Sure, you seem relatively harmless, just had to make sure you weren’t a warrior planning to turn this around to ask for nerfs or something.
First, I have seen just as many people play chronomancers on the beta weekend as other specializations. Additionally, many people aren’t going to play chronomancer both beta weekends if they are not die hard mesmer lovers. In the first beta, everyone played chronomancer, revenants, and reapers. In the second beta there were more specializations available to play and you may not have time to fully play all of them. Therefore, if some people played a chronomancer first beta, they are probably going to move on and try something new like the daredevil in the second beta.
PvP: In pvp, chronomancer can buff a mesmer’s burst potential with the tradeoff of having less defensive capabilities. Technically, the illusions line can kinda do this. However, its not the same. The illusion line can reduce shatter cool downs and add 10% critical hit to mind wrack. It can also reduce the cool down on illusion summoning skills. However, this becomes less useful if you like to weapon swap a lot.
With chronomancer, you get the cool down reductions through flow of time to gain some alacrity when you shatter. This can be combined with other skills like improved alacrity to make up for the illusion tree right there. Then you can also give your illusions super speed on shatter to give them a better chance of landing and you can use chronophantasma to have a phantasm be resummoned again once and hit an additional time after your shatter, which adds a decent amount of extra damage to the initial bursts. And if all else fails, you’re at least going to bait more dodges with this trait. You can also use seize the moment instead to gain quickness after a shatter burst, which can = more damage. You can also combine illusionary reversion with chronophantasma to resummon two illusions after a shatter. This adds a lot to illusion generation which is needed. Obviously illusions are needed to shatter. However, at most you can only summon two illusions with a 2 handed weapon or weapon set. Before, this made deceptive evasion a must for clone generations for shatters. However, now we no longer are required to take the dueling line. This allows for a lot more potential pvp builds. Finally, if you like more of a lockdown style, you can really apply a lot of slow by combining danger time “30% increased critical hit on slow enemies” with Lost time “basically after 4 critical hits, your 5th hit will give the target two seconds of slow”. These synergize very nicely. With a lock down build you can also use delayed reactions to apply 3 seconds of slow when interrupting a foe. Therefore, chronomancer helps add a little something to everyone. Extra burst damage for shatter builds, A lot of slow for lockdowns, and another way of summoning more illusions besides deceptive evasion for condition builds.
In pvp you can also use continuum shift to do two mind wracks very close together in time. You can also use continuum shift to use your elite skills twice, like moa morph.
WvW: time catches up allows you illusions to reach targets faster on shatter. Therefore, they are more likely to survive. This is a major problem in situations where this is a lot of aoe damage. Illusions die right away. A lot of the wells also apply some AoE damage, which was severely lacking in mesmers compared to other classes. Finally, you get time catches up which allows you to move 25% faster. Dear lord, we never had a skill that allowed us to move faster until now. This is one of the reason you almost always saw mesmer caring a focus in wvw and pve. Without some swiftness, they move very slow and can easily fall behind other classes in mobility. This is actually not only useful in wvw, but all aspects of the game. Many mesmers wanted some extra movement speed so bad they almost cried when they saw this trait.
PvE: continuum shift allows you to cast your elite skill and other skills twice every so often. There is also All’s well that ends well that gives 2 seconds of alacrity to allies when wells end.
So, you can do something like quickly summon some illusions pop continuum split. Quickly use mimic, well of recall, well of action, well of eternity, time warp, continuum shift, mimic, well of recall, well of action, well of eternity, time warp. Of course, its suggested you save time warp for another continuum shift since it has such a long cool down. However, this rotation gives 28 seconds of quickness, 28 seconds of alacrity, gives a bunch of healing, removes 6 conditions, gives 24 seconds of slow, provides chill for 20 seconds, and does a little bit extra damage. Most fights don’t last this long, so its best to utilize your skills and rotations to save cool downs based on the length of the fight. However, this shows you can easily make actions 50% faster and reduce skill cool downs by 66% for a full encounter on your allies. By doing this, in another thread, it has been calculated that it is theoretically possible for a chronomancer and 4 eles to out dps 5 eles. Same applies to other group compositions, eles just provide the most standard dps out of the classes.
Finally, tides of time on the shield can give allies more quickness and stun foes. Also, Echo of memory can now provide more alacrity, some slow to allies, and is now a channeled block.
Conclusion: A lot of people like the chronomancer specialization because it can be utilized with a wide variety of builds and play styles. It adds a little bit for everyone. Additionally, I mean, common, the idea of a profession that can control spacetime is just cool as kitten. I’m not going to give you a set list of builds. Although I gave you an idea, the skills and traits I pointed out to you should give you an idea of when chronomancers are going to use certain traits based on their builds. It was also nice that the devs worked with all aspects of the specialization so that pretty much everything the specialization offers can potentially be useful.
p.s. In pve mesmer are also one of the best classes at reflecting projectiles. However, reflect damage scales with critical chance. Now, by mixing slow with danger time, you can get 100% crit chance fairly easily depending on your cool downs to deliver more damage with reflects.
Additionally, on game changing, have you ever tried to pvp stomp in an enemy time warp? Imagine this all the time, its a game changer. Alacrity is also a game changer as it reduces all cool downs by 66%. This means instead of casting ice bow 4 every 20 seconds, you can cast it every 6.8 seconds if under alacrity for the full duration, which as I have mentioned, is possible.
