Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone,
I’m currently thinking about my chronomancer’s build.

I’d like her to be as tough as possible. Almost invincible. I know that a knight stuff would be great, my toughness could be around 1675.
But I’m into raids, and I’ve been told my DPS would not be enough.

On the other side, I could have a full zerk stuff, my DPS would rise by roughly 4k, which is not negligible, but I’m afraid about not reaching my goal : being “invincible”.

The best compromise I can think of is : Zerk armor + knight jewels. My toughness would be about 1475. What do you think of it ?

Thank you

If you want to raid, the No.1 goal is to get close to 100% boon duration. Other things don’t really matter.

And for PvE, being ‘invincible’ is all about knowing the encounters and having good group synergy. You don’t need super high toughness. If you make bad mistakes, no toughness can save you or your group.

I’m in agreement with Exciton here. In PvE, “invincibility” comes down to two things: good timing with active defenses (blocks, dodges, invulnerability skills) and familiarity with boss/fight mechanics. Having defensive stats do not help you become invincible, it merely gives you limited wiggle room to make small mistakes.

As Exciton said, what you should be aiming towards in terms of PvE is to hit that 100% boon duration cap.

As a tangential point, it sounds to me that you’re looking to be “invincible” through the means of having high defensive stats so you can facetank things and still survive. Mesmer isn’t the best class for that, and neither is Knight’s gear the best choice for pure survivability. If you want to facetank AoEs and get the best returns for passive defense, I would probably look at decking out a Warrior in Nomad’s gear. Warrior has so much passive defense that you don’t really need to do much to survive. You won’t do any damage whatsoever but hey, you’re “invincible”!

Invincible is a PvP or WvW concept. Due to the nature of fights against other players, some damage is unavoidable. This means that toughness and other defensive stats have a real purpose. In PvE, however, that is not the case. You can avoid all damage through skilled use of defensive abilities and positioning, making defensive stats nothing but a waste of space on your gear.

However, this is, of course, a personal decision for you to make about how you gear your character…until you enter a raid party. At that point, the other members are depending on you to be a competent player in order to successfully complete the content. As a chronomancer in raids, your role is to provide permanent uptime on quickness for your subsquad. This requires a substantial investment into boon duration either in gear stats, runes and sigils, or both. If you accomplish that and still want to boost your toughness without compromising the buff aspect of the build, feel free. Neglecting your role in the party to become an unnecessarily tanky bruiser, however, will result in nothing but kicks from groups.

A lot of raid groups like the tank to have 1401 toughness, in case the warriors (or is it guardians) take that trait that grants them 400 toughness when rezzing someone. This allows the tank to always have aggro. Anything more than that is a waste of toughness and would be better spent in offensive stats. More competitive raid groups will take a tank with as little as 1001 toughness, every other point going into offensive stats.

For a chrono, most important is 100% boon duration, which you can get with any mix of commanders gear, platinum doubloons, food, runes, sigil of concentration. Obviously a build with more offensive power will be better, however if you keep going down you are useless. So take as much toughness as you need, but only after you can get to 100% boon duration.

As others have mentioned, +100% boon duration is priority. If you want to stack toughness? That’s fine. Just realize that you will have to tank virtually every encounter that uses the toughness-aggro mechanic.

I did the math a while back and found that a fully zerker Chrono is contributing about 13k DPS which is ~4-5% of the squad’s total DPS (typical disclaimer of Golem smacking and is realistically less due to having to move around if you’re tanking). If you want to stack toughness you can go the old Commander’s gear route, and you’d drop to contributing about 9.5k DPS which is around ~3-4% of the squad’s total DPS.

That being said, some of the rotations for quickness/alacrity uptime have small margins for error which can get utterly messed up if you go down. Even worse, if you go down as a tank, you jeopardize the entire encounter.

If anything I would summarize Chrono priority to:
buff uptime > staying on your feet > DPS.

’evening

Thanks for all your answers,
So, taking everything you said into account, I’m going to focus on boon duration, and try to have good DPS. Afterwards, I may think about toughness ^^
I’ve checked, I can go up to 1036 toughness with a full zerk stuff, which enables me to tank, as long as wars do not rez. I might choose some knight jewels -not all of them though-, but I will decide when I’m gearing my mesmer.

Again, thank you so much, and bye !

Tuturyy.1238:

’evening

Thanks for all your answers,
So, taking everything you said into account, I’m going to focus on boon duration, and try to have good DPS. Afterwards, I may think about toughness ^^
I’ve checked, I can go up to 1036 toughness with a full zerk stuff, which enables me to tank, as long as wars do not rez. I might choose some knight jewels -not all of them though-, but I will decide when I’m gearing my mesmer.

Again, thank you so much, and bye !

Before you go, keep mind there is meta mesmer build out there you can at least use as reference.
http://qtfy.enjin.com/mesmer

Remember there is a gear type called commander that gives you power precision toughness and boon duration. This is probably the gear type you will like.