Pyroatheist.9031

Alrighty, time for a bit of comparison between vanilla shatters and the chrono shatters. Mind WrackSkill Coefficients ListedClone # || Pre-patch Vanilla || Vanilla || Chrono || Chrono vs Slow0 clones || 1.15 || 1.15 || 0 || 01 clone || 2.3 || 2.3 || 1.15 || 1.532 clones || 2.76 || 2.4 || 1.6 || 2.133 clones || 3.22 || 2.8 || 2.1 || 2.793 Prior to this patch, mind wrack deviated from tooltip damage at higher numbers of clones, resulting in a damage boost. There was an undocumented change that removed that damage boost, reducing the damage of all mind wrack shatters. Additionally, the chrono version of the shatter is weaker at all numbers of clones except a full 3-clone shatter with slow. If the target does not have slow, it will be drastically weaker at all clone levels. Cry of FrustrationTheoretical Confusion stacks per secondClone # || Vanilla || Chrono0 clones || .04 || 01 clone || .08 || .052 clones || .12 || .133 clones || .16 || .3 The vanilla cry of frustration is slightly stronger or slightly weaker than the chrono version at 1 and 2 clones, and obviously superior with 0 clones. However, the chrono version is drastically stronger when using exclusively 3-clone shatters. The addition of alacrity and traiting illusions for lower cooldowns pushes this more in favor of the chrono version. However, the existence of mirage means that chrono still will be a substantially less effective condition setup. SummaryIt's trash. Edited mind wrack summary and table based on some additional testing I did on a hunch

I used it all the time in open world. Double time warp for no reason, double gravity well into approaching mob hordes. I played a round Dragonfall and tbh is was annoying. Clones die fast in monster packs or they despawn instantly when the zerg murders the enemies they are attached to. If you want to use shatters at all might as well just smash the F keys as fast as you can to get at least any use out of them. I liked the longer csplit duration and alac/quickness from the shatters for purely selfish reasons. But ugh, this plays not very well now. I understand dry shattering an F5, it was pretty much a thing ever since this e-spec was introduced, and that nerf I understand - no more double-casting on demand is a giant nerf (truth be told double-casting an Elite is pretty OP...), but weren't other F abilities pretty niche when cast like that? On the other note - if things haven't changed, the F abilities light up before the clone actually shows, which would make Staff 2, Sword 3, Scepter and clone-on-dodge more important now as fast ways to enable shatters, right?More realistically it highlights just how deficient our clone generation mechanics are. Staff 2 is decent, but staff itself is awful in most areas of the game. Sword 3 requires you to be very close to the enemy and has a cast time, so it's useless for any kind of fast reaction. Scepter auto is slow and needs 3 autoattacks to make a clone, so that's totally useless. Scepter 2 is great...but not for clone generation. You can block the attack, but by the time you get your clones the attack is over.

I don't care about established combos. If you care about stuff like that things will never change and get stale. However, this certainly is a good example why IP is so important for Mesmers. Calling IP an "established combo" that if you care about will cause things to get stale is enormously disingenuous. Nobody was calling IP a combo. He was referring to a combo and I said that I don't care about specific combos if those are sole arguements. I didn't say I don't care about IP and what it does in general. He was literally talking about IP. Not sure if you're just being intentionally obtuse or what...

I don't care about established combos. If you care about stuff like that things will never change and get stale. However, this certainly is a good example why IP is so important for Mesmers. Calling IP an "established combo" that if you care about will cause things to get stale is enormously disingenuous. IP is not a "combo", it is a baseline mechanic that shatter requires to be functional in multiple areas of the game. Removing it is not making things less stale, it's just disabling shatter on chronos.

Hmm, I disagree because even before IP baseline, every build used shatter. Even me on a full clonespam like 20/25/15/10/0. Mean I didn't know a build who never shatter before IP baseline.Every builds used shatters, phantasm and on death even by specing into one prefered gameplay. Incorrect. Phantasm builds avoided shattering at all costs because it destroyed their damage resources. You'd only ever use distortion, and even then it was a substantial loss to use it because then you had to re-summon all the phantasms. Similarly, clone death builds avoided shattering unless you needed to destroy phantasms that had built up. Shattering was strictly worse than destroying the clones in all situations, so you avoided it unless you absolutely had to. The only builds that regularly shattered intentionally were builds taking IP. A good F3 rupt was used even in clone death, same with F1/F2 depending on direct/condi dammage during a sword 3 immob for example to put a mini pressure spike.Only in PvE phantasm build never use shatter but in PvP/WvW I never see a mesmer who never shatter and I'm not talking about only F4.Btw I'm pretty sure majority of mesmers didn't use IP before june 2015.Watch the old mesmer video thread pre-HoT : most builds didn't use IP.There were aslo shatter builds without ip with just DE. IP was just an easy way to get 1 more perma free clone. Nah, you really didn't do that almost ever. In theory you could interrupt things with F3, but usually you'd just block it with the scepter and get more damage out of it. Clone death relied on you letting the enemy attack, interrupting them went against the concept of the setup. Phantasms were similar. The cost of using any shatter was enormous because you lost all of your damage pressure. You'd shatter only if you had absolutely no other option, and it sucked when you were forced to do that. Generally if you were forced to shatter defensively to interrupt a skill or protect, you were already on the back foot and losing the fight. There were indeed shatter builds just using DE, not IP, but they were bad, that's just how it was. DE was a master tier trait back then, so you'd take 30 illusions, 20 dueling, and 20 pick your own adventure for a shatter build. If you didn't do that, your shatter build was bad, no questions asked. Recall that the whole shatter setup relied on being able to do a daze into the shatter combo, but you couldn't do that without IP. Additionally, because of how the IP damage calculation worked, not using IP resulted in your shatters being anywhere from 50% to 80%ish as strong as someone using IP. It simply was not an optional trait for a build intending on shattering. It was better to rupt a heal or other keyskill than to leave clones alive.Sometimes true, but really depended on class honestly. A lot of heal skills weren't really interruptable, a la withdraw, a lot of classes protected the heal skills with stability and such. It was very situational. Correct, phantasms rarely lived more than 1 attack...which is why nobody played phantasm builds in actual competitive environments. You still didn't shatter them...you just didn't play them at all. Burst builds with PU did exist, but they were generally rather weak. While a matchup between a PU build and an IP build favored the PU build, the PU build was disfavorable for pretty much any other actual matchup because you simply couldn't deliver the oomph necessary to burst people down properly.

I have a huge facepalm after reading sigmoid comment tho Nah sig has a point the shatters could very well be strong. The issue i have is the feel good aspect which i think got hella gutted for their shatters.I cant imagine them being so strong to turn blind eye on the loss of IP that made entire mesmer class playble. Me neither but we will have to w8 until the numbers are here, its still a fair statement tho it doesnt nothing for the fun factor. But who knows having to spawn a clone first might not be as bad, but i still believe the devs took a mile where they should've taken a meter.Lets not kid ourselves here: if the new version of the chronomancer mind wrack is strong enough to overcome the loss of IP, it will be strong enough to be nerfed down to size in the next balance patch.

Hmm, I disagree because even before IP baseline, every build used shatter. Even me on a full clonespam like 20/25/15/10/0. Mean I didn't know a build who never shatter before IP baseline.Every builds used shatters, phantasm and on death even by specing into one prefered gameplay. Incorrect. Phantasm builds avoided shattering at all costs because it destroyed their damage resources. You'd only ever use distortion, and even then it was a substantial loss to use it because then you had to re-summon all the phantasms. Similarly, clone death builds avoided shattering unless you needed to destroy phantasms that had built up. Shattering was strictly worse than destroying the clones in all situations, so you avoided it unless you absolutely had to. The only builds that regularly shattered intentionally were builds taking IP. A good F3 rupt was used even in clone death, same with F1/F2 depending on direct/condi dammage during a sword 3 immob for example to put a mini pressure spike.Only in PvE phantasm build never use shatter but in PvP/WvW I never see a mesmer who never shatter and I'm not talking about only F4.Btw I'm pretty sure majority of mesmers didn't use IP before june 2015.Watch the old mesmer video thread pre-HoT : most builds didn't use IP.There were aslo shatter builds without ip with just DE. IP was just an easy way to get 1 more perma free clone.Nah, you really didn't do that almost ever. In theory you could interrupt things with F3, but usually you'd just block it with the scepter and get more damage out of it. Clone death relied on you letting the enemy attack, interrupting them went against the concept of the setup. Phantasms were similar. The cost of using any shatter was enormous because you lost all of your damage pressure. You'd shatter only if you had absolutely no other option, and it sucked when you were forced to do that. Generally if you were forced to shatter defensively to interrupt a skill or protect, you were already on the back foot and losing the fight. There were indeed shatter builds just using DE, not IP, but they were bad, that's just how it was. DE was a master tier trait back then, so you'd take 30 illusions, 20 dueling, and 20 pick your own adventure for a shatter build. If you didn't do that, your shatter build was bad, no questions asked. Recall that the whole shatter setup relied on being able to do a daze into the shatter combo, but you couldn't do that without IP. Additionally, because of how the IP damage calculation worked, not using IP resulted in your shatters being anywhere from 50% to 80%ish as strong as someone using IP. It simply was not an optional trait for a build intending on shattering.

From a spreadsheet composition standpoint, Chrono will be just as good as it is now. From a playability and QoL standpoint, Chrono will be miserable.

Hmm, I disagree because even before IP baseline, every build used shatter. Even me on a full clonespam like 20/25/15/10/0. Mean I didn't know a build who never shatter before IP baseline.Every builds used shatters, phantasm and on death even by specing into one prefered gameplay. Incorrect. Phantasm builds avoided shattering at all costs because it destroyed their damage resources. You'd only ever use distortion, and even then it was a substantial loss to use it because then you had to re-summon all the phantasms. Similarly, clone death builds avoided shattering unless you needed to destroy phantasms that had built up. Shattering was strictly worse than destroying the clones in all situations, so you avoided it unless you absolutely had to. The only builds that regularly shattered intentionally were builds taking IP.

Chaos interrupt will fall in the unused builds like it always be once people start playing with condiclear and more defense again.BTW about the note : What did they mean by the illusion counter ? it may be my bad english but I don't get it.Speed of Sand = no superspeed reset when using master of manipulation.Chrono shatter : it's a shatter mecanics like without IP and we lose F4 invul. Need to see the numbers.Dune cloak : can be pretty good with boon removal.Auspicious anguish : hudge survival nerf for all chaos builds. (Hopefully I switched to no chaos builds.) Will see how did it perform with other changes. BTW WHERE IS THE GLAMOUR TRAIT : https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/72428/when-will-the-glamour-trait-come-backCome on please... the three purple/pink dots next to shatters now reflect on non-shattered clones only rather than included ones running towards enemy for shatter. To clarify further, it's a cosmetic change only and has no gameplay implications. The changes to chrono being unable to self-shatter, on the other hand, is pretty devastating for any hope of mesmer being usable in WvW groups. It's also just generally a miserable change from a QoL perspective. There's a good reason why almost every single build in vanilla took illusionary persona until it became baseline. To be fair, IP was predominant only on the forum elitist power "shatter is skill" mafia.What we saw in game was wy more diversified from full clone spam to PU direct burst with hybrid focus, glamour WvW few rupt builds etc.I'm pretty sure there were more clone death based builds than IP builds. BTW thanks for explanation about illusion count.I explained this more in another thread, but you had 2 broad archetypes of mesmer builds: builds that used shatters and builds that ignored them completely. The difference was IP. Now in 2019, Anet has gone to great lengths to try and make all mesmer builds rely heavily on shattering, and Chrono builds are no exception. Without IP though...it'll be trash. The problem is that Anet balances on a spreadsheet and goes "well, we can remove this mechanic and they'll still be fine, look at this calculation". In reality, these changes make the class miserable to play even if it's still technically capable and viable.

Right!? The suspense! !

Yeah, that's a pretty good point, and it's a very systemic issue with the Anet balance team. They have extremely little game experience, and so they usually have no clue what the actual ramifications of their changes will be. That results in them making really poor decisions that require a fix, but they only get around to implementing that fix months or years later. Could removal of illusionary persona be fine alongside a rework of clone mechanics? Sure, but they're gonna make the first change now, and probably never get around to fixing clones.

Chaos interrupt will fall in the unused builds like it always be once people start playing with condiclear and more defense again.BTW about the note : What did they mean by the illusion counter ? it may be my bad english but I don't get it.Speed of Sand = no superspeed reset when using master of manipulation.Chrono shatter : it's a shatter mecanics like without IP and we lose F4 invul. Need to see the numbers.Dune cloak : can be pretty good with boon removal.Auspicious anguish : hudge survival nerf for all chaos builds. (Hopefully I switched to no chaos builds.) Will see how did it perform with other changes. BTW WHERE IS THE GLAMOUR TRAIT : https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/72428/when-will-the-glamour-trait-come-backCome on please... the three purple/pink dots next to shatters now reflect on non-shattered clones only rather than included ones running towards enemy for shatter. To clarify further, it's a cosmetic change only and has no gameplay implications. The changes to chrono being unable to self-shatter, on the other hand, is pretty devastating for any hope of mesmer being usable in WvW groups. It's also just generally a miserable change from a QoL perspective. There's a good reason why almost every single build in vanilla took illusionary persona until it became baseline. True but they were looking for a way to add a trade off to chrono, what would in your opinion be a fair tradeoff? They got rid of distortion, did you not notice that? Well they rolled it to cs but ye. You reckon that would be enough?Not exactly. CS provides 1 second of distortion upon activation with the changes. This means that the access to distortion has a much longer cooldown, does not scale in duration, and requires you to waste CS if you're only using it for distortion. Effectively, they removed the shatter and just buffed CS slightly.

Chaos interrupt will fall in the unused builds like it always be once people start playing with condiclear and more defense again.BTW about the note : What did they mean by the illusion counter ? it may be my bad english but I don't get it.Speed of Sand = no superspeed reset when using master of manipulation.Chrono shatter : it's a shatter mecanics like without IP and we lose F4 invul. Need to see the numbers.Dune cloak : can be pretty good with boon removal.Auspicious anguish : hudge survival nerf for all chaos builds. (Hopefully I switched to no chaos builds.) Will see how did it perform with other changes. BTW WHERE IS THE GLAMOUR TRAIT : https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/72428/when-will-the-glamour-trait-come-backCome on please... the three purple/pink dots next to shatters now reflect on non-shattered clones only rather than included ones running towards enemy for shatter. To clarify further, it's a cosmetic change only and has no gameplay implications. The changes to chrono being unable to self-shatter, on the other hand, is pretty devastating for any hope of mesmer being usable in WvW groups. It's also just generally a miserable change from a QoL perspective. There's a good reason why almost every single build in vanilla took illusionary persona until it became baseline. True but they were looking for a way to add a trade off to chrono, what would in your opinion be a fair tradeoff?They got rid of distortion, did you not notice that?

Yeah, and playing without IP sucked. There's a reason they made it baseline. Not really looking forward to this change. True I agree it was always stupid to not be able to use the class F mechanic without clones when they are so easily got rid of. But on the other hand I like that in principle Core is to be the classic "Shatter" style, with the elites not being able to play in that style. Perhaps if Illusionary Reversion was completely unnerfed back to always returning 1 clone on shatter, and made a minor trait for Chrono - so it would add some consistency with using the chrono shatters. If these notes stay as they are then Chrono really should have better access to clone maintenance. In addition CSplit cooldown could be moderately unnerfed, and things like Shield cooldowns. But we'll have to see how it ends up in practice come tuesday - probably going to be some glaring weaknesses as you say from past experience playing without "IP" and all the problems that entailed. Would be more comforting if we knew Anet would follow this up quickly with more tweaks, but of course it's likely to be another 3 months before anything significant happens... which is and has always been the most annoying problem with their approach. :/All those changes you mention would be interesting as compensation for losing distortion. Nothing can possibly make up for losing illusionary persona. It was a long time ago now, but I do remember build-crafting and playing mesmer back then. You basically had 2 major archetypes of mesmers: Mesmers that pretended shatters didn't exist, and mesmers that used them. The difference between these 2 archetypes was illusionary persona. Shatters were completely unusable without that trait in an extremely broad set of situations, and that has not changed since the beginning of the game. At this point, I've pretty much given up on the mesmer class as a whole. It's been unusable in WvW group content for a long time, I already use firebrigade in raids for most fights, and I'm actively trying to figure out how to use firebrigade for the fights we still use chronos on because I just don't want to play the class any more when it feels so bad to play.

Technically speaking, it's not a nerf exactly, it's a mechanical change. Realistically speaking, however, it makes chrono even more clunky and unfun to play. This has been a pattern in the last year or so of changes for chrono. The class is still technically functional/viable/good. However, when you actually get to playing it...it feels miserable. It's clunky, the mechanics don't work well together, it's a struggle against the game itself just to play the class. It feels awful.

Yeah, and playing without IP sucked. There's a reason they made it baseline. Not really looking forward to this change.

Chaos interrupt will fall in the unused builds like it always be once people start playing with condiclear and more defense again.BTW about the note : What did they mean by the illusion counter ? it may be my bad english but I don't get it.Speed of Sand = no superspeed reset when using master of manipulation.Chrono shatter : it's a shatter mecanics like without IP and we lose F4 invul. Need to see the numbers.Dune cloak : can be pretty good with boon removal.Auspicious anguish : hudge survival nerf for all chaos builds. (Hopefully I switched to no chaos builds.) Will see how did it perform with other changes. BTW WHERE IS THE GLAMOUR TRAIT : https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/72428/when-will-the-glamour-trait-come-backCome on please... the three purple/pink dots next to shatters now reflect on non-shattered clones only rather than included ones running towards enemy for shatter.To clarify further, it's a cosmetic change only and has no gameplay implications. The changes to chrono being unable to self-shatter, on the other hand, is pretty devastating for any hope of mesmer being usable in WvW groups. It's also just generally a miserable change from a QoL perspective. There's a good reason why almost every single build in vanilla took illusionary persona until it became baseline.

The real question is whether you took the free 20 gold.

Yeah, it's pretty awful. The fact that interrupting your auto chain is such a drastic dps loss in PvE makes this really irritating to work with.

Everything sounds like ping-based issues. The blurred frenzy, distortion, and axe 3 ones are absolutely ping problems, not bugs. The mount issue sounds like a mix of ping plus slightly odd interactions when you have that much ping.

While I agree that "easy 20k+" is an exaggeration, you've done your calculations wrong. Superiority complex is multiplicative to crit modifier, so that should be: All damage modifiers are multiplicative, and danger time acts just like superiority complex, so adding danger time, scholar runes, and and egotism looks like: Then add a wee bit of might/vuln and you crack 22k.

Ghastly claws is single target and has no condition damage component.

Well, it depends on what they want the identify of the skill to be. If they're going for high impact, more similar to how it is now (pre-nerf), they could use a similar mechanic to rev hammer 5: gtaoe channel delayed hit. If they want something that maintains the current pulse-based output but has usable aoe, they could make it a single gtaoe pulsing skill similar to a well. If they're really committed to the beam attack method, they can remove the windup and increase the execution speed to <1s, to make it feel more similar to GS1 in terms of use. If they're committed to the long channel method, then they could make it a large cone aoe, similar to guardian torch 5. Lots of options for what they could do, and specifically what I mentioned are not the only ones.

Well you're not entirely wrong at that, though imo the block is fine. Regardless though, clunky mechanics should not be balanced with overpowered effects just like a long cooldown does not balance an overpowered effect. A skill that is overpowered once in a while is still overpowered and should be fixed. This game has a fairly large variety of solid targeting/damage output mechanics, any of which could be used to make this skill actually functional. It needs a rework like that in conjunction with a rebalancing of the damage/condition pressure that it applies.