Showing Posts For Adonisis.9736:
Honestly I was surprised also at how good staff is with viper/cele. The auto attack is actually good unlike GS where it barely tickles unless using full power gear.
Sure I can understand if you prefer Shield. I’ve always been a Sword/Torch guy and loving the recent buffs to torch damage output. If taking Shield then I’d go for Persistence of Memory.
Yeah sadly Lunar New Year is a long way off, but if you know you’re going to want to roam in Chrono next year then good idea to plan and save for the drop in price of that food. In my opinion it’s the best roaming food for hybrid or condi chrono.
Of course with Mirage not having the innate -25% to cripple/chill/immobilise I’m likely going to make a second set of roaming gear with different runes/food if stacking passive condi duration reduction isn’t as effective as it is on chrono.
Thank you for your explanation. I just returned to this game after a long break and started doing the HoT living story and stuff. Is your build also good for that? I’ll try your build in WvW, I think I’ll like it after reading everything. Do you think this hybrid is more fun/better than a full power or full condi build?
I can only speak from my own experience of iterating over the last few years, and oscillating between power and condi – from glamour confusion, moving to power phantasm, then to power shatter, then to condi shatter, back to power shatter and so on… I finally feel over the last year or so since I made this build that I reached the peak of what I have been aiming for over the course of this game.
I don’t think I’ll ever play pure condi again because it’s so slow and boring, and most likely not play pure power again for mesmer, unless there’s an elite spec that provides a kitten good reason to play pure power such as sustained power damage.
I love supplementing the burst potential of direct damage with the sustained damage of condis – it makes up for not having enough sustained direct damage and similarly not having enough burst damage while playing pure condi. It’s fun to aim for reasonable mind wrack crits while watching condis tick away maintaining pressure on your opponent. It also fits my playstyle of light bruiser with a bit of burst, rather than full yolo shatter or full attrition.
As said previously, the main weakness of this build is not quite excelling at doing any one thing, whether tanking damage or dishing it out. You may run into the odd player (arbitrary statistic) who you’ll just have to walk away from (eg one or two druids I can recall), and equally you won’t be able to facetank damage as you might be able to in full trailblazer or dire so must be more evasive (you have the luxury of making mistakes and eating the odd bit of damage here and there) – but the good thing is any player who is tanky enough to mitigate most of your damage will also have a very difficult time killing you – you’ll have the luxury of deciding to walk away from an encounter whenever you feel overwhelmed, unless badly outnumbered or in unfavourable terrain.
But overall it’s difficult to describe how to play and also does kind of require maximising every stat to be efficient (ie getting those attunements/infusion slots from fractals and getting ascended everything – though I still haven’t bothered with ascended underwater weapons…) – the nature of hybrid does demand squeezing out as much stats as possible, hence my reason for mixing in cele trinkets and headgear. So it’s a difficult one for me to say craft exotic and test, because you won’t get the same experience from exotic and will feel noticably weaker – I can recall it wasn’t amazing at the time but I had an idea of what to aim for so worked through it. You can get a flavour of the playstyle from exotic, but you’ll be slightly squishier and deal less damage (food and utility will be crucial) which prevents the build from performing as well as it is able in maximised gear.
So yeah I’m a huge proponent of this build and find it far more fun and less gimmicky/one-trick than pure power or pure condi. The only gimmick I suppose is shatter spam, but that’s the nature of chrono in pvp/wvw anyway so can’t be avoided.
I always enjoyed the condi roamer but played against Osicat with full zerker before and could best him sometimes. But I always thought full zerker or full condi missed something, that’s why I think your build would be nice to try.
About your build: what do you think about the berzerker runes with +power and + condition damage instead of the antitoxin runes you have now? And do you think the Chronomancer traitline is a must or replaceable?
Great vid Slynn! May I ask why sword over scepter?
Hi Adonisis!
This is strictly my own personal opinion (play what you have the most fun with is what i think people should do).
I have a sword/pistol, scepter/torch/shield build that’s better than this one for 1v1s.
However for WvW roaming when you can have adds jump in anytime, scepter is just too slow.
When you’re fighting against 2 or 3 people (of which 1 or 2 of them are roamers themselves, not zergers),
1) scepter 3 (confusing images) just leaves you wide open to get bursted down.
2) scepter block can proc on a pet or some random clone so its not very handy.
3) scepter auto attack is still too slow and leaves you wide open as wellSword on the other hand,
1) blurred frenzy allows you temporary evasion (sorta, gotta dodge or stealth or blink after you finish though)
2) the best thing about sword is actually ileap. mobility on the battlefield when vs multiple targets help a lot. Catching and immobilizing targets is good too.
3) sword auto attack is pretty meh, but 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.In 1v1s though scepter can be pretty good if there are no clones/pets. But theres no fair fight in WvW. If i had a silver everytime i got ganked in WvW i’d be able to buy Tyria by now
Hehe, I guess you have a valid point there. Nice vids, I’ll make sure to follow u! Btw, u planning on making sPvP vids anytime too? I know this build is wvw only, but still.