Guild Wars 2

I leveled up a necro to 80 based on the first preview and reaper overview.

I’ve been building gear, learning the new skills, recording video of my gameplay to try to see what I’m doing wrong, etc.

I know there are lots of folks who aren’t happy about the changes, and I’m definitely wondering what heal I’m going to really end up using. But I also recognize that a ton of work has gone into these changes, and that they are really trying to make the profession more fun and make the traits more powerful.

I’m eager to try everything out, and I’m hopeful that ArenaNet can monitor and make adjustments quickly. With the amount of change in this patch, it’s basically guaranteed that some things will break and some things will be overpowered. Hopefully, there will be very regular updates over the coming weeks.

Anyway, since there are so many negative posts, I just wanted to say that I’m thankful to have something to look forward to, and I hope that things work out for all the professions to be happy with the update.

Didn’t mean to make this a question – sorry about that

I’m mixed on the updates myself.

I wrote at great lengths once about how I hated necro traits, but I’ll give an anecdote on that fact. One day, I decided to do dungeons on my necro. So, I switched from WvW condi gear into full zerker, reset my traits, and then when I saw someone was doing a 3-path run of HotW I quickly jumped up and joined.

After going through all 3 paths of HotW, I was going through my gear and traits when I noticed something: I never picked out my traits. I just reset them, and then went into dungeons. I went through 3 dungeons, and I never even noticed that I was missing every single trait + 1600 stat points. That is how minor and inconsequential all of the necro traits were. I couldn’t even imagine doing something like that with my mesmer/thief/engi/guard/ele, where I would’ve noticed immediately that some crucial traits were missing.

So many of our traits have gone from literally useless to kind of interesting. Prime example being the spite line adept traits: Parasitic Bond (heal when killing a foe, mostly useless) is becoming Reaper’s Might, a trait I would purposefully take from time to time. Death Into Life (gain healing power based on power, the epitome of useless) becomes Death’s Embrace, which is an interesting idea where you start piling on vulnerability onto a mostly dead enemy. Siphoned Power (gain 5 seconds of might when struck under 25% health, highly situational and mostly useless) is changing so that against a half-dead enemy you start stacking massive amounts of might (capping at 20 stacks by itself). Granted, these aren’t as useful as the flat-rate boosts most classes get, but I still see countless situations where these traits actually mean something.

I’m looking forward to playing around with things like spiteful spirit and rending shroud. I’m looking forward to combining Signets of Suffering with Plague Sending. I’m looking forward to weakening shroud causing a passive 50% uptime of weakness with procs alone. I’m looking forward to the entire blood magic tree actually being an option, making necros have some rather unique abilities (Group siphon, no degen when downed). And finally, I’m looking forward to life blast builds possibly being a thing again, with the combination of Reaper’s Might, Rending Shroud, a newly enhanced Unyielding Blast, an enhanced Vital Shroud, and Deathly Perception.

It is a shame what happened with corruptions, consume conditions, and plague, though.

I’m super excited for both the update and the expansion.
I was just running over the build creator on Dulfy and I managed to make an awesome build that I’m excited to try out when HoT comes out. Its a Reaper build that uses Reaper, Blood Magic, and Soul Reaping to potentially keep you in Reaper Shroud for 100% up-time as long as you’re good at dodging damage spikes.

I’m hoping this patch makes things a lot more viable. Finally, you can be a little bit more supportive by just taking the Blood Magic tree. I don’t feel like I’m totally gimping myself out because it doesn’t only revolve around siphoning now.

Honestly, I’m looking forward to HoT. Why? So I can compile a good weeks worth of playtime into a two minute MLG kill montage full of perfect situations, and make the entire community rage about Reaper.

All with airhorn spam, hit markers and the dankest memes ever to hit the internet. Look at all those spinning moves, Reaper is just MADE to 360 noscope!

Yeah, I’m looking forward to not having a decent heal or elite skill