Guild Wars 2

So is it true that the benefits of using vanilla shroud is greater? i am interested in ccs boon corrupts and condi.I even have burn effect to add extra condis to my enemies.

Nope it’s not. On those 3 area you will perform better with reaper shroud.
CC : reaper is meant to put chill on foes, have an aoe fear and a hard stun.
Boon corrupt : Reaper have a shorter cool down on it’s skill 2 which benefit from path of corruption.
Condi : Vanilla shroud put torment, bleed and burn. Reaper shroud put poison, more burn and potentially more bleed than vanilla shroud. (The number of poison stack blow away the low number of torment stack of vanilla shroud)

Wait a min i wonder:Is reaper going to be kept as is? or is it going to be made more of a power build? because as is its superior.Then again sand shroud i guess will replace it

Well a lot on people on this forum want to think that Anet will transform the reaper into a power spec. They probably won’t do it.

What reaper give to the necromancer is a different way to fight, a way to fight that is more based restraining a foe to fight it in melee range. Objectively, the reaper, while being a pushover when it come to power damage in PvE, is threatening enough against player to prevent anet from giving additionnal damage to power reapers.

The same way, what scourge will give to the necromancer is a new way to fight. The scourge won’t dig in the melee like a necromancer or a reaper, the scourge will set the battlefield, control it and try to stay on the ouskirt of the fight while soaking incoming damages with small bundle of extra health.

Thought, it doesn’t mean that a build that heavily focus on defense won’t be able to tank, nor does it mean that the scourge will be forced to stay at range in pve as a damage dealer. The real strenght of the scourge in PvE will be it’s ability to dish out extra damage via the “shroud” skill without having to transform. Also, there is no “sand shroud”, there is just a skill that globally work like locust swarm except that it doesn’t have any cast time.

Vannila shroud in my opinion is Superior in PvP

Why you ask ?

well the momment you go into reaper shroud people will just use their infinite ammount of mobility againts you and stay away from you and range your Shroud down and after that you done for and you barely did any dmg….

you barely gonna hit any decent player in PvP as a reaper seriously….

just removed the elite spec to try out my old power necro and HOLY hell its a Huge difference in PvP i actualy can keep dmg ing people while they try to stay away WoW…..

but sadly i love GS too much x.x

In my experience, when you fire that first Life Blast, they switch to just staying in melee range and smacking you. Usually with hard CC since you can’t do anything about it.

Hrm so i should use life blast in pvp instead of reaper?

Axl.8924:

Hrm so i should use life blast in pvp instead of reaper?

No you should stay with reaper.

The only skill on core shroud worth the time it takes to cast is Doom.

As i see it both are situational (pvp), as who, where you fight and what build you use. The only thing making reaper stand out more for general use is stab and being able to combo fields.

Awkwardly, I still have this lingering hope that anet’s dev will take our numerous feedback into acount and make some change to death shroud so that it become more userfriendly.

But well… whenever I think they will do something good they have something along that shatter my hopes.

Like getting rid of vital persistence, it was something needed and undoudtely a good thing for the necromancer as a whole but it come along with so much damage to the shroud as a whole that I can’t believe that they even tested the changes. And to top the pain they kept lich form as a transform with it ridiculously abysmal uptime for… nothing good at all.

There has been countless thread that revisited the death shroud skills into something more user friendly, working alonside the traits to reach a balance with the reaper shroud. There has been countless thread that discussed about how reliably improve the necromancer support so that it become desirable. There has been countless thread saying how good we already are at condi and lacking at power damage.

Yet none of the balance patch answer the concern that the players face and offered solutions about. Scourge is supposed to be a support spec yet it will fail at it because :
- your teammates will need to invest in vitality
- you will need to invest in vitality and heling power
- you won’t be able to give enough “extra” to cope with the 2 previous things.

In the end, the scourge will found it’s place as an extra dps which will underperform as much as reaper and the support that he provide will be deemed as unneeded. Which will put the scourge on equal term with the reaper and the vanilla necromancer : unneeded in raid/dungeon, welcome in wvw zerg and “situational” (I’m taking the word of Emapudapus here) in PvP.

So in the end, I truly believe that in most situation, at the moment, the reaper shroud is better than the vanilla shroud but whatever you take, vanilla shroud, reaper shroud or scourge, the necromancer will still be shackled in it’s current (and everlasting) positions in each game mode.

- your teammates will need to invest in vitality
- you will need to invest in vitality.

Just because barrier scales from max HP I wouldn’t say you or your allies need to invest in vit more than anyone does now.