target, instantly.
Better change it to just one skill like this:

• Illusionary Counter:
  Gain Aegis for 2 seconds and at the same time shoot a bolt that damages and blinds your target and enemies, it passes through. Affected enemies also suffer Torment.
  In addition to that you summon a clone at your position that casts Ether Bolt.

.

When Illusions die during fight, or when Illusions disappear after an enemy’s death, they should explode and cause damage and conditions.

.

It would be great, if we could increase the range for Scepter-, Torch- and Shield-Skills to 1200; just like the Pistol-Skills.

.

Some people have stated, that the Mesmer is, or at least was (GW1) not only a Illusionist, but also a kind of Stage-Illusionist.

If that’s the case I am wondering, why the Mesmer does not use Cards, Wands, Linking-Rings, and so on.

I have made some suggestions about the Mesmer using Cards as weapons …

Azathoth.2098:

The Cardist: Show Off With Cards.

I really love the idea of using Cards as a Weapon, just like Gambit.
So this is my suggestion for a new Mesmer-Specialization, using a 2-handed-weapon.
The skills, more or less, apply to Card-Tricks.
…

[Game]Create Your Own Specialization!

… and about a new Class: The Stage-Illusionist.

[Class Suggestion] The Stage-Illusionist

It would be so great, if the Mesmer would be more like an Stage-Illusionist, using Cards and thinks like that.

2 things i tested in the last beta

bunker mesmer with wells and glamour fields
and
condi shatter

bunker – i see that wells stop cleansing 2 conditions. this is bad idea as the 2 sec alacrity is hardly much in team fight. also put the bunker is harder spot to support and stand against heavy condi pressure.
i think you should add for the heal well 2 condi cleanse as base when used or every pulse instead of vigor. or bring back the condi cleanse with the alacrity
also the ability to create 3 illusion with 9% dmg reduction was very helpful which now i guess with IR nerf wont be achieved at all.

condi shatter- i really had fun fighting without DE. sure with the right rotation i could shatter faster f1-f3 with average of 2 illusions which make my condi burst more faster. but now i see IR got nerfed so i probably have to play DE to get the same result. which you will see the same complains i think with power builds as well.

i think you should bring down to 1 clone and not 2 to see how ppl handling it . and pls consider group fight and not 1v1. as in group fight its harder to create 2 illusions.
or give IR small cd like 2 sec with no illusion needed so the fast constant burst wont get achieved so easily. above 2 sec this trait can be more rng so harder to play with it.

regarding burning dmg. every other class got buffed with stacks. but we didnt. now also warrior can burn better. i think you need to buff the AA with 2 burning stacks as its random condition and also our torch should do 3 stacks of burning to par with others class which can do 10-15 burning stack in a combo

Anet i would love to see bunker and condo shatter entering into the meta good builds as we lack of it and have only 1 build to play with (power pu)

even now warrior can play condi hybrid with burning and bleeding – common

I was thinking about Gravity Well, and thought that I might have a decent idea for making it fun and balanced with all the core elements intact. The idea would be to give it a little wind-up. Instead of having it deliver three pulses of Pull right from the start, have it ramp up in effect. Have the first pulse be just Cripple. Then one pulse of weak Pull (like enough to drag you from the edge to halfway to the middle or from there to the center), then a second pulse of stronger Pull (enough to drag you from the edge to the center), then the Float.

The idea is that if you don’t react at all to it, then yeah, it’ll lock you up, but if you react well to the first pulse, you might be able to escape it without even dodge rolling, but at minimum you could roll out of it. Even if you get hit by the second Pull, it would be weak enough that you could still dodge roll away from the third and the Float. I think this could be a fun and useful area denial, without being overpowered long CC.

Would that work for people?

Not sure if you’re still following the thread, but coming from a WvW standpoint, and since I’ve been trying to be a support mesmer for 2 years, I was wondering if the Well of Eternity duration could be reduced to 2s total? (granting the same vigor of 7,5s , just doing the heal sooner).

I’m imagining that commander asks for a quick regroup, I throw down well of eternity and in 2s or so he’s already moving. Or I try to throw down a well of eternity mid fight to try and sustain people but people are moving around and 3s is too long of a time.

Or maybe still have the 3s duration but split the final heal into all 3 ticks? So it’s not as punishing for missing the final tick? I can already tell this is gonna lead to frustrating game play

Just thought I’d jump in and say eles in general did not like damage increases on tempest overloads. We were actually looking for changes to actual execution of our mechanics. Despite all these apparently big numbers, it’s unlikely tempests will be as popular as eles once HoT is released. This is, IF anyone makes a tempest, as it stands it’s too crappy.

lordkrall.7241:

“General sentiment from feedback was that the PULL was what was important to selling Gravity Well rather than the float. "

Noo
I loved my float

I was doing Tim Curry impressions every time

OH THEY’LL FLOAT, THEY ALL FLOAT!

I was running around world bosses and telling map chat the boss was drinking too much Red Bull. It was the most fun I have had in game in a long time… I even thought I would make chronomancer one of my mains. No float though… makes me cry a bit on the inside. I think everyone else loves seeing haw epically amazing Karka Queen was when flying. She looked like an alien space craft. I loved every minute of it.
I was even going to make it the first thing I did tomorrow…. now I re-read this and see it was nuked off? SAD TIMES.

Robert Gee.9246:

Mallekay.8967:

Robert Gee.9246:

Illusionary Reversion: Updated functionality. You must shatter at least 2 illusions in order to generate a clone from this trait. (You do not count as an illusion towards this total.)

• Yeah I know this one probably stings but when we started looking at it it was pretty silly that this trait could let you get so much power out of just using all shatter skills back to back.

Wouldn’t it be more plausible to set an ICD of lets say 5 secs to prevent chain shattering? I also thought, this trait was intended to eliminate the need for DE.

ICD is another option I think. If it proves too weak in the next BWE we can look at trying this or some other solution.

That’s potentially worse for certain builds that can generate clones quickly enough, and has some degree of anti-synergy with itself, as it means you’re forced to hold off on shattering the clone that you generate, giving it more time to get killed by a stray AoE.

Clones die extremely quickly if left alone, and if not used to shatter, don’t do much. Requiring two clones is probably fine, it just means that we’ll need to use a clone generating skill between shatters, taking less than a second, which we can pretty reliably have available due to alacrity fueling the already fairly low cooldown clone generators.

Eponet.4829:

That’s potentially worse for certain builds that can generate clones quickly enough, and has some degree of anti-synergy with itself, as it means you’re forced to hold off on shattering the clone that you generate, giving it more time to get killed by a stray AoE.

I see two options in this regard:
1. Very low icd. 1s icd would prevent super-spam, as a full spam combo would take several seconds, which is not realistic, but still give a decent enough generation rate to the trait to be worthwhile, and would not incentivize taking DE with IR as the 2-clone requirement does. Consider that the current icd on shatters is .25s. A 1s icd would extend that by 400% (for people who actually want to benefit from IR), dramatically stretching out the timing of a shatter-chain, opening up abundant opportunity for counterplay.
2. IR doesn’t generate a clone after you shatter, but as part of your shatter. In short, if you activate a shatter with less than max illusions, IR instantly creates a new illusion that immediately runs over and shatters. This way the icd doesn’t create any danger for the clone, but still rate-limits the pacing of the shatters. I’d say any icd over 1s should pretty much require this change to IR.

Eponet.4829:

Clones die extremely quickly if left alone, and if not used to shatter, don’t do much. Requiring two clones is probably fine, it just means that we’ll need to use a clone generating skill between shatters, taking less than a second, which we can pretty reliably have available due to alacrity fueling the already fairly low cooldown clone generators.

I would agree if clone generation were actually a quick process in the first place. Without Deceptive Evasion, however, it’s not really. The only relatively quick clone generator outside DE is scepter AA, which is just a terrible use of time in general.
IR should be a viable alternative to DE, but instead it strongly incentivizes taking both.

Has anybody noticed undocumented changes from Robert’s initial post? Just curious, can’t check anything myself until tonight.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

Eponet.4829:

That’s potentially worse for certain builds that can generate clones quickly enough, and has some degree of anti-synergy with itself, as it means you’re forced to hold off on shattering the clone that you generate, giving it more time to get killed by a stray AoE.

I see two options in this regard:
1. Very low icd. 1s icd would prevent super-spam, as a full spam combo would take several seconds, which is not realistic, but still give a decent enough generation rate to the trait to be worthwhile, and would not incentivize taking DE with IR as the 2-clone requirement does. Consider that the current icd on shatters is .25s. A 1s icd would extend that by 400% (for people who actually want to benefit from IR), dramatically stretching out the timing of a shatter-chain, opening up abundant opportunity for counterplay.
2. IR doesn’t generate a clone after you shatter, but as part of your shatter. In short, if you activate a shatter with less than max illusions, IR instantly creates a new illusion that immediately runs over and shatters. This way the icd doesn’t create any danger for the clone, but still rate-limits the pacing of the shatters. I’d say any icd over 1s should pretty much require this change to IR.

Eponet.4829:

Clones die extremely quickly if left alone, and if not used to shatter, don’t do much. Requiring two clones is probably fine, it just means that we’ll need to use a clone generating skill between shatters, taking less than a second, which we can pretty reliably have available due to alacrity fueling the already fairly low cooldown clone generators.

I would agree if clone generation were actually a quick process in the first place. Without Deceptive Evasion, however, it’s not really. The only relatively quick clone generator outside DE is scepter AA, which is just a terrible use of time in general.
IR should be a viable alternative to DE, but instead it strongly incentivizes taking both.

Deceptive evasion is definitely an important aspect in a sustained shatter build, but there are other options. Sword/Sword probably has the best off of them.

With fencer’s finesse and illusionist’s celerity, Illusionary Leap drops down to around a 7 second cooldown, or around 4 and a half seconds with alacrity.

With the same traits, Phantasmal swordsman is on a 12.8 second cooldown. Persistence of memory reduces the cooldown of the skill by another 2 seconds whenever a phantasm is shattered, meaning that casting it then shattering brings the cooldown to around 11 seconds, or around 6.5 seconds of alacrity, chronophantasma reduces it further, alternatively, if 6.5 seconds is fast enough for you, time catches up makes it quicker to cast the clone generators. I’m not even a very good player, but even I was able to solo the supposedly overtuned AC story cave troll with it without taking 10 minutes, while remaining in melee the whole time. The thing that really hurt the most about the nerf was the 25% reduction in alacrity uptime. After about about 3-4 minutes I started running dry and noticing my cooldowns. It’s only because it died very soon after that I managed to avoid getting worn down.

Additionally, for once, utility skills like mirror images have some appeal to them.

On another note, why not have both solutions? Give it an internal cooldown, and only have the cooldown refresh instantly when shattering with two or more clones.

Holy kitten! :o

I didn’t get to play the previous beta so this is my first time testing chrono and… I love it!

Don’t even care about the IR nerf right now, because Duelling/Chrono/Illusions Sword/Torch + Staff condi shatter is too much fun, even with losing traited mirror, blink and Bountiful Dissipation from Chaos.

Oh and scepter/shield + staff with inspiration/chrono/illusions and mental defence with chronophantasma is… amazing!

tobascodagama.2961:

Has anybody noticed undocumented changes from Robert’s initial post? Just curious, can’t check anything myself until tonight.

Gravity Well is now 90 secs, so once again we don’t have a low cd elite.

My small change list:

1) Make shield 4 a channeled ability. Upon activation, spawn phantasm.
2) IR change to an ICD rather than two clones
3) Gravity Well does too little damage and too little overall for an elite that’s on a 90 second cool down.
4) Signet of Ether should have a 0 illusion passive heal added and changed from 3 seconds to 1 second ticks.