Guild Wars 2

Basically on the old trait system it wasn’t all that viable or recommended to bring a shatter build into a dungeon. I’m wondering with the influx of shatter traits that allow us to do so much more with them, is it at all viable support/damage wise. Or is the support/damage just laughable compared to a phantasm build?

In the sense of traiting for Mind Wrack damage and letting your phantasms attack once before you blow them up, that’s probably even optimal for trash mobs if your group kills them quickly enough.

For bosses, maybe if you’re with a super-organised group that kills faster than you can summon phantasms. If a phantasm attacks 2-3 times that’s more damage than you could ever hope to get from shattering it.

Traiting for a PvP-style shatter “build” probably also means you lose Harmonius Mantras and/or Fencer’s Finesse, which is a massive damage loss. Shattering during combat also costs you the Compounding Power bonus if you trait it.

Also, what kind of “support” do you expect to give with such a build? The shatter effects themselves are selfish and F3/F4 you can pop when the situation calls for it even in a phantasm build. AoE blind can help in a pinch, but other classes do that better. Bountiful Disillusionment would require you to invest in the rather selfish and lackluster Chaos line, and the boon uptimes are nothing to write home about.

Shattering is still a dps loss over time, but a quick spike in damage immediately. Essentially, shattering to finish off any type of enemy is worthwhile. If they don’t die though, it’s a waste of good dps.

Think about how much damage shatters do. A 3-clone mind wrack will probably be able to do something like 5-6k per, maybe even a bit more. In total that would be 4 hits of 5-6k damage.

Ok, now you’ve got no phantasms up, so you need to recast them. In the time it takes to recast 3 phantasms (using ether signet, which means lower sustained modifier from HM) all 3 of your phantasms could have attacked once, and you could have been auto attacking.

3 phantasm attacks plus autoattacks from you over that time period of 4-5 seconds will easily do far more damage than your shatter did.

Shattering if the mob isn’t dead afterwards is always the wrong thing to do.

Now, once HoT hits, this might change a little. With the chronophantasma trait, your phantasms will not only immediately respawn after a shatter, but have their attack timers reset as well. This means that you could spawn phantasms, they attack, shatter for damage, and then they attack again. You could ofc extend that combo in several ways by playing with ether signet and F5 shatter, but that’s the general idea.

Even then though, that’s just an ultimately heavier version of the original burst, that also takes a bit longer to pull off. If you do the whole combo (F5, summon, shatter, F5, shatter) and the boss isn’t dead yet, it might not have been worth it. Hard to say without testing though, since the shatters will be giving you alacrity and potentially quickness, and double-tapping on the phantasm attacks plus a second shatter is a pretty massive damage increase.