Guild Wars 2

So what’s the general thought on the class after the beta weekend. There’s been a lot of crying from behalf of the community that chronomancer is way too op, others say it’s still undertuned. So in general, what are we expecting? some well changes and the block/ avenger changes or just a hands down nerf on traits, alacrity access and clone/phantasm generation?

I wouldn’t say it’s undertuned. As for OP, we have to wait and play it more to determine that. It’s definitely very strong.

I’m expecting a reduction on block time for Shield 4 and possibly a slight increase to CD for Precog.

Anything else probably won’t happen in what time we have left unless Rob thinks it’s a big problem.

Most cries simply stems from lack of understanding of a new class plus facing a new class as a well know old spec. If you ask a lot of them what exactly is OP about chrono as oppose to normal mesmer they can’t pinpoint anything other than continuum shift. Keep in mind HoT is a power creep for every profession hence it’s a bit early to say OP or undertuned when every profession shines at somewhere due to their nature.

At this stage I think there won’t be any changes to the functionalities of the skills and we’re just expecting small number changes.

The problem is F5 in my opinion. Without it, he’d be undertuned, but with it some combinations may be a liiiiittle op :| in pvp you can counter it tough and pve it only gives the mesmer more support and damage wich won’t make him op in any way.

I guess right now he’s considered op, since people in pvp or / and wvw don’t really know how to react on F5 or how to counter it. I guess it will autobalance itself over time.

I didn’t find it overpowered to fight against, nor underwhelming to play. It felt good with how it were tuned in Beta Weekend 3. I do expect some minor tweaks however, on the nerfing side (sadly), people are quick to jump on the “nerf this, nerf that” choo-choo train, and the general feedback is that we are OP. Then again, so is Mesmer. Has been said to be OP since Guild Wars for that matter.

Never mind that it takes some rather skilled individuals to actually make Chronomancer shine. Who cares about that. It’s OP. This really skilled player, made this thing seem easy. OP. Nerf it. I don’t care if I can’t do the same. A few people can. OP! OP! Furry kittens and fluffy sheep OP!

Well in matters of diversity of utility Chronomancer seems OP… but utility alone won’t win you a match. I believe Chronomancer will be an essential part of PvE dungeons and raids in the future and will be a welcome asset to PvP teams. The Mesmer alone however won’t win the match for your team.

We will also have to wait and see what happens after people have adapted to what Chronomancer can do.

My personal opinion: Chronomancer is a spellcaster that actually can manipulate time. So of course it should be totally op^^

What bugs me most is that the Chronomancer is simply stronger than the Mesmer. The base traitlines and skills (looking at you – pesky mantras >_>) need to be onpair with the Chronomancers.

Therefore I doubt we will ever see a Mesmer again in HoT. I almost can’t think of situations where the Mesmer would be stronger than the Chronomancer. F5 alone is too good to be not taken.

Xyonon.3987:

What bugs me most is that the Chronomancer is simply stronger than the Mesmer. The base traitlines and skills (looking at you – pesky mantras >_>) need to be onpair with the Chronomancers.

Therefore I doubt we will ever see a Mesmer again in HoT. I almost can’t think of situations where the Mesmer would be stronger than the Chronomancer. F5 alone is too good to be not taken.

In my opinion chronomancer isn’t the problem, mesmer is. The game with such a playerbase and such an amazing world being balanced mostly around pvp, is a pretty fail idea IMO. The fact that core professions havent undergone major changes during the last years is really surprising. Let’s take mesmer for example. The mesmer’s DPS is mostly reflects and phantasms. Shifting a great portion of damage to AI, a crappy AI tbh, is pretty bad. It works Okay’ish in the pvp environment where you “brainlessly” spam clones and press F1 F3, yawn, repeat. But when it comes to PVE, well we all know what happens to clones and phantasms (RIP). I’ve been maining mesmer for around 2 years now having around 2k hours on mesmer only and well, sometimes the game gets really frustrating because if i use my core mechanic in fractals or dungeons (unless its to finish the boss) i instantly get called noob,scrub,etc. The idea of clones to confuse your opponents and shattering them for damage is pretty kitten good in my opinion but what ruins it are phantasms. What phantasms could’ve been, or should’ve been is like personal utility skills, for example, iWarden. You cast the skill, a phantasm appears and puts a bubble on the spawning point that absorbs projectiles and reflects when traited. After 5 secs of reflecting he vanishes. Has no hp bar and doesn’t die instantly to AoE cleaves. Another example iSwordsman. You cast him, he runs after the ooponent, does his jump animation and applies slow and weakness (or something), then disappears. iWarlock, instead of damaging the opponent, hits you with the bouncy attack and gives you and the allies who it bounces to might or fury or protection or w/e. There’s point to bring these out and they aren’t dead as soon as you spawn them. On the pvp side of things, they’re just as useful as on the pve side of things. I guess this would require some trait rework but hey, we’ve had Shattered Strenght redone which “broke the game”. Anyway, on the chronomancer side of things, yes the class feels strong and niche, but my biggest concern are the Chronophantasma nerfs (most likely ICD) that we will most likely get due to QQ and whatnot. The other thing is that we will stop being Time Warp and portal bots and will become alacrity bots. Seriously some wells feel rather weak but personally i would probably run them anyway in most PvE situations just because they dish out AoE alacrity, and being able to double cast them with F5 encourages you to take wells wether you like it or not.

So this is my take on the whole, mesmer/chrono deal.

I very much enjoyed playing chronomancer in this past BWE. I’m not really seeing anything that needs any type of nerf…possible exception being the F5. The only reason I mention the F5 is for PvP reasons though…which I think is a very poor reason to nerf it btw. Its not like players can’t adapt to the concept that a chronomancer is extremely likely to try to unload everything they have with this right at the start of any encounter…before they put anything on cool down. Its also not like our damage is super high either.

Everyone keeps crying about our shield #4, which is absolutely ridiculous to complain about. Its definitely not the longest block in the game. The second phase of the block (deja vu) only becomes available if people are dumb enough to attack you with echo of memory up. Shouldn’t there be a penalty for bonehead decisions? Its not any worse than attacking a Herald with infuse light up or attacking a guardian with retaliation, attacking a druid through sublime conversion, trying to melee a warrior in the middle of hundred blades, or trying to melee a reaper….all bonehead decisions with way worse penalties than echo of memory/deja vu….who’s only actual penality is summoning a phantasm with weak dps…that gets insta-gibbed anyway and a second opportunity to block. We can’t even dps while the block is active. Performing any attacks while it is active actually cancels the shield and cancels the phantasm summon. The shield does not even do any damage initially, during, or after it ends. To my knowledge, we can’t even use our healing skill during the shield without cancelling it. That all seems pretty balanced to me. Shield is not a high dps weapon. To be honest, there is no combination used with chronomancer shield that actually yields high dps. Chronomancer is really not a high dps profession. Even with the 10% to sword auto…we still rank pretty low on dps. That’s why it seems so ridiculous that people keep talking about nerfs to the chronomancer. All we have are survival tools and group utility.

If anything the chronomancer needs a few tweaks and possibly a buff to its damage output. I think blurred frenzy should have gotten the same 10% buff that the sword auto attack got. I think protected phantasms should be baseline…or at least a couple of seconds of distortion upon summon for phantasms to be able to not die instantly. I think the well trait needs to be reworked again, so as not to make it so desirable to slot 5 wells and nothing else for utilities. They need to make more alacrity available on a couple of wells…instead of a trait that encourages you to chain spam wells…ignoring their actual individual intended purposes. Other utilities should not be completely invalidated because of one trait.