Guild Wars 2

Looking over the traits, and with some reason examinations I’ve made of condi pve numbers, I’ve come up with a chronomancer-based build that looks to incorporate the two halves of Mesmer condition application. This build is designed to be more PvE oriented, but I suppose it could be somewhat useful in PvP or WvW (swap sinister to rabid in spvp, wish you didn’t have to. Rampagers might be an alternative?).

Assumptions:
1. No structural changes between the trait reveal and the actual traits, that were not explicitly mentioned. So, no 60s icds that make the trait useless, no Confusing Combatants switcheroo, etc.
2. No ICD on Illusionary Reversion
3. Illusionary Reversion only gives one clone per shatter. If it directly replaces your clones…why ever would it do that, because that would be amazing.

The base build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQNAW7ansICVohNoBOqBUrBFcDCN3ncHlBY1/C-TxxCABAcQAYW9HnV+d8FAgq9HQ+JA6GGTJYAgDgd3Ndrbw4jP+4jPeXv7u7u7uFCQxCA-e

The Chronomancer line:
Delayed Reactions; Illusionary reversion; Chronophantasma

What did I give up?
Chaos, toughness (rabid -> sinister, if you weren’t already using Sinister)
Only two traits were relevant to the efficacy of the build:
Chaotic Transference – a sinister build loses about 100 condition damage, a rabid build loses around 230ish.
Chaotic Persistence – anywhere from 0 to 33% boon/condition duration. I generally expect about 6-9% condition duration most of the time.
The other traits were decent defensive traits, but none were needed for dps purposes.

What did I gain?
Short answer: illusion uptime while shattering
Long answer: we can shatter our phantasms once without losing them, we get alacrity when we shatter, and we get a clone when we shatter, so we can just keep shattering without losing condition uptime from illusions.
Shatter conditions and Illusion conditions > Shatter conditions or Illusion conditions.

As an example rotation:
iDuelist->Signet of Ether->iDuelist->dodge->Cry of Frustration
->Confusing Images->swap->Chaos Storm->iWarlock
->Mind wrack->Phase Retreat->Diversion->swap->iDuelist
Rinse/repeat

Cry of Frustration = 4s off iDuelist
Mind Wrack = 6s off iDuelist
Diversion = 2s off iDuelist
Total: 12s off iDuelist
iDuelist cd is 20s without interrupts, so you need to spend 8s doing other things, which gets you to your next iDuelist by the time you get back to pistol.
That’s not even counting the 3s of alacrity we got from our 3 shatters.

I realize that’s not a perfectly optimal rotation, but it presents the example pretty well I think. At this point a lot of the rotation becomes about timing your shatters alongside iDuelist volleys, and balancing low-damage phantasms like iWarlock and iDefender with iDuelists and clones.

Both scepter and staff have clones that apply conditions on attacks, and bleeds on crits. When you shatter clones, you get a clone back.
When you shatter phantasms, they stay alive through one shatter, and you get 2s off all phantasm cooldowns.
So you can keep phantasms up to apply conditions while throwing down shatter conditions, and you can keep clones up to apply conditions while throwing down shatter conditions.
There will be downtimes where you only have 1 phantasm up instead of 2, but clones apply enough conditions to help make up for that.

Mechanical problems with the concept:

• As it is, Illusionary Reversion clashes with Chronophantasma. If you have 3 iDuelists and shatter them, Illusionary Reversion pops up a clone, which would break a phantasm. Anet really needs to fix that, but meanwhile it’s a conflict.
  My answer to that, though, is that you can’t start the fight with 3 iDuelists, so a constant shatter/summon rotation isn’t going to get up to 3 duelists anyway. As a compromise between illusion-condition and shatter-condition builds, this approach relies on amping up both sides of the equation as much as possible.
• Timing gets really weird. I’m not totally confident that trying to work out an optimal rotation wouldn’t fall completely flat.

Some possible variations that come to mind:

• Replace staff with scepter+torch, so you can be rotating between iDuelists and iMages, and so you don’t lose access to Confusing Illusions and Illusionary Counter.
• Same as above, but focus or shield instead of torch.
• In either of the above cases, you can probably drop Phantasmal Defender for whatever you feel like. Mantra of Distraction for more interrupts to proc that 3s slow, perhaps?
• Phantasmal disenchanter over Phantasmal Defender, depending on context.
• Swap Nightmare runes for Perplexity. Interrupts have limited use in PvE, but they do come up, and Perplexity’s 6-piece is a pretty sweet boost to interrupts.

I’m sure there are many ways you might optimize the approach, and obviously we won’t be able to test any of it until HoT. Still, I think it’s a pretty cool that Chronomancer provides tools to mesh the mesmer’s two approaches to condition application.

Well it’s approximately what I had in mind in
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chronomancer-PvE/first#post5317836

but I used increased alacrity. I still think alacrity will be interesting because I have this foolish hope that Anet will realize it’s not so dangerous and they can give us a bit more than what they announced… I didn’t see the gain with the extra clone.
I also started with F5 to get the first phantasm for free and save the signet for later. I also like that it allows to keep the signet in case things go wrong with your health or with dying phantasms. But with F5 + signet one can start the fight with 3 duelist which is VERY tempting