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.