Guild Wars 2

I thin a-net does not like condi mesmer
bugged traits: duelist’s discipline, malicious sorcery
overnerfed traits: MtD, chaotic dampening

if you see a pattern…

That’s about what I am using. I have a slight preference for chaotic dampening over chaotic transference, but I guess both are good alternatives. I use ineptitude over malicious sorcery. If malicious sorcery was not bugged, it would probably be better, but just a CD reduction seems “meh”, but I agree more confusing image is good.

So overall, I think the build is right!

While I don’t play ranger that often, I think I heard people complaining about the pet AI as much as necro complain about their minion AI. The one exception of course is that ranger cannot choose a pet-less build

@Fay
Was this officially stated?

Ok, thanks for spotting it, then that’s very good This will definitely be interesting in PvP!
As for PvE, we really need to see how good is alacrity for the party DPS and see if we should invest in signet of inspiration!

Well it’s approximately what I had in mind in
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Chronomancer-PvE/first#post5317836

but I used increased alacrity. I still think alacrity will be interesting because I have this foolish hope that Anet will realize it’s not so dangerous and they can give us a bit more than what they announced… I didn’t see the gain with the extra clone.
I also started with F5 to get the first phantasm for free and save the signet for later. I also like that it allows to keep the signet in case things go wrong with your health or with dying phantasms. But with F5 + signet one can start the fight with 3 duelist which is VERY tempting

@Tristan
Can’t I love both mesmer and necro?
Death Perception will affect reaper’s shroud. All “old” shroud traits still apply to reaper. But without stability, the only corpse will be yours I’m afraid. Already currently, WvW partly evolved to the “pirate boat” meta because of the change to stability. For the necro, no point. The good news is that necro already have a place in the zerg meta, but I would have loved (and will probably try and die a few times) to be more frontline.

I agree with most things here. For mistrust, I already wrote a bit about my opinion:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Suggestion-Meaningful-condi-interrupt/first

Illusionary Inspiration is already decent I believe, and acting as a signet is a plus since it synergizes with signet traits.

Temporal Enchanter: I haven’t tried it yet post-patch, but I kinda like the idea of this trait as it is. Maybe the idea is good but does not work in practice…

Ether Bolt: just need a full rework of the scepter AA!

Phantasmal Mage: I don’t think 2 stacks of burn would be op…

I would not be so pessimistic. I think reaper was designed PRECISELY for PvE. GS is too slow for PvP, reaper’s shroud is melee, the shouts work best with many enemies around… You could hope for frontline zerg WvW, but let’s be honest, lack of stability would be problematic here.

So considering it was designed for PvE, there is a good chance they will make sure it fixes the necro problem in PvE. Currently, I will say it still lacks DPS for that. When they said “we’re pushing numbers here” I assumed they would have realized that since the attacks are twice slower, doing twice the damage is not pushing anything! But I bet they will fix that. And they better fix, because the lack of utilities of necro can only work if it is compensated by insane DPS (since both warrior and ele have utilities AND insane DPS). They said they don’t want team support since it does not fit the theme, but hitting with wet noodles is not exactly the horror monster theme either…

I’m still amazed that devs are more afraid of alacrity than quickness. Well of Recall 50% higher CD than Well of Action??? Since when 3s of chill and 3s of alacrity is better than 3s of slow and 3s of quickness? Or do you think it is?

Embolism.8106:

All’s Well Ends Well needs more. Given it pops 3 seconds after casting it should cleanse at least 2 conditions. A CD reduction for Wells might be nice too, maybe in the form of “Alacrity is ?x more effective on your Well skills”.

I was thinking of something of this line, although it may be a bit niche since chronomancer may just not use alacrity… CD reduction would be very nice, though anything will be better than 1 condition removed!

@Drayos
I think an important question is how will HoT new PvE mode be. Depending on how they build it, it may form a bridge between PvE and PvP content. Staying alive may become a more important part of everyone’s builds, stacking enemies will most likely not work anymore reducing the importance of cleave etc… But that is very much an unknown.

The good news is that aNet seems to be aware that they need to balance PvE, the best example being I believe the reaper. Too slow to be useful in PvP, based on melee combat, benefitting from the number of enemies around (while the necromancer usually lacks scalable defense/offense)… that is the definition of what the current PvE needs. I still think the damage is too low for reaper, but that’s hopefully something they will change.

The shield alacrity could be welcome… if it hit more than one ally. As of now, I don’t see the slightest reason to use it in PvE. WvW zerg may be where the chronomancer is the best addition to the mesmer.

I super vote for “iCaptainAmerica” as the new name for this phantasm!

For the shatter rotation, it looks very possible and especially interesting with phantasms that are slow (so all but sword). Start the fight with F5 and you can in principle use time warp + 1 phantasm “for free” (tight schedule, you may need a first clone up to give yourself more time). This way, you can cast the 3 phantasms without using the signet. Shatter after their attack, shatter again after their attack. With 6 shattered phantasm, you get 12s recharge for your phantasm, which should be close to enough to have them ready to cast. This time use signet. Then you can shatter once more.

This can create a very strong burst, but assumes you run illusion+chronomancer. Definitely a bad idea in reflect situation since (currently) it will sync phantasms so you will destroy the warden reflection uptime + too restrictive for traits. I actually think this could shine in my favorite hybrid build
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_Dungeon_Hybrid

Removing domination is not so bad in this build, and the shattering will be good for duelist and warden to reduce the time between their attacks. Also, since personal damage is low anyway, the time to cast phantasm won’t be such a DPS loss.

Say you shatter and get a bit more than 5s alacrity. After 5s, the signet has reduced recharge of close to 9s. Since we have the signet and the phantasm every 24s, assuming full sync and adding some wells, we can have close to full uptime…
Alacrity+quickness pretty much means a 50% increased party DPS. That sounds neat.

One concern is the difference between “gain quickness for each illusion you shatter” and “gain alacrity when you shatter”. It sounds like you get only 1s alacrity regardless of the number of illusions shattered. Without that, it is 1s alacrity and 4s quickness every 12s which is still interesting, but I don’t know if this will make up for the DPS loss (especially since we can’t take chronophantasm).

Moreover, with F5, we already have a chance to strong quickness from time warp. Basically if F5 is on 60s CD (I think they said they already increased it but… ) that means time warp on 60s cooldown and possibly used twice on the final boss.

I really agree with Xaylin and that is what disturbs me the most: they already give AOE boons massively. Mesmer does not do that, mesmer is fairly selfish on its boons (except staff), so it is a mechanics made to compensate that. That may also be the pitfall for elementalists: they simply don’t need it

Just to make the thread more clear, could you specify if you run solo or in (organized) team? The build I mentioned was meant for an organized team, while the build of alpha sounds a bit more like a solo run, isn’kitten

I haven’t seen a thread of the type while I have seen many discussions orbiting around this specific subject. The idea of this thread is to explain what do you think the chronomancer could bring to PvE. I am restricting this to the current PvE model (dungeons, fractals in particular) and not the “challenging group content” of HoT since we know nothing about it yet (the fact that the developers still haven’t showed it means either it is so good they want to keep the news for the end or they have no idea about it either ).
Also, as we have been the first specialization revealed, a lot of tweaks are to be expected in numbers, traits etc… Anyway, here is my opinion based on the current info:

1) shield is useless for PvE. We already have better blocks/evade and the phantasm seems lackluster as it only applies alacrity to a few allies. The AOE interrupts could be nice, but we already have some of those for trash.
2) F5 at the start of the fight (with IP) can be very useful for time warp for example.
3) wells seems very nice. I would argue this is what I am most tempted about. Currently our utilities are mostly to boost a bit our personal DPS, but well of action and recall seems very interesting and calamity may turn out to be a nice DPS boost on its own.
4) alacrity could be useful, but we don’t seem to have many sources of it currently. Except for the well or the shield, it’s only shatter and for yourself only! Also, it would be interesting to know how much other classes actually benefit from alacrity. Most PvE rotation rely mostly on AA. Could alacrity change the DPS ranking of the classes? Or the best weapon of each class?
5) traits: I suspect this is what could change the most until release. Currently, there is no DPS increase trait except for possibly a crit rate increase. We can get a lot of slow from traits, which can be useful in a few occasions. “Time marches on” can be useful in record runs. Then one thing which could either be very useful or completely pointless is “chronophantasm”. Will this be finally the moment where shatter become of global use in PvE? I hope so considering how much shatter traits we are forced to take with the current specialization system, but some number crushing will be needed.

Finally a last important question is what core specialization should we give up for chronomancy? Because of this, I really don’t think chronomancy can be used in reflect builds. But maybe it could be a way to find some good support niche when reflects are not needed. We would oscillate between a “reflect bot” and a “quickness/alacrity bot” so that we would still be very relevant to both cases…

Overall I am fairly excited since if chronomancer lives up to my expectations and becomes meta or close-to-meta, it will probably give up more interesting fight rotations.

Your opinion?

The one positive things with alacrity is that it affects all CD, not just the one next skill. But yes, except for possibly the well, there is not enough sources of shared alacrity and they are too weak. The developers said they were afraid of meddling with CD recharge. Actually, for an elite skill, I would argue that rebound is underwhelming…

A little while ago, I showed my calculations in a 30s fight, assuming 25 might, banners, no food, etc… The rotation is pop up iWarden and then the 2 main phantasms (sword or pistol for assassin resp. rampager build). As you can see, the rampager is close to the assassin DPS. If you can summon your third duelist, it even beats the assassin.
https://dviw3bl0enbyw.cloudfront.net/uploads/forum_attachment/file/195298/Ass_vs_zerk.png

The PvE build I was suggesting is quite different. It is essentially this one
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_Dungeon_Hybrid

The torch is just terrible in terms of damage. There are better sources of fury, and while burning is nice in theory, the torch just does not apply enough of it. They key to the build above is the bleedings from iDuelist with sharper images + (when it is fixed) phantasmal duelist. The focus can be nice for decent AOE phantasm damage. Then on the build there are 2 signets, but the condition duration signet can be removed at will since foods + rune can already boost bleeding duration to 100%.

It is in principle possible to use the scepter instead of the sword, the main limit is the clone generation preventing optimal phantasm DPS. If enemies would attack more often, it would help too…

I think the discussions will look different with HoT. Right now, the boss use deadly AOE to make up for the lack of AI. Right now, you can stand in front of packed mobs and AA to victory. Right now, you only care about DPS, the highest DPS wins (ele, warrior…).
There is hope that this will be different in HoT and then PvE may look a bit more like PvP, and this discussion would be less relevant.

I think parts of the discussion deviate from the original intent, but no, conditions are perfectly viable thanks to bleeds. The theoretical DPS is near-identical to the meta assassin build, and the build-up is decent. And if you manage to get additional burning by iDuelist through fire fields, or put an ethereal field yourself, your DPS is actually higher than assassin.

For PvP, I’d say “Bountiful Disillusionment” is one of my favorite, especially for the stability.

I think at the end it will just boil down to how viable is the warhorn for elementalist. The mesmer boon share does not sacrifice much, it is close to be the usual metashatter. Elementalist would have to give up off-hand dagger or focus, and while I haven’t played ele much, I did not feel “amazed” by the warhorn (except for the boon part).

@Photoloss
Well I am actually very curious about alacrity in PvE. Since mesmer does not play very much with cooldowns (except time warp), we don’t gain much from alacrity. On the other hand other profs do. Hundred blades is one which comes into my mind. And maybe some weapons with average AA but high burst can also benefit from it.
If the increased DPS in other professions exceeds our loss, chronomancer can be very interesting.
As for our DPS, illusion is usually the line which we give up (for reflects for example), we then loose 9% damage and 20% CD reduction and 20% phantasm haste. If we use shatters, the haste does not matter as much and alacrity + Persistence of Memory should be more than enough to have shorter phantasm CD.
Also for record run, 25% faster speed on a portal mesmer can be nice.

So we will need to look at numbers: how much alacrity we apply (maybe warhorn ele can add 2s to it), how much of damage boost it will be for a party, how good a phantasm shatter rotation we can do…
+ chronophantasm currently competes with lost time. With the recent time warp buff, we know how good “slow” can be in PvE.

I think conditions are underestimated in PvE while they are really effective.

@Fay
With chronophantasm, we’ll have to see if shattering may start to make sense. It really depends how they finally implement it since in the stream they mentioned they were skeptic about it.
Pop up 3 phantasms, shatter for big damage + resynchronize them, shatter again after their burst and bring them all back from reduced CD + signet.

Since I guess the topic will show up at some point, what did you think of the boonshare abilities of the warhorn?
They have a boonshare skill with similar cooldown (although we can reduce our CD with traits) and maybe worse an additional skill which adds 2s to all current boons on allies. While this is weak for some boons like might which usually have long duration anyway, it may be very strong for quickness or other “rare” boons.

Also, elementalist have naturally very strong access to boons while we get random short duration boons on staff and then need to spec into chaos to get some decent boons from GM. (of course, we can send back boons we are given by, for example, an elementalist).

It feels like they have a somewhat stronger boonshare potential than we have while they were already amazing at giving boons in the first place.

On the other hand, a boon-share + elementalist combo can be fun!

I think you misunderstood me (or I didn’t explain myself very well). I don’t see any argument why the developers thought minions should be destroyed by the elite or the moa. I think it shouldn’t: you should be able to use your elite without loosing minions.

Mesmer lover does not mean necromancer hater. My main is mesmer, but necro comes second in my heart.

Burjis.3087:

This whole idea that changing forms should kill necromancer minions, and only necromancer minions is just a dumb, irrational and inconsistent decision made at release and nobody ever bothered to take another look at it.
Even if a minion master with all their minions turn into plague or lich form, they are locked out of their minion secondary skills. I don’t understand how anet deduced that it would be too imbalanced to keep the necromancer minions intact when they change form or get turned into a moa.

But is it a choice they made or a limitation they had from their implementation? Because I cannot see any possible rational argument against it…

Tommyknocker.6089:

RashanDale.3609:

Tommyknocker.6089:

but honestly any class than can kite us will always win.

so…we’re good against other necros?

Touche!

It’s a-net way of convincing us the reaper is an improvement over necro

If I could just give on advice, do not focus on “interesting” builds for leveling. Leveling in PvE is usually done solo + fights are usually short so healing is not as important as killing things fast. I remember in my first days in the game trying to use a fancy hybrid necro build and I was not killing things fast enough. The build game starts when you do specific content like dungeons (although unfortunately here again, healing is not so important) or PvP/WvW. So my advice is to just level up doing max damage and once level 80, start to enjoy the fun in playing with builds.

Did you include the stats from the trait lines before patch? I can’t see them (maybe didn’t look well). The shatter build had 200 power, 200 precision and 200 ferocity from the trait lines.

xitsLuisx.2480:

Brokensunday.4098:

necromancers are the masters of transfers not conditions any class can deal more condi damage than a necro

No other class has epidemic.

… which is … a condition transfer…

The thing is that while the first load of mantra is indeed pre-charged when we enter combat, we often have to go and hide in the terrain for 3s to reload them and being able to come back to the fight with them. I think the main problem is that the interrupt puts on full cooldown while an interrupted mantra does not (except if it was interrupted by a mean mesmer giving us 15s cooldown). I don’t know yet how strong the effect is, but that seems like a fairly high risk.

The cast time of the overload is basically the charging time for mantras in mesmer, and I don’t think anyone will pretend it is does not work. We just have to see how easy and useful it is to prepare it somewhat away from the fight and then jump in the fight when the effect is ready. You may not benefit as much from the effect while loading but the final effect seems good on its own.

On a mesmer, using the pistol you can stack in theory up to 50 bleeds although right now the duelist’s discipline traits is bugged. Still about 30 bleeds without it.

On the last ESL NA tournament, one team had 2 mesmers which they used to great effect! But they had exactly the same build (mantra).

Thanks indeed

I’m amazed on how much fight there is on a specialization we haven’t really seen in action and even less tried in action.

All specializations we have seen so far did not change the essence of the class but simply added a new way to embody that essence. The Reaper is still very much a necromancer, that slow, powerful and selfish class, the dragon hunter is still very much a guardian, king of defensive support, the chronomancer is still very much a mesmer, a twisted-minded utility-bot. So yes, the elementalist remains an AOE power-machine with massive team support. Something that, it is worth reminding, is the reason why it is the single top tier class in all game modes. But with this specialization, you will have a different way to be god on the battlefields.

You say that your class won’t work without fast att-swapping. Well, mesmers used to say that you can’t play without deceptive evasion, now we have some of the top mesmers playing without it in competitions.

Did you seriously expect the specialization to “fix your poor broken class”? You’re already dominating, you should NOT get better. The problem of elementalist is the lack of variety in PvP (something which I would argue is the case for all classes, but yes, this is a problem), so a new specialization which gives new ways to do be as good is exactly the right solution. And if it turns out not to be as good (which would still probably be better than most classes), well, it will just join the long list of sub-par builds that all classes have.

No signet experts here?

What I’ve seen most in competition recently is the double-ranged dom-duel-inspiration.

edit: that’s the one
http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Mesmer_-_Mantra_Shatter

The problem with ANet trying to make the enemy more dangerous is that they have no self-control. When they give hard CC to an enemy (even mobs!) they don’t give one, no, they put it on each skill. Same with your retaliation example. So instead of making enemies harder, they just make them frustrating! I really hope HoT will be better.

Yep, that’s the one!

I have been trying the celestial signet (Nos-type) build recently, but I really don’t think I’m playing it right. In particular, I don’t know how to properly use my signets. Between the might, the boon corruption and their own intrinsic effect, I am never quite sure when to use them. Could anyone explains me briefly the main strategy of the build?
PS: I’m fairly beginner at necromancer, and maybe this build is just for higher tier than I am, but I like the survivability it brings compared to power necro so I would really love to master it.

nekretaal.6485:

Also sword autoattack on other classes rips boons. That’s much better than anything necromancers can hope for.

There used to be a guild bounty that required boon ripping. Guilds banned necromancers from doing that boss because of scaling and Necomancer boon ripping not being good enough.

What you mention is only the mesmer as far as I know. The mesmer does have good boon ripping abilities, but as I said, corruption is better than ripping (although many conditions are intensity-stacking while most boon are duration stacking and you get at most 3 stacks of the conditions from corruption).

So yes, the boss should have skills that apply many boons and have a reasonable cooldown to them so that peak corruption is better than corruption-over-time.

On the other hand I strongly believe the concept of sacrifice can be something to push further (and better) than current corruptions. In PvE, necro underperform because of low damage + group utilities, but the reason for this low damage is the high (passive) sustain of the class. They don’t dare pushing the DPS since we resist too well (pun?). PvE could work better with a trait increasing SIGNIFICANTLY the DS damage at the cost of increased LF cost, reducing sustain but increasing DPS (getting full LF in PvE is super easy anyway). Out of LF, some improved Blood is power version which adds a non-might type damage buff to everyone could work well. I like BiP because it is very thematic and yet supports team, it is just bad currently because others apply might better and we already cap without it.

While what I mentioned was PvE based, similar mechanics would work also in PvP if you want to be a glass cannon, but that will not fix the lack of damage negation.

Since coefficients usually have “round” values, I think the exact coefficients on this stream were
Greatsword
Dusk Strike – 0.85
Fading Twilight – 0.85
Chilling Scythe – 1.0
Gravedigger – 2.0
Death Spiral – 0.9
Nightfall – 0.72
Reaper’s Grasp – 1.0

Reaper’s Shroud
Life Rend – 0.6
Life Slash – 0.6
Life Reap – 1.2
Death’s Charge – 1.0
Soul Spiral – 2.75
Executioner’s Scythe – 1.5 2.0 2.5

Which is not that much higher than current necro. The only real benefit is when enemy’s health is below 50% we can spam gravedigger which is about 50% higher damage than the AA. Considering they said “we are pushing the coefficients”, as if they were being generous, I hope they realized their high coefs just compensate the slow cast time.

Also the life force generation is on low DPS skills. Sure vulnerability is nice but usually already capped.

I think the problem with necro in PvE is not the necro but the PvE… If enemies used boons to make them more powerful, a necro would be a strong and unique addition to the party as a debuffer. If they used conditions against you, sending them back would be better than cleansing (the same way reflect beats deflect). Necro has unique utilities, but they are irrelevant to PvE for no reasons. As Brazil said recently: “necro is really good at being good at things that just don’t matter”.

But there is hope. In HoT, Reaper seems to really add DPS and “challenging group content” may be happy to have a razzing/healing necro.

Why changing main? I did not choose mesmer for its efficiency but because I like the play style. If they nerf us to the ground, I’ll still play it because I enjoy it. I’ll just end up in lower tier PvP.

As soon as you enter more organized PvP, I think condition are not as good as you say. There is too much AOE cleanse. In lower tier, conditions are definitely worth using.

As for PvE condi mesmer, I would say that there are condi or hybrid builds which get close zerker mostly thanks to the bleeding of pistol. But that is still theoretical since duelist’ discipline is buggy, and also, you should not try it on non-crittable boss (like in Twilight arbor which I played in hybrid after the update and I was like "something’s weird, he has no bleed on him while he should have 50 with my duelist… o.O " before I understood my mistake)