It won’t be a thing until HoT at the earliest.
Power Shatters do their damage on too long a cooldown. The lowest you can get Mind Wrack is 10.5s cooldown, and even assuming you get 3 illusions up every time, and including Mental Anguish, you get dramatically outpaced by the Auto Attacks on any other clkitten
ters make great burst, and that’s what they’re balanced around: doing a lot of damage all at once. But since they happen so relatively infrequently, the dps is terrible.
Chronomancer promises to change that somewhat, as alacrity allows shattering more often (and using other skills more often), as well as providing more shatter fodder and even letting phantasms get some damage into the mix. That said, the numbers a full power shatter chronomancer build are still actually fairly low for pve. We’ll have to see how that goes to be sure.
That brings us to condi shatter. Condi shatter now does not provide the dps needed for success in pve outside of killing random hyenas and devourers in the silverwastes. The problem is that confusion and torment are the weakest conditions in PvE at large, so doing damage with them requires stacking them really kitten high, but especially with the nerf to Maim the Disillusioned, you can only get those levels of stacks very briefly (enough to burn down low-health mobs or husks in SW, but not enough for longer fights). The culprit is, once again, those long cooldowns, as you just can’t shatter fast enough to keep up the high stacks you’d need for competitive dps.
Chronomancer again promises some change, but this time with promise. In BWE1 before the Illusionary Reversion nerf, I was able to slaughter an entire line of husk slingers in seconds. The combination of condis on every shatter, alacrity on every shatter, quickness on every shatter (I didn’t use Chronophantasma), and extra clones on shatters gave me a really rapid application rate, which made it competitive.
The nerf to IR slowed down the pace and requires Chronophantasma to keep up a cadence, so it’s not as good, but it still promises to be useful, and we’ll have to see if the build survives to HoT.
As it stands, the only shatter build that is competitive in pve is a Chronomancer condition shatter build assuming it remains unchanged, but which will only be available when Heart of Thorns is released.
I’ve never enjoyed Phantasm builds. Guess I gotta just tough it out until HoT (hopefully).