Path of Exile 2: Chronomancer Sorceress Ascendancy Explained

This guide focuses on the Chronomancer Ascendancy for the Sorceress, covering their Unique Skills and Skill Interactions.

Stormweaver Overview

The Chronomancer is a Caster that specializes in the use of time-related Spells to aid them in combat.

Chronomancers get access to the unique spells Time Snap, Time Freeze, and Temporal Rift. These allow a Chronomancer to Reset their Cooldowns, Stop enemies in their tracks, and rewind time for themselves to get an advantage in combat.

Additionally, Chronomancers can alter time around them to Slow Enemies, Cast Faster, and reset cooldowns. However these effects are limited in range, happen periodically, or happen by chance making them slightly less powerful than the Spells they command.

Now and Again

Now and Again gives Chronomancers a chance to not consume their cooldowns 33% of the time when used.

This can be exceptionally powerful in combination with multiple powerful cooldown skills, allowing them to be used more often on occasion. If luck is in our favor, we can repeatedly cast these skills making them feel closer to a spammable skill.

Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. If it happens to never trigger, or at least do so very little, then we’ve spent Ascendancy Points on nothing essentially. It’s for this unreliable nature that if we do opt to take it, it’s usually to reach Unbound Encore.

Unbound Encore

Unbound Encore grants the skill Time Snap, allowing Chronomancer to reset their cooldown instantly.

This helps to balance out the unreliable nature of Now and Again, giving you an on-demand way to reset cooldowns. Time Snap itself does have a length cooldown of its own which can be skipped by Now and Again, bringing more value to Now and Again.

Similarly to Now and Again, it’s best used alongside multiple cooldown skills. It’s best to use when all cooldowns are exhausted, granting more uptime to all of them. On rare occasions, it can be used to reset just one very important cooldown skill, even if others are still off cooldown.

Ultimate Command

Ultimate Command grants the Time Freeze Skill, stopping time enemies in place for a short duration.

Time Freeze is a very good defensive skill, as it gives plenty of time to either clear enemies, or reposition to a safer location. It has a very lengthy cooldown and reduces its own duration if cast on the same enemy in a 30-second window.

This is a skill that should be used sparingly, as the lengthy cooldown alone makes it hard to use often when not paired with Now and Again or Time Snap. Paired with those skills though, it’s a good example of a skill that’s worth expending Time Snap’s cooldown to reset.

Footprints in the Sand

Footprints in the Sand grants the Temporal Rift Skill, allowing the Chronomancer to return to a previous point in time. This moves them to where they were up to 4 seconds ago and sets their Life, Energy Shield, and Mana Levels to where they were at that time.

Temporal Rift is an amazing utility skill, as its short cooldown allows for frequent use of it. This allows it to be more freely used to get out of bad positions or restore Life and Mana.

The only downside to using this skill often is having to constantly keep track of where we’ll end up. This is eased by the Afterimages it creates, but it can still be a lot to keep track of in the middle of combat until we adapt to it.

Quicksand Hourglass

Quicksand Hourglass grants the Sands of Time Skill, a buff that modifies our Cast Speed and Area of Effect. Over 10 seconds, the Cast Speed bonus will start at 60% and shrink over this duration down to 1%, while the Area of Effect bonus will start at 1% and Increase over this duration up to 60%.

This skill is going to be very tough to work with, but it has potential. Both bonuses it provides are great, but making them stay and meaningful numbers for long period of time isn’t going to be effective. Increasing duration should extend the window each buff is at its strongest, but also comes at the cost of slowing down the whole cycle.

With the instant weapon swap added in 0.3.0, we could also set up a weapon set that slows down the clock when we want it to be slower, and use the other weapon set to speed it up. This would be very tricky to balance, but it might be the best way to get the most out of this skill.

However, if we speed up the cycle by reducing the skill’s duration, this will instead create large jumps in the bonus, while also making them more frequent. If we were to reduce the duration by half, the full cycle would take 5 seconds, with an overall change of ~12% each second compared to the normal ~6%.

Assuming this changes once a second rather than every server tick as needed, this faster cycle results in a higher average bonus over the duration. This average continues to increase as we continue to reduce the overall time. But this does still come with the downside that the speed at which it changes may be harder to capitalize on.

Apex of the Moment

Apex of the Moment Slows all enemies in our Presence by 20%, which covers a large area around us.

Slows are a great defensive tool and having one that’s effectively an Aura around you without having to use Spirit to do so makes it even better. It’s not a particularly strong Slow, but we can’t complain about it being free.

This has good synergy with Curses and other delayed skills as well, providing a consistent crowd-control effect and making it far easier to land them on moving enemies. Similarly, it also helps keep enemies in Damage over Time (DoT) effects for longer.

The Rapid River

The Rapid River reduces the duration of Recoup to 4 seconds from 8 seconds.

This brings the Recoup Duration to the base Recoup Duration of POE1, making it far more viable to use as a defensive layer. It will take much more investment compared to POE to get this working as a defensive option for most classes, but this helps the Chronomancer to require much less to get it working in general.

It may not be strong enough to be the main defensive layer currently, even with this buff, but worth using nonetheless. Future Unique items could further tip this balance toward making it stronger.

Inevitability

Inevitability grants the Inevitable Agony Skill, causing a curse that stores damage from hits. This damage is dealt again once the curse expires.

At face value, this seems like a terrible curse to use since it does nothing interesting on its own. However, paired with Hexblast it might be an interesting combo. This allows it to detonate the skill on demand, as long as half the duration has expired.

The obvious flaw here is that Hexblast isn’t the greatest skill, as we have to wait for half the curse to expire. However, with enough Area on both skills, we can make each cast of Hexblast feed into the stored damage of each curse around it, ramping more and mor as it continues to chain and feed into the next enemies. Alongside Hexbloom Support to continue the chain, this should be fairly comfortable once it gets going.