Guild Wars 2

I was SUPER confused after the patch today, to the point where I had to stop, check my build, and then read the patch notes to ensure that I wasn’t just plain hallucinating.

After the changes to Soul Reaping I fall out of Shroud amazingly quickly and have to wait 10 seconds to get back into it. At first I thought that I was doing something wrong. Then I assumed that I had my build reset with the patch.

The truth is far more depressing: with the Soul Reaping traitline receiving such heavy-handed nerfs, Reaper Shroud builds just don’t function anymore. I’m much better off just picking up a Greatsword and keeping my Life Force as a fallback in case I start taking heavy damage.

I can’t properly convey my disappointment. The Reaper Shroud build is the most fun I’ve had in this game, but with the amount of time spent out of Shroud now I’m not getting enough value out of the traits dedicated to it to justify the build.

Could we just… bake in the cooldown reduction from Speed of Shadows and reduced Life Force decay from Vital Persistence to the baseline Shroud? It’s not like the reduced cooldown and decay rate made Shroud overpowered; in fact, it was the bare minimum necessary to be able to use Shroud for anything other than an emergency lifebar.

Please ArenaNet… you’re breaking my heart!

Tiresias.6473:

Could we just… bake in the cooldown reduction from Speed of Shadows and reduced Life Force decay from Vital Persistence to the baseline Shroud?

Please ArenaNet… you’re breaking my heart!

Zoltreez.6435:

Tiresias.6473:

Could we just… bake in the cooldown reduction from Speed of Shadows and reduced Life Force decay from Vital Persistence to the baseline Shroud?

Please ArenaNet… you’re breaking my heart!

I read this and my hearth break .. the nerf bad hit us like glenn of the walking dead rest in pices my fellow necros

Brokensunday.4098:

Zoltreez.6435:

Tiresias.6473:

Could we just… bake in the cooldown reduction from Speed of Shadows and reduced Life Force decay from Vital Persistence to the baseline Shroud?

Please ArenaNet… you’re breaking my heart!

I read this and my hearth break .. the nerf bad hit us like glenn of the walking dead rest in pices my fellow necros

my heart broke too

bump. wake up, anet devs.

cobracommander.5861:

bump. wake up, anet devs.

Necros don’t have a Dev……

Zoltreez.6435:

cobracommander.5861:

bump. wake up, anet devs.

Necros don’t have a Dev……

they do but is mia

I loved my power necro, played him most of my time. I’ve done some doric eventfarm yesterday before the patch and this morning. It feels like i play two complete different specs. Now it feels pretty clunky and kinda slow like the flow it has before is gone.

Imo the devs want to push necro in a condi only class. But why do they don’t just say it? I loved the shroud mechanik and traits like it was, it was the mainreason for me to play necro since i started to play gw2 years ago. I thougth to myself okay let’s give scourge a try, if it it’s not my thing without that cool shroud mechanik i can stick to my reaper.

Now it seems the fisrt time ever im thinking to go over to my second most played class the guardian.

The loss of Vital Persistence and Speed of Shadows was incredibly significant for Power Reapers. When the Reaper was showcased, ANet even indicated that Reapers were created to “camp” death shroud.

I agree that VP and SoS should either be baseline or reworked into the minor traits of Soul Reaping.

All these silly assumptions about making scourge the only boon corrupt spec or turning necro into condi only- no. Just rethink your build. You have new stuff to play with, too. Some of these changes like making signets of suffering much more support-y and required for keeping shroud up better don’t make sense though.
For now, just adapt. Every other thread is already telling Anet about how much “we”(not me anyway) dislike how “our” builds were all broken due to some trait changes.
Plus, vital persistence is only required if you’ve been using it your entire life and have grown way too attached too it. Most people can get in shroud, do what they want to do with shroud, and get back out when they need to. Dhuumfire and the like aren’t gone, and spectral armor & walk still keep you up- spectral grasp even gives you 100% shroud back if traited(not sure about this, i didn’t test it but it would make sense since the tooltip doesnt say that every one of the five gives you 4% lf)

SunTzu.4513:

Now it seems the fisrt time ever im thinking to go over to my second most played class the guardian.

Guardian was my first class and it’s my second choice to do everything when not playing my necro.

Guardians have gained very good buff but most peoples can’t see them.. too busy crying for the lootstick’s nerf.

Kumouta.4985:

For now, just adapt.

First off all you are right. Every time we get a big update we have to adept. Sometimes a little bit more, sometimes a little bit less. The simple thing why i don’t like the changes is, that the build i used before the patch was my ‘’this is it’’ build.

Everything feels good to me while playing. Rota and all the things feels smooth and flows nicely. I played differnet builds on my necro before, some of them were okay others not. I know i will adapt my build in a way that it will work good for the type of contend i play, but i don’t think i will get that feeling back while i’m playing. Hard to explain english is not my first language. Thats why i’m upset with the actual patch and state of the shroudtraits.

Well, this is just miserable.

Let’s spend our money elsewhere…

The reality, despite anet for an inexplicable reason not being forthcoming about it, is that pre-nerf vital persistence had no effect on Scourge or its skills and thus had to go. All scourge skills just cost flat life force like it’s a mana bar. Even desert shroud is a glorified mallyx elite.

Build diversity buff by virtue of Soul Reaping being an open-air debris garden?

Brokensunday.4098:

Zoltreez.6435:

cobracommander.5861:

bump. wake up, anet devs.

Necros don’t have a Dev……

they do but is mia

They traded MVP RobertG for Irenio behind our backs

Prepare for clarity of purpose

zedapoc.1493:

The reality, despite anet for an inexplicable reason not being forthcoming about it, is that pre-nerf vital persistence had no effect on Scourge or its skills and thus had to go. All scourge skills just cost flat life force like it’s a mana bar. Even desert shroud is a glorified mallyx elite.

Build diversity buff by virtue of Soul Reaping being an open-air debris garden?

None of that matters, it’s the Speed of Shadows nerf that people will REALLY feel.

Kumouta.4985:

All these silly assumptions about making scourge the only boon corrupt spec or turning necro into condi only- no. Just rethink your build. You have new stuff to play with, too. Some of these changes like making signets of suffering much more support-y and required for keeping shroud up better don’t make sense though.
For now, just adapt. Every other thread is already telling Anet about how much “we”(not me anyway) dislike how “our” builds were all broken due to some trait changes.
Plus, vital persistence is only required if you’ve been using it your entire life and have grown way too attached too it. Most people can get in shroud, do what they want to do with shroud, and get back out when they need to. Dhuumfire and the like aren’t gone, and spectral armor & walk still keep you up- spectral grasp even gives you 100% shroud back if traited(not sure about this, i didn’t test it but it would make sense since the tooltip doesnt say that every one of the five gives you 4% lf)

My hatred of these kinds of arguments knows no bounds. Let me boil this mentality down to its bare essence:

“Just deal with the fact that your build was severely crippled without warning.”

Unacceptable. Many people — not just me — are using a Reaper Shroud build because they enjoy it and have invested a significant amount of time into acquiring gear and learning how to play the spec.

Bear in mind that this is a spec that isn’t considered to be the most powerful way to play a Necromancer. The damage output is decidedly worse than a condition build and it offers almost nothing in the way of group utility. On top of all of that, Necromancer as a class is performing worse than almost every other class in the game in terms of damage and utility.

And it’s not like this is a recent problem! The issues with Necromancers are well-known and have been discussed to death. If they were concerned about these two very necessary traits not affecting Sand Shroud they could have literally just buffed them by adding in the new effects (Swiftness on Speed of Shadows and Vitality on Vital Persistence) without changing anything else and it STILL wouldn’t have fixed the core issues that the Necromancer class faces.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I enjoyed the Reaper Shroud build because of the visual effects and mobility. In reality it’s mostly an auto-attack spec that doesn’t even have access to utility skills most of the time.

So yes, I can “adapt”, but there is no good reason that I should have to. This was a scorched earth approach to addressing a problem that didn’t actually exist. The “solution” was not only lazy, it feels terrible.

And to top it off, there was no warning! So now I’m stuck with gear for a build that doesn’t work anymore, and my choices are to either go with a Greatsword power build that is even LESS effective than the already underperforming build that I was using yesterday or scramble to put together a set of condition gear.

I can’t even begin to describe how terrible that feels.

Tiresias.6473:

Kumouta.4985:

All these silly assumptions about making scourge the only boon corrupt spec or turning necro into condi only- no. Just rethink your build. You have new stuff to play with, too. Some of these changes like making signets of suffering much more support-y and required for keeping shroud up better don’t make sense though.
For now, just adapt. Every other thread is already telling Anet about how much “we”(not me anyway) dislike how “our” builds were all broken due to some trait changes.
Plus, vital persistence is only required if you’ve been using it your entire life and have grown way too attached too it. Most people can get in shroud, do what they want to do with shroud, and get back out when they need to. Dhuumfire and the like aren’t gone, and spectral armor & walk still keep you up- spectral grasp even gives you 100% shroud back if traited(not sure about this, i didn’t test it but it would make sense since the tooltip doesnt say that every one of the five gives you 4% lf)

My hatred of these kinds of arguments knows no bounds. Let me boil this mentality down to its bare essence:

“Just deal with the fact that your build was severely crippled without warning.”

Unacceptable. Many people — not just me — are using a Reaper Shroud build because they enjoy it and have invested a significant amount of time into acquiring gear and learning how to play the spec.

Bear in mind that this is a spec that isn’t considered to be the most powerful way to play a Necromancer. The damage output is decidedly worse than a condition build and it offers almost nothing in the way of group utility. On top of all of that, Necromancer as a class is performing worse than almost every other class in the game in terms of damage and utility.

And it’s not like this is a recent problem! The issues with Necromancers are well-known and have been discussed to death. If they were concerned about these two very necessary traits not affecting Sand Shroud they could have literally just buffed them by adding in the new effects (Swiftness on Speed of Shadows and Vitality on Vital Persistence) without changing anything else and it STILL wouldn’t have fixed the core issues that the Necromancer class faces.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I enjoyed the Reaper Shroud build because of the visual effects and mobility. In reality it’s mostly an auto-attack spec that doesn’t even have access to utility skills most of the time.

So yes, I can “adapt”, but there is no good reason that I should have to. This was a scorched earth approach to addressing a problem that didn’t actually exist. The “solution” was not only lazy, it feels terrible.

And to top it off, there was no warning! So now I’m stuck with gear for a build that doesn’t work anymore, and my choices are to either go with a Greatsword power build that is even LESS effective than the already underperforming build that I was using yesterday or scramble to put together a set of condition gear.

I can’t even begin to describe how terrible that feels.

So much this. Thx for writing this, thats exactly the reason why i’m upset to the changes.

Yes, we can adept and it seems we must, but the feeling and the way to play this spec now is imo complete differrent. I’m already changed some gear but it feels so much different to me to play this spec now. Maybe it’s getting better if i play one or two weeks but at the moment i’m just disappointed…

I quit the game over this, that’s how bad it is. I liked Reaper-gameplay with shorter cooldown on shroud, now it feels clunky. Reaper was the class that kept me playing the game.

On the bright side, i have more time for cycling now. GW2 was bad for my health.

Never used it in power builds anyways. Sucks to lose it though I guess, but the doomsayers are wrong.

one of the worst things about reaper design is to make it melee range spec and give it worst possible survivability.

.

Kumouta.4985:

All these silly assumptions about making scourge the only boon corrupt spec or turning necro into condi only- no. Just rethink your build. You have new stuff to play with, too. Some of these changes like making signets of suffering much more support-y and required for keeping shroud up better don’t make sense though.
For now, just adapt. Every other thread is already telling Anet about how much “we”(not me anyway) dislike how “our” builds were all broken due to some trait changes.
Plus, vital persistence is only required if you’ve been using it your entire life and have grown way too attached too it. Most people can get in shroud, do what they want to do with shroud, and get back out when they need to. Dhuumfire and the like aren’t gone, and spectral armor & walk still keep you up- spectral grasp even gives you 100% shroud back if traited(not sure about this, i didn’t test it but it would make sense since the tooltip doesnt say that every one of the five gives you 4% lf)

What are u talking about? The vast majority of builds are dependent on 1 or 2 key traits, remove those traits and the builds are dead, necro builds are no exception.

Balance patches are supposed to encourage build diversity, this recent patch obliterated reaper power builds, it’s indefensible.

Unknown.3976:

Kumouta.4985:

All these silly assumptions about making scourge the only boon corrupt spec or turning necro into condi only- no. Just rethink your build. You have new stuff to play with, too. Some of these changes like making signets of suffering much more support-y and required for keeping shroud up better don’t make sense though.
For now, just adapt. Every other thread is already telling Anet about how much “we”(not me anyway) dislike how “our” builds were all broken due to some trait changes.
Plus, vital persistence is only required if you’ve been using it your entire life and have grown way too attached too it. Most people can get in shroud, do what they want to do with shroud, and get back out when they need to. Dhuumfire and the like aren’t gone, and spectral armor & walk still keep you up- spectral grasp even gives you 100% shroud back if traited(not sure about this, i didn’t test it but it would make sense since the tooltip doesnt say that every one of the five gives you 4% lf)

What are u talking about? The vast majority of builds are dependent on 1 or 2 key traits, remove those traits and the builds are dead, necro builds are no exception.

Balance patches are supposed to encourage build diversity, this recent patch obliterated reaper power builds, it’s indefensible.

Not just reaper power core necro and even condy to some extend amd btw corupt necro via signets got destroyed also

It took me months to get used to my necro, to build him up, nourish his power and craft/grind a fitting set of ascended gear. The shroud build I used was a thing of pure beauty and joy for me. And now… u had to ruin it Anet. U had to cripple my necro in a way as if you had just crippled one of my beloved dogs. Like a heartless kitting sadist.

You ruined him… YOU RUINED HIM! kittenMIT!

Samsariel.4758:

It took me months to get used to my necro, to build him up, nourish his power and craft/grind a fitting set of ascended gear. The shroud build I used was a thing of pure beauty and joy for me. And now… u had to ruin it Anet. U had to cripple my necro in a way as if you had just crippled one of my beloved dogs. Like a heartless kitting sadist.

You ruined him… YOU RUINED HIM! kittenMIT!

I liked it a lot, too, because it was an easy, relaxed build, and innocuous in the grand scheme of things.