Guild Wars 2

First off, this is not a rant. I’ve played this game since the day it released and still enjoy it very much! :p

I have played a necromancer forever now and use it for everything PvE related (I know the necro gets hate sometimes, but nobody seems to bug me about it) and I was thinking about the elite specializations coming up. Now I’m a HUGE fan of the Reaper and I am, in fact, already prepared to play a reaper when it comes out because my original hope when buying this game was to have a heavy melee class with dark magics like that.

Here’s my thought, however. From what I’ve seen, aNet doesn’t want the elite specialization to completely take over a class. For example, you’ll still have guardians who aren’t dragonhunters; you’ll still have rangers that aren’t druids, etc. Based on what I’ve seen and heard through my community of players, it seems like almost every necromancer is going to become a reaper upon it’s release. This doesn’t mean I want the reaper to change at all, but I wonder what they could do to other necromancer specializations/skills so that both reaper and regular necromancer are played and viable.

Let me know if you see this as well and what they might be able to do so that regular necros still see game time. For the most part, I PvP and WvW with mesmer (very rarely) so I’m not sure what’s going on there in terms of “necro good, necro not good”. I feel the reaper will hopefully get necros more PvE respect (again, not that it’s something I’ve ever had to deal with) but what do you think could be done to make both necro and reaper more attractive in the PvE world?

Let me know your thoughts, and play nice children :p

Ill be taking Reaper, but I won’t be using Greatsword. The greatsword skills are just too slow. I hate the greatsword on the other professions because its too slow, so I immediately dismissed Reaper’s greatsword when I heard it was even slower than the other professions.

The traitline is nice, because it has a few traits that synergize nicely with some of the existing Core traits.

Im not sure if any of the healing or utility traits will be replacing my current set up, but the elite one is definitely replacing Lich Form in open world PVE and PVP. A bit of hard CC is nice.

On the whole, I don’t really like Reaper, because I can only make use of 1 elite skill and a few traits, but ill welcome it for now, in the hope a better Elite Specialization comes in time.

Well, the trait line has a nice bit of everything, condi damage (chill), tankiness and healing, power and even boons (if i remember right). And helps in applying a lot of chill, which really helps our lack of mobility.
Still, chill isn’t that needed in pve, so spite and soul reaping (for 50% crit chance) will maybe still be the priority, but it could give more damage than blood and death magic lines.
In pvp it could be really strong, with overall tankiness and chill uptime.
In wvw i don’t know, a reliable way to apply chill is surely good, but necros right now are seen as well dispensers for aoe burst. nothing more, nothing less. In raids at least.
When going solo, it might be similar to pvp, except chill would allow us to stick to our targets more than now, something we really need in open spaces.

Apart from that, a problem of the profession itself is that we’re supposed to go in short-to-melee range, even if we’re not as resilient as warriors or guardians. And this may be where the spec comes in handy: reaper shroud, together with the soul reaping line, could sensibly extend the duration of shroud, making us “invulnerable” for quite a long time. And that might be one of the spec’s main focuses: to greatly enhance shroud duration, to the point where we won’t really need new forms of damage mitigation. Right now it seems it focuses more on the shroud than the rest (GS included).

Where the GS role will play out, i don’t know. I don’t really mind slow attacks, considering they’re meant to be used carefully and not spammed, IF they’ll deal really high damage. There’s a shout that’ll make a few attacks unblockable, and if a single attack of GS will be able to hit nearly like Lich Form, it will be nice. Otherwise, I’ll just keep the dagger

The reaper looks bad.

It lacks a ranged power option, does not have anything to keep it in the thick of things and allow it to stand frontline in the middle of a fight (compare it to DPS warrior, it just does not compare), it is easily interruptable/blinded, and can not stick to targets (chill will just not do the job, you need serious movement/teleportation skills to keep up). In a teamfight, if the meta remains as bursty, it will just get shredded unless you are running some tanky build, in which case you would be better off taking a more potent tank either way. It is also too slow to be a roamer. So for conquest – I really can not see it work. It will lose most of its 1 v 1 encounters purely by the virtue of being unable to stick to kiting/ranged targets, or stand toe-to-toe with melee DPS ones like the zerker warrior.

For PvE – it will be more viable than current necro, but this does not say much, and does not mean it will not remain at the bottom of the tier list, thus getting shooed away. It might bring damage comparable to warrior one at best, but it will never have the support and utility a warrior brings.

All in all – I will give it a shot and the current traits look like you can make some interesting builds, I just doubt they will be worth it in comparison to other meta builds which are around right now. The concept is cool, but this is the problem with necro – theme and concept always get in the way of viability.

If the speck is as bad as my doom and gloom predictions foresee, I am sure A-net will pay attention to necro forums and fix it… /s

Honestly, I think one of the bigger reasons there’ll be a higher Reaper:Necro ratio than say Dragonhunter:Guardian is because the Reaper just looks cool. I think (so far) it’s had the best presentation. I mean, it’s inspired by freakin’ Pyramid Head and the likes. It’s fun to be the “monster”, and that’s what the Reaper is. I don’t know how it’ll perform in PvE, but looks like so much fun in PvP!

Reaper is the ultimate betrayal. When they released it, it seemed to be intimidating and cool. Since then, we have received a ton of nerfs to things that are hardly even good on base necro before the Reaper is released, AND the Reaper will likely be limited to open world PvE because of the brutal nerf-hammer.

Gs will probably not out dps Dagger . Need to test first and see how well skill scale with power . plu sConsidering how slow necro Gs only for a chill condi that u can get 36 % to chill with food buff quite sad ….
They should have added vulnerability to gs auto and make it with normal attak speed..
now were are some kind of nothing

Reaper can become a great tank bad Dpser I hardly see that

Life steal Gs life steal Passive signet with heal then all the dmg reductions from posioned 10 % from chilled champs 15 % and builds up to a solid tank + Corupted Fevor Pasive that stuck toughness …with PVT armor accesories ….that is LOTS of dmg mitigations a LOT ….. but as DPS I hardly see it happen

It’s going to be very hard not to pick Reaper. It’s one of the only lines that gives us deathshroud aside from Soul Reaping, it allows us to power up chill to new heights, has a speedy melee cleave auto attack and good mobility… what’s not to like!

Reaper could be great, they just need to make sure it is appropriately balanced, which I’m not holding my breath for. However it was built in a way that doesn’t have the same pitfalls as the rest of the profession assuming they get that balance right, it has ways to deal with CC, it has mobility/anti-mobility, it has self-combos, it scales into teamfights, really the only thing its missing (balance aside) is some kind of active defense.

Reaper could be nice.
The Greatsword might be fun to play around with. It seems to have some nice power AoE play and executes. Daggers will likely (and should) remain better for sustained single/dual target fights; but I think GS will be really good with 3+ targets or for a bit more burst.
The only thing I’m afraid of is with the string of Chill nerfs lately it’ll be hard to stay on target; but I’m not going to judge it before it’s released.

Reaper Shroud looks really nice. And the trait line itself also has some real good parts. Can’t wait to play around with it.

That all said. I’m not too concerned with Reaper / GS yet. We’ve heard about some nerfs and stuff, but it’s impossible to judge without having really played with it.
What I am more concerned with, and I really really really hope they will address in HoT, are some of the other issues that plague (harr harr) necromancer.

Minion AI, Axe skills, lacking group support, corruption skills, ironically we’re one of the weaker condition damage dealers, etc etc etc. We all know the issues.
I hope they have looked at those issues as well; if not all, then at least a few of them. Fixing some of those issues would break a lot of walls down for necromancers, giving us more builds to play with and some much needed love.