Interested in starting a Chronomancer build. What are pros/cons I need to be aware of? Which type of builds have strengths & weaknesses (chaos vs temperalis, vs time, etc).
Curious but struggling with a starting direction. Any thoughts help
Chronomancer is very weak. Not non-viable, but you will basically be playing the game on hard mode. Slow clear and limited damage scaling without extreme investment. If you're making a fun off meta build, chrono presents some interesting possibilities. If you're trying to farm currency (maximize dmg + clear speed), you would be 1000x better off putting that investment into a blood mage.
The current meta for any spellcaster is roughly blood mage > oracle > varashta/stormweaver.
recoup is great, wont protect oneshots tho.
I think Chrono would actually work really well as a base for incinerate/oil grenade. The ability to (1) never have to worry about scaling damage and (2) literally stop time while the burn ticks up plus (3) the free pbaoe slow aura means you can index hard on defensive abilities.
Witch hunter is a beast with incinerate/oil but I think if you wanted to make Chrono work you could do it there too.
Chrono is fun. Recoup CoC frostbolt is a blast and easy to set up. I used bow/talisman through campaign on leaguestart then pivoted once I could afford the recoup gear needed. Should be easy to setup, but will take big investment to clear big temple (duh)
Paintmasterpoe on YouTube has a really good guide and even a calculator to help solve mana.
For attack based builds you can use the curse and time freeze. Literally whichever skill you want. I used ice shot with mirage archer and cooldown reset to have like 3 up on bosses in interludes.
paintmasterpoe on youtube has some decent builds for chrono. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBhkF3ROsrY also this build looks pretty cool. i havent played it so idk how hard it is to set up, but it looks juiced. but idk i think the people saying chrono is weak havent really played it. i do agree that blood mage is objectively stronger in terms of damage numbers on tooltips, but chrono has great utility and honestly the damage difference doesnt really matter in the current state of the game. I played chrono and blood both this league and they both felt fine. The time freeze is awesome for bossing, and being able to reset your energy sheild with ekko ult feels really good. glhf!
I've started as Chrono this league. If you go down the recoup rabbit hole you can sort your defenses and sustain in a really nice way, the main con being that recoup nodes on the tree are very spread out and mostly located in the upper area. There are also a couple of uniques that are mandatory for this choice (body armour and belt) meaning you give up all the interesting gear choices for these pieces. Finding enough damage under these constraints will be challenging.
Sands of time is huge if you think about it, any skill that benefits from cast speed and AoE is a good choice, and if you check the values of other nodes on the tree that provide one or the other, you will instantly realize that it's a very powerful node. The issue is obviously that it will be going up and down constantly, it's very noticeable while actually playing it. Consider it as an "on average 30%" buff and it's still good for the right skills.
Cooldowns avoidance: this would have been good to spam strong skills with long cooldowns, unfortunately the main candidate (flameblast) was nerfed last league and required a specific staff-only skill (solar orb) to make it nice.
Inevitable agony: good dps boost IF you get the time right and IF you invest enough into curse magnitude. Unfortunately the best scenario to use it is against bosses which have reduced curse effect against them. Too many hoops to go through to get a not-so-meaningful dps boost while other builds can just deliver all the damage immediately.
Enemies are slow: great defensive layer if you stack it with blasphemy temp chains and slow effectiveness.
I have tried the other nodes only briefly and they all felt a bit clunky to use.
I got bored at this stage in the league and decided to spend many of my hard earned divines on a small project. Wouldn't it be funny to stack Energy shield for a min-level char? [https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/1a027](https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/1a027) Tabula rasa has relevant jewel mods noted on it in POB so the math actually works out since it doesn't seem to work properly in POB. second screenshot is with a lvl 29 discipline aura with 36% increased aura magnitude - I didn't wanna spend another several thousand divines on a support character, I just wanted to see how well it would work theoretically >3000 ES without aurabot is possible, however, its basically impossible in practice. As of now, there are \*18\* 2 socket uncorrupted crown of thorns left on trade - on average it takes \~11 to hit a 30% and then another 1 in 3 to get a 3 socket one. Hitting a double corrupt on said 3 socket would be better then my current one, but that's not plausible sadly. Same for the boots. Hitting a better double corrupt on the gloves and focus would likely be plausible, but I couldn't buy more bases from Finn. Grip of Kulemak 59% ES \*should\* be possible, but it already took me over 40 attempts to hit 57% so I think I'll just leave it as is. Belt I didn't find any other way besides the 25% corrupt to get ES without a level requirement - if anyone has any idea tell me. Amulet could sanctify for 19/19 but again, would require silly amounts of currency (each try is \~30 div as is with annoint + sanctify + quality). I \*think\* patient barrier should be best annoint, but correct me if I'm wrong. Total investment into this character so far is about 3000 divines, probably a bit more. further thoughts \- maximum technically possible is 3112 ES at level 2 unless I'm missing something important. POB [https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/1a02a](https://poe.ninja/poe2/pob/1a02a) \- doubting this but: is it possible to get an ascendency at this low level by skipping straight to geonor with a helper? In which case it might be possible that xp penalties kicking it would allow me to ascend at lvl 2? This would allow +20% +20% (ascendency) +60% (jewel) ES, which would get me to 3218 ES (actual build) / 3732 ES (max technically possible) Did I miss anything?
I made an elemental crossbow varashta sorc this season as my starting build (goal was to exploit yoke of suffering's full potential, you can find poe ninja below, don't be fooled by the dmg tooltip, it kill ubers before they can move) and so since I was in the intel side of the tree I used my weapon swap to maximize exposure (with whispering ice) and curse magnitude. Here with some non-optimized gear I'm reaching a total of -338% res (that's -169% on bosses), meaning it's better than rakiata's. I use cursed ground support to apply the curse and icestorm (which comes with the staff) with prolonged duration and potent exposure to make the exposure last longer. This tech doesn't require much investment apart from your weapon swap and a few sockets at most so it can be plugged into many elemental builds. As it is now, it requires you to cast the spells with your weapon swap, so I use it mostly for bosses, but i might cast icestorm on bulky rares in juiced maps once in a while. If you have a skill dedicated for mapping, it'll propably better to use rakiata on it, and remove it or use another skill for bosses. Here's the poeninja: [https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/McZaatar-0907/character/Dendjala](https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/McZaatar-0907/character/Dendjala) I might make a build showcase if people are interested, it's a fun league starter build. With yoke and the electrocution node on the tree, enemies have 120% damage taken, more if they're cursed, on top of the giant res drop, plus you benefit from a lot of the "damage against enemies with ailments nodes" so that's why the tooltip is low (explosive grenades indicate 60k in game but they hit bosses for like 2M) at first I was playing with permafrost bolt with frost nexus + navira's fracture + fragmentation rounds, it was a fun combo and really strong for leveling but I couldn't scale navira's fracture damage in late game (I had command + minion nodes on my second weapon instead of the curse/exposure at the time) Hope this inspires some of you!
The Oracle Death Star is fully operational- only took 30 days of playtime. GGGs https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/L0L-breh-1628/character/ShapesofWrath