Alacrity: Time for a Change

[Khisanth.2948]

Mmm all that gold

[Laila Lightness.8742]

Bye bye chrono

[Zaraki.5784]

I Just hope that this will finally put an end to the dominion of chrono tanks, opening the tank spot for other professions.

[nia.4725]

I'm sure we will find a way to adapt, but I feel this change is completely unnecessary. Why change alacrity? What's the issue with that? I also don't see why you have decided to remove quickness from Tides of Time. It's a key point of our quickness rotation.

[Laila Lightness.8742]

By bye chrono we eont miss you we will have a superior tank called renegade bow

[ThePlayMaker.1058]

@Zaraki.5784 said:I Just hope that this will finally put an end to the dominion of chrono tanks, opening the tank spot for other professions.

Quite a few other classes can and have been able to tank for ages, but very few of them have the utility or damage that a chrono has. Either way, this doesn't heavily affect the chrono tank meta.

[Rym.1469]

As always, please be cautious when adding new boons to the table. It often throws the boon-corruption relations out of balance and we have all seen what disaster adding few boons here and there can release with launch of HoT and Season 1 of PvP. That event called for drastic boon corruption availability adjustements, moving boon corruption from main niche utility to main source of damage.

[Robert Gee.9246]

@Sephylon.4938 said:Since alac is becoming a boon, will other classes gain access to the alacrity boon as well or will it still be chrono and rev that can give alac?We don't plan to add alacrity to other professions at this time.

@TwilightSoul.9048 said:I'm wondering about Quickness uptime for Chronomancer now since they replaced Quickness on Tides of Time with AlacrityI am guessing you are talking about uptime for a raid group and not personal quickness uptime? When we checked current raid builds we found that quickness uptime was already higher than 100%. Removing it from Tides of Time should still allow full uptime, though it may be a little more difficult to run without Time Warp now.

[Attuned To Love.6579]

Improved Alacrity's increased potency and decreased duration affects only the chronomancer, where any instance of alacrity going into the character will receive this treatment so long as you have this trait.

ok i go back to my previous statement... it will just slower down the gameplay if alacrity is just 25% ... i mean not too much but still a bit... thats not exactly what this game needed

[Sephylon.4938]

@Robert Gee.9246 said:

@Sephylon.4938 said:Since alac is becoming a boon, will other classes gain access to the alacrity boon as well or will it still be chrono and rev that can give alac?We don't plan to add alacrity to other professions at this time.

aww :(

[Daishi.6027]

If it already gets 100% up time, and you expect chrono to keep it's up time; I don't see the point in reducing it to 25% just because other classes have little bits of access to it. Am I miss understanding something here?

If not, it would sound better to just have it be a boon that is used by it's primary distributors, instead of spreading it around and nerfing it.The exception to that being if Chrono (and by extention mesmer as a whole) is getting much better DPS after the phantasm change. Which none of us have seen so I'm not going to knock it, but I'm a bit skeptical chrono wont be at a significant net loss after losing all that sustained DPS.As we've seen with condis there is quite a large emphasis on high sustained DPS in this game.Which worries me even more since it's likely that will pigeon hole mesmer into condi for decent DPS, after losing phants for illusions that scale better with condis in general, and a 8% loss on alacrity.

[Adriaen.7895]

What is the condition corresponding to the new alacrity boon?

[Sephylon.4938]

@Adriaen.7895 said:What is the condition corresponding to the new alacrity boon?

in my opinion, it would make sense for it to convert to chill since chill increases your cds and alac reduces it.

[Titan.8215]

Chrono received several nerfs along HoT, some of them huges, and now this. Nerfing alacrity from 33% to 25% feels bad. I think that converting the alacrity from class only to boon was fair enough. I need to see the changes, but at this moment I'm disappointed. This big rework to the class (not only alacrity, the phantams changes) have to be done carefully, because you are changing a class for a lot of people that they liked it from 2012.

[Laila Lightness.8742]

Add the boon to all pls too enable all proffesions the chance on playing the role and way they want

[Donari.5237]

@Robert Gee.9246 said:

@"Sephylon.4938" said:Since alac is becoming a boon, will other classes gain access to the alacrity boon as well or will it still be chrono and rev that can give alac?We don't plan to add alacrity to other professions at this time.

You mean other than in one offs like in the OP "You'll find alacrity in some unexpected places, such as the Thief's stolen bundle "Consume Plasma," and on the condition conversion list for skills like "Contemplation of Purity." " ?

[Faaris.8013]

Hmm, I'm mainly playing thief. Alacrity does almost nothing to me, so I don't really care if you'll add it to "Consume Plasma". What my thief needs is quickness, but you are taking that away from the chrono. Since chrono is always part of a party, this means a thief in that party will be weaker than before. For other dps classes, alacrity is important and the chrono will still provide that. It's already hard to keep up with the other dps classes.

I think if you do that without providing any other source of quickness for thief, this will be another step to remove this class from group content. So far, I can show that my dps is good enough to be valuable in instanced content. If it drops by 30% because I get not enough quickness anymore, I think I will switch to engineer myself to not be the joke in the party. Sure, there are other classes that can provide quickness, but we all know that chrono will be No 1. I'll not be able to make people play support firebrand just so I can do more dps. They'll just ask me to play something else.

[Bugabuga.9721]

Feel sad that effectiveness is getting a significant nerf. Primary concern is that all raid rotations are going to be impacted and this is basically large nuke to damage output. This is going to impact CM fractals a lot as well, given bosses large HP values makes everything longer and more tedious. Raid-wise, stretegies for tank might get mega-nuked (block/evade for say Deimos might get mismatched and be not yet up for next attack due to cooldowns). Was that taken into account?

[NICENIKESHOE.7128]

I suspect Seize the Moment will be used instead of chronophantasma as part of the raid rotation, but if quickness is getting a hit could have a look at that trait @Robert Gee.9246 ? Since the PvP change to res speed it was rarely used in any end game content because it filled a very niche role that chronomancer already covered very good without it. Changing chronophantasma's functionality suddenly makes it look appealing is, for the lack of word to describe, quite disheartening.

Anyway I'm a bit neutral on this. I have quite a lot of gears for boon duration so whether this is a good/bad changes will be based on base values. And making it a boon allows signet of inspiration to continue it during raid rotations. However by changing iAvenger to one use only will mean these phantasm skills need more impact to balance out loss of sustain use.

[Blinkin The Blind.3190]

Well, Quickness was turned into a boon, now Alacrity. Why not just make Invisibility a boon too. Judging by how many people depend on it and how boon conversion appears to be the flavor of the game these days.Steal and Consume Plasma are already broken enough. No need to add more to them.

[Knamliss.9148]

@Daishi.6027 said:If it already gets 100% up time, and you expect chrono to keep it's up time; I don't see the point in reducing it to 25% just because other classes have little bits of access to it. Am I miss understanding something here?

I think what they're trying to convey is 100% uptime on alacrity that's 25% effective is better than 70-80% or less uptime on alacrity that's 33% effective. It being a boon means it'll be easier to keep up because it can be shared with SoI. But they've also stated that the Improved Alacrity trait will be changed to still give you the previous 33% at a loss of your own personal duration. It wont' be safer, but it'll be better to use on bosses that you know you can keep uptime on easily.

[Nebilim.5127]

What about the confusion change? Will that affect pve? Is the clone mirage build in danger?

[Bugabuga.9721]

@Nebilim.5127 said:What about the confusion change? Will that affect pve? Is the clone mirage build in danger?

With Phantasm changes, technically every build is a clone build now ?

[Xyonon.3987]

@"TwilightSoul.9048" said:I'm wondering about Quickness uptime for Chronomancer now since they replaced Quickness on Tides of Time with AlacrityI am guessing you are talking about uptime for a raid group and not personal quickness uptime? When we checked current raid builds we found that quickness uptime was already higher than 100%. Removing it from Tides of Time should still allow full uptime, though it may be a little more difficult to run without Time Warp now.

I really enjoy being able to play accoringly to the Raid boss - like sometimes less than 100% boon duration or duelling/illusion. It would be sad to see only one build viable from now on, don't you think?

What would be helpful tho would be a stat combiantion of Power>Concentration=Ferocity in combination with Danger Time. Unless you want Chronos to never reach 10k DpS anymore that is - that's your design choice. I personally just don't like the idea of preventing minmaxing. :(

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About Alacrity becoming a Boon - a very important information I'd require to create a new rotation is: How often does Alacrity stack now? 5, 8, 15 times? Will it now be able to be overwritten by longer stacks aswell?

The effectivity reduction of 33% to 25% makes a Continuum Split delay by 4.33s (90s cd). I think the impact of this is too small to be a serious change. Either you have to say "Alacrity is way too strong we have to nerf it harshly" (which it isn't anymore) like you did after release from 66% to 33% or you have to agree that the change you are making now is nothing but a little nuisance. It will just annoy all players rotations like Holo: currently Forge 3, 4, 5x aa, 3, 4 will now just be gambling for the last "4" being fully channeled. It won't change anything really, so just leave it at 33% so current healthy rotations won't be screwed.

[obastable.5231]

@Robert Gee.9246 said:

@Vermillion.4061 said:What about Frenzy Sigil which is used on almost every weapon in WvW, is that sigil going to be adjusted to?Yes, this sigil will be receiving a functionality change that causes it to give flat recharge reduction instead of alacrity.

Any word on the duration of this? If it's being changed from a boon to a flat duration we lose out big time on being able to co-ordinate alacrity in our groups and stack that up-time like we currently can, so how big of a nerf are we talking here? :disappointed: Will it at least be 25% recharge reduction for 6 seconds on a 10s ICD? Will it be more than this? >.>