Dear anet: I'm done with Chrono.

After years and years of playing Chrono in raids, fractals open world and WvW and PvP, I'm done with this class.

It's not the fact that you struggle to balance it, it's not that I have to regear and relearn Chrono every 6 months, it's not that I did not enjoy it for quite some time (I really did). It's most definitly not that you try to change its overpoweredness.

In the spirit of the post-fact world we live in: It's the way your balance approach feels:

Every balance patch since the distortion change feels unfinished, as if you prepare for the "real thing" that will surely follow - in half a year or so. I'm talking about randomly giving Phantasms might when they hit, while not being affected by might until a patch or two later. Changing Phantasms and Clones in preparation for a playstyle that you intend when other changes arrive. Changing the Boon duration the chaos traitline gives - changing our gear - into updating sigils and runes and streamlining them (btw, what happened to the Rune of the Chronomancer? Other than that, great patch...), scrambling our gear just to scramble it again with a patch a couple of weeks later because you suddenly don't need boon duration for Sigil of Inspiration anymore. Rotations get rough around the edges, and really weird with mimic, or cooldowns don't line up anymore. Or they do, but for Chrono you'd have to have 130% alacrity/quickness to be able to use your utility in a matter that makes actually sense - just to find out that you want to nerf that utility, but only half a year later.

It just makes me scratch my head, you know. I'm happy you started telling us again what you actually want to happen from the things you implement. It's great, please never stop doing that. But half the class just feels like in constant repair mode while you expect me to play with the half that actually works and makes internal sense.

You take away my toys and my joy playing this class. You balanced out the fun. I could talk a lot about what I actually want from this class. How alternatives to Chrono should be viable. What felt incredibly rewarding, how high skill should result in high payoff and not so much effort still in playable and good, what you took away from the experience of playing Chrono and what you did not add in its place. But I - and many others - did for so long. I can only feel resignation at the moment.

I'll miss playing Chrono. The old, good one. When well placement mattered, when it was one of the most flavorfull, most rewarding experiences I ever had in a videogame because it challenged me to actually predict the future and plan ahead with my skills, when the sky was the limit when it came to the skill you could pour into this class.

But I'm not gonna miss the abomination this class is at the moment.

You've got a long way ahead of you balancing this. Please don't do it in tiny, half-hearted steps like you did until now.

Maybe until then,Spike

Chrono was brokenly op for 4 years. Guess what? It's still Meta. You actually have to have your allies pay attention and contribute as a group to keep boons up. Sounds great to me. For FOUR YEARS literally no other professions boon contribution mattered outside of druid, and Chrono's could solo boon for the last 9-12 months. Now other professions matter, they open up more party dynamics and warrant using other utility other than HURR DURR TOP DPS.

I cleared W1-5 today with the same old comp as usual (2x Chrono etc.), and facerolled CM's with a Chrono, druid, and 3 meme condi classes. Nothing has changed, you just actually have to contribute to boon uptime.

What a breath of fresh air. It's not perfect, but it's so much better.

Of course the first answer did not get at all why I am frustrated, despite me explicitly stating it is not this very reason at all. Oh well, whatever. None of my business anymore.

Well i have to admit, chrono was broken, but in last 2 months i rly started to enjoy playing it, i rly started to think about this class, and how to improve in raids and fotms. I said, that i dont want to play any other spec in pve. And BAM xD. No class should be able to share all the boons possible in the game, but hey. now we share only 2... 5 with chaos, but chaos is junk right now, so its only quickness and ala now... or aegis with inspi, its 3 !I rly understand You wanted to nerf chrono, but u just destroyed it, i feel no fun out of playing this class, got no idea what to do with my leg armor on itI would be fine with these changes if we could at least share stab...

relying on wells is not only annoying. its boring. rip chrono

Well, this patch just killed the Chronomancer for me, completely, and like another had posted, sucked all the wind right out of my sails for the class. So many people rely on the CS reset of mimic to do so many more things than just provide the already difficult task of Chrono rotation in raids... This may seem like small potatoes but; not being able to triple blink to escape enemies in WvW, or triple portal my team-mates to a location in a timely fashion, not to mention the cooldown reset of mimic now absorbing the time of the skill used is just ridiculous. I am in 3 mesmer guilds, and we are, to say the least, utterly disheartened. This is quite possibly the worst Wintersday, ever.

I understand you wanting to make it so every class has to contribute in raids, that's fine. Then just nerf the boon share, NOT the mimic reset. THAT ability is the one and ONLY really unique ability of a chronomancer. ANET, you are just plain making it so people who enjoy the Mesmer class.. just don't want to play the game.

Likewise, i will NOT alt Chrono anymore. And that's Anet fault. And we already have shortage on chrono's.

You are aware that chrono is now EVEN MORE meta and desirable than before right? A lot of groups are now simply stacking like 7 chronos.

@fadeaway.2807 said:You are aware that chrono is now EVEN MORE meta and desirable than before right? A lot of groups are now simply stacking like 7 chronos.

I'm aware. Are you aware that BEING META was not what I was talking about? It's you who's inserting this here, then complaining about it.

The sky was the limit when distortion effected 5 people. It was also the closet thing we had to the old monk in gw2 where 1/4s cast time heal skills was the main aspect of the role. It was all about reaction time and predicting the future, in contrast to the other healer role that focused on healing over time.

It would be nice to see a similar split here with two type of healers. One that give great healing over time, and one that is focused on short burst damage prevention. The mesmer class looks like just a patch away from being that, but I could also see that role given to other classes if the concept could be fleshed out beyond aegis.

@rabenpriester.7129 said:I'm aware. Are you aware that BEING META was not what I was talking about? It's you who's inserting this here, then complaining about it.

I wasn't complaining about anything. Just pointing out that chrono is meta, very strong, very powerful, rewarding, challenging, high skill cap, different. I really don't see what you are complaining about.

@Blue.1207 said:For FOUR YEARS literally no other professions boon contribution mattered outside of druidExcept for the majority of that time Warrior was the might provider. If you are going to get angry at least get your facts right.

How does viability discredit OP's main point of how the changes feel? These may be subjective, but are these not separate things?

@fadeaway.2807 said:

@rabenpriester.7129 said:I'm aware. Are you aware that BEING META was not what I was talking about? It's you who's inserting this here, then complaining about it.

If you consider chrono challenging and rewarding at the moment, I doubt you and rabenpriester are ever going to agree on anything.

Chrono definatly has no high skill cap any longer, don't kid yourself. It went from one the the most interesting to most boring rotations of all classes (besides Thief maybe, but that one is at least fun for mindless mashing).

This is not about chrono being meta or overpowered. It's about the constant journey which Mesmers are undergoing ever since Hot launched which is a constant cycle of balance and rebalanced only to have something broken be unintended added (chaos all boon share previous patch, SoI now, etc.) to then require more rebalancing.

Having to work more and more hoops is not fun. It gets old eventually.

You know, I just remembered earlier today that Chronomancers at launch could keep permanent alacrity by maintaining 3 shield phantasms, and SoI copied full duration quickness on to teammates. Playing chrono at this time was incredibly easy, since all I had to do was spam shield phantasms, the continuum split with time warp, drop all of the wells + time warp, then duplicate all the quickness over.

It was pretty easy to do.

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:You know, I just remembered earlier today that Chronomancers at launch could keep permanent alacrity by maintaining 3 shield phantasms, and SoI copied full duration quickness on to teammates. Playing chrono at this time was incredibly easy, since all I had to do was spam shield phantasms, the continuum split with time warp, drop all of the wells + time warp, then duplicate all the quickness over.

It was pretty easy to do.

But you played only one chrono that was jumping from ine subsquad to another (if I remember correctly)

@fadeaway.2807 said:

@rabenpriester.7129 said:I'm aware. Are you aware that BEING META was not what I was talking about? It's you who's inserting this here, then complaining about it.

Chrono is not very powerful, its just more powerful DPS wise than it was a week ago but payed a big price for that 3k plus DPS, rewarding? Well yeah, but its mostly rewarding for the people who you play with if they can dodge mechanics to stay in your well, you have your own alac and quickness uptime anyway. Challenging? Its rotation is slightly more advanced than Daredevil, the only challenging with it is standing in wells, high skill cap is for the players who need to stand in wells, the only high skill cap thing i can think of is to do TW/WoA/WoR/SoI/Shield 5 with one clone nothing else

And as people said, with chrono its not about if its meta or not, but the thing that you need to re-learn the whole rotation and redo all your gear every time ANet wants to get chrono balanced, this gets fustrating after some time, and this is the 4-5th time chronos get something different from a balance patch so i can fully understand the OP why is the leaving of chrono. I did the same, I join fractals -> they are happy that they found a chrono after 1h of waiting -> i tell them that am power -> gets top DPS with a support class. Being a support chrono sucked even before this patch because if you looked at LFG everyone was looking for chrono and not for 10 mins, sometimes when i LFGd for a chrono took 20 mins to find one... Now you will not even find after 40 mins so you better off by running with out it

@"Blue.1207" said:For FOUR YEARS literally no other professions boon contribution mattered outside of druid

This is laughably wrong. Did you forget the single chrono days where herald was responsible for protection? I guess the condi ps meta never happened either. Everyone forgot about when pinpoint distribution was meta (technically not a boon I guess)? You missed when the ele ps was the 2nd warrior in some fights? I guess you missed when thief detonate plasma was a meta boon share skill?

"For FOUR YEARS". LOL

To me, the hardest nerf was always when they took distortion share out. Distorting specific attacks on fracs and raids was really demanding and it was the most fun in the class. It was what kept the class interesting, always striving to become better at distorting while keeping the boons up. I couldnt care less if we give 2 or 10 boons, distorting mechanics required focus, precision,timing,management of cd's...It was a like playing tetris while fighting a boss and it made chrono the most interesting and challenging class in the game. RIP.

I am trying to level up a new prof but honestly I think I am just going to put gw2 away for a while. Take care, everyone. It was fun while it lasted.

I don't play mesmer, but I kinda can understand OPs point of view. Anet is heading for something, but released only half of the thing.Playing challenging content now feels awkward, lacking symbiosis between classes.

@Clyan.1593 said:I don't play mesmer, but I kinda can understand OPs point of view. Anet is heading for something, but released only half of the thing.Playing challenging content now feels awkward, lacking symbiosis between classes.

Thanks, it means a lot to me.

@Blue.1207 said:Chrono was brokenly op for 4 years.>

Let's not forget Engi that made it so no one else had to CC anything on Gorseval..

Herald keeping that uptime, protection and still had some decent hits on their sword, then trashed

Warrior Berserker stacking that might as a physical build with decent damage.. then severely gutted when Berserker adrenaline was royally nerfed hardcore.Condi berserker took over for might, then even that was destroyed

And now we finally hit the pinnacle for Mesmer and that's just the way it is.

Just play DPS Chrono then? We were broken supports for years.Plus it's the chance to stop masquerading and pretend we should go "meta or burst" in this game...Plus, to those saying the encounters are cluncky without Chrono, I'm sorry to say, if you NEED a class to make the game smooth and playable, then the game is quite badly designed.