Guild Wars 2

So, it’s been mentioned many times that Tides of Time can give quickness to the entire raid. So, I decided to put my hand to figuring out what it would take to give 100% quickness to an entire raid. I’d appreciate if anyone can verify the workability of any of the mechanics I use.

Edit: revised the process and math to account for some shortcomings in my original assumptions.

Assumption 1: You can get 100% personal alacrity. Whether through shatters, or wells, or whatever, we’re gonna need it. Not trying to optimize group alacrity, just our own.

Assumption 2: We can get the entire raid with Tides of Time every time.

The rotation:
f5 → shield5 → f5 → shield5 → shield5 → repeat
Even though we can double-proc cooldown reduction after f5, we still only have time to cast shield5 twice between CS runs, so we get shield5 3 times per cycle.

At a base 3.5s quickness to everyone who got double-hit, and some unknown boon duration x, quickness uptime = (3*3.5*x)/45.9 = 10.5x/45.9
At 100% boon duration, that would be only 46% uptime, so we need more.
We don’t have any more raid quickness, but we do have some 5-man quickness.

Time Warp:
uptime = 11x/45.9. At 100% boon duration, that’s 48% uptime, which puts group 1 at 94% uptime at best, so we’ll still need a little more, but we’ll deal with that in a second.

Well of Action:
30s cooldown with alacrity and f5 means we can cast it 3 times per cycle, so
uptime = (3*3.5*x)/45.9 = 10.5x/45.9
At 100% boon duration, that’s 46% uptime, which puts group 2 in a similar situation as group 1, with 92% uptime at best.

At that point, we have 3 options:
1. Lengthen our cycle artificially so we can get another Tides of Time.
2. Use Mimic with MoM to get 2 extra Wells of Action.
3. Hope they’ve got some quickness of their own. A group with a guardian makes this easy.

Option 1: Lengthen the cycle
Given a 20s cooldown on the first Tides, and 30s cooldown on each of the following, with 100% alacrity, we can get in 4 Tides of Time if we lengthen the cycle to 48 seconds. Since the cooldown keeps going while we are running CS, we shouldn’t have to subtract CS time from the total, but we do have to account for cast times, so raise that to 49s.

14x/49 brings us to max 57% uptime on Tides.

Group1: We’re down to 45% on Time Warp, for a total of 102% uptime, barely squeezing in under the line. There’s a little bit of room to reduce boon duration, but not much. Math says we need 96% boon duration, which is only 1% below the maximum possible. Time to break out the Givers gear!

Group 2: We’re down to 43% on Well of Action, which means we barely hit exactly 100% quickness uptime for group 2, with maximum boon duration and a little bit more. Looks like Chaotic Persistence is a requirement here. That’ll lighten a little of the load on our gear, as we can probably count on 12% at least from CP.

Option 2: Mimic
Gotta have MoM (chaos) for this to work, or you’ll only be able to Mimic once, and you really need it twice—once for each group.

We can use the same math as earlier, so we need an extra 8% for group 1 and 6% for group 2.
Mimic gets us 2 extra Well of Action per cycle (1 during CS, 1 after), so that’s 3.5x/45.9.
At max boon duration, that’s 15% uptime, which is sufficient for both groups, so we did it!

Using the more in need of the two groups as our minimum, we find that we need at least 88% boon duration to accomplish this. Counting on 12% Chaotic Persistence takes that down to 76% from armor/food. In theory you can do that without Givers gear, so that’s nice.

You can also combine options 1 and 2 to lower the required boon duration investment.

Option 3: Non-you quickness.
I really don’t know much about non-mesmer sources of quickness, except for FMW.
A guardian in each group would fill the gap and then some.
Another shield chrono would make the whole exercise trivial (double tides of time, and both with Time Warp), and maybe neither of you would have to totally kitten yourselves equipping loads of boon duration.
A non-shield chrono could do the job no matter what their build, since they can just double down with you on Time Warp and Well of Action.

I really don’t know what kind of alacrity uptime you’ll be able to keep with all of that.

Answer 1: No. You can only proc the cooldown reduction one single time per individual wave.

Fay.2357:

Answer 1: No. You can only proc the cooldown reduction one single time per individual wave.

Edited the post to account for this.

In the end I came up with 3 ways to get the last little bit of quickness you need:

1. Lengthen the time between CS casts in order to fit in an extra Tides of Time. This decreases uptime from Time Warp/Well of Action (not enough to fit in another Well of Action though), but increases raid-wide uptime from Tides.

2. Mimic. With Master of Manipulation, you can cast Mimic during f5 and again after f5, and have it off cooldown before CS comes back up. That gives you 2 extra Wells of Action, one for each group, which is enough.

3. Some other source of quickness, like a guardian or another chrono.

You can also combine 1 and 2 to get varying degrees of required boon duration gear.
I might take some time to calculate what you’d need from having 2 chronos in the raid and what you’d need if you combine the first 2 options.

Signet of inspiration
Inspiration line, grandmaster, middle trait gives another signet of inspiration.

Rune of the chronomancer + Signet of inspiration

The signet has the same cooldown as eternity and action, so you can just pop it off as part of your rotation. You’re sharing more than just quickness that way too. Now that you’re running Inspiration, you can experiment with Seize the Moment to stack and share even more quickness (if its even needed…). Chronophantasma would definitely be tough to give up though.