How badly were Chronomancer's alacrity Nerfed in Fractals/Raid

Standing in Chronomancer Wells now give Healing instead of Alacrity.

This alone completely destroys the reason for bringing a mesmer to fractals and raids.

Am I missing something? How useful are Chronomancer's in giving the party Alacrity now for fractals or raids?

Although I was never against giving other professions access to Alacrity, the Chronomancer's identity was the ability to cast "Haste" on the party.

Is Chronomancer still the best class to give Alacrity to the entire party?

Alacrity is a lot easier to maintain now, in fact, you'll most likely run out of quickness before running out of alacrity because every single SoI proc also shares it.

Chrono is as meta as ever, you're missing basically every other trait interaction outside chrono.

You do know that Alacrity was nerfed from 33% to 25% too? The impacton the entire parties damage while under Alacrity was nerfed by 8%!

I'm waiting to see an update on qtfy's website to see how the Chrono still plays in raids or fractals.

Is ChronoMancer still the best at giving the party access to Alacrity compared to other classes?

@OutOfOrder.3719 said:You do know that Alacrity was nerfed from 33% to 25% too? The impacton the entire parties damage while under Alacrity was nerfed by 8%!

I'm waiting to see an update on qtfy's website to see how the Chrono still plays in raids or fractals.

Is ChronoMancer still the best at giving the party access to Alacrity compared to other classes?

It's an abysmally small nerf that will only affect tight rotations and even then it won't be anything big. qT doesn't exist anymore, for benchmarks you use snowcrows website.

And yes, chrono is still BiS not because of alacrity but because of alacrity, quickness, CC, portal, etc.

@OutOfOrder.3719 said:You do know that Alacrity was nerfed from 33% to 25% too? The impacton the entire parties damage while under Alacrity was nerfed by 8%!

I'm waiting to see an update on qtfy's website to see how the Chrono still plays in raids or fractals.

Is ChronoMancer still the best at giving the party access to Alacrity compared to other classes?

If you wait on qT, you're in for a long wait(dead guild)Chrono works fine tho, its jsut a bit clunky here and there

My chrono buddy says alacrity and quickness can be provided in the same amount as before. Apparently, power chrono dps is a thing again, he was able to pull 30k+ at the golem. I played T4s with him yesterday and today and noticed no difference to the time before the patch. The rotation changed, and apparently, it takes a little longer to get it to full power, but that's it.

Support chrono is even stronger than before. Well heals can be insane, and the buff spam is real. Just had some raid fights where I had 8 active buffs on me for a LONG time after the fight ended.

I suppose Alacrity acting as a boon could allow it to last longer on the entire party with higher concentration.

So it sounds like the mesmer's role has remained the same and is still the best at boosting a party's Alacrity.

Does any other profession come close to being as effective at boosting Alacrity?

@OutOfOrder.3719 said:I suppose Alacrity acting as a boon could allow it to last longer on the entire party with higher concentration.

So it sounds like the mesmer's role has remained the same and is still the best at boosting a party's Alacrity.

Does any other profession come close to being as effective at boosting Alacrity?

Heal renegade can do it easily while maintaining 25 stacks of might. It is probably the best second healer when your group has a druid

@Feanor.2358 said:Support chrono is even stronger than before. Well heals can be insane, and the buff spam is real. Just had some raid fights where I had 8 active buffs on me for a LONG time after the fight ended.

So, could Minstrel's/Durability chronotank be a thing now?

It isn't too bad from what I've seen in fractals. At the moment I'm having a hard time sustaining alacrity, but permanent quickness isn't much of an issue.

Maintaining 100% alacrity is quite easy now. That 50% recharge reduction trait on the mesmers themselves means they get to spam their skills constantly. Turning alacrity into a boon had other side effects such as increasing the damage on some of the top DPS builds like the weaver due to their "% damage per boon" trait. Even the pets have full alacrity now since they share the ranger's boons, resulting in even more utility like CC. Not to mention the additional healing coming from wells and quite a few other factors. Chronos are not going anywhere.

Alacrity got toned down but is super easy to maintain now. If anything chrono can do more than before, heals, might, quickness, alacrity. The dps drop is barely noticeable. Think derpy said its 0.7% for weaver.

When all the other posts that said the changes is a nerf on mesmer went silent after the patch note is out. It's a very big hint of whats happening :lol:

@Mourningcry.9428 said:

@Feanor.2358 said:Support chrono is even stronger than before. Well heals can be insane, and the buff spam is real. Just had some raid fights where I had 8 active buffs on me for a LONG time after the fight ended.

Minstrel's/Leadership I believe.

@Warscythes.9307 said:

@OutOfOrder.3719 said:I suppose Alacrity acting as a boon could allow it to last longer on the entire party with higher concentration.

So it sounds like the mesmer's role has remained the same and is still the best at boosting a party's Alacrity.

Does any other profession come close to being as effective at boosting Alacrity?

The thing is, the Minstrel chrono is effectively a secondary healer who generates quite a bit of might by himself and does Quickness in addition to Alacrity. So I expect 2 chronos - 1 druid - 1 banner warrior - rest dps comps to become a thing. Did that on VG yesterday. It was quite messy, but we were able to ignore greens by simply outhealing the damage.

Party alacrity is actually easier with SOI share.

However, party quickness is much harder. You only have two sources to give party-wide quickness(well of action and SOI).

I highly recommend going for passive 100% boon duration rather than sigil of concentration now. Sigil of concentration will make rotation very painful and extremely easy to miss out quickness or alacrity.

An alternative is to bring time warp but that means you will lose out CC skills like gravity well and moa. You will need to bring in some one else who has good CC into your composition.

As for chaos line boon spam, it is pretty good. But you do lose out aegis share with distortion and stronger CC with confounding suggestions in domination line. In the end, the boons from chaos line are mostly already covered by other classes. So it is not really that big of a deal.

If you're really having a hard time with alacrity (my guild was too) you can run inspiration/illusions/Chrono and you'll have more than you'll ever need.

You can run sigil of concentration and basicaly do the same as you did (since rotation was designed to have sigil proc on quickness) and alacrity will be fine.

Anyone know if what everyone said with alacrity easier after patch already consider bringing feedback or not? Before chrono can drop well of recall and bring feedback or well of precog. What about now? Is chrono still flexible for any encounter?

Today i did 99cm and all dailies and recomended. For volcanic i took timewarp and feedback instead of well of action. I am not sure you could take other elite and keep 100% uptime

Edit: if i count correctly you cannot provide 100% uptime without wor even in perfect situation. In 16.6 seconds you get 16 seconds alacrity (2*soi+tot both hits). This is counting that you have permanent alacrity with improved alacrity trait.

But thanks to improved alacrity you get focus reflects faster

@BillC.4521 said:Anyone know if what everyone said with alacrity easier after patch already consider bringing feedback or not? Before chrono can drop well of recall and bring feedback or well of precog. What about now? Is chrono still flexible for any encounter?

For my response I am assuming 100% boon duration. We need to look at up times to answer this. First off, even if a chrono makes a mistake, they can instantly get alacrity back on themselves using any shatter. So I dont see any situation where you wouldn't bring improved alacrity. Regular alacrity decreases cool downs to 80% of their original cool down. Improved alacrity decreases cool downs to 66% of the original cool down. The down side, is that this means having 100% alacrity uptime outgoing is only 70% on yourself.

Lets look at alacrity source uptimes:

tides of time: 4 seconds of alacrity on 20 second cool down (30.66). Remember cool down reduced by 10 seconds for catching your tide.

uptime: 20%signet of inspiration: 4 seconds of alacrity on 16 second cool down (24.66). Assuming you run domination.

uptime: 25%lesser signet of inspiration (soi on phantasm): 4 seconds of alacrity on 16 second cool down. This one is a little bit deceptive. As the internal cooldown of soi is not the same as the cool down on your phantasms. If your perfect with your timing, you can use 16 seconds as the cool down, if instead you were to camp a single weapon like shield, you would be looking at 20 second cool down, if you camp focus you have 13 seconds between phatasms, which would mean your only proc'ing lesser soi every other phantasm. Most chronos are using conc sigil (I personally dont because I think its stupid and im not trying to be a good player). This makes it tough to say the exact uptime but here is an estimate:uptime: between 20% and 25%.

Just for anyone interested, well of recall is 10 seconds on 23 second cool down.

uptime: 43%

So far, you can see we do not have 100% uptime if we remove well of recal, at best we have 70%. Now continuum split needs to be factored in. You get to cs once every 60 seconds. However you cant use cs until your skills are off cool down. Every 3rd tides of time you could be ready. But what about soi? Your first soi is at 0 seconds, your fifth soi is at 64 seconds. So it seems to be every 3rd tot and every 5th soi is doubled. This means tot uptime is increased by a multiplier of 1.33 and soi is increased by a factor of 1.2

Our readjuste26%d uptimes are:

tot: 26%soi: 30%lesser soi: 30%

That brings us up to a maximum of 86%. But, tides of time affects 10 players, or at least it did before patch. I assume it still does. So because we are talking about raids, where you have 2 chronos, tot uptime is effectively doubled to 52%.

Giving us a total of 112%.

So it is probably still possible to remove well of recall and maintain 100% uptime. But it seems tight. Lets say you only tides of time in continuum split. You would have:tot: 52%soi:25%lesser soi:25%

Now remember, that is assuming a perfect rotation for lesser soi. So in practice this is probably just shy of being 100% given very good players. If you make sure to use tot and a soi proc in cs, I believe you could live without well of recall. However, remember, that is outgoing alacrity. Alacrity applied to yourself, only has 70% of that duration. Which then affects your alacrity uptime, etc etc. So, if you dont bring recall at the very least you have to shatter frequently to make sure you have alacrity for soi procs.

However, given how incredibly powerful well of recall (43% uptime before factoring in cs!), we need to reevaluate the idea that well of recall is what you would give up in order to bring precog. It is possible that well of action is better to give up. Or even possibly soi. I will do a quickness uptime breakdown in my next post at I think this post is getting close to max length.

Ok lets break down quickness doing the same procedure, before continuum split.

well of action uptime: 48%soi uptime: 37%lesser soi uptime: between 30% and 37%

Compare this to alacrity uptimes before continuum split:well of recall: 43%tot: 40%soi: 25%lesser soi: between 20% and 25%.

We can see, out of all the utility skills, soi is actually the skill which provides the lowest uptime for either boon. The upside being it helps the uptimes of all boons, and has a massive range.

What about time warp? Use it once every 60 seconds (continuum split). How much quickness does it provide? Well I tested it. It provides 24 seconds of quickness. Which mathematically lines up with what I would expect (6*4).
Uptime: 40%

But remember time warp affects 10 people. So if two chronos off set their time warps, it becomes an 80% uptime skill. If both chronos can bring time warp, it is not wise to drop recall for feedback or precog. It would be wiser to drop either well of action or soi. Part of me wants to say it may be better to drop soi because it is the weakest skill for either individual boon, but soi gives you so much more than just quickness/alacrity. It seems to me that if you can bring time warp, you lose less dropping well of action.

Now, at Matthias you need moa, so either you sacrifice quickness uptime, alacrity uptime, or you have a guardian or a mirage bring the reflects (giving up personal dps).

However, at many bosses, bringing time warp is not a problem. I find precog to be really good at soulless horror, and deimos. Both are bosses where you dont need moa, at least in my experience soulless horror's break bar isn't too bad.

Hope that helps OP.

Note: I'm sure I made a math mistake somewhere, and I apologize.

Hey so I just tested with a friend, in a raid, you definitely dont need well of recall for perma alac on yourself nor the group. i.e everyone can have perma alac. Just make sure you use tot inside cs.

ofc well of recall is nice, have extra boons is nice because at some point something will go wrong. But if you need feedback or precog, as long as both chronos do their job, it will work.

@thrag.9740 said:Hey so I just tested with a friend, in a raid, you definitely dont need well of recall for perma alac on yourself nor the group. i.e everyone can have perma alac. Just make sure you use tot inside cs.

ofc well of recall is nice, have extra boons is nice because at some point something will go wrong. But if you need feedback or precog, as long as both chronos do their job, it will work.

I've put hours and hours in on chrono since the patch hit and I really struggle to maintain alacrity without recall TBH. So I'm just wondering are you traiting improved alacrity when you test it?