Guild Wars 2

What builds have people been running. So far I haven’t been entirely impressed with Chronomancer. Yet I see people going nuts on the forums about how powerful it is. So what are the builds people are running that are so “OP”?

Depends. Do you mean PvE, sPvP or WvW?

PvE and sPvP.
I found some good PvE builds, but didn’t see an overall boost in DMG.
sPvP I didn’t find anything that spectacular.

For PvE, you have to understand that chrono won’t boost YOUR damage. But it is very good at boosting the damage of your allies.

Pyro’s Power Bunker.

My Condi Bunker.

Yes, they’re both Bunker builds. But they’re really good at what they do. Maybe a bit too good, depending on who you ask.

Buton’s Lockdown Anguish which is the chrono variant of Mental Lockdown.

This is for roaming DPS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRROnU40Spk

For PvE you can give out tons of alacrity and quickness which comes out to more overall damage than another ele in addition to being able to do things like reflect/projectile destruction, condition removal, portal etc.

To explain the points made about PvE:

Chrono’s damage boosting comes almost entirely from cooldown reduction via alacrity. Continuum Split allows for some bigger frontloading than mesmer normally gets, which allows Time Warp to become actually viable on a regular basis, and heavily enables the alacrity-sharing build. All that said, here are the problems:

1. Chronomancer has 0 traits that can be reliably used to boost dps in PvE. Danger Time is the only specific damage boost in the entire spec, and being contingent on slow makes it worthless against breakbar mobs. This means you are losing damage just by taking Chronomancer, because you could be taking one of our 3 great damage specs instead.

2. Mesmer dps is abysmal. Our auto-attacks are terrible, and getting our other abilities on a 40% cooldown just doesn’t do the job.

3. The best mesmer dps comes from phantasms. But phantasms die constantly in any high-cleave environment (like, say, PvE), and chronomancer does nothing to fix that.

4. Shatters are terrible dps. Chronophantasma is cool, but shatters are still terrible dps. Alacrity is fun, but shatters are still…terrible dps. To give some perspective, in order for full mind wracks on cooldown to be the same dps as what an elementalist can get out of just spamming Lava Fonts, MW would need to be on a 2 second cooldown, and you’d need to be able to have 3 illusions up on every single one of those shatters. As it is, alacrity gets you to 6.3s at best, and can’t guarantee full illusions on those.

The unfortunate truth is that chronomancer improves mesmer dps in the end, but it just can’t make that dps competitive in PvE.

What it can do, however, is make allies who already have good dps (eles, warriors, engies, revs, etc. etc.) even better. While the chronomancer has to trade damage traits for the 40% cooldown reduction, and his damage is so low to start that he still doesn’t make it up the damage ranks, his ability to share that cooldown reduction with his team multiplies the value of it. If 3 eles do 33% more dps, that’s the same as having another ele. Add in a fourth man, and you’re beating out an extra elementalist right there.

@AlphatheWhite
so when I’m in a 5man party, even if my dps is kitten, if I give them Alacrity, the total damage output would be greater than a good 5man without Alacrity?

rogerwilko.6895:

@AlphatheWhite
so when I’m in a 5man party, even if my dps is kitten, if I give them Alacrity, the total damage output would be greater than a good 5man without Alacrity?

Exactly. And in fact, when I did the math, I proved that if you had a party of 4 elementalists, adding chrono alacrity/quickness alone (not counting anything else the chrono brings to the table) would always add more dps than adding another elementalist.
Since ele dps is the highest, this would hold for any other dps class, as well.
(There are some caveats to that, based on the fact that alacrity sharing means everyone being in your wells when they end).

The only time you might vary from that is if you’re considering replacing a high-dps class in an otherwise low-dps group. A group of 4 regular mesmers, for example, might benefit more from an extra ele, because alacrity is only as good as the classes that you’re augmenting with it.
Even then though, you’d have to do the math, because the chronomancer does bring some damage of their own to the table.