Guild Wars 2

This will be a long post detailing my thoughts on the overall design of the class, and will not delve into many specifics over certain traits and/or spell choices. I felt like this was a topic that no one had really delved into, at least in a lime lighted fashion. Without further ado, these are my thoughts on what could have been a better way to create the reaper elite spec.

He Was No Longer A Mere Warrior, But Death Itself

So… what does it mean to use a elite spec? Certainly A.Net has answered this question amongst the team of developers, and this will be purely MY take on answering this question and thus may be different then what A.Net has envisioned. An elite spec is the obvious front-running reason players will choose to buy the expansion, and compared to current specializations should offer the player some things beyond what previous specs have given, such as:

• Due to Elite specs allowing an additional weapon-type, they MUST offer greater build diversity then current specs
• They should alter the gameplay of the class to a greater extent then current specs
• While allowing greater build diversity they need to feel like they are a complete package of skills

Now, when it comes to the Reaper I could say that they have definitely done this. However, I fear that I don’t think they have gone far enough to warrant the title “Elite Specialization.”

Hence He Came From The Shadows, His Blade Afire With Lust

DISCLAIMER: Greatswords on necromancers are cool as hell!

So.. as I’m sure most of the people here that have played the beta weekends could tell you, we all absolutely love our Reapers. They are fun, they are visually some of the most awe inspiring sexiness in the game. So why do we complain about them so much?

There is a lack of options available to the reaper, for one. Gameplay wise they were created to fill a melee orientated AOE role, and a tanky one at that. Their single target isn’t the greatest, and they have a lot of holes in their mechanics when trying to take someone 1v1. If this were a regular specialization, or if the greatsword was something that was open to the class without requiring the Reaper spec, this would be okay. The fact, however, is that the greatsword uses up one of the spec’s minors and thus is required to fully use the specs potential.

This is a flaw in the design.

I don’t believe that relegating a trait slot to the ability to use a weapon type is a good idea for several reasons. The first is that this automatically weakens the spec. While a regular build will utilize 9 strong passives that create the basis of their strengths and weaknesses, a reaper only gains 8 passives and the ability to choose from 4 additional utility spells and an extra weapon-type. Now, this could be possibly have been a strength, but since you don’t gain an increase in spell slots this doesn’t actually further the gameplay of the build, since all you’re doing is adding to an already overwhelming amount of utility spells.

The second reason I do not fully believe in the design choice is that, since this takes the slot of a minor trait that would generally have increased the power of the gameplay choice, there are several repercussions.

1) The Great Sword itself and the utility spells need to present themselves as the best choices in terms of numbers and utility given. This is determined by the need to offset the loss of the passive; If a passive would have increased a spec’s damage/survivability by 10%, then the great sword would have to increase damage by that amount, the shouts would have to give superior utility choices, or they would have to combine for an overall increase to count it as a worthwhile trait. However, this isn’t a viable strategy for the designers since they need to make sure that this is a side grade to the other build options. Another choice to this problem is:

2) The other 2 traits need to compensate for the loss. This generally means creating passives that are much less generic and are complex in their use and application. While not a bad choice for A.Net to have done, it is clear that this is not what they chose. There is one other option:

3) Skills from the great sword need to have stronger coefficients that provide a 10% increase in output. Once again, not a very viable strategy if they want other specs to compete with the elite spec.

Continued….

A.Net, while wanting to give classes some new mechanics to explore through weapons, created a problem in which they are gimping their Elite Specializations at the very base level. While there are several ways to tackle the issue, at this point in development the best possible choice would be to give Elite Specs the new weapons/utilities/etc as an EXTRA passive and creating a new minor trait that gives each class a boost. For reapers specifically, I think a good option for the utility choices would be to allow Reaper’s in Reaper’s Shroud to use any slotted shout (and if there are classes with similar situations I would say that this would be a good idea for them as well).

His Path Branched Out Before Him, Yet He Knew Only The Path Of Sorrow

Alright, so Elite Specializations have brought upon A.Net some new issues. With a trait dedicated to a single weapon type, it means you should rarely deviate from that, at least in theory. The spec was created with the weapon type in mind, and you really can’t waste a resource such as a spec trait. So… what does this mean? Well, in other specs you can see that there are several choices you can make in regards to playstyle. The benefit that these specs have over the Elite Specializations is that you can move your weapon-type around with trait choices, based on maximizing the skills available to the bonuses.

With Elite Spec’s, this is off the table. Whatever weapon type you were given is what you SHOULD (once again, in theory) be using. In essence, the roles are COMPLETELY reversed in the trait-weapon interactions. You have the base of your spec in the weapon, and now must choose traits that specialize you further. However, at least in the Reaper spec, you just don’t see that.

While you do see some changes in game mechanics, the gameplay stays the same, heavily based on AOE. In an elite spec, the traits should give you the option to change the actual gameplay. Have a trait-line that emphasizes on AOE by giving bonuses to attack splash range or targets hit, a secondary line that focuses on increasing the power of your attacks/shouts on single targets, and the third increasing the mobility of the spec. I see some semblance of these sorts of ideas within the current iteration however the spec suffers heavily from just trying to do too many things at once. Stand-alone traits such as Chilling Nova, Reaper’s Onslaught, and Decimate Defenses are strong in their own right and serve to cement different playstyles, but there just isn’t enough of these traits to bring true choice to the table.

General Thoughts Regarding Shouts and AOE’s In General

I may be crucified for saying this, but I don’t believe balancing a spell with a gigantic AOE in mind is entirely beneficial to the game mechanics. Lets just make an example. You walk into enemy filled territory with your trusty great sword at hand. What do you expect, as a player? First off, from both past experience and the visual asthetics of the great sword equipped, it is going to hit HARD. A great sword swing will be slow but if you hit with it you should see a huge chunk of health missing. Now, you have this ability that pulls several minions together. You decide to use the ability and then swing the sword down onto them. What happens? Well, since they all got hit, you should see huge chunks of health missing from multiple opponents. This is what makes interesting gameplay, feeling rewarded for doing semi-hard to pull off combos such as this.

With the reaper, there are SO many abilities with huge AOE’s. This ties into the issues that Elite Specializations have with build choice. Why have abilities that start with such an AOE centric toolset, when you could build them in a way that allowed the traits to more greatly effect diversity in game play? Entire synergies could be changed by trait centric choices. Anyways, just food for thought.

TL;DR: Elite Specializations suffer from a lack of build diversity and potency, due in part to the way bringing in new weapon-types to the classes was realized and the way that the new Elite Specializations rely heavily on Trait’s to determine game play choice.

I like this well thought out post, hearing some of your fixes in greater detail might help to solve some of the Reapers problems or atleast get it down the right road.

Honestly, I really, really wish that the new weapons weren’t tied to elite specializations. I wish we were just getting a new weapon for each Profession as a baseline.

Honestly, although at this point in development I don’t see it being doable, what they should have done is just created an epic quest-line with the new weapon being part of the rewards. Class specific quests for all classes would have needed to be developed near the beginning however, so its just not feasible.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Honestly, I really, really wish that the new weapons weren’t tied to elite specializations. I wish we were just getting a new weapon for each Profession as a baseline.

I agree with this so kittening much! While it does generally make sense thematically, it always doesn’t sync well with good build design in practice.

For example, the tempest warhorn is considered to be a weapon with a lot of great skills, and some that need minor tweaks, but no one will ever run it because tempest traits are poop. Or at least they are in their current state.

They aren’t making them base because of balance reasons, the more they add to the base professions the more combinations they have to consider, by tying it to elite specs they can add tons of elite specs but each one only needs to be internally balanced and balanced with a relatively small pool of base stuff, instead of needing to also be balanced with every single combination of previous content.

Also makes you buy the xpac.

about the Adept minor trait, Chronomancer has same trait, but to compensate for that, they gave it a Grandmaster minor trait with 25% increase speed+reduced duration effect on movement conditions(chill, immobilize, cripple). for Reaper they only gave the reduced duration effect on movement conditions, but it’s on major trait, and it only works in Reaper Shroud. hahahaha, the discrimination is too strong

Bhawb.7408:

They aren’t making them base because of balance reasons, the more they add to the base professions the more combinations they have to consider, by tying it to elite specs they can add tons of elite specs but each one only needs to be internally balanced and balanced with a relatively small pool of base stuff, instead of needing to also be balanced with every single combination of previous content.

Also makes you buy the xpac.

I get that, it’s just disappointing.

Yeah, the really disappointing part is certain professions (like Necromancer, though others like Engi have issues too) have large gaps in what their weapons can do. An example is support, Necromancers have no weapon to really allow supporting to work, so we’ll rely on a specialization later to fill that entire slot for us, instead of having some support on the base profession and an elite to really specialize it.