I suppose I’ll do an effortpost of impressions, as Robert is soliciting feedback and I spent most of the day on the chronomancer.
Shield is basically a bust in pve, I think. The phantasm deals only nominal damage (~30% of a swordsman, slower attack speed), which means you’re sacrificing warden reflects or duelist dps for alacrity alone. I’ll reserve judgment on that until I see the ~~challenging group content~~, but as it stands alacrity is a tough sell in a game where most classes deal most of their damage through autoattack. The greater issue is that the phantasm is only summoned when the block ends, which means that unless you have aggro or environmental damage on tap every time you need it, you’re going to channel the thing for a full 2.25 seconds. That’s over double the cast time of any other phantasm on a class with already unweildy ramp-up required for every new mob or every aoe pulse, and I suspect makes the weapon stillborn.
Shield in pvp is more promising. Phantasm builds will pass on it due to the dps loss, but it will likely have a home in a shatter build which uses the weapon for its two blocks, aoe stun, slow and projectile deflect. It’s actually a pretty great utility offhand, especially as the phantasm debuffs slow for a ridiculous 3s (versus buffing alacrity for 1s).
Incidentally, the avenger phantasm uses the bad version of bounce where it will bounce up to 3 times but will never hit a target more than once. Lack of targets causes the projectile to fizzle. Also, it needs a new graphic to distinguish it from the defender phantasm.
The wells are alright. We traditionally lack aoe damage and this helps, but in pve I imagine time warp, feedback, and a slot for portal/mimic/nullfield will still be mandatory and I don’t see any well except maybe calamity muscling its way in.
Pvp they’ll have a role, especially as area denial and aoe stability are always in demand. Gravity well will be the default elite, I imagine, although it has lost the pulsing cc seen in the POI.
The traitline features a 25% runspeed passive as the GM minor, meaning everyone will be a chronomancer forever until the servers die and if the next mesmer elite spec is literally the messiah come again, nobody will give a kitten . Aside from that, some decent filler. Chronophantasma is welcome but should really be baseline, as it’s compensating for a flawed profession mechanic. Interestingly, as long as you have a target, Illusionary Reversion currently allows you to pregenerate clones even ooc (up to 1 clone outside 1,200 yards, 3 within 1,200 but they engage).
Continuum split is a delectable joy of the first order in pvp and in terms of curbstomping unwashed pubbies is wickedly good. You can pull off some truly unprecedented bullkitten with it, even by mesmer standards, which is a high bar. Note however that they nerfed the duration to 1.5s per illusion.
Its performance in pve will depend largely on what kind of encounters they end up designing, but I imagine it will generally just be a more powerful mimic.
I will be amazed if F5 is not nerfed to be unrecognizable before release or shortly thereafter. It’s a neat mechanic in that it doesn’t actually do much for you if you’re not already good at mesmer-ing, but you can’t design skills to be balanced both if they do X and if they do X*2, and right now there’s very little opportunity cost to X*2.
Overall some new tools and tricks, but it’s pretty incremental compared to the other elite specs. Reaper plays like a completely new class, and tempest isn’t far off.
P.S. – In terms of changes between the POI and now, it looks like the well trait was buffed to remove 2 conditions instead of 1, and Lost Time now procs every 5th crit instead of every 3rd. Both justified.
Also, I would like to take this moment to again complain about the stupidity of giving us a 5th offhand when we only have 2 mainhands (which are essentially mutually-exclusive). No other profession has a ratio this bad.
its seems perfect…