Need Some Advice for Open World Power Chrono Build

[chripsy.1027]

I have been playing a double staff Mirage build forever and want to try a power chromo open world build. I have experimented a bit, but I feel quite squishy and my damage isn't great.....

Could someone suggested a decent build for Power Chrono that has good survivability? I was thinking about GS/Sword-sword or pistol. Maybe using the Inspiration trait line to get lots of heals, and using the 50% alacrity trait so I can spam my phantasms and get more heals. I don't know. Some advice from a very experienced player would be welcome.

[Infusion.7149]

pChrono is weaker in PvE against most bosses than mirage due to lower might generation and the rampup of damage due to clones generation for shatters. Against trash mobs you are better off with virtuoso unless there are projectile reflects.

You probably want to run well of precog (stunbreak/aegis) with the standard StM quickness chrono (which is swords x2, greatsword) if you want to be somewhat tanky or at least use shield offhand which affords you two channeled blocks and protection, which means your block uptime is far higher along with blurred frenzy. I think a major thing to note with chrono is the normal builds for instanced content run thief rune, but you want to use eagle rune for openworld, fractals, or solo because flanking is not always possible. If you run chronophantasma then your phantasms have a 1.5s delay before recasting so it is not good for trash mobs or shatters.

One key thing to remember is the phantasms do not gain sigil of accuracy.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I've been running something like this for my overworld runs.  When it comes to survival, the only things that prove any difficulty are the harder champions.  It was squishier in the past, but the Jade Tech Offensive + Defensive Protocols with a tier 10 core have made the builds significantly more hardy.

The big difference between this and the many of the raid builds is the Mirror Images skill.  It's a DPS loss... under perfect conditions over a long period of time.  For general use, Mirror Images is a far superior skill than just about anything else you can put there.  It's a stunbreak, and lets you get to 3 clones almost instantly for shatter damage, daze, distortion, or continuum split.  Personally I never had a problem surviving with it, mostly because there's very few dangerous threats that can survive the full Continuum Split combo.  When it comes to mesmer, I've found that tactics are much more key to survival than anything else.  Kite with Greatsword, use sword skills to evade/block big attacks, etc.  

[Levetty.1279]

 http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAExzlVw2YesPWJOyWaNfA-zRIYRU/XIRkC1GoVUVqNAVA-e

 

Enjoy the might and quickness uptime.

[Infusion.7149]

7 hours ago, Levetty.1279 said:

 http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAExzlVw2YesPWJOyWaNfA-zRIYRU/XIRkC1GoVUVqNAVA-e

 

Enjoy the might and quickness uptime.

Running pack rune isn't a panacea because your recharge on fury is 30s then and phantasms no longer spawn with fury if you use illusions instead of dueling. Not to mention accuracy sigil doesn't affect phantasms.

Relying on chronophantasma also means that you have that 1.5s delay before they respawn again and the additional wait time for the clone to appear for shattering.

Edited March 27, 2023 by Infusion.7149

[Levetty.1279]

13 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

Running pack rune isn't a panacea because your recharge on fury is 30s then and phantasms no longer spawn with fury if you use illusions instead of dueling. Not to mention accuracy sigil doesn't affect phantasms.

Relying on chronophantasma also means that you have that 1.5s delay before they respawn again and the additional wait time for the clone to appear for shattering.

and?

[dead.7638]

People make Mesmer too complicated.   Learn how to survive first with all your defense counters from skills/ults /traits.   Then learn your burst or learn this first it’s way less complicated than the defense rotation.   You are giving distortion and blink for oh kitten moments, don’t waste them.   With pvirt you’ll have aegis out the kitten.   Mirage you’ll have your dodge.   Chrono shield is very clutch if you use it correctly.   Dps is all about cranking out the burst rotation quickly.   Like you’ll have to hot key your burst clicking skills is to slow.   The faster you pull this off the better dps you’ll get during your spike.   Chrono by far has a much harder time doing x2 burst with CS which can complicate things until you learn it fully.   But a good amount of your defense will come from Mesmer mechanics in general with high evades, mobility, and positioning.

[dead.7638]

.

Edited March 28, 2023 by dead.7638

[dead.7638]

Also if you choose inspiration, insanely great for learning Mesmer, however, running the trait you lose a lot of dps.

[chripsy.1027]

Thanks all. Chrono just doesn't;t seem to be clicking with me at the moment. I even tried experimenting with Improved Alacrity, which states it will reduce recharge of skills by 50%. So I timed it on my stop watch. A 20 second skill should have taken 10 seconds to recharge, but it took almost 13 seconds...... Can someone explain the Improved Alacrity trait to me? Maybe I misunderstood it?

[Infusion.7149]

11 minutes ago, chripsy.1027 said:

Thanks all. Chrono just doesn't;t seem to be clicking with me at the moment. I even tried experimenting with Improved Alacrity, which states it will reduce recharge of skills by 50%. So I timed it on my stop watch. A 20 second skill should have taken 10 seconds to recharge, but it took almost 13 seconds...... Can someone explain the Improved Alacrity trait to me? Maybe I misunderstood it?

"While having the trait  Improved Alacrity equipped, alacrity gives 50% skill recharge rate (recharge is around 66.67% of the original time). So for every second under the effect of alacrity, skills recharge 1.5 seconds."

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Alacrity

[chripsy.1027]

Ah ok. Is it just me of is the in-game skill description a little misleading?

[Nephalem.8921]

On 3/26/2023 at 7:45 PM, Infusion.7149 said:

pChrono is weaker in PvE against most bosses than mirage due to lower might generation and the rampup of damage due to clones generation for shatters. Against trash mobs you are better off with virtuoso unless there are projectile reflects.

You probably want to run well of precog (stunbreak/aegis) with the standard StM quickness chrono (which is swords x2, greatsword) if you want to be somewhat tanky or at least use shield offhand which affords you two channeled blocks and protection, which means your block uptime is far higher along with blurred frenzy. I think a major thing to note with chrono is the normal builds for instanced content run thief rune, but you want to use eagle rune for openworld, fractals, or solo because flanking is not always possible. If you run chronophantasma then your phantasms have a 1.5s delay before recasting so it is not good for trash mobs or shatters.

One key thing to remember is the phantasms do not gain sigil of accuracy.

pChrono is very strong vs most bosses. should be better than mirage vs stuff below 1m hp since you can burst most stuff with 1 cs opening. The old build was just dueling illusions with sword/sword + sword/focus. Not sure if gs is better than focus without the gs trait. focus pull is still very nice in open world.

Chronophantasma allows you to trigger quick from illusions twice per phantasm and also generates very easy 25 might. pChrono is a high dps solo spec. would be even better if anet would unnerf timewarp. 6sec quick on 120sec cd. FMW are also 6sec quick but on a 30sec cd. Just guardian things. And it gives fury on top!

Also isn't chronophantasma worth like 20-25% dps? Quickness adds max 25% dps in the best case. So vs bosses you are trading your strongest mod for a boon that achieves the same.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Nephalem.8921

[Infusion.7149]

3 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

pChrono is very strong vs most bosses. should be better than mirage vs stuff below 1m hp since you can burst most stuff with 1 cs opening. The old build was just dueling illusions with sword/sword + sword/focus. Not sure if gs is better than focus without the gs trait. focus pull is still very nice in open world.

Chronophantasma allows you to trigger quick from illusions twice per phantasm and also generates very easy 25 might. pChrono is a high dps solo spec. would be even better if anet would unnerf timewarp. 6sec quick on 120sec cd. FMW are also 6sec quick but on a 30sec cd. Just guardian things. And it gives fury on top!

Also isn't chronophantasma worth like 20-25% dps? Quickness adds max 25% dps in the best case. So vs bosses you are trading your strongest mod for a boon that achieves the same.

If you run illusions, where is your fury coming from unless you drop domination? It is going to be a far less crit chance without dueling. In that case you are just suggesting dueling+illusions instead of domination +dueling? That part is unclear.

If it is really openworld there are quite a few bosses with phase shift meaning running a fully melee build is quite a hassle and you are under the assumption you are the only person around. If it is an openworld area and there are any other people around having AoE quickness is going to be more beneficial and that is why even fast farming EU has had quickness chrono on their pages for ages.

I'd be really curious to see a graph of said build with dueling+illusions however.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

3 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

pChrono is very strong vs most bosses. should be better than mirage vs stuff below 1m hp since you can burst most stuff with 1 cs opening. The old build was just dueling illusions with sword/sword + sword/focus. Not sure if gs is better than focus without the gs trait. focus pull is still very nice in open world.

Chronophantasma allows you to trigger quick from illusions twice per phantasm and also generates very easy 25 might. pChrono is a high dps solo spec. would be even better if anet would unnerf timewarp. 6sec quick on 120sec cd. FMW are also 6sec quick but on a 30sec cd. Just guardian things. And it gives fury on top!

Also isn't chronophantasma worth like 20-25% dps? Quickness adds max 25% dps in the best case. So vs bosses you are trading your strongest mod for a boon that achieves the same.

I'm not sure that Chronophantasma double-procs phantasmal haste.  That said, consider the jade tech combat protocols.  With those up, the mesmer gets 20 seconds of nearly ever boon, except for quickness.  The self-buffing abilities of mesmer, while quite strong initially, are largely outdated.

The way quickness on phantasms interacts with DPS is a bit different.  Quickness is a large modifier on player damage because players use that saved time to execute more skills.  I.E. in a 10 second period, if the player would've done 5 attacks normally, they can do 7.5 under quickness.  Quickness will help phantasms execute their skills quicker, but once they've unloaded their damage the phantasms themselves proceed to despawn, doing nothing with that extra time.  For PVP that quickness is great for hitting other layers, but in PVE it is much less substantial.  You'll want to boost the absolute damage that the phantasm does as much as possible.

To compare Illusions to Domination, under maximum might Phantasmal Force will increase phantasm damage by 25%.  Domination has three traits: Bountiful Blades, Vicious Expression, and Empowered Illusions.  Vicious Expression is 15%, Empowered Illusions is a further 15%, while Bountiful Blades is a total of 33% for the greatsword only.  So, domination totals to 30%, or 15% with 53% on Berserker.  

[Nephalem.8921]

12 hours ago, Infusion.7149 said:

If you run illusions, where is your fury coming from unless you drop domination? It is going to be a far less crit chance without dueling. In that case you are just suggesting dueling+illusions instead of domination +dueling? That part is unclear.

If it is really openworld there are quite a few bosses with phase shift meaning running a fully melee build is quite a hassle and you are under the assumption you are the only person around. If it is an openworld area and there are any other people around having AoE quickness is going to be more beneficial and that is why even fast farming EU has had quickness chrono on their pages for ages.

I'd be really curious to see a graph of said build with dueling+illusions however.

It is indeed dueling illusions. Something like

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAwy3lVw8YTsNWJW6WaNfA-zxQYhQR2R75eZUbBURKYyBJM2+PAA-e

you can swap focus for gs for a minor dps loss. With focus i can finish the 1m golem within ~38seconds finishing with 26k dps. With the boon build i can not even get close to this since the boon build has very poor might generation and not even perma fury. 

I can get like ~20k in mirage solo on 1m golem. It will win during longer fights but chrono can burst trash unlike mirage. 

11 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I'm not sure that Chronophantasma double-procs phantasmal haste.  That said, consider the jade tech combat protocols.  With those up, the mesmer gets 20 seconds of nearly ever boon, except for quickness.  The self-buffing abilities of mesmer, while quite strong initially, are largely outdated.

It does double procc phantasmal haste. Does double procc every phantasm related trait. Responsible for a lot of might too. Yes the jadebot protocols are nice and allow you to burst down most champions on regular raid dps builds but if an encounter lasts longer than 20sec they will drop insanely hard. This chrono build can stay well above 20k dps solo for extended periods of time and can also spike quite high during cs peak.

11 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

The way quickness on phantasms interacts with DPS is a bit different.  Quickness is a large modifier on player damage because players use that saved time to execute more skills.  I.E. in a 10 second period, if the player would've done 5 attacks normally, they can do 7.5 under quickness.  Quickness will help phantasms execute their skills quicker, but once they've unloaded their damage the phantasms themselves proceed to despawn, doing nothing with that extra time.  For PVP that quickness is great for hitting other layers, but in PVE it is much less substantial.  You'll want to boost the absolute damage that the phantasm does as much as possible.

To compare Illusions to Domination, under maximum might Phantasmal Force will increase phantasm damage by 25%.  Domination has three traits: Bountiful Blades, Vicious Expression, and Empowered Illusions.  Vicious Expression is 15%, Empowered Illusions is a further 15%, while Bountiful Blades is a total of 33% for the greatsword only.  So, domination totals to 30%, or 15% with 53% on Berserker.  

Illusions is not only adding quickness. Also increases 50% fury uptime to perma and stacks tons of might. All these factors combined beat domination quite hard in a solo buff scenario. During old times when anet did not hate chrono super hard you could argue that you could cs double timewarp and try to burst within that time period but it will drop might very fast. Without illusions your only might sources are sword 5 and mirror blade if you run gs. With illusions and chronophantasma every phantasm generates 6 might.

Try it. I could not get close to illusion numbers on golem with domination. Might, shatter cd, fury and quickness uptime are not that easy to compare to mods.

Edited March 31, 2023 by Nephalem.8921

[Infusion.7149]

2 hours ago, Nephalem.8921 said:

It is indeed dueling illusions. Something like

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?PiwAwy3lVw8YTsNWJW6WaNfA-zxQYhQR2R75eZUbBURKYyBJM2+PAA-e

you can swap focus for gs for a minor dps loss. With focus i can finish the 1m golem within ~38seconds finishing with 26k dps. With the boon build i can not even get close to this since the boon build has very poor might generation and not even perma fury. 

I can get like ~20k in mirage solo on 1m golem. It will win during longer fights but chrono can burst trash unlike mirage.

Okay, thanks for being much more specific. The topic creator was stating they are having problems with sustain so I guess if they play your variant they would range with greatsword while the phantasms are on cooldown or something like that. A golem scenario is always going to be better than reality especially if the signet of ether is saved.

The metabattle videos for a similar build have roughly 1 min kills for this sort of build on champions https://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Chronomancer_-_Phantasmal_Duelist