The Chronowarden tree doesn't add a new spell, instead it focused on enhancing and improving every part of the base kit of the spec.

Where does your healing come from

Your main sources of healing in dungeons will be ve, sb and db. You will combine these in different ways and add echoes into the mix depending on how much time you have to prepare for mechanics and how much healing you need to do.

sb is a short-ish cooldown aoe burst heal that will smartly pick the three players with the least amount of hp and heal them alongside your target. Most of the time you want to cast sb on yourself for two reasons: First because of how our mastery works, casting sb on yourself means you get healed by it a couple of milliseconds before everyone else, which means your mastery will be active when healing the other targets. And second due to lb a lot of the time you will be transferring healing done to yourself to everyone else.

db is a frontal cone heal that has two components, one part of it it's done instantly at the moment you cast and the rest is done over time. The higher you empower it the stronger the initial heal gets at the cost of a shorter (and thus weaker) heal over time. Most of the time you will cast db at rank 1 due to it being your best tool to respond to burst damage, while upranking it is usually not needed because sb and ve occupy that role. In the scenarios where you don't have other options available you should uprank it as needed.

ve is a very versatile spell. If buffs your db by giving you coy, it can increase sb healing via lb and it also does very strong healing on it's own combined with s24p. Using ve correctly is one of the hardest parts of mastering Preservation, as juggling all the different uses of the spell appropriately while also leveraging it as a movement tool without wasting part of it or killing yourself in the process is a complicated thing.

Important things to know

• s24p reduces the cooldown of ve and makes it apply insurance. This makes echoing ve very strong as you can do it very often and can be strong enough to cover some damage events by itself. On top of this insurance doesn't scale with echo strength which means even ta echoes apply full power insurances.
• Both sb and db will do extra up-front healing thanks to afterimg. You don't have to actively do anything about it as it will happen on it's own but you should remember that both empowers will also heal three targets with chronof and this can also lead to some bursts being generated.
• lb doesn't care about range, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to heal people far away, you can echo them preemptively and then ve when the damage hits, followed by healing yourself to transfer healing to them as needed while they are out of range. ec is particularly good for this.
• For Chronowarden tts also gives you tempburst which makes it way stronger at helping you recover from emergencies.
• zephyr and tg are very important tools for M+ that you shouldn't forget about.

Gameplay

You will be using sb and ve to heal burst damage, and db to cover rot damage. Every db you cast should be buffed by coy, and sb can be echoed directly or fed into lb depending on the situation.

You should use your empowers often and frequently but also being careful to not overcommit short cooldowns making you run out of healing. Pace yourself and only use resources as needed. Both sb and db keep healing over time after the initial application so you have to notice when it's ok to not cast anything else and just let your heal over time do the work.

ta is used as a quick way to apply echo to the whole group to make your follow up healing stronger, but manually casting echo on the group results in a bigger increase. You will choose between one or the other depending on how much healing the specific situation you find yourself in requires and how much time do you have to prepare echoes for it. The only important consideration for choosing ta echoes as opposed to manually applied one gp and insurance do not scale to echo strength and are full power regardless of how you apply them.

Conclusions

Chronowarden is the go-to spec for Preservation in Mythic+. It is strong, very versatile and does a decent amount of damage. It is also somewhat hard to play effectively, as it requires a good mix of planning to set up properly before damage comes in and also a decent amount of adaptability to react to unexpected situations without getting thrown off your game plan.

Flameshaper adds engulf to our kit. This spell is filled with little interactions mainly with db that make it's usage very important to get right. engulfing a target with db will cause consume, on top of that fsiphon will reduce the cooldown of db and fb every time you engulf.

Where does your healing come from

Your main sources of healing in dungeons will be ve, sb and db. You will combine these in different ways and add echoes into the mix depending on how much time you have to prepare for mechanics and how much healing you need to do.

On top of that, engulf can be used both as a decently powerful single target heal by stacking heal over time effects on a target, and also as an aoe healing tool when combined with lb and proccing consume.

The main tradeoff Flameshaper has in contrast to Chronowarden is that most of your kit is a little bit weaker. Your empowers lack afterimg and sb is missing reverb. You need to compensate for this by the extra power on db and leveraging engulf and cinders properly.

It might seem like this adds another layer of complexity to how you need to approach damage events because you have extra pieces to try and solve the puzzle, but in reality this extra tools are very simple to use and the extra power baked on db means you don't need to be as precise with your timing due to having a strong heal over time with a decent uptime available.

Important things to know about

• fulm makes db heal in 20% less time (down to 12.8 seconds on a rank 1 db) while doing the same total healing over the whole duration. This doesn't increase the healing of db but it does so for consume. You need to keep in mind this duration as consume will remove 2 seconds from the remaining duration meaning if you plan to use two engulfs you need to do so in the following 8 seconds after casting db, anything later and it will fall off early.
• s24p reduces the cooldown of ve and makes it apply insurance. This makes echoing ve very strong as you can do it very often and can be strong enough to cover some damage events by itself. On top of this insurance doesn't scale with echo strength which means even ta echoes apply full power insurances.
• lb doesn't care about range, if you find yourself in a situation where you need to heal people far away, you can echo them preemptively and then ve when the damage hits, followed by healing yourself to transfer healing to them as needed while they are out of range. ec is particularly good for this.
• fsiphon will reduce the cooldown of db by 6 seconds every time you engulf. If you are using stasis to send four engulfs in quick succession this will reduce the current cooldown on db by 24 seconds, letting you cast it again almost instantly after releasing the stasis. db is a really strong spell and you don't want to waste uses of it so be mindful of how the cooldown reduction affects its availability

Gameplay

You will be using sb, engulf and ve to heal burst damage, and db to cover rot damage. Every db you cast should be buffed by coy, and sb can be echoed directly or fed into lb depending on the situation. engulf should ideally always be send into lb and must always hit a db to cause consume.

You should use your all your short cooldowns often and frequently but also being careful to not overcommit them making you run out of healing. Pace yourself and only use resources as needed. engulf has two charges so it's ok to keep one rolling most of the time unless you think you're gonna need both charges soon, and db is really powerful so when you cast it you should be mindful or letting the spell do it's healing over time and not commit extra unnecessary resources making it overheal.

cinders is a very important part of your toolkit and you need to use it frequently on any important high single target damage over time effects that you come across. It is specially potent on tanks that are bound the take very high amounts of damage in short periods of time.

ta is used as a quick way to apply echo to the whole group to make your follow up healing stronger, but manually casting echo on the group results in a bigger increase. You will choose between one or the other depending on how much healing the specific situation you find yourself in requires and how much time do you have to prepare echoes for it. The only important consideration for choosing ta echoes as opposed to manually applied one gp and insurance do not scale to echo strength and are full power regardless of how you apply them.

Conclusions

Flameshaper has received substantial improvements compared to what it was in season one in what respects to mythic+ performance. However it still seems to fall short of what a well played Chronowarden can do, and so it isn't really recommended to consider the tree as the go-to for keys. It is much better and can be an enjoyable change of playstyle, but it's still lacking in certain ways on top of doing much lower damage.