I can’t read worth kitten. It’s your fault.
#1: Foot in the Grave isn’t bad.
Yeah, I’ve used it so much in all the dungeons and fractal 50 runs I’ve done. How could I make such a silly mistake.
#2: Your entire premade build structure idea is flawed. I’m not sure anyone should bother taking reaper into a premade, because the utilities it offers are redundant and already covered by other classes. Since “trash” is irrelevant, greater cleave isn’t needed. You wouldn’t need shroud knight to stack might because you’ll already be capped. Shroud knight won’t stack vulnerability because you’re not taking Soul Reaping. So what is left? Decimate defense is nigh redundant, chilling force is redundant, blighters boon is useless, augury of death is useless, relentless pursuit is useless, chilling nova is too weak, the minors are all “bad traits”… that leaves Soul Eater, Reaper’s Onslaught, and Chill of Death. Soul Eater is meh at best, and Chill of Death is exclusive with Reaper’s Onslaught.
Yeah, who wouldn’t take soul reaping in pve. It’s not like a 5% damage modifier at the life force threshold is one of the few damage modifiers necro has, and death magic is so useful as an alternative if we’re not using Curses.
So, funny bit of trivia: the dagger auto attack outdamages reaper shroud’s auto attack, even with onslaught. The greatsword AA is only 0.66% (that is less than 1%) weaker than shroud auto with onslaught. Throw in signet of spite, and the gap widens. There’s only one reason that someone would use Shroud’s AA over the other weapons, and that is the might and vulnerability stacking from Spite and Soul Reaping respectively. Without soul reaping and with pre-capped might, there is no advantage to using Shroud AA. The only skill in reaper’s shroud that is higher than its AA is Executioner’s Scythe, which you’ll just pop in to and use every 30 seconds or so, which means onslaught contributes almost nothing to the skill. Regular Death Shroud already has a burst skill: Tainted Shackles. Its fast cast time means it has relatively high DPS, higher than Executioner’s Scythe at 25%+ health, before factoring in torment. This is also sacrificing the damage bonus from Weakening Shroud.
As it did Greatsword before the 20% buff to the greatsword skills and the 50% buff to Gravedigger. Who knew, a beta period introducing new features might have some of them undertuned that take feedback on simple numbers tweaking. Shocking.
Guess I should stop asking in my previous posts on this feedback thread to give reaper shroud the greatsword treatment. We can only fix one thing and that’s it!
But lets assume that we’re going to sacrifice all of the goodies in Curses for what is in Reaping.
And by “goodies” you mean weakening shroud, which you can’t flash effectively with reaper shroud thanks to the 1 sec icd, the also redundant fury on death shroud since you’ll have permafury from ele’s Persisting Flames, and Target The Weak.
Wow, I’m missing so much.
Yes, Decimate Defenses will cover for Target the Weak. You have to pick chilling force or reaper’s onslaught for damage. At maximum might, Deathly Chill will inflict 314 damage +50%, and 471 damage below it, for an average of 392 DPS. This can be tacked directly onto the greatsword auto, meaning 73% uptime until gravedigger spam. This isn’t including chilling nova, chill of death, or executioner’s scythe, which push the numbers up a bit, or any additional sources such as Icebow or whirl finishers. You can stop right here, since that extra 392 DPS is being tacked onto the sword, which given Signet of Spite is already more damaging than Onslaught Shroud.
392 DPS sounds just fantastic for a grandmaster. Let’s keep them that way.
I guess the short of this is, I don’t trust your judgement on what is “good” or “bad” at all.
The feeling’s kinda mutual.
#3: You’re not hypocritical. You’re inconsistent. I’m not sure if you’re talking about either under my changes or your changes or the current setup, and you change this up from point to point. Now, to talk about Dhuumfire, this is largely a PVP oriented issue, where Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper will be frequently used. With this trait setup, a shroud focused build will be able to pick decimate defenses, reaper’s onslaught, and dhuumfire at the same time. This build isn’t overpowered, so the rantings about dhuumfire come from thin air.
Yeah, now I’m pretty sure you can’t read worth crap. Point to where in my posts I said dhuumfire was overpowered.
The rantings with dhuumfire come out from the fact that originally it was a 4 second burn on a 10 sec icd on crit. A necromancer could do his normal rotation and the burn would come in it, which was also good for condition necromancers since death shroud was pretty much garbage for them with life blast.
Thanks to spvp, it was nerfed in duration, then moved over to life blast with a shortened duration. It’s been like that, considerably quicker for most necromancer builds until the advent of reaper shroud auto. It’s still crappier than before since for condition necros it involves dropping their condition build up from scepter and go into death/reaper shroud to have access to burning, essentially trading their bleed/poison stack upkeep for burning upkeep.
I didn’t say it was OP. I said your “worry” that reaper with these announced changes would have to be reeled back would be a repeat of the mistakes made with Dhuumfire.
The end.
It is an unfortunate effect that my change will necessitate a swap, but this isn’t just a loss. You get to use Deathly Chill and blighters boon alongside of Onslaught instead of exclusive with it. You also can use Decimate Defenses with Soul Eater at the same time. The only issues that really prop up are when you are using a power focused Spite/SR/R shroud-focused build. If you aren’t using that particular playstyle, then there are already obvious choices to go for that either lose very little, or gain.
Which brings us again to my whole point, why swap? Why not buff what isn’t competing in the grandmaster tier? We have so many weak/niche traits, and your answer is to justify their status by swapping them around tiers.
You just said above, you’re not sure why anyone would bring a reaper to a meta premade. So make the kitten changes (aka buffs) on the deficient traits and weapons/shroud skills.
#4: Sigil of Night doesn’t always work. It is only good if you’re running specific dungeons, in which case general builds might as well go out the door. Besides, I suggested Sigil of Accuracy as a general example. There’s more than that. I balanced on the current stats of my necro, but it goes further than that. Calculating out a full zerker ascended with precise infusions, this sits at 56% crit chance. I also noticed that a sharpening stone is only a 2.7% damage increase at max might, so if I switch that out with a maintenance oil, that comes to a 61% crit rate, resting. So, add fury, 81%. Add banner, 89%. Add Target the Weak + 5 conditions, 99%.
Sigil of the night works in 5 of 9 dungeons and 5 out of 14 fractals. It’s not some niche scenario. Dungeon runners carry the mob-specific damage bonus sigils to swap in in entire stacks, they’re virtually dead cheap to replace.
In any other case you can also afford to take sigil of energy for more challenging fractals, given that necromancer’s lacking on vigor uptime and your only other choice is endurance regen+might on dodge food.
#5
and you call them myopic, because god forbid a person who only plays PvE cares only for PvE balance, much like spvp and WvW folk do
That is the definition of myopic. Its actually worse than that. You’re talking about premade meta dungeon runs exclusively. What about overworld? What about casual runs? What about solo dungeon runs? But I digress: the reason why the devs and players are so focused around PVP balance is because it is actually a competition, with winners and losers. However, the devs and players are wrong in this. They should also be concerned about PVE as well. Them being wrong doesn’t give PVE players an excuse to be wrong themselves. That’s hypocrisy.
Of course I’m talking about premade dungeon runs in PvE exclusively. Are you under the delusion that overworld PvE is even balanced? It’s a zerg train, with little requirements for coordination or class make up. You can brute force most overworld PvE and even WvW with zergs.
That leaves us PVE dungeons and SPVP. You assume that we HAVE to make room for balancing that accommodates the formats. This is impossible, no side will be satisfied. You have one format in which we strive to do the most damage possible on mobs with tons of HP, and another format in which performance can be disrupted by opposing players who have at most 23k hp.
You can’t come up with solutions on damage output when the hp pools and behaviors of both formats are so vastly different. The mesmer’s design is a prime example of this. Seemingly great burst in spvp, and sustained damage is not so important there when you burst can do 80% of most opponent’s hp. The mesmer’s wimpy autoattacks and blurred frenzy damage are of no issue there. meanwhile in PvE, the amazing mind wrack burst is not so amazing, greatsword (and the nerfed mirror blade bounce) is not used at all, and mesmer is one of the lowest damage classes in need of damage buffs.
So split the balancing. World of Warcraft is doing that this very expansion, a PvP exclusive skillset with its own balance concerns.
And WoW is LATE to the party. GW1 already did this so many years ago, and to good effect. GW2 is a pale shadow of what people came up with in GW1, because the formats were allowed to flourish on their own without strangling each other.
The very reason mesmer/ranger/necro are where they are, is the constant struggle between spvp balancing and PvE. Spirits for rangers have always been inferior warrior banners that can be killed, but they were nerfed even more for the sake of spvp that complained about spirit rangers until they were nerfed out of the meta.
Split the formats already. I’m not being myopic, I want to enjoy my format with some semblance of PvE class balance after 3 years of waiting.
#6: Thus, my main complaint with your suggestion regarding moving around Soul Eater is that you aren’t trying to create a balanced trait line. You’re shoving personally inconvenient traits into obscure places to let them die, and not even thinking about what it might do to other game modes.
They wouldn’t be dying if they were actually worth taking. Look at Chronomancer, most of them are actually tough decisions because you WANT many of them. Because they’re good, not just “OK”.
#7: I’ll admit I misread what you meant about the shout. When you said “it becomes terrible”, you were referring to Augury of Death in regards to the bonus it gives to the healing shout. I thought you meant the heal as a whole becomes terrible even with Augury of Death.
Finally. This has been the core problem of the shouts, they are balanced in a way that makes them immediately discarded in PvE.
Let’s not fool ourselves, necromancer utility options in WvW and spvp are vast. People use wells, epidemic, corrupt boon, spectral wall, flesh wurm. And now maybe even shouts (most of them won’t be used in PvE since the benefits don’t scale weel with bosses and said benefits are selfishly defensive in nature).
Shouts were our opportunity to bring something to a group in PvE and bosses in particular outside wells, and they made ours SELFISH; they in general do less than the Tempest shouts, which are instant, provide group benefits, and in the case of feel the burn actually do more damage than any of our shouts with their silly cast times for some reason.
Lich Form was marginally useful in PvE, and it was NERFED for spvp’s sake, without fixing the useless skills outside the autoattack.
This is what drives PvE Necromancers mad, that few of our feedback about the class’s lackings in PvE were addressed. The greatsword changes signal a good direction, but our traits, utilities, and reaper shroud need rethinking to accommodate PvE concerns. And utilities like shouts and related traits like augury of death/reaper’s pursuit do nothing, as does the specialization’s focus on chill when chill isn’t even an attractive condition in PvE.
