What bugs me most is that the Chronomancer is simply stronger than the Mesmer. The base traitlines and skills (looking at you – pesky mantras >_>) need to be onpair with the Chronomancers.
Therefore I doubt we will ever see a Mesmer again in HoT. I almost can’t think of situations where the Mesmer would be stronger than the Chronomancer. F5 alone is too good to be not taken.
In my opinion chronomancer isn’t the problem, mesmer is. The game with such a playerbase and such an amazing world being balanced mostly around pvp, is a pretty fail idea IMO. The fact that core professions havent undergone major changes during the last years is really surprising. Let’s take mesmer for example. The mesmer’s DPS is mostly reflects and phantasms. Shifting a great portion of damage to AI, a crappy AI tbh, is pretty bad. It works Okay’ish in the pvp environment where you “brainlessly” spam clones and press F1 F3, yawn, repeat. But when it comes to PVE, well we all know what happens to clones and phantasms (RIP). I’ve been maining mesmer for around 2 years now having around 2k hours on mesmer only and well, sometimes the game gets really frustrating because if i use my core mechanic in fractals or dungeons (unless its to finish the boss) i instantly get called noob,scrub,etc. The idea of clones to confuse your opponents and shattering them for damage is pretty kitten good in my opinion but what ruins it are phantasms. What phantasms could’ve been, or should’ve been is like personal utility skills, for example, iWarden. You cast the skill, a phantasm appears and puts a bubble on the spawning point that absorbs projectiles and reflects when traited. After 5 secs of reflecting he vanishes. Has no hp bar and doesn’t die instantly to AoE cleaves. Another example iSwordsman. You cast him, he runs after the ooponent, does his jump animation and applies slow and weakness (or something), then disappears. iWarlock, instead of damaging the opponent, hits you with the bouncy attack and gives you and the allies who it bounces to might or fury or protection or w/e. There’s point to bring these out and they aren’t dead as soon as you spawn them. On the pvp side of things, they’re just as useful as on the pve side of things. I guess this would require some trait rework but hey, we’ve had Shattered Strenght redone which “broke the game”. Anyway, on the chronomancer side of things, yes the class feels strong and niche, but my biggest concern are the Chronophantasma nerfs (most likely ICD) that we will most likely get due to QQ and whatnot. The other thing is that we will stop being Time Warp and portal bots and will become alacrity bots. Seriously some wells feel rather weak but personally i would probably run them anyway in most PvE situations just because they dish out AoE alacrity, and being able to double cast them with F5 encourages you to take wells wether you like it or not.
So this is my take on the whole, mesmer/chrono deal.
