Guild Wars 2

So, Cele can be okish in a PvP bunker build. Probably okish in WvW, too?

But Chrono doesn’t change the big weakness of Cele Mesmer in general, which is that Mesmer has absolutely godawful scaling on Healing Power. As a result, you’re wasting 560 stat points, and that seriously cuts into the stat advantage of Celestial amulet.

I think you’re talking about open world PvE, though. In which case, you can certainly get by with just about anything… But Cele is gonna make fights go so slowly. You owe it to your sanity to get a Berzerker set instead. Take advantage of the ability to mix-and-match gear by taking a couple of pieces of Rampager or Sinister if you really want condition damage. Or a couple of Soldier or Knight pieces if you feel you’re too squishy.

What Unterkiefer did actually isn’t too terrible, either. If you really want to craft Cele armour, combining it with Zerk weapons and trinkets is probably the best way to make it work.

AFAIK, the “meta” S/S /F build now is actually Dom/Duel/Illu. Inspiration is only taken for reflects on iWarden, and my understanding is that a huge variety of projectiles in dungeons are actually unreflectable.

I do think it’s somewhat debateable whether Dueling or Illusions increases your personal DPS more, though. It basically comes down to computing Phantasmal Fury + Fencer’s Finesse vs. Compounding Power + Phantasmal Haste. I’d give an edge to Dueling on this one just because Compounding Power doesn’t affect Phantasm damage at all, so its multiplicative effect is actually quite small despite +9% damage sounding pretty good on paper.

Fay.2357:

It’s also worth noting the maximum reduction obtainable. With permanent alacrity, your new cd is 60% of the original one.

This is probably the simplest way to express Alacrity’s benefit, even if it doesn’t perfectly match all real-world situations.

If I have a big hitter skill on a 30s cooldown, then I can potentially reduce that skill’s cooldown to 18s with permanent Alacirty.

Maybe some of the Legendary Armour skins will include cool particle effects like this.

Daniel, you have been a piece of kitten the entire time I’ve been on this forum, and you continue to be a piece of kitten now. Just so you know.

Silverkey.2078:

Assuming you want to do raids, where conditions are needed… you would probably not take mesmer.
It’s not that mesmer condi DPS is particularly lower than power DPS “in principle”, but more the fact that confusion is not ideal in PvE, even with the new enemies. At least as far as we can see right now.

For Vale Guardian, at least, you’d definitely want your Mes on the boonstrip boss instead of either damage boss…

apharma.3741:

Currently in PvE I would take any other class over mesmer (yes even ranger) if there was already a guardian in the party. Considering everyone and their mum, daughter has a guardian and all new players seem to get insta given a guardian at conception I find his analogy completely correct here.

I don’t even think alacrity is going to make it that much more popular either given how much current classes do without sacrificing damage to do it.

OTOH, don’t underestimate the effect of follow-the-leader. The (beta) world-first Vale Guardian team included an Alacrity Chrono, so I expect PUG groups to copy their template for at least a couple of months.

Gravity → Calamity → Precog → Action → Eternity → Recall

Recall would be way higher if AWTEW had more competition in its trait tier. But, as it is, I’m always gonna have AWTEW and at least three Wells on my bar whenever I have Chrono traited. (Calamity, Precog, Eternity) Recall is just Alacrity overkill at that point.

The Wells are actually all pretty useful, though. There isn’t a single one I can’t come up with a plausible justification for taking.

I feel like Runes of the Mesmer don’t offer that much to this build. But the stats on RoM are obviously useful, so they’re not a bad choice by any means.

I think Chaos’ use of Hoelbrak runes is more in the right spirit, as far as extending the Might you get from Chaotic Interruption. As usual with Hoelbrak, you can freely use Strength instead for more pure damage in exchange for being slightly weaker against conditions.

As much as we’d all like proper boonshare to be a thing, the boons we can actually generate and share to a meaningful degree are Might (via BD), Quickness (ToT + Time Warp), and of course Alacrity. We can generate a lot of Protection, but the only ways we have to share it are SoI and II, each on a 24/30s cooldown.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

A lot of the chrono’s new survivability is in that shield block, and shield does very little for condi atm.

Yeah, but what off-hand does offer anything for condi? Torch burn application is a joke, even in condi builds it’s used for defences more than anything. And Shield covers that even better.

Silverkey.2078:

Poor inspiration, always trying to help, to be supportive, and yet there is always something a bit underwhelming about it… While I love the line, I do think it lacks “punch” (supportive punch that is)…

I think the problem is that Inspiration is a bit too unfocused. Yeah, it’s a support line, but what kind of support?

The group healing is pretty blah unless you take Restorative Mantras and spam Mantra of Pain, which is suboptimal in every game mode.

The condition cleanse is good, but Mender’s Purity can be replaced by Well of Eternity.

Encounter design has made Warden’s Feedback counterproductive in a lot of places where projectiles are unreflectable.

Illusionary Inspiration boonshare sounded good on paper but wound up being clunky in practice — and we always needed to combine it with Bountiful Disillusionment to get anything good out of it, with BD doing almost all of the heavy boonshare lifting by itself anyway.

Having two dead minor traits doesn’t really help either. (Inspiring Distortion is great on paper, but Well of Precog now does the same thing with a shorter cooldown and without consuming illusions…)

Oh, and the less said about Persisting Images and Protected Phantasms the better.

Title says Dom/Duel/Chrono, post ends up at Dom/Chaos/Chrono. I call shenanigans!

Actually, I think that Chr/Duel/Illu makes a pretty solid Condi Shatter build…

Truth is, the best thing about Chronomancer is that it fixes one of the core issues with the class through the Chronophantasma trait. And that makes it synergise with literally anything else we want to do.

I think, if anything, that Dom/Duel/Illu might provide more absolute raw DPS in absolutely perfect solo-versus-golem testing conditions. But in realistic conditions where Phantasms can die, ramp up time counts for something, and we have teammates around, Chrono’s utility wins out by far.

Merrex.5384:

Well I don’t see the wells as a bot function because they actually do damage so if I use them I will at least be getting kills and doing DPS which means Bags in WvWvW.

Yes, this is exactly Fay’s point. “X-bot” implies that we just drop one or two skills and then are useless. But all of our Wells have useful effects in addition to providing Alacrity when they pop. And that’s on top of all the other nice things that Chrono and Shield give us in every game mode.

Probably just missed seeing it. The CD reduction was working before the 9/29 patch, at least.

Forum ate my post.

Anyway, Silverkey, I don’t think your suggestions are totally off the mark. It does seem like a little too much of our group support is pushed onto a single trait. Which is not necessarily a problem in itself! But it is something worth commenting on and discussing.

It does put Well of Recall in a weird spot, though, because it’s not enough Alacrity to build around without AWTEW but with AWTEW we’re better off taking a different Well (e.g., Precog) for almost as much Alacrity plus another effect we want.

Maybe AWTEW needs a slight nerf to Alacrity duration? Like from 2s to 1.7s or something. Just enough to shave a couple of seconds off a full F5 Well rotation, which could make WoR more desireable by making up the difference.

Making Flow of Time compete with Chronophantasma is an interesting idea, but ultimately I don’t think it’s the right one. I’d be more inclined to suggest making Chronophantasma into the Adept minor so that the GM Master tier looks like Lost Time vs. Seize the Moment vs. Flow of Time. But CP is kind of the new Deceptive Evasion at this point… you can’t give it away for “free”, but it’s always going to be stronger than anything else you put at the same tier.

Except that CP isn’t as situational as DE is, which makes it even more mandatory. (I mean, a Phantasm DPS build could conceivable take Dueling and skip DE, but it’s hard to imagine ANY Chronomancer build that doesn’t benefit immensely from CP…)

It’s an AoE Stun that can combo into a chain-Daze with a skill on the same weapon, and you’re complaining that it doesn’t do enough damage?!

I’m with Fay. Raiding requires optimisation and efficiency, which are the absolute enemy of flexibility. Chronomancer’s “alacritybot” build and rotation are not any more set in stone than a Staff Ele’s “dpsbot” build and rotation.

If you want flexibility, look to PvP/WvW where flexibility actually is a virtue (to a certain extent) or look to open world PvE where what you do doesn’t actually matter that much.

Don’t complain about Chronomancer actually giving us a truly unique, effective, synergistic build that requires the coordinated use of utility skills, weapon skills, and our class mechanic. Instead, admit that you just don’t kittening like raids. Nobody is going to crucify you for that opinion, but people WILL be rightly mad if you start agitating to take away the one thing that makes Mesmer playable and desireable in the raid meta.

Me, personally? I don’t kittening like raids. I got the raiding bug out of my system by doing it for two years in another game, and now I’m done. But I’m not gonna be mad that there’s only one viable Chrono raid build, because that’s more than the number of viable Mesmer raid builds, and it’s pretty kittening rare that any class has more than one viable raid build anyway, in any game. At least the “alacritybot” Chronomancer means my fellow Mesmers who like raids have something to do in them, and I’m happy for them to have that.

At least we aren’t damage bots or heal bots.

Phloww.1048:

Hmm….I’m trying out other elite specs and notice their stunbreakers have very short cooldowns. Well of Precognition is 45 secs long and the stability only applies to the mesmer. Think the cooldown’s too long? Maybe shorten it down to at least 35 or 40 secs?

Yeah, but we also have multiple other stunbreak options on shorter cooldowns, and Precog does a lot for us beyond just breaking stuns.

Dastion.3106:

However, I would ask that the Illusionary Defender have his mechanics changed so it’s not so similar. Perhaps he could channel a block while taking damage for allies.

That would be interesting. Might as well make iDefender highly resistant to direct damage; it’s gonna die fast enough from absorbing damage for the Mesmer’s team anyway.

Condi Mesmers are the only ones worse off then before, and I think even that is somewhat debatable. (Potency is down, but our shatter cadence has improved, especially with Chronomancer.)

Power Shatter Mesmer is as good as ever in PvP, with a lot of nice QoL changes. PU is technically still better than before June 23 even after the most recent nerf.

PvE Phantasm Mesmer has basically held the same position of being at the bottom of the DPS totem pole but still viable just for skips and reflects — they neither lost nor gained there. With Chronomancer, Mesmer gets a super viable PvE spec that doesn’t rely on our weak, unreliable Phantasm DPS.

Yeah, but most of our PvE DPS is coming from Phantasms, not our own attacks. And Lost Time doesn’t affect Phantasm crit chance. If it did, it might be a trait worth taking, but as it is we’re better off with Improved Alacrity.

This is for structured PvE? Or just open world?

Anyway, Chrono doesn’t actually change the calculation at all. Danger Time is not really being used anywhere at the moment. The only reliable Slow application we have is Lost Time, which frankly can never compete with Chronophantasma even in a Danger Time build.

So, the basic situation is still that Assassin’s is still better by a bit if you can count on reflecting everything, while Berzerker’s is the best general damage option.

The June 23 patch made Sinister a more-or-less viable third PvE alternative when running the Dueling line for Sharper Images, though, and Chrono hasn’t changed that either, except by enhancing our ability to shatter frequently for condition application via the Illusions trait line.

Activate F while stunned to have the Function Gyro cast a stunbreak. Procs all Function Gyro-related traits.

Sorry, that was rude.

Would you kindly kitten off?

Oh, just kitten off.

Hard to say, since the raid has been closed due to bugs all evening.

EDIT: Correction, it JUST reopened like two minutes before I posted.

I wonder if you could substitute Scrapper/Mass Momentum in for Alchemy/HGH in Wolfineer’s Juggernaut build. Combine with Perfectly Weighted and the Tools line for permanent Stability and tons of dodges. Could be a completely immovable bunker with Bulwark Gyro and Healing Turret. Add Elixir Gun if you need to cleanse conditions or maybe like Toolkit if you want Gear Shield instead.

Here’s hoping the pet survivability changes Irenio mentioned are gonna land with HoT.

Ayrilana.1396:

Ascended armor, which currently costs around 460G for a full light set, provides only a 1.82% increase in DPS. I doubt that raids would be so strict that a 1.82% difference in DPS would cause a group to fail versus succeed.

We’re just taking ANet’s raid designers at face value. They are straight-up telling us that the first two bosses in a wing will can be done with an Asc/Exo mix with a top tier group and that the third boss will require full Ascended. This is not conjecture, this is the Word of kittening God.

Either ANet lied to us when they originally said all PvE content could be cleared in Exo gear, or they’re lying to us now. But you can’t get around the fact that they lied about gear requirements.

The problem is, what ANet doesn’t like about condi Mesmer is the burst from high stacks of Confusion and/or Torment. So, this suggestion is moving in exactly the opposite direction from where ANet is trying to go.

I’m not really sold on Crusader stats for Chrono. I tried it out in BWE1 in a build that had a lot of incidental healing via Inspiration and didn’t really notice a difference in survivability versus Cavalier or Knight’s armour.

I think the theory — similar to the theory behind Chronoshift — is that casting a skill twice in rapid succession is situationally much stronger than having a second utility available. In a lot of situations, Mimic isn’t doing anything for us, but in certain specific situations (chaining Feedback against a projectile-spamming boss is one of the more obvious ones) it’s the most powerful non-Elite skill we have.

So the power of Mimic isn’t related so much to the inherent power or cooldown of the skill it’s copying as much as it’s related to the situation you’re using Mimic in. An algorithm just can’t account for that, so the CD of Mimic is ultimately based on ascenario that aligns with the following assumptions:

• You have an ability worth mimicing
• You’re in a situation where mimicing that ability makes sense
• Mimicing that ability is more useful than having some other ability on your bar

90s is actually pretty reasonable when viewed that way, it’s just those assumptions aren’t necessarily always met — particularly the third one. Lowering the CD wouldn’t actually make Mimic more popular, it would just make Mimic stronger in the rare situations where it’s already really strong.

Still, I guess it’s a decent rune option if you’re bunkering in Cele or Dire gear.

(Though I’d be more inclined to something like Melandru or Dolyak. And also Knight or Cavalier over Dire or Cele. But, I mean, I’m not the boss of you.)

Xstein.2187:

A: You may not necessarily need to do a lot of damage (may). You may just need to stay alive and make sure your squad is doing a lot of damage.

This is definitely true if you’re running the Jetlab/Alacrity Support build that Fay has been theorycrafting, which assumes that you’re contributing to the raid by buffing your group’s DPS to such a degree that whatever DPS you bring is mostly just icing. So you can probably get away with some combination of Valkyrie/Captain’s/Knight’s gear, if you want an extra cushion.

Same as it ever was: As close to Zerk as you can get while staying alive.

IMO, the “bug” is that only armour affects Phantasm health and not other sources of Vitality.

At this point, I’ve given up hope for the core Mesmer’s Phantasms to ever see any significant rework. But I’m somewhat hopeful that there might be a future Elite Spec that radically modifies Phantasms, perhaps something along these lines.

Personally, I’ve always seen Phantasms as something between standard “pets” and Final Fantasy summons skills. Which is cool! It’s unique. But I don’t think ANet is able to really balance that unique position. So, frankly, I’d rather they push more in the direction of FF summons and stop treating Mesmer like a pet class.

Fay.2357:

If GW2 is still active and hasn’t been superseded by a better game when they release the next expansion, I will be exceedingly surprised.

Hey, I’m just taking them at face value that the whole “Elite Specialisation” business is actually a framework for future development rather than a one-off expansion gimmick.

Time will tell if kittenting on their existing fanbase to chase after WoW exiles pays off.

Fay.2357:

So yeah, chrono is almost always a direct upgrade to Mesmer, but that’s primarily because base Mesmer is simply bad.

This puts a lot of pressure on the next Mesmer elite spec they come up with, needless to say…

BRA’s build is a pretty solid starting point.

Note that Imagined Burden is usually considered a poor trait selection compared with Power Block and Mental Anguish, but it’s good in the Silverwastes because the Cripple condition it applies will interrupt Mordrem Teragriff charges. Very handy.

There are two slightly tankier variants that you can try as well.

The first one switches Illusions for Chaos and takes Staff instead of Greatsword. Chaotic Dampening gives you Protection whenever you have Chaos Armor (which is easy to get off all your Ethereal fields). You can then take Illusionary Defence for the incoming damage reduction and Bountiful Dissipation for the Stability and Might on shattering.

The second one switches Illusions for Inspiration. Take Restorative Illusions for a really solid source of extra healing and round it out with Mental Defence. If you want to substitute Null Field or Feedback for Mantra of Pain, you can take Restorative Mantras for even more healing. If not, take either of the other two. I like Persisting Images, but Medic’s Feedback can be handy when allies get downed during dynamic events. (Don’t rez anybody who’s dead, though. Takes too long. Just let them WP out and run back.)

Iavra.8510:

Staff isn’t a condi weapon, but hybrid/utility, though. That’s why it stacks might and vulnerability (even before the latter one affected condi dmg) and its phantasm scales with power.

^^^^^

Mesmer doesn’t have any condition weapons at all, just hybrids. Even Scepter is really a hybrid weapon; Confusing Images has a really good Power ratio, and clone generation on AA is as useful for Mind Wrack as Cry of Frustration. Only Torch can make a claim to being a pure condition weapon, but even that I would argue is more of a defensive weapon. And, truthfully, the pMage scales equally badly with either Power or Condi stats.

StickerHappy.8052:

tobascodagama.2961:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

You forgot.. It’s also a stream of projectiles. Which means.. Bodyblocked, absorbed, blocked, reflected..

… Or my favorite, the humble dodge that negates 90% of the attack.

Pfft, who dodges in this game?

Yeah right, You only have to dodge the Phantasm right? You can ignore the mesmer completely right?

/end of argument.

kitten off and kittenpost somewhere else, you kittening troll.

It’s not about what I like, it’s about ANet’s vision for the Mesmer class. Which does not, and never will, include pure-condition builds.

Phantasmal Warlock is currently a perfectly good Phantasm to use in hybrid or power builds. Turning it into a condition Phantasm would — because pure condition builds are not allowed to be a thing on Mesmer — result in its effectiveness being drastically reduced. Therefore, arguing for Phantasmal Warlock to be turned into a condition phantasm is effectively the same thing as arguing for it to get nerfed.

Living in denial of the fact that condi Mesmer will never, ever be allowed to be good isn’t particularly solid ground for advocacy either.

AlphatheWhite.9351:

tobascodagama.2961:

Phantasmal Warlock is one of our better phantasms, it doesn’t need to be messed with.

I’d like it to be messed with.

I think we’ve already established that anything condition-based on Mesmer will be nerfed into oblivion. So I it’s fine how it is. Fix the projectile to be more reliable, maybe, but for the love of Lyssa don’t rework it into a condi Phantasm.

AtomsOrSystems.9420:

In all seriousness, though, I think you’re right. I just… I don’t really accept it as a valid reason for the repeated gutting that condi Mes seems to get as a matter of course.

Oh, it’s obviously not a valid reason. But that’s how kitten rolls around here. Balance by QQ.

Fluffball.8307:

Chaos Archangel.5071:

Yeah man, as a long time ranger main I’m sick of all these posers and pretenders offering balance advice to a class they have no idea how it works! And then to pretend to be a ranger.. Ugh. It’s so frustrating sometimes.. You just don’t know who you can trust.

.. Except me. You can trust me.

You look like a mesmer main you impostor!