Guild Wars 2

If all traits are balanced with Reaper in mind, does it mean that if a necro doesn’t go Reaper, he/she will end up with crippled traits ? They keep following the same terribly flawed balance design: all skills/traits are balanced around the best case scenario. You don’t believe it ? Let’s take a little tour…

Case 1: We have scarce bleed stacks because back in the days Epidemic could melt groups if the necro was left unfocused. So, stacks were balanced around that utility. Now condi builds are a joke, Epidemic hasn’t been used in the past 2 years, while, in team fights, necromancers are greedily focused/chased on sight and ping-pong’ed to death.

Case 2: more of a given: Shroud traits were all balanced around the 5 sec Shroud CD used back to back regardless of Life Force or appropriateness… Now it’s 7 sec at best, a DS flashing build has never ever been remotely viable, but close to nothing has changed.

Side note: designers at ANet don’t seem to have a clue about scalability. They should look at what Blizzard did a decade ago with PPM (procs per minute) to normalize things.

Case 3: Dhuumfire (that created unwarranted collateral damages that remain to this very day): its current awful/laughable state is caused by what I would call the Reaper effect. It’s a Reaper trait in a non-Reaper trait line. I can hear ANet screaming “Synergistic trait lines!” and really believing it…

Case 4: That finally brings us to the latest patch with Chilling Darkness: another average trait outside of the Reaper line that got butchered in case you go Reaper. Are they so scared of necromancers that they fear a Reaper going Plague could have as much impact as, say, a warrior with Rampage ? And if it was the case (which I highly doubt), isn’t there any counter play like mesmer/engi using moa or simply side stepping away from it, especially now that chill doesn’t reduce leap/charge distance ? The only players this net may catch on its own are fellow necromancers… My hand in the fire that a condi necro has way less counter play to a diamond skin ele or even a zerk stance warrior !

So what do we end up with, with that borked design philosophy ? Lots of unusable/weak skills/traits that requires other skills/traits to barely function…

RIOT !

Well at least I think the PvE meta with necro will be reaper. To some extent, I am actually grateful that we finally get something which SEEMS to solve some of our PvE problem, it is just sad that you have to pay the expansion for it…
For PvP, I’m really afraid that the greatsword will make the reaper mesmer meat. And I don’t see the new shroud as good in PvP as the old except if they significantly boost the damage (we haven’t seen actual numbers yet).

Right now the reaper looks like a sitting duck. Anybody with a ranged weapon and a movement skill is going to eat them for lunch.

Damage and life force generation outside melee range looks pitiful. And the only counter to this is chill which keeps getting nerfed.

The reaper could be half decent if axe/scepter/staff were better and one of them could handle on swap kiting duty, but they can’t, in their current state.

Already you see many threads here about ditching greatsword and all of the chill mechanics.

For WvW, power necro running Wellmancer builds will still be the meta. Reapers right now just don’t have enough defense/stab to roll with the melee train.