Guild Wars 2

Based on doing some fractals with Reaper. Unfortunately I didn’t think ahead before BWE started so I was only able to put 10 AR on it and do scale 10.

Reaper’s Shroud
Just gonna get this out of the way and say it’s amazing. Deals good damage, has some good personal utility, and has awesome animations.

Greatsword

Overall it needs to deal more damage to make up for the poor LF gain. The poor LF gain is a major problem because you need to pass up some nice traits in order to make up for it. Below is specific feedback on each GS ability.

Autoattack chain: Weaker than dagger chain, no LF gain. The chill has niche uses in PvE and some trait synergy. Does not justify the weak damage.

Gravedigger: Love the animation, but the damage is horrible for how long it takes. Whirl finisher is fun but not very useful.

Death Spiral: A great source of burst vulnerability and triggers siphons 6 times. No complaints about this skill. Well worth the long animation.

Nightfall: Pulsing damage, blind, cripple, dark field. Pretty good… Would be more interesting as a smoke field. Even if we had a single smoke field our stealth capabilities would be very limited but would look and feel awesome. Imagine Death’s Charge stealthing you.

Grasping Darkness: Awkward to use and a very unrewarding pull effect. My suggestion is give it a second pull that occurs after the first and deals high damage if it hits, but give enemies a moment between the two pulls to use a dodge roll or active defense. This way it can be useful in PvE (mobs don’t try to escape it) and in PvP it would become more useful when your opponent has exhausted their defenses, or at least it would force them to use an active defense if they get hit by the first pull.

Traits

Adepts: There’s nothing here that helps in PvE at all. Chilling Nova looked ok before it was nerfed. The version we got is completely useless and I’d rather just take Relentless Assault even for PvE. It doesn’t sound like PvP players are happy with Chilling Nova either, so why not remake it into a PvE centric trait?

Majors: All 3 look good on paper. However, Decimate Defenses seems to be bugged and either doesn’t function or is a lot weaker than advertised. This could be a promising trait for PvE and really needs to be fixed.

Grandmasters: Same as majors, they all look good but Reaper’s Onslaught is bugged and doesn’t function.

Minors: They both have some useful synergies. No complaints here.

Shouts
I didn’t touch them. They appear too bad/irrelevant on paper to bother. This may not be useful feedback but it’s kinda important to make new abilities actually look appealing to get people to try them.

yeah the shouts are all god aweful, like every single on is pretty terrible… The minion summoning one should summon a GW1 bone minion style minion instead of the crappy things it summons now, make it only do this in pve and still the crappy minions in pvp for balance but why not… mobs in pve don’t complaign about bs AI comps so why not make them good in pve…

I also was noticing that Decimate Defenses seemed to be bugged.

Making shouts functional and good on a single target and making the aoe component just a bonus should be a primary goal in their subsequent balance passes.

No skill should be weak/useless if there are less people around, because this is exactly the scenario with PvE bosses.

Also, the minors are garbage for PvE. Cold Shoulder is not good in PvE since it does not provide offense or group utility, the whole idea of tanking hits in PvE is flawed.

Shivers of dread is horrendously bad for PvE. Nobody fears mobs in PvE, and for good reason since it displaces the mobs away from the clumped AoE/Cleave of your group.

The Adept and Grandmaster are…..bad. Chilling Nova was the only PvE relevant trait, it was already mediocre and is now nerfed into obsolescence in that format. The other two adepts are worthless in a PvE dungeon setting.

Of the grandmasters, only the 15% attack speed in reaper shroud is of PvE relevance, and it relies on reaper shroud being a damage increase above all other sources in PvE if it is to have any value, making reapers want to stay in reaper shroud. Blighter’s Boon is simply bad for PvE, minuscule heals/life force gains amount to little of worth. Won’t even mention the other one as it’s the worst of them all.

I can only hope they’ll take surgical measures with necromancer. They keep trying to make it a chill based class when it in fact has low chill uptimes on PvE relevant, non gimmick builds, chill is useless in PvE for the most part, and Necromancer weapons are still weak across the board as is their damage and group utility.

And for a class that was in such dire need for group utility, they give wimpy selfish shouts instead while the elementalist gets the more powerful, target count independent shouts that boost their allies….

The balance between Reaper GS and Necro Dagger I want to see is something kinda like Warrior GS and Axe- 1h weapon technically has the better dps with it’s AA chain, but the GS’s larger range and burst skills keep it competitive, especially for trash mobs or taking advantage of weapon swapping. Right now it’s not there, the GS doesn’t have enough good abilities (3 and 4 are pretty, but 2 is weak for it’s cast time and 5 is just unwieldy) to justify having a weaker AA chain that dagger. I’d like to see a shorter cast time on the final strike of the AA chain as well, the importance of chill for Reaper is just too great to have to depend on such a slow attack the majority of the time.

As for shouts, YAAW is actually pretty good, with it’s might stacking and AoE weakness, as well as having a shorter base cooldown than any other Necro stunbreak. In fact, the only stunbreak that I think I would prefer over YAAW is Plague Signet, and that’s only for pvp (and this is a PvE feedback thread) “Chilled to the Bone!” is a pretty good elite too, but could use a shorter cast time and cooldown. Other than that, the biggest change should be making the rest of the Reaper shouts more like “Nothing Can Save You!”, having a larger chunk of their effects become baseline, and less emphasis in having to hit 3+ targets to make the skill worthwhile. YAAW should always give might, “Your Soul is Mine!” should generate Life force on it’s own (or at least more life force with the first target) and “Rise!” and “Suffer!” should always spawn at least one minon and remove at least one conditon, respectively.

Foefaller.1082:

The balance between Reaper GS and Necro Dagger I want to see is something kinda like Warrior GS and Axe- 1h weapon technically has the better dps with it’s AA chain, but the GS’s larger range and burst skills keep it competitive, especially for trash mobs or taking advantage of weapon swapping. Right now it’s not there, the GS doesn’t have enough good abilities (3 and 4 are pretty, but 2 is weak for it’s cast time and 5 is just unwieldy) to justify having a weaker AA chain that dagger. I’d like to see a shorter cast time on the final strike of the AA chain as well, the importance of chill for Reaper is just too great to have to depend on such a slow attack the majority of the time.

As for shouts, YAAW is actually pretty good, with it’s might stacking and AoE weakness, as well as having a shorter base cooldown than any other Necro stunbreak. In fact, the only stunbreak that I think I would prefer over YAAW is Plague Signet, and that’s only for pvp (and this is a PvE feedback thread) “Chilled to the Bone!” is a pretty good elite too, but could use a shorter cast time and cooldown. Other than that, the biggest change should be making the rest of the Reaper shouts more like “Nothing Can Save You!”, having a larger chunk of their effects become baseline, and less emphasis in having to hit 3+ targets to make the skill worthwhile. YAAW should always give might, “Your Soul is Mine!” should generate Life force on it’s own (or at least more life force with the first target) and “Rise!” and “Suffer!” should always spawn at least one minon and remove at least one conditon, respectively.

The problem with the warrior comparison is that mainhand axe does more damage than necro mainhand dagger, and it cleaves 3 targets instead of dagger’s puny 2 targte cleave.

The mainhand axe also has eviscerate.

People use Warrior greatsword for trait reasons: it might stacks, which is a central focus of phalanx Strength.

Necro dagger cannot be a baseline for comparison because necro dagger is BAD even relative to other classes.

Dagger skills 2-3 just need buffing, period. Dagger 1 could also afford to have secondary effects besides just life generation, like stealing endurance on last hit, giving Dark Pact a 1/2 sec cast time and making it inflict 10 stacks of vulnerability or provide the necro with super speed when dark pact lands.

Dagger should hit 3 targets. 2 targets is stupid when the weapon doesn’t even provide single target damage output comparable to a thief D/D or elementalist staff or warrior GS.

Make life siphon work like Death shroud #4, reduce its cast time to condense the damage in a shorter cast just like rapid Fire got its fix, and make it a 600 range aoe sustain skill.

A lot of necromancer weapons need serious buffing.

If we allow necro dagger to be the baseline by which our class is balanced, we’re screwed because PvE necro has been terrible for 3 years with dagger, and an addition of a greatsword that’s just as mediocre or only better at aoe is going to keep the necromancer in the place it has.

The reaper traitline needs revamps as well to support pve with damage modifier increase traits and group utility. All this chill/fear centric pvp crap traits won’t do. Shouts are dead in the water for pve, wells do anything they do better and provide group support.