Guild Wars 2

I’d like to write about how I played chronomancer in our first raid. I feel like I’m playing far from perfect, and I’d love to receive some feedback about how I can improve my rotation and build.

The build
I equipped sword/pistol and sword/shield, using the following build: http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgMEaAKoBvw~ which I think might be too support oriented, as the raid seems to require a massive amount of dps.

The utility skills
Signet of the Ether – Provides healing over time to deal with the damage aura
Well of Action – Grants quickness and alacrity to players
Well of Recall – Grants tons of alacrity to players
Well of Precognition – Grants evasion to players (I use this when 5 players are inside a circle and seekers aren’t knocked back)
Time Warp – Grants quickness

The rotation
- I begin the fight summoning a phantasmal duelist, switching to shields, and using shield 4 twice. This grants me 3 illusions from the beginning, 1 that does dps, 2 that grant alacrity to the melee tanking the boss.

- When a circle appears, I use continuum split, and spam time warp and the two first wells on the circle, and shield 5. This should provide the circle team a massive amount of dps and cooldown reduction.

- When circle ends, I run up to the boss, do blurred frenzy, shatter, shield 4 and sword 3 (grants me three new illusions).

- Every third circle, I swap to pistol to summon a duelist, signet, duelist since wells are on cd.

That’s my rotation, my personal dps is decent, but I think I’m making up for it by providing the raid with constant cooldown reduction and quickness.

Final thoughts
As you might have noticed, I rarely switch to pistol during the fight. I only do it when my wells are on cd, or during a split to increase dps instead of utility. A lot of my time is spent spamming wells on circles and summoning new phantasms so I can shatter them.

If I drop shield completely, it will significantly reduce my survivability (so much that I’m not sure if I’ll survive), but it will allow me to significantly increase my personal DPS.

If I drop inspiration from my build, I can again increase personal DPS a lot, but reduce both my personal and raid survivability.

Were you hitting the enrage, or were you wiping sometime before?

Last night, we started to semi-consistently get into phase 2, but lose it there. I was running Chrono/Insp/Illu with Well of Recall, Well of Action, Well of Precog, and Well of Eternity at first, then I dropped Action for Blink, because getting to the green circles is such a priority. Once I feel like I am better at getting there without it, I’ll switch back. I also think I agree that going with the signet is probably better due to the ongoing damage.

Anyway, if you aren’t hitting the enrage, build defensive until you are, once that is the reason your raid is dying, then start swapping things for more DPS.

I don’t have the gear for it, but after last night, I am thinking something like this might do well:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQRAse8cnsIClfi1fC+fCUrhFlj6MAWgJDtyGoMrORj0KF-TxBBQBOU9Hso8DAnEg/t/g/0PEgnAwZUCSGA9FA-e

Get into a shatter cadence for the group alacrity and the self heal, then drop wells as needed as you suggest.

Yeah we hit phase 2, but we were never quick enough to break the breakbar and control vale, so hitting circles was an impossible task.

We will be giving it another go on sunday, and I’ll adapt like you said after that.

If there are any mesmers out there who has managed to clear the first boss running shield spec, I’d love to hear about it!

I’ll actually be raiding tomorrow night, but me and Fay grabbed a bunch of random pugs and went after vale guardian last night. Our comp was flat-out awful (I was forced to go condie mes because we had so little condie), and it was altogether a bit of a mess on fights. However, here are my reflections.

I ran sc/focus /shield (don’t actually use scepter, I had no other choice). I was tanking, so I had control of the boss. I was able to pump out fairly good uptime on alacrity, though that’ll get easier as I get more familiar with controlling the boss. I found that with full alacrity, focus 4 was capable of almost all the control needed to manage the seekers. I swapped back and forth between focus and shield as necessary, since I also wanted as much uptime on ToT as possible, and chaining blocks made my life easier insofar as damage mitigation went.

We pretty easily got into phase 3 (moving around as floor tiles light up) several times, getting the boss down to about 50%, but didn’t quite have the coordination to keep breaking the bar in that phase while staying mobile.

I was our chrono for a few attempts, under the direction of someone who had cleared it. I followed what I understand to be the standard for PvE raid mesmer.

Weapons are sword/shield//-/sword (no mainhand on second set). Phantasmal Swordsman is the highest dps phantasm (or so the experts assure me) because of its superior attack rate. I usually went with 2 Swordsmen and 1 Avenger, or 3 Swordsmen.

Domination vs. Dueling is basically a wash, as most of the traits are useless for PvE, with the former coming out slightly ahead: 15% illusion damage beats illusion Fury (assuming illusions have 150% crit damage), and 12.5% personal damage (from full Vuln uptime) beats 10% more crit damage (from Fencer’s Finesse). Then it’s Illusions and Chronomancer. I would strongly suggest that healing is not your role, and drop Inspiration. I ran the healing Well, which was more than enough.

I would recommend not being in the party that does the circle. You are melee dps; any time you spend running around is lost dps. Let the OP Condi Engis chase circles.

Quickness is more valuable than Alacrity. I ran Action and Recall, though I would take raid composition into consideration. Given that many specs’ max dps rotations involve primarily autoattacks and few cooldowns (for example, we had a couple Revenants, for whom Alacrity is basically useless), it can happen that the primary benefit of Alacrity is getting Quickness out that much faster (i.e., on yourself). I might even suggest throwing the Alacrity well on the Condi Engis if your melee group is mostly Revs and PS Warriors.

Since I wasn’t running the Signet heal, I mostly saved shatter for Continuum Split and phase changes. You more or less get the phantasms out and autoattack between wells. I would often use Blurred Frenzy instead of dodging the teleport rocks so that I could keep dps’ing (time it right — if you’re under Quickness it can end before the rocks go off — though realistically the cast has enough of a tell that you can usually just step aside without dodging).

Naturally, there is more than one way to kill a boss, and I’m not suggesting that this is the only way to go, and I’m certainly no PvE expert in GW2, but to my knowledge successful groups have leaned toward this. Hope it helps.

ran my pvp build in raid (insp,duel,chrono). Got to phase 3 . I think we could have done it but gp quit. GS/Staff 2x shatter worked pretty good. 2x elite well works wonders on breaker bars. Didn’t have any problem with defense, the heal sig and heal on shatter was more than enough.