Although the Chronomancer specialization line has not been fully released I’ve been trying to make sense of all these changes by thinking of their potential applications. And with the skills known to us so far the most obvious builds I can think of are lockdown builds.
With the upcoming mesmer changes and our new Chronomancer interrupt skills we should be able to cause never before seen amounts of chaos and grief among groups of clumped up enemies. Hopefully this can elevate us from our veilbot status in open world pvp.
So there are two lockdown variants that jump out at me straight away, one being power based and the other condi based.
Power Lockdown Carnage:
- Dominaton: [I] Confounding Suggestions, [VI] Furious Interruption, [IX] Power Block
- Chaos: [III]Master of Manipulation, [VI] Chaotic Dampening, [VII] Chaotic Interruption
- Chronomancy: ???
- Utilities Mirror, Blink, Arcane Thievery, Well of Calamity, Gravity Well
- Weapons: Sword/Shield, Staff
- Gear: Berserker
The general idea is to drop AOE CCs on groups of people from the mid-line because of your range or lack there of. I’ll briefly go through the idea behind the main skills.
I chose staff for chaos storm and chaos armor. The trait chaotic dampening reduces staff cool downs and increases our access to protection, this paired with alacrity should reduce the cool down of chaos storm by a decent amount. I chose shield for its AOE projectile stun and quickness but perhaps focus pulls would still be more desired. Sword is simply there for blurred frenzy’s defensive and offensive capabilities.
I chose Master of Manipulation (mainly for blink cd reduction) but also because of it’s new and improved mirror/reflect after cast. Mirror’s 20% cd reduction and its 4sec of reflect make it a much more interesting heal now when paired with MoM. Arcane Thievery could probably be swapped out for null field or mantra of resolve.
The most attractive part of this build is Gravity Well, Chaos Storm and Tides of Time. Each of these skills have the potential to proc Power Block (which now includes halting strike and weakness as well as increasing cool downs on interrupted skills), Furious Interruption (Quickness on self), Chaotic Interruption (Immobilize and other soft CCs as well kitten might and other boons).
With our ability to double cast (Continuum Shift) Chaos Storm, Gravity Well and Well of Calamity, our ability to tear away at multiple stability stacks while pumping out nasty interrupt procs would be valuable to any team.
It should also be said that gravity well currently counts of 4 ccs on 5 targets and grants stability to allies, and deals decent damage on the final pulse. While Robert Gee said the final cc (float) will most likely be nerfed before release it’s still a very useful skill. Personally I hope they don’t get rid of float because that would be so much fun.
Condi-Shutdown
- Dueling: [?] meh…Phantasmal Fury, [?] another meh, [VIII] Mistrust!!
- Chaos: [III]Master of Manipulation, [VI] Chaotic Dampening, [VII] Chaotic Interruption
- Chronomancy: ???
- Utilities Mirror, Blink, Arcane Thievery, Mantra of Distraction, Gravity Well
- Weapons: Sword/Shield, Staff
- Gear: Maximise Precision & Condition Damage so Rabid most likely. The key though is RUNES OF PERPLEXITY!
Use your imagination, increased condition duration on chaotic interruption can be pretty lethal, this combined with confusing combatants, mistrust and perplexity runes could be quite lethal to mindless 1-1-1-1ing zerglings. Although its potential to apply confusion probably won’t be as great and op as glamour builds of old.
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So, do you think such builds might become more prevalent when HoT is released or is it too gimmicky to work?