Man, I love guild wars 2. Too bad my characters can’t be gender goals 'cause they’re all charr, except for my meme-y salad man named “wyrd sahlud”. I just wish their balance team wasn’t so shit. I still haven’t returned after they absolutely butchered my beloved Chronomancer.
I’ve been loving my power support Chrono lately for solo, story and open world play.
Good mix of melee and range plus good CC, a bit of active defense, and perma alacrity and near perma quickness to you and 5 friends.
It’s not the be-all-end-all like it was in the HoT days, but it holds its own while being far less stressful to play.
If you’re refering to the time they removed quickness/alac combo, it was absolutely deserved. Back then, the only 2 supports were chrono druid, now you have much more variety. The nerf to distortion share was also deserved as it trivialized many raid mechanics. Besides these two things, chrono is still very viable, even in the hardest of content. PvP/WvW roaming burst is great, support in zerg is still very common. It can also be played as a decent power alacrity dps or pure dps in PvE.
It’s true however some patch notes are kinda bad, like a few months ago deadeye went from full dps 44k benchmark to quickness support 49k to all builds below 40k. This patch balance is really good however, and as someone who played since launch, I’d say it’s better than it’s ever been.
I’m referring to when they removed lesser signet of inspiration. The thing I liked about Chrono was that it was able to function as a hard support, taking care of boons and whatnot. I also really, really liked the fact that the meta builds were able to incorporate the shield and a couple wells. Like, there are too many elite specs where their “meta” builds don’t actually incorporate their elite spec weapon or abilities, only the spec’s skill tree. Finally, the spec just felt good to play because it felt very intuitive once you got the basic idea of how to maximize your boon uptime; lesser signet of inspiration meant you wanted to make sure your phantasms got boons, because when the phantasms expired, they’d give their boons back to you, which you could then give to allies using signet of inspiration.
I honestly think a better solution would have been to buff other classes that already had supporting potential than to nerf the shit out of Chrono. It just stopped feeling good to play and felt more like a rollercoaster where you spend time smacking something with a stick while you wait for everything to come off cool down, dump everything at once, and then wait a minute or two again.
Edit: I guess to use a Dota analogy, the way I saw chrono was that it was like Witch Doctor or Dazzle (hard supports, their skills are highly focused on buffing or assisting allies), but there weren’t really any other Witch Doctors or Dazzles, so it was OP in comparison. Had there been other Witch Doctors or Dazzles, it wouldn’t have seemed as OP.
Edit 2: there was also a lot of hate, toxicity and entitlement towards Mesmer players in general, which was starting to get to me. Mesmers aren’t NPCs and don’t owe you shit. I’ll drop a portal for you out of the goodness of my heart, don’t start bitching at me because I forgot or because the portal timed out and I can’t be assed redoing the jumping puzzle for you. I was on EU servers though (that’s where most of my friends were at the time), US servers might be nicer.
I don’t particularly remember the changes you’re refering to unfortunately, mesmer wasn’t the class I played the most. I agree however that it’s annoying that you get new skills with the spec but practically no build uses them.
I mostly only do weekly raid cms and WvW nowadays and honestly I find that you don’t need the “meta build” most of the time. For example, soulbeast has access to stances and while no meta build uses them, I often use dolyak stance for stability because I know my healer will likely forget, or the moa stance to pad out boon duration that my squad is likely missing. The dps loss is negligible anyway, but builds don’t mention that.
I disagree with buffing everything else rather than nerfing one thing however. This is how you get powercreep, and the game already has too much as it is.
As for NA-EU toxicity, I never played on EU so I wouldn’t know, but one thing’s for sure, EU is way more elitist. They will kick new players the instant they fail a mechanic, ask for li… Asking for li in raids died years ago on NA, still ongoing on EU…
