SaferMurderweapon.7143

Don't get too attached to a single class. Anet has a history of completely neutering a given class or spec and letting it rot for years.

Reroll to anything other than a Mesmer

100% absolutely yes They had a change in management sometime in or around 2019 and a lot of people came and went. 2019 also was when all the class butchery began starting with the SoI change and then requiring clones for shatters and taking away Distort from Chrono. There has also been a clear demonstration of class bias since GW2 launched. Remember how Necro used to always see nerfs but Guardian always got buffs despite being the most popular class? Pepperidge farm remembers...

Not exactly what I'd want, but definitely better than what we have

Ask this in PvP

Honestly, very few if anyone care why you and some other players currently use them. Most care about how they were used before they got turned upside-down into something different with Anet's weird juggling of game balance philosophies. For a long time Chrono was treated really well and suddenly three years ago starting with the SoI rewotk, Anet decided it was time for it to eat dirt. They even took away zero clone shatters which demonstrated that whoever was handling these changes paid little attention or consideration to this game's balance history and failed to understand why it was added in the first place It used to be that Chronos would be support or Power DPS and Mirages Condi DPS with all options being viable and really good. This is what a lot of longtime Mesmer players want. To be viable in a group without needing to be a healer or DPS or at the very least, make Support Chrono viable. When I say "viable" I don't mean playable. Nobody wants Chronos outside of two or three encounters as tanks for a reason. You don't hear about it as much anymore because a lot of them quit because of these changes. But some such as myself show up from time to time because no other class in any MMO scratches the itch that this one did Now Support Chrono died along with Chronojail they minute they got nerfed and everyone else gained Alac/quick including their own other elite epec Mirage leaving them as the only viable support spec. It has a healing build but why in the world would you take a mirage alacrity healer over a mirage dps that gives alacrity along with a quickness firebrand who can heal? As for Virt, it's just a less clunky core Mesmer for people who don't like playing Mesmer. A lot of us were hoping for a real support spec like Bard or something. Doesn't matter if it can heal because if Firebrand wasn't so heavily played, Firebrandjail would be a thing. And with so many Guardians readily available, why take anything else? Nobody who actually understands this class and has played it before Summer 2019 thinks it's in a good spot or even wants to play it. But after experiencing Pre-Summer 2019 Chrono, it's very hard to go back to anything else

Remember when it used to copy your boons to others? Pepperidge farm remembers...

Bit of a rant here; Honestly, this spec as a support is dead. The most recent SoI change was the nail in the coffin. It's just another DPS spec that provides quickness. Healing on Mesmer is laughable at best as is the uptime on boons that other classes can provide much more consistently with less boon duration and more benefits on the side without nearly as much tradeoff or investment in addition to healing. There is no reason whatsoever to take this class over another aside from Teleport/Portal skips and other such clever techs that Mesmers can pull off just to save a minute or so which would have been saved by just running a better comp in addition to having a better safety net ALA Firebrand Quickness Firebrand jail isn't a thing simply because so many people play it. Where as few people played Chrono despite it being overpowered because not anyone could just pick up a Chrono. It was easy to tell a good Chrono from a bad one. FB is overpowered and it's also very popular, but nobody is complaining. See the comparison here? Anet, why do you hate Chronos all of a sudden? You tolerated them for most of HoT and then in 2019 you just started kicking them while they were down. At least we got zero clone shatters back, but that's still not enough. Either we need to be able to copy boons again and get Distort back on F4 AND Continuum Split back on F5, or make Chrono a viable healing spec. Hardly anybody wants a Mesmer in their group these days unless it's a Mirage giving Alacrity and Alacrity was originally Chrono's thing. Now everybody BUT Chrono can do it consistently without nearly as much maintenance As a Mesmer, I do not enjoy being pidgeonholed into playing DPS

A lot of Support Mesmers quit over the changes that happened in 2019-2022 such as changing SoI from copying boons to other players to extending Boons by 3 seconds and then more recently making it only work on the caster and now people are just calling it a "dead skill". Tying Distortion to CS effectively removing that as a utility only to then remove it entirely anyway. Requiring clones for shatters which they then took off, but the damage to the interest in this class is already done at this point. And then making all their 10 person skills work on only 5 which was one of the few remaining reasons you would take a Mes over a FB/Ren and even then you wouldn't. And all this happened right after their shift in management. Someone at Anet has a clear bias against this class. But back in 2019 when this class was overpowered gifting every boon in the game, all the other support specs were still relevant because what they lacked in healing they made up for with boon support and utility. And despite this, few people played it because despite being meta, it was hard for a lot of people to play. Now Chrono/Mirage have both been reduced to pure damage builds only and are only taken over other damage builds for their niche utilities

Just like the rest of this class lol Mesmer has replaced Necro as Anet's punching bag

Welcome to the club and why I quit this game years ago RIP Chrono

Don't. Don't give me hope. Q_Q

Here's one. It's called Firebrand. I'm sorry, but don't play Chrono. Save yourself while you still can. It's a good time to play Necro though now that Anet found another class to pick on.

Or skip step 2 and keep repeating 1 and 3 like I have for the past 11 months

Resto in pesto for Guardian is the besto RIP Chrono 2015 - 2019

So...... anybody remember this? I dunno if you guys do, but these are the changes that went live before I quit a game that I played for x amount of years blah blah blah I know you've heard it a million times. But please try to understand (I beg you) where I am coming from and why I like many others kept coming back to this game and why I like many others am bothering to create yet another obnoxious wall of text in ever seemingly vain hope that something will change despite the fact that it will probably not get read. It's because I love Chrono and I love this game. But I love Chrono more. Liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike Everquest nostalgia more. Anyone else play that? Fun game, but it's not the game we remember now is it? In regards to the genre, stuff has changed, things are modernized and overall the MMO genre has grown stale. We know this. However, amongst all this Chrono is a gem. Forget that the rest of the game is even good debatable as that may be for some people. I would and have played it for this spec alone. And ever since last year, Chrono just felt so clunky and unfun to play y'know where I'm going with this if you're another forum user who plays or played Chrono. We all complain about the same things. But this is directed at Anet. I am not a developer. But despite this, and in light of witnessing the same trend that we witnessed with Necro, as coincidental as it may be, these changes have been complained about for almost a year if not more if you include others though they're not as sever as this one and our complaints have been met with what I can only describe as apathy based on what I've seen. Maybe an Anet dev had something constructive to say to another user at some point. I dunno. I didn't see it, doesn't mean it didn't happen. I want to try and acknowledge that there may be some people at Anet that feel the same way the Mesmer community does about... Mesmer. And that they may be trying to work on a problem they don't know how to solve. But at the end of the day, what most people see are the patch notes. The ones that you so gracefully provide despite the fact it may result in pandemonium. However you do so for a reason. Transparency or whatever you decide what that reason is, you wouldn't be providing patch notes and having places to discuss patch notes if you weren't going to factor in feedback on said patch notes. Little quick disclaimer; I am not saying Chrono is dead. It's presently not fun imho and I would like to have fun playing it again. And I am sure that there are too many people who can relate than there should be. Assuming they are still around. I'm guessing not. That's what typically happens when a developer does something that makes players upset about something. They go somewhere else and move on. I haven't been able to do that because in my opinion, with all due respect everything else sucks. Anyway, topic at hand... Put simply as far as the forums go, Chrono is a victim of those who don't understand it, don't want to understand it, and yet think they can discuss what should be done about it like they do understand it. I'm referring to the "QQers" and those who bandwagon against Mesmer as a black sheep amongst the rest of the professions that they keep losing against often ingame by people who don't like losing or don't like the meta focused comp bias which will always exist whether Chrono continues to or not. Even if it merits in a 5% increase in DPS. Don't believe me, go play another MMO. Elitists exist wherever elitism will matter. Including the "friendly" games. Anyway, those who have mastered Mesmer or Chrono rather are the ones that need to be heard. The ones who have been complaining for the past year instead of actually playing the game that they love and would otherwise be playing if their main wasn't unfairly shot in the kneecaps by a class rebalance disguised as a "rework". We've seen this trend with Necro albeit not for the same duration but long enough to matter, it's happened to Mesmer at a much greater extent. Mesmer has become the new black sheep. Arenanet, we don't know what you're doing and you need to talk to us if you want your Mesmer players to come back. Or at least show through updates that our feedback is being taken into consideration while keeping in mind that the Mesmer community is in the minority among other professions and those that speak about that don't actually play it are often those that want to impose their own support build upon others in raids (looks at toughness firebrands in WvW guilds that try to raid), or those that often lose to it and can't be bothered to learn the game beyond treating it like its a tab-target Destiny where you just click an enemy player, CC them, and then burst them till dead. Every. Profession. Does. This. And yet only Mesmers seem to be paying for it. How come Guardian doesn't have a tradeoff yet? I wonder... Assuming you haven't already, please seriously consider the feedback you have received over the past two years from Mesmer players. It was in the perfect spot back in Summer of 2018 before the Signet of Inspiration change which was also when I first started raiding and Chronos were basically regarded as unicorns at the time despite being "overpowered" and I knew only one other person besides myself who enjoyed Chronojail. We all know our class is overpowered and why nerfs may be necessary. But consider more alternatives like buffing other classes and offering them new options like the ones that make Mesmer so unique and fun to play or just dialing down its performance a bit without completely changing how it plays. Over the past year, I have seen some smart choices from you that are both fun and just plain good. Like giving Thieves portals for example. Utterly brilliant and this is coming from someone who likes helping other players with jumping puzzles FOR FREE without accepting tips and FOR FUN in addition to supporting them. Why not give Guardians a utility where they can target a player and give them invulnerability kinda like how Mesmers spread Distort around them or if not that, take damage for them? Why not make smoke screens do this instead of just blocking projectiles? Oh wait, they can reflect too when traited for. Why not provide more group pull abilities to other classes? Why not give another class the ability to provide more boons and create more options to play supports or tanks. I can go on and on. Honestly, if people who mained other classes played Chrono and took some time to understand it, they would see exactly what they are missing and would be asking for it instead of crying for nerfs kinda like how people have been asking for portals on other classes for YEARS and now we finally have 3 classes with portals in addition to any others that may have been added recently. I dunno if there are any since I've been primarily focused on Chrono this whole time. But my point stands nonetheless. Everything can be powerful and fun on top of being viable and the game shouldn't be balanced around people who crunch numbers all day and min-max DPS. It should be balanced around those who actually play the game instead of staring at spreadsheets and going for speed clears whenever they're not hitting a golem in the squad training area. I'm not saying they should give everything Chrono has to other classes. But that, rather than just outright gutting a single class so that way everyone is bland, make everyone truly unique or rather, non-generic. If someone wants to play like a Chrono but play something other than Chrono, why not let them? It doesn't have to be a Chrono-like or Chrono-lite, it just needs additional complexity. More options, utility, anything you can think of that enables players to be tactful with their class and reward them for doing so and as a matter of fact, some of this exists already. We just need more. With your game, you have the most interesting class choices out of any modern MMO in my honest opinion. As financially successful as it may be, please don't FFXIV your game. It's growing because of WoW's failure but the quality has actually declined. Being a good game nonetheless, more people are going to talk about it and it will sound like it is getting better when it really isn't. It's just becoming more popular. Good or great, makes no difference. But this game is its own game. It's your game. Homogenized classes are bad. GW2's classes are special. Just look at Scholar. It was seen as the most complicated class in the game back in Heavensward. It was different and complex. Had pet micromangement and hard to play according to most people. It was my main and it was fun and I understood it thoroughly, taught many people how to play it, and once upon a time, one of my so called "mentees" better than me and went on to be one of the top Scholars in the game according to fflogs. He quit. These days you now often hear "it's the only class I don't suck at". Even my ex plays it now and she despises anything complicated. In addition to making it easy to play, they made it overpowered. People who used to dislike it now love it and those who loved it have moved on or fall asleep spamming Broil because that's their game and well... same case as Chrono basically. Meanwhile, anyone can fit into raids because anyone can play basically anything because the skill ceiling is super low due to the lack of complexity beyond abilities like Rescue that are often used as a trolling tool rather than what it was intended for. Let me reiterate this another way in case none of this makes sense. I don't expect it to given that most of the feedback that does make sense somehow seems to not as a reflection of what is being done to the game in some instances, specifically Chrono. But you can make everyone happy without constantly nerfing things or making everything the same and have the whole Mesmer community view you as their savior. You have already proven that you're capable of this, that you're not an incompetent developer, you've done in an old engine (trust me, I know the spaghetti code and what this game's engine was originally intended for and in addition to lot of the technical issues you deal with and an idea of what you might deal with in studio and blah blah blah blah) what's taken a AAA dev like Square Enix far too long to do (specifically adding flying to earlier zones and swimming AFTER overhauling their entire game with a near world ending cataclysm which you never had to do ONCE), but we feel our feedback is being ignored. I say all this because people act like you have no idea what you are doing when you actually do and yet the changes to this class somehow don't reflect that hence the lack of faith in you as a developer. I don't know if someone in development has a class bias or feedback isn't being relayed properly. But we're beginning to assume the former given the case with Necro and its similarity to what is going on with Mesmer. Anyway, please make good things happen so good things can happen. I mean, what you need is already there. Excluding the rants and vulgarities, you have a treasure trove of feedback that is seemingly untapped. You truly have the power to make change o reader mine. ;) Edit: Forgot to proofread. Don't have proof about proof read. Can't proofread the proof either because there is no proof to proofread. But if there was, what would it prove? Can you prove proof? Proveproofreadprove

If you think condi mirage got nerfed and are asking about Chrono... my friend... you have no idea the tragedy that has befallen. Save yourself. Go Necro. And don't look back. Anet has demonstrated again and again and it is without a doubt clear that they are prejudiced against Mesmers, notably Chronos. Necro was bullied again and again but survived countless nerfs. Anet wants Mesmer buried. They don't want anyone to play it. Anytime they become relevant or good at something, they put them back down and show them their place.

If its still an illusions trait, having a trait there that does nothing to core and mirage, makes no sense.if its an chronomancer trait, you gotta sacrifice a trait in chrono to fit the skill and which one will u sacrifice instead? Nah it should be baseline if it's base line, then what is the point of removing the ability to shatter without clones?They just removed the ability to shatter without clones to fit their ideology of elite spec. They will not reverse the nerf imo. Anyways, this thread is not going where I wanted it to go in the beginning.If they removed the ability of chrono to shatter without clones, Restorative Illusions should have the tooltip updated. Where did you want it to go? Bringing back IP is a better idea. No exception. Losing IP was an arbitrary design choice. IP existed for a reason. Every Mesmer who actually pays attention to their class and the changes that happen and has bothered to read the changes that have happened is going to derail every discussion at every opportunity because it's clear that we are being ignored and people are pissed.

I came back to GW2 after playing XIV for three years. They stuff Anet does over here? They do it too. Only they're much less creative with their content, recycle so much stuff all the time, and the game is basically designed to inhibit your progression so you stay subbed for as long as possible.

My thoughts exactly. Been having fun with other games. Can't tolerate a developer that is prejudiced against something they developed. They made a masterpiece of a class that actually took some degree of understanding and mastery in this bland genre and vandalized it in the name of "balance".

Enchanter. The closest thing to it in a modern MMO was Chrono back in Summer of 2018. You had CC, buffs, debuffs, all of which I loved about enchanter. Chrono let me do all of that and be a tank while bringing some supplementary heals. They weren't strong heals, but they were good enough to matter and help me carry people who are learning content or to take pressure off the healers in case someone makes a mistake. I know it was more optimal to maximize DPS as much as possible and that I shouldn't worry about healing, but I wasn't exactly playing with tier 1 players or trying to speedrun and honestly, I don't like being a damage monkey Now Chrono heavily limited and clunky and has been nerfed with seemingly extreme prejudice. Much so that I haven't touched the game in a year as that spec was the reason I played. There are things like it, but they don't come close to how fun, unique, and challenging that class was. These days, I hear anyone can pick it up and play it now and people rant about it more than ever before. So the next best option for me would be something like Warden or Sorc in ESO. They have some things in common. Controlling enemies, protecting allies, buffing, etc. I enjoy playing anything support as long as it's support that require tact and not just clicking a cooldown. For instance, Chrono, you could just fire your shatters and then SoI. Or you could pre-cast shield 5, CS then fire your remaining shatters while casting SoI then do it again like a smart person would. Or assuming other utilities aren't required, get your wells into CS too. There was a lot of thought that went into playing this spec and now it's just wells or gtfo and you can't even shatter during CS anymore because all shatters require clones now and distort is merged with CS so not only does distort have a much longer cooldown now, but it's merged with an even more powerful cooldown rendering its effect moot. Basically you're forced to choose between two different skills as they are the same skill now. That's like taking a car and then merging the gas pedal and brake pedal into one pedal. I honestly feel very out of place in the genre because everything seems to be moving away from new ideas and all about a damage meta with skills that more or less function and feel the same but look different while getting in bed heavily with the trinity. In GW2, tank was very fight specific and more involved with mechanics and not just spank the big bad and hold aggro. I kinda went off on a tangent here, but honestly, I like anything that plays and feels like Chrono as it did long ago.

Pretty much this. I've been checking back again and again for almost a year now waiting for something to change. I really like this game, but what made it for me was Chrono. There's just nothing like it in the modern MMO genre. And it just isn't fun to play anymore. Almost feels like torture and each time I come back I hear how it's getting nerfed and gutted again and again like people just can't be bothered to learn to play against the class or someone on the Anet balance team has some kind of hate-bias for us and are abusing his/her position to undermine Chronos make their preferred class more favorable. Probably someone who plays Guardian in WvW and doesn't want to have two sets of gear given that a Guardian is better off as a healer or DPS. I remember raiding with a WvW guild that claimed to have experience and there were so many Guardians running toughness gear which made me as a boon chrono basically useless and we weren't making enough DPS. Anet's balance team also seems to favor Guardians quite a bit over other classes. I remember when they picked on Necro for a long time. Guess it's Chrono's turn.

This is why the old version of Signet of Inspiration was so helpful. It wasn't optimal and by no means overpowered as you could achieve the same result by simply running wells. But back then, all you had to do was pre-cast shield 5, CS right as Shield 5 is finishing then hit all your shatters as quickly as possible while casting SoI then repeat as SoI wears off. It's not 100% uptime, but it was much better than no uptime at all because someone went full Kirito and forgot they were in a group. And wells weren't mandatory to run a boon build despite being optimal to do so so you could get creative with your boon Chrono. Honestly, they should just rollback Mesmer as a whole back to what it was in Summer 2018 and then nerf Mirage and leave chrono alone because clearly someone at anet who's handling Chrono and Mesmer as a whole barely has any feel for the class if any and balances it as a part of keeping the game balanced with no compunction about keeping it fun and enjoyable for those who appreciated the class not because it was powerful but because it was fun and engaging and unique. Chrono then was overpowered, yes. But it was overpowered in the right hands and not just anyone could pick it up and have it carry them. Not that many people played it especially not nearly as some specs cough cough Mirage. And they didn't play it for a reason, because they couldn't, so they complained about it which led us to where we are today. Ranting on the forums once or twice a month about a change that killed the game for a lot of Chronos and then some.

It got worse? I quit back in July of 2019 when they forgot why IP was implemented and they poorly reworked shatters.

Give the Mesmer community more reasons not to play the game. Smart as usual.