The B- minus (and easier) Soulless Horror GW2 strategy

Background: I've recently taken to raiding 1-2 times a week in GW2 as part of my goal of eventually acquiring a legendary for each gear slot. Something that's equal parts frustrating and puzzling is how GW2 players play: essentially, the wisdom of the internet (snow crows, meta battle) says "play a glass cannon, run as many dps as possible, and try not to die" This is terrible advice. Yes, it's true, higher DPS means faster clear times and potentially less time for a screw up. But 90% of the time, this requires really really really good technical timing from players. The GW2 community, as a whole, is terrible at replicating snow crows' results, especially when timing comes into play. I don't want to rag on them completely, their builds are good starting places, but the GW2 community needs to understand that they're making a lot of PVE content 100x harder than is necessary, because alot of them, whether they like it or not, are not as "l33t" as they believe they are, and if they can't replicate "l33t" players in a given circumstance, they're really just wiping more than they should.

Soulless horror strategy (modified from conventional wisdom):

3 healers: Note, it's best to have an alacrity renegade healer as one (this will make up for the chronos' changes below). I also highly recommend a tempest as another for condition cleansing, as this fight can get very condition damage (condi) heavy. This also makes your heal druid, if they're the pusher as well, have a much easier time as they can focus on push tormented dead off of the platform. This set up essentially makes your group much durable and your chrono tanks' lives much easier. What's normal is 2 healers, one is a pusher

Chronomancer (chrono) tanks don't continuum split (CS can easily kill you because of all the fatal mechanics, even if you cancel early) & run seize the moment -> Seize the moment will help make up for the fact that your chronos aren't using continuum split to double-well on your well boons. They should also take time warp for extra quickness. Basically just don't die and pay attention to wells. Obviously, spam your boon support abilities when off CD, but this makes things much easier as you can just focus on using your block ability and sword distort ability when there's an attack as you're tanking. As a chrono tank I also took well of eternity for extra condi cleansing and clutch healing.

Here is our DPS report:
https://dps.report/Jbns-20200523-042114_sh

If you actually do the math on our clear time & boss health, our group DPS was around ~95k. Good dps can pull 30-40K on their own. Given condition damage isn't properly recorded, we probably had 1 top tier DPS and the rest I would argue were average or even sub par. There is a boss timer, so you can't completely be lazy, but the community needs to understand what "good enough" in terms of DPS looks like and focus on survivability outside it. Snow crows and metabattle should try to advertise this as well. I believe our PVE could even get puggable on some level if they did that.

As a side note, what no one explained to me when I was chrono tank the first time was that standing in front of the boss when you don't have up taunt means you're taking more damage and can renew your stacks (making it so when you take agro again, you die), moving away from the front of the boss is crucial to staying alive.

Basically as long as your DPS and other players can interrupt the horror's fear, and correctly dodge mechanics, you should have no trouble with this boss. This boss (unlike harder ones like Largos twins) is not a DPS rush and if you take your time & make your life easy, it becomes a piece of cake when you have the right set up.

Also as a note on Meta-battle and snow crows builds: There are often runes and exotics with the same stat setups that you see on the site. It is not 100% necessary to have full ascended gear when raiding & there are often very close rune combinations that can be used instead of the ones on the site. Search for the most important stats that mimic the ones you see.

For chrono tank specifically, Maklains, even crafted exotics, are prohibitively expensive. Purchase giver's instead and run some Nomad's trinkets and/or back with some diviner's in the trinkets slot. This worked fine for me for both having the toughness, vitality, and boon duration needed. Also note that selectable stat exotics are earnable through strikes and visions of steel as well as ranked PVP. So even if you're not a crafter, you can get your armor that way. My chrono tank set up is Giver's: All armor & weapons, Maklain's from selectable stat exotic back from New Year's festival, crafted nomad's earrings and Diviner's neck & rings from my power boon support DPS build.