Guild Wars 2

Second time this has happened to me in pvp so I fired up the screen recorder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs2vgxtFENk

Rising Dusk.2408:

Check this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAre7ansIClfiFoBWoBUrhlcjqeVr1bF9HWiZoMAStWD-TRSAQBX8JAAgTCw4mfIUlc3UJIA3fIjKHio6PBU/ApAWUXF-e

The stat spread is about as optimally distributed as you can get with wanting both boon and condition durations maxed out. Some highlights:

• Sc/P + Sc/Sh
• 100% bleed/confusion duration
• 90.47% boon duration (with Concentration)
• Manages to pick up both Illusions and Dueling for condition damage
• Illusions reduces recharge on CShift, allowing you to use Time Warp more often and get closer to 100% quickness

It won’t be perfect. This is a definite case of a build trying to do too much. That said, I think you’d at least be able to pull off necessary quickness uptimes with about as much DPS as a condition druid. Note that the optimum phantasm split here is 2 duelists and 1 avenger so that you get enough personal alacrity to upkeep quickness.

I love this!

Going to try it out. Thanks for the constructive response.

Fay.2357:

The capabilities include:

• 70%-80% quickness uptime on 5 people
• 40%-60% alacrity uptime on 5 people
• 8k-13k realistic DPS
• Some healing stuff
• Condie removal or whatever.

Fair enough. Still really good and fun to play!

Cheers

DuckDuckBOOM.4097:

Not too familiar with the website but from what I can glean from it, the facts don’t add up. Squads are weird so I feel the need to call them out:
Squad 0: 3 ppl
Squad 1: 5 ppl (including Higgs)
Squad 2: 1 Chrono
Squad 3: 1 druid

You are in squad 1 and there are only 5 ppl so ALL of your buffs should hit squad 1. Squad 1 alacrity is:65%, 23%, 104%, 68% and 101% on yourself. Given that all your alacrity should hit you and you have a 50% bonus to alacrity duration on yourself, 101% on yourself means you are only providing 67% max to your allies. Then again, you have a second chrono in group 2 which are buffing 9 other ppl at random. So this isn’t cold hard facts of 100% alacrity uptime on your allies. Collectively 2 chronos averaging 75% alacrity on a boss that’s really easy to stack… and if the other Chrono has 3 shield phantasms up and wells… I don’t think you are even at 50% alacrity uptime on 5 ppl.

Here’s the actual raid video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8McUbqhl68

There are 3 squad groups, not 4 and the Condi Chrono’s group (with 7 people not 5) averaged 83.5% alacrity uptime there for Mursaat…well over 50%.

But I see what you’re saying about the other Chrono contributing. Thanks for the feedback…

For what its worth, my raid group yesterday (where I said we cleared two wings one shotting each boss) were cool about me trying this Seraph chrono and gave me some very honest feedback similar to yours. The build is far from perfect. I knew that from the start, and was trying to say I’m just trying to have a little fun trying out something new here.

Lots of ways to skin the cat…

Just played with this guy and his friends on my Seraph / Viper Chrono. One shotted each boss of two full wings in under 2 hours.

Look bud. I’m proving things with cold hard facts and evidence. You’re busting out theoretical math that isn’t really adding up.

Have a look at Higg’s channel. Not only do we have dps golem videos, we have actual videos of raid clears and detailed analytics.

Haters gonna hate.

More proof (Higgs)
https://padl.tk/u/ypqbTO2YYdAS

Well here’s a similar thing pulling over 20k dps….so sorry Fay, but you’re just being close minded here.

Here’s the proof. Now stop denying it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YSXezDxCXQ

Fay.2357:

You can do 100% quickness…but you can’t do more than maybe 50% alacrity uptime with a really crisp rotation. Additionally, you’ll be capable of getting 14k dps at the high end, more realistically 10k.

Fine, let’s be fair and say it is 10k-14k dps realistic because most likely I’ll be using the water rune or some non-dps support rune.
I got 100% alacrity uptime in the video. I’ll do it again with 3 avengers and zero dualists and we can see what the dps is.
The current berserker meta build for chrono averages 12.6k dps….about the same as what I’ve got here; the key thing though is that I’ve also got a fair amount of healing power to provide the group whereas the meta has zero healing power…unless you’re doing minstrel gear and your dps is almost nothing.

Fay.2357:

whetpheet.5921:

Fay.2357:

So you’re saying you’ll hit 14k-19k DPS using shield phantasms as damage? That seems…unlikely. I’ll take a closer look later when I can test things a bit, but since you’re not scaling power at all and avengers attack rather slowly, I really can’t see you reaching that sort of DPS.

Ok, some rough math here.

Avengers attack every 7.6 seconds. If they permanently have alacrity (they won’t) they’ll attack every 6.08 seconds. We’ll drop that to a flat 6 seconds for an easier calculation and a bit of wiggle room.

3 avengers means an attack every 2 seconds on average. The avenger skill coefficient is .345, so the power damage coefficient per second is .1725. Your power is 1770 on the builder with might, but I’ll just bump that to 2000 to account for various things for an approximation.

The phantasms will have 76% crit chance with fury. With spotter we can just assume they’ll be at 100% crit. This means that you will proc sharper images an average of 1 time every 2 seconds, or .5 times per second. Each bleed will do 900ish damage on the builder, but we’ll bump that to 1000 just for wiggle room. The total condition damage per second you’ll be applying, therefore, is roughly 500.

Ok, I was going to go ahead and do some rough power damage calculations, but I’ll stop right here. You’re getting 500 dps from sharper images. I didn’t drop a decimal point there, that’s not 5000. You’re getting 500. This is in a set of gear that has zero power, so your power damage is going to be nothing spectacular, but you expect us to believe that you can pull up to 18.5k DPS from your wimpy phantasm power hits and personal damage? No way that number is true. If you’re keeping 3 shield phantasm up I’ll be astonished if your total DPS breaks 10k.

Ask and you shall receive. https://youtu.be/LQLsBt9kGd0

Rune of the water there so much more dps to be had.
Full alacrity uptime and quickness.
13k dps with healer rune.

Uh no. There’s so many things wrong with that clip.

1. At no point in the clip did you have more than 1 shield phantasm. This means that your alacrity upkeep for your party is close to nonexistent.
2. Your phantasms all got quickness and alacrity from your buffs and wells. In a real fight this would not occur.
3. You used time warp outside of CS. In a short fight this buffs you more, but in a real fight this just means you sacrificed the ability to use it more frequently.

So no, that clip did nothing but prove my point. Even when using almost solely pistol phantasms you’re barely cracking 13k dps. If you used shield phantasms like is required for alacrity upkeep you’d probably be around 6k at best.

Edit: Just to make it abundantly clear what I’m arguing about…

In your OP, you say this:

whetpheet.5921:

Key points:

100% quickness uptime
100% alacrity uptime
14-19.1k dps realistic buffs

You can do 100% quickness…but you can’t do more than maybe 50% alacrity uptime with a really crisp rotation. Additionally, you’ll be capable of getting 14k dps at the high end, more realistically 10k.

Huh?

Watch it again. There was alacrity up 100% of the time once I dropped my first well.

And I botched the rotation and did time warp out of cs on accident. Still pulled 13.4k dps with the botched rotation and a rune that offers ZERO dps.

I appreciate your calculations and acknowledgement that these dry runs are done in a bubble as they say. So true. With that said though, let’s acknowledge that there is no point to dps the golem with a healer.

Fay.2357:

So you’re saying you’ll hit 14k-19k DPS using shield phantasms as damage? That seems…unlikely. I’ll take a closer look later when I can test things a bit, but since you’re not scaling power at all and avengers attack rather slowly, I really can’t see you reaching that sort of DPS.

Ok, some rough math here.

Avengers attack every 7.6 seconds. If they permanently have alacrity (they won’t) they’ll attack every 6.08 seconds. We’ll drop that to a flat 6 seconds for an easier calculation and a bit of wiggle room.

3 avengers means an attack every 2 seconds on average. The avenger skill coefficient is .345, so the power damage coefficient per second is .1725. Your power is 1770 on the builder with might, but I’ll just bump that to 2000 to account for various things for an approximation.

The phantasms will have 76% crit chance with fury. With spotter we can just assume they’ll be at 100% crit. This means that you will proc sharper images an average of 1 time every 2 seconds, or .5 times per second. Each bleed will do 900ish damage on the builder, but we’ll bump that to 1000 just for wiggle room. The total condition damage per second you’ll be applying, therefore, is roughly 500.

Ok, I was going to go ahead and do some rough power damage calculations, but I’ll stop right here. You’re getting 500 dps from sharper images. I didn’t drop a decimal point there, that’s not 5000. You’re getting 500. This is in a set of gear that has zero power, so your power damage is going to be nothing spectacular, but you expect us to believe that you can pull up to 18.5k DPS from your wimpy phantasm power hits and personal damage? No way that number is true. If you’re keeping 3 shield phantasm up I’ll be astonished if your total DPS breaks 10k.

Ask and you shall receive. https://youtu.be/LQLsBt9kGd0

Rune of the water there so much more dps to be had.
Full alacrity uptime and quickness.
13k dps with healer rune.

Fay.2357:

I believe mender’s purity only procs on power return, not the charge of the mantra itself. I could be wrong on that, but that’s how I recall it working. That would reduce the total number down to 30 as I said.

Alright well fair enough, I wasn’t even thinking about condi clear when I thought up the build. Just a little bonus.

You can swap out mantra to signet or well if you don’t like mantra.

As such:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAse8dncfClfiFoBWoBUrhFcjqMASgX7cGmtbruVv1cF-ThSFQBFQJY/U3Zl6Hiz+APb+DAOJAXbhBXq8bgPBgWqSApAWUZF-e

Might actually be better to take ‘Persisting Images’ anyways to keep your illusions alive and proc the bleeds more reliably…

@Exciton Yeah, will do and I’ll double check it and test out each one of these other variants I wanted to write about and some other stuff:

The quantify condi mesmer will get higher dps for sure @Third Degree Ember, but has less group utility (heals, condi clear, boonshare, alacrity). Even with as low as 10k-15k or so dps for the Seraph Chrono build, I think the build still functions as a standard boon bot without much compromise. Not a ton of dps here, but I personally like condi dmg better as, for me, it seems more sustained….

Like I said, having a ton of fun with this build and looking to keep improving on it. I considered using Rune of durability for wvw zerg or havoc groups or maybe Rune of the water, leadership or herald;

The idea here is zero waste, zero compromise, always improvement….and honestly, I just like theorycrafting stuff and haven’t seen anyone successfully use the Seraph gear set for any profession. I’m looking for any feedback here on things I might be missing, and/or for improving this build that, no matter what anyone says, I am having a lot of fun with and having success with in almost all parts of the game.

I slept on the build a bit more, and realize that it isn’t perfect. I play classic chrono tank a lot in PVE Raids (about 100 LI earned on my Chrono). So here are the cons with the Seraph Chrono build:

*We’re not running domination so no signet distortion share, and that is often important. This build might not work as well on say Gorseval no updraft where a well timed distortion can save the day and make life easy on your healers.

*Other con = you won’t be tanking with this build.
how much of a con is that though? so often I find myself, tanking and the other chrono telling me he’s got to kitten his build to lower his toughness because he’s not comfortable tanking. Huge dps loss because he’ll usually still have about over 200 points over the stock 1k into toughness and out of dps. Seraph stats don’t carry any toughness, and if a chrono’s main focus, if not tanking, is boon sharing and group alacrity, then anything else is more or less a bonus.

Still though, Chrono’s make great tanks and you only need so many Chronos in a raid group; On the other hand I am 100% certain there are many players in pve raids who went into playing chrono gearing for boon duration as the #1 priority and not understanding or forgetting that all of the gear sets with concentration we used to have set you up to be the tank: one of the hardest roles in which you wouldn’t want a low experience player doing.

If you’re good, then Mesmer is probably the best class in the game for tanking, but without a doubt, there are a number other viable and interesting options for tanking in raids.

Here are a couple of variants, and yeah guys, I will try to set up a screen recorder and realistic buff dps check all of these for you and for myself:

One last thing @Third Degree Ember — FWIW, and since you mentioned the ‘quantify condition mesmer’ meta build….I love it, but have a couple issues. These issues, I feel that the quantify folks are smart and probably are more on top of these things than I am, but correct me if I’m wrong (in the theme of ‘zero waste’ I bring this up): Doesn’t the sigil of earth NOT apply to the illusions? Also, I don’t think their rune of the berserker’s 6th trait (+5 dmg, +5 condi dmg) applies to the illusions which, they’ve said, are the main source of dps in the build. So, arguably, if I am right on those technicalities, you’ve got a good amount of waste going on with the quantify condition mesmer.

VARIANT #1 – USE A SCEPTER OFFHAND w/ Pistol or Torch

*Note: You can start off summoning the pistol or torch phantasms, but after you swap weapon sets to Sword / Shield and get 3 avengers up, DO NOT use Phantasmal Duelist or Phantasmal Mage again. Also note: Scepter’s chain 3 ‘Ether clone’ won’t be summoned when you have 3 avengers out so you can auto attack away.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAse7fn0nBlfiFoBWoBUrhlVjq+Yj2ptcDGhA48IauoD-TlSFQB/SJ4K1P8sJOXbhhXq8IO7D0S1fG4TAAAnEAXqEjUAQsrC-w

Sigil of earth is something I really like the idea of using to make use of the seraph precision which is up to and unbuffed 61.43% crit chance here which your illusions will also inherit to proc Sharper Images on almost every attack.

Boon % goes just a hair under 100% with the concentration sigil.

VARIANT #2 – Easy and cheap to gear up

Not the most optimal of the bunch, but this is a good one if you don’t really trust it and don’t want to seriously invest in it and already have Viper Gear.

ALL of the trinkets will be bought for Lake Doric currency. I farmed mine in a couple days I think it was…

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAse8dn0nBlfiFoBWoBUrhlVj68Iauor+Yj2ptcDGhAA-ThSFQBPb+DAOJAuU5X/U3Zl6Hu2CDtUlg4sPQBUCOwnAApAWUZF-e

Cheers!

Fay.2357:

I have an extremely hard time believing that you can maintain permanent alacrity with that setup while achieving your claimed DPS. Alacrity upkeep on a party requires shield phantasms, but that DPS is going to require high upkeep of wardens. You should be able to maintain quickness just fine, but I’ll believe your alacrity+DPS claim once I see it.

The other thing to note is that your DPS will drop massively on many fights due to the stationary nature of wardens. Have you tried with pistol instead?

Edit: As an aside, how exactly do you think you’re going to manage 20 condie cleanse on a group? You’ll get 3 hits of mender’s purity from expending all your mantra charges. That’s 6 AOE clears. If you count each one separately, that’s 30 across 5 targets (don’t count like this please), so I have no idea how you arrived at 20.

Well, I said, “MAX 20 condis” cleansed on a group (240 radius). In a ‘burst’, with a 2 3/4 mantra cast time, you have the POTENTIAL to cleanse a total of 40 conditions actually…not 20.

That is a perfect storm scenario and I understand, it would rarely happen due to you needing 5 players no more than 240 ticks away from you after a 2 3/4 sec mantra cast, all 5 players actually have the (at least conditions to even cleanse.

But here’s the math and how that would work.

Step 1. Begin cast Mantra of Recovery
Step 2. Within 2 3/4 sec, position yourself so that folks with condi’s to be cleared are in your 240 radius.
Step 3. Proc ’Mender’s Purity’ > Cleanse maximum of 2 condi’s times 5 people = possible 10 condi’s cleared.
Step 4. Keep proccin’ ’Mender’s Purity’ on a 1 sec trait cd by casting ‘Power Return’ (instacast on 1 sec cd) 3 times.

That’s 2 * 5 * (3 + 1) = 40 possible.

“Don’t count like that”
Ok fair enough. I’ll edit the original post and say that 40 clears probably would never happen….but am I missing something? Why wouldn’t this be possible?

Thanks so much for the variant @Third Degree Ember. I’m not actually sure if runes with condi duration % increases or signet of midnight condi duration % increase or sigil of agony or malice apply to illusions. I think I might just be your raw ‘expertise’ core stat that applies. Been reading the wiki but it isn’t clear and it is hard to tell dps’ing the golem.

Does anyone know if non-‘expertise’ condi duration % increases (through runes, signets and sigils) apply to illusions?

Key points:

100% quickness uptime
100% alacrity uptime
8-14k dps realistic buffs [depends on ratio of seraph:vipers and runes you use]
98.67% boon duration
50% bleeding duration
*10 max condi’s cleansed (5 allies 240 radius) burst
*Potential (unrealistic) 40 max condi’s cleared + 11.2k heal (5 ally aoe group heal and clear) with traited mantra and 3 power returns.

The Build:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAse8Nn0nBlfi9fCGohlVjq+Yj2ptcDGhA48IauoD-TBSAQBBV9nx9EwfklSQhq8rQ7D8T9DA4kAsuFGIFAg7qA-e

Note:

*We aren’t using any weapons out of the ordinary (Sword – sh / f ). Seraph provides high precision and thus, quite a lot of bleeds via Avengers procing ‘Sharper Images’ boosted by ‘Phantasmal Fury’ if you like depending on the situation.

Looking forward to feedback. I’ve been having a ton of fun with this experimental build so far!

The ‘meta’ isn’t based much on reality. Just public opinion. I’ve seen non-elite spec builds rock it hard. All comes down to how you play in my opinion.