Guild Wars 2

Greatsword attacks steal health. When gravedigger hits a foe, all other greatsword skills recharge by a small amount.

• Life Siphon Damage: 55
• Damage Life Siphon Healing: 49
• Recharge Reduced: 3%

I tried to use it both in PvE and PvP and it didn’t feel much useful. I appreciate they tried to move away from the uninspired “20% CDR plus bonus effect” master weapon trait design, but I don’t think it works very well with the greatsword’s design.

Overall the greatsword isn’t really suited as a Life Siphon weapon, but if you manage to hit multiple foes with Death spiral you do get a small heal. This effect can be good but it suffers from “unlikely perfect case scenario balance”. Since GS attacks are slow, and Death Spiral has target limit or 3 nor it’s spammable, it should be safe to rise the siphon heal and damage.

The CD reduction is good only if you hit multiple foes below 50% HP. But if you are hitting something at <50% HP you want to keep spamming gravedigger as much as possible instead of using other GS skills. I would like to see something that helps you when you are fighting a foe that is above 50% HP, like:

• Recharge reduced by 3-5% whenever a GS attack hits a foe above 50% HP (doesn’t scale per foe but works with all GS skills).
  or
• If your GS attack hits a foe above 50% HP your next GS attack is 15% faster (doesn’t scale per foe).

The second idea is interesting. Finally the GS would be fast enough to land hits on PvE bosses without cancelling or missing your skills because you have to move away from, or dodge, the hard hitting attacks. GS DPS gets boosted too, currently above 50% HP it’s only 3% better than dagger assuming all of your attacks land. In PvP it rewards skillful play since you want to setup your enemies to chain hit them and you gain nothing from face-rolling the keyboard. Note: even with 15% faster speed, GS attacks are still slow enough to give both the attacker and the opponent a fair chance to hit and avoid. Soul Eater needs something good to compete with Chilling Force and Decimate Defenses.

What do you think of Soul Eater? How would you change it? Do you think my proposal would work?

I found it okayish in a minion build on top of vampirc aura, but that is it.

Yep, kind of okayish in some corner cases/build but not worth it compared to the other 2 Master traits. How would you change it or what do you like from the GS trait?

Btw cool stuff your PvP Reaper video.

I personally would be fine with the standard 20% cooldown reduction. Yeah, those are uninspiring and boring as traits, but they are straight-forward and aren’t clunky while trying to be creative. Keep it simple.

Both the lifesteal and the cooldown reduction are boring and uninspired and too weak.

They need to go back to the drawing board with this trait.

Maybe it could be a trait for condition users (even burning on crit isn’t too strong given the slow casts of greatsword skills).

This trait should be a flat cooldown reduction trait (20%) plus the lifesteal then it would be much better.

Well soul eater has to compete with a good sustain trait and a good damage increase trait all which have decent synergy with greatsword so I don’t think making soul eater’s life siphon compete with these is a good idea. An other aspect of greatsword is it cleaving and aoe potential so why not boost that?
One option could be to increase the range of skills allowing the greatsword reach it’s target limits more often plus it increase the effect of the pull distance allowing for a bit more chasing capabilities.
Another option is to increase the target limit of all skills. This comes with potential more life force and damage reduction from cold shoulder and easier gravedigger cooldown reduction. Limited effect in a low enemy fight though.
For the cooldown 20% flat should be fine. Making gravedigger the centric cooldown reducer was not a great idea since it was necessairy to save it for when the target reaches 50% health.

Hm. I was thinking the same in my tests; the life siphon on Soul Eater seems lackluster outside of a handful of best-possible-scenario issues, and the cooldown thing, while interesting, doesn’t seem terribly impactful and honestly sorta rewards bad play (i.e. blow all your cooldowns as quickly as possible, then Gravespam to earn as much cooldown recharge as possible before next fight. Blegh).

Recalling from the Reaper coverage that the top line is supposed to be the multiple-enemies, face-eating brawler line focusing on the Reaper’s area coverage and group-slaughtering attacks, and continuing in my own assertion that the Reaper’s defenses are just not up to snuff for the mass AoE brawling ArenaNet wants it to do…

Thought Experiment:

“Soul Harvest: Gain Protection when striking multiple enemies with your greatsword (1s per enemy, 10s ICD). Greatsword skills that hit more than one target recharge 33% faster.”

Still encourages ganging up multiple enemies on the Reaper, but actually gives them some of the desperately needed defenses they need to survive the focused attention of multiple threats. I like that ArenaNet is trying to do interesting things with recharge traits and wanted to continue that, but we also want to reward smart/efficient play, and besides which – Gravedigger hits hard enough that you don’t generally get a ton of recharge off of the existing modifier anyways. It doesn’t take a lot of Gravedigger for your enemies to drop.

This way, using the GS skills against multiple foes as ArenaNet encourages nets you a hefty recharge bonus, but using the weapon against single foes leaves you high and dry. No Protection, no recharge bonuses. In those situations you’d naturally want to move onto Dagger for a while, which helps keep the Dagger relevant in PvE as ArenaNet’s been intending to do. This trait, on the other hand, is great if you’re looking to grind down huge mobs of junk, and might actually compete with the other excellent choices in the Master tier.

Currently my choice is build around Decimate Defenses or build around the Chilling Victory/Blighter’s Boon combo; Soul Eater just doesn’t measure up at all. A trait that provides Protection in group fights and also heavily reduces cooldowns in same fights? That would make me agonize over the choice more.

Make any sense?

It really needs to offer stronger CDR, that is the biggest problem I have with it currently, though it also has the issue of competing with two amazing traits and not being remotely comparable.

Grave digger giving cooldowns makes sense. When you’receive grave digger spamming, your longer cooldowns important GSM skills (death spiral and deathly grasp) both should be on cooldown, and you’Lloyd want them for your next target. I think the cool down part is fine and flavorful, it just needs to be boosted from 3% to 5%.

The siphoning portion however, isn’the really thematic nor good. The reaper relies on building up life force and staying in reaper shroud, so I think it should be changed to something that sounds similar to the trait while supporting GS life force build up.

Soul Eater: heal for the life force you generate with the great sword.
1% life force = 100 health (rounded down from the nearest percentage. 1.5% = 1%)

This makes sense thematically and gives the skills besides grave digger more value.

An alternative:
Soul Eater: greater sword attacks siphon health based inversely on how much life force you have:
0%= 200 health
25%= 150 health
50%=100 health
Ect

It’s just not enough health. I don’t know why Anet is so worried about buffing life siphoning when other forms of damage have fluctuated so much. My best guess is that it would diminish the usefulness of shroud.

Has anyone done any testing with healing gear?

Its awfully terrible, both in strength and design.

Above 50%, youre not getting much juice out of it, even if all 5 galaxies allign.

Under 50% youre spamming gravedigger anyway.

It suffers from the same too-low-floor that Augury and the shouts are/were suffering from. The vamp is actually pretty incredible on Death Spiral to 3 targets, but terrible on, say… anything else as the others hit too infrequently. It could really use x procs per y seconds and an increase to the amounts.

The recharge reduction is fantastic on Gravedigger hitting 5 enemies (even above 50%), but awful when you hit just one (even under 50%).

If you hit 1 target 5 times in ~10 seconds, you’re getting 15% off other recharges in that time.

If you hit 5 targets twice in 10 seconds, you’re getting 30% off recharges in that time, which is quite good considering how long the other cds are.