Guild Wars 2

Nice feedback I realy want the first 2 hits of the gs to be a little bit faster not to much but enough actualy use it. The last hit is ok with me. Oh and if soul eater would work with reapers shroud so that other build options can open up besides blighters boon might stacking.

Good feedback, but one thing I’ve been chewing on a bit is the usefulness of the minor trait Shivers of Dread. While I can see this having PvP applications due to boon corrupting stability, in PvE our meager access to fear basically makes this trait useless even while running staff. What do you think about it?

Couple points, spoj.

1. You can’t give first AA in chain Chill application. I’d abuse hell out of it, cancelling other parts of AA just for the spammable chill.

2. About Reaper’s Shroud Life Force generation – I think that by this point we all can agree that RS is stronger in most aspects than DS and we’re balanced for running Reaper. I still don’t like giving RS-exclusice goodies out when DS bites the dust. If Shroud needs more LF generation, this should be solved in Core profession, not just the Reaper by giving it more LF gain on AA. It already generates much more LF than DS.

3. RS Fear – keep it this way. It gives Stability and Fears in AoE. Let DS single target fear-only ability be better at least in interrupting by being instant.

Very awesome feedback. Only thing I would add is to make Necrocopter travel a longer distance to make it feel more of a mobility/travel skill, maybe like a warrior sword leap.

Very nice feedback, Spoj. A good thread for devs to see.

Do these things and reaper will be great!

We still have some desirability issues, but at least we’d be usable.

Rym.1469:

Couple points, spoj.

1. You can’t give first AA in chain Chill application. I’d abuse hell out of it, cancelling other parts of AA just for the spammable chill.

2. About Reaper’s Shroud Life Force generation – I think that by this point we all can agree that RS is stronger in most aspects than DS and we’re balanced for running Reaper. I still don’t like giving RS-exclusice goodies out when DS bites the dust. If Shroud needs more LF generation, this should be solved in Core profession, not just the Reaper by giving it more LF gain on AA. It already generates much more LF than DS.

3. RS Fear – keep it this way. It gives Stability and Fears in AoE. Let DS single target fear-only ability be better at least in interrupting by being instant.

1. Yeah i can agree with that. Thats why i suggest moving the lifeforce instead. But having chill on the middle and last hit could also work. My point was just to spread some of the stuff around.

2. DS doesnt really need more lifeforce. RS does. Its in melee and loses lifeforce a lot faster. Life transfer also seems to be better practically for maintaining life force than the RS auto attack is. Which is why i think the base numbers on RS auto need to be buffed slightly to compare with life transfer.

3. Yeah i can agree it shouldnt be as perfect for interrupting as Doom. But the cast is too long for the fear duration. One of them needs to be tweaked very slightly. 0.5 second cast or 1.5 second fear would be enough. It also only has a 360 radius so it would be fair to give it a slight cooldown/duration buff to make it that little bit more usable.

Few things I want to add.

1. You seemed to miss the minors? In regard to the minors, I really want Chilling Darkness merged into Shivers of Dread (Master minor). Reapers only have 1 baseline fear, which makes the trait hardly useful, where as chilling Darkness has perfect synergy with the reaper cobsidering the blind on Death’s Charge. This would give Reapers a much needed low cooldown baseline soft CC in RS, and make the trait less terrible in general.

2. I agree damage in RS (especially 4 and 5) needs to go up, and reaper is rigged with tons of weird after casts that really hurt the class.

3. Personally, I feel Death’s Charge needs its cast time reduced to 3/4 and needs to be more prompt about landing and executing its AoE blind burst (in addition to the other bugs).

4. Nightfall needs to tick faster for sure, it’s just too unreliable right now, and I think it’d be sweet as hell if, like Torch5Warrior, it followed the Reaper. God that’d just be the best.<3

5. Spiral needs more impact and use, in a raid or group with full Vuln coverage, the skill just didn’t mean much as far as I’m concerned. It could have been so much more, and I’d love to have another button worth using in a rotation for maximizing DPS.

6. You’re incredibly right about the GS trait… I didn’t think too much about it before but it makes very little sense at all, though it will probably never get used anyways.

7. Chilling Force NEEDS a longer duration.

That’s all the direct notes I wanted to add here. :P

Oh yeah for minors. I like the idea of merging the current master and grandmaster minors. And then having the grandmaster minor provide 5-10% damage to chilled foes as a bonus would be awesome.

However i dont agree with Death’s Charge. If you shorten the cast time of that skill it becomes much less useful as a projectile block. I would like it to stay exactly as it is (minus the bug where it charges in random directions).

spoj.9672:

Oh yeah for minors. I agree merging them would be good. Having the grandmaster minor provide 5-10% damage to chilled foes as a bonus would be awesome.

However i dont agree with Death’s Charge. If you shorten the cast time of that skill it becomes much less useful as a projectile block. I would like it to stay exactly as it is (minus the bug where it charges in random directions).

Problem with how it works now is that it sort of cripples it’s synergy with Curses (path of corruption for example), the delayed landing makes it easy to avoid or interrupt before it gets to finish, even if you reach your target. I also attribute a lot of he bugginess of it (in combat) to its delays. Not sure about the non-targeted bugs. I can’t figure out the inconsistencies.

I must be playing a different game, I personally found the Necro a let down compared to other classes, the GS attack is to slow, in high end PvE you would be massacred by an enemy before getting to the 3rd auto attack on skill 1, in PvP anyone who can dodge and you are missing, I think this is why they have put so much into chill,

The REAPER part of it I also found boring to use, so much so I actually dropped the elite spec and moved back over to DS, for me the expansion brings nothing to make me want to continue playing my Necro.

I know im not alone in these comments, ive spoken to a few people whom also don’t like it,

I love playing my necro but the new spec/weapon are a real let down for me.

Im of the opinion that if all the aftercasts and unresponsive activation bugs are fixed then it would feel a lot faster. Wouldnt you enjoy it more if thats the case?

I get that a really slow auto attack is annoying. But as long as it hits hard enough to compensate the self interruption and attack speed its perfectly acceptible. And it is pretty much in that place right now numbers wise at least. Maybe a little more damage would help cement that position. Its coeff per second is 1.2 compared to daggers 1.33. So thats pretty good if you dont interrupt yourself all the time.

I’m kind of at odds about boosting RS auto attack Life Force regeneration and the removal of the ICD in Chilling Victory. At least the part of having both and 2% LF per hit on auto (correct me if I misread it)? Seems like a lot, but I could be over-thinking it.

I know Anet keeps balancing Necro in terms of perfect-case, so maybe an in-between like 0/1/2% LF on Reaper auto and keep the 1s ICD on Chilling Victory but boost the Might duration to 10s and LF per target struck that is chilled to 1.5-2%?

Agree with most of the feedback, though, especially “Chilled to the Bone!” I would like to see this be an AOE version of Deep Freeze on Ice Bow if they were to keep the 120s cooldown. If not, shorten it considerably as a 2s stun is too brief, even with chill duration considered.

Oh no i just meant the current life force should be boosted from 1.5% to 3%. Its only on the final hit after all.

Chilling Victory will never compete with decimate if it keeps the ICD. Even with 10 second duration its going to be lackluster on single targets. Increasing the might duration would definitely help. But to make it worth while on single targets it would have to be about 15 seconds which is getting into broken territory when dealing with multiple enemies. Honestly forceful greatsword on the warrior has perfect balance for this (no ICD but 5 second duration). Dont see why we cant have that. We might be able to proc it a bit more easily which could make it too strong. If thats the case just reduce it to 4 second duration.

I don’t want the buff to greatsword autoatatck damage.

What I want is 1 second of chill put on the first and second autoattack each, and increasing the life force gain.

I don’t want to camp greatsword all the time. It’s why I want reaper shroud damage UPPED. It’s really too low.

That way, we can start with Greatsword 3>Greatsword 2, go into Reaper Shroud, then come back out of it for another Greatsword 3>2. Until 50%, where we spam gravedigger and Greatsword 3.

I also think that if reaper shroud’s 4th skill reflected projectiles, we could afford to improve the leap cast time. It makes little sense to put projectile protectionon a short duration leap skill.

My big problems with reaper are:

- The amount of time we are vulnerable trying to use the greatsword’s autoattack and gravedigger. In Verdant Brink so many mobs have the potential to take off half your health in one hit in the amount of time your animations go through if you don’t dodge.

- Sustain/Recovery. Our healing options are all terrible, but in particular the shout. Once you get low in hp, you are staying low in HP, it’s no good especially with all the poison and cleave damage verdant brink mobs are spitting out. If minions stop being AoE fodder I’ll probably run the minion heal since it seems to be the only viable sustain heal.

- The selfish shouts with mediocre effects. Did we really need more selfish utility? Why not give group benefits to each shout when we strike a foe?

- The bad minors. Shivers of Dread is terrible for how little fear reaper has. Just slap a 10% damage modifier against chilled/vulnerable foes on it. Right now the 10% against foes with vulnerability would be ideal, since chill is useless on champs/bosses.

I don’t ever see myself using shouts over wells, which are our least bad utilities. Our elites still suck and I don’t understand why Lich Form was nerfed in PvE for the sake of PvP when warrior’s Rampage is an infinitely better version of Lich Form.

Stab DOES carry over out of shroud!

Suzukou.4831:

Stab DOES carry over out of shroud!

The pulsing part doesn’t, maybe that’s what he means. I’d agree with that.

ronpierce.2760:

Suzukou.4831:

Stab DOES carry over out of shroud!

The pulsing part doesn’t, maybe that’s what he means. I’d agree with that.

I don’t think it should carry over. It is there to make staying in RS worthwile while also having unique interactions. If you’re in shroud the whole time, you can blast it in the last second for extra CC. If you plan to leave shroud, you can use it before leaving. If you get knocked out of shroud before using it, you’ve kittened up. The whole Reaper is designed to be unstoppable in RS. And the counterplay is to knock him out of RS. That’s good and makes stuff kinda balanced!

Agree, aftercasts are the only thing holding back the GS. You end up
cancelling your skills and missing far too often. However GS is much better than the previous BWE.

What I don’t agree with is:

Shouts summary
———————————
The main problem is still their poor effectiveness on a single foe and this a problem with all shouts. There’s not really an easy solution for this other than having inverse exponential scaling (which you did do partially with “you are all weaklings”). I like that the base effect works without hitting a target now. Unfortunately Rise does not work this way so it needs to be fixed. Generally speaking i still think shouts in general need way more damage and more single target usability.


Traits
———————————

Augury of Death
—-
This trait doesn’t really have a lot of use in PvE because shouts are weak. In PvP it doesn’t make sense because you aren’t going to hit many enemies. Not sure what to do about this other than making shouts better.

Ideally we should mix shouts with 1 or 2 utilities from the base class to cover for this weakness. The issue is that our base utilities are bad, or have long cooldowns, and many encounters both in PvE and PvP don’t involve many foes.

If you are fighting multiple enemies shouts are already in a good place,

I soloed Operative Belka in Arah path 2. All her attacks are ranged and do a lot of damage. Blinds are useless and any chill you apply vanishes in less than 0.5 sec. You pretty much have to eat all of her damage since you don’t have evades, blocks or projectile destruction (except RS2), and you have to save your dodges for the 1 shot Pulsing Orb when she teleports.

To beat her I used “Your soul is mine”, “You are all weaklings”, “Rise!”, “Chilled to the bone!” with Augury, Soul Eater and Vital Persistence. Since the barrels count as enemies I had crazy sustain, most of the fight my health was above 80%. When I got out of shroud my shouts were ready, after using them and GS skills the shroud was full and ready.

Yep, shouts and Augury definitely need some tweaks especially the damage, but they are already good in the right setting. I hope the new content makes use of this and we should accept that shouts necro is suited mostly for mid fight and stronghold in PvP and situational in current PvE. Note: I’m not saying that shouts should stay bad in 1vs1 but that we have to acknowledge that they are not meant for single targets so at best they’ll always be a bit under powered in those situations.

Charblaze.6958:

Agree, aftercasts are the only thing holding back the GS. You end up
cancelling your skills and missing far too often. However GS is much better than the previous BWE.

What I don’t agree with is:

Shouts summary
———————————
The main problem is still their poor effectiveness on a single foe and this a problem with all shouts. There’s not really an easy solution for this other than having inverse exponential scaling (which you did do partially with “you are all weaklings”). I like that the base effect works without hitting a target now. Unfortunately Rise does not work this way so it needs to be fixed. Generally speaking i still think shouts in general need way more damage and more single target usability.


Traits
———————————

Augury of Death
—-
This trait doesn’t really have a lot of use in PvE because shouts are weak. In PvP it doesn’t make sense because you aren’t going to hit many enemies. Not sure what to do about this other than making shouts better.

Ideally we should mix shouts with 1 or 2 utilities from the base class to cover for this weakness. The issue is that our base utilities are bad, or have long cooldowns, and many encounters both in PvE and PvP don’t involve many foes.

If you are fighting multiple enemies shouts are already in a good place,

I soloed Operative Belka in Arah path 2. All her attacks are ranged and do a lot of damage. Blinds are useless and any chill you apply vanishes in less than 0.5 sec. You pretty much have to eat all of her damage since you don’t have evades, blocks or projectile destruction (except RS2), and you have to save your dodges for the 1 shot Pulsing Orb when she teleports.

To beat her I used “Your soul is mine”, “You are all weaklings”, “Rise!”, “Chilled to the bone!” with Augury, Soul Eater and Vital Persistence. Since the barrels count as enemies I had crazy sustain, most of the fight my health was above 80%. When I got out of shroud my shouts were ready, after using them and GS skills the shroud was full and ready.

Yep, shouts and Augury definitely need some tweaks especially the damage, but they are already good in the right setting. I hope the new content makes use of this and we should accept that shouts necro is suited mostly for mid fight and stronghold in PvP and situational in current PvE. Note: I’m not saying that shouts should stay bad in 1vs1 but that we have to acknowledge that they are not meant for single targets so at best they’ll always be a bit under powered in those situations.

The problem is PvE reapers have no good adept trait alternative besides Augury, which involves shout.

Chilling Nova is useless on enemies with defiance bars, and it’s just plain weak in general. You gotta have chill an opponent for a chance to trigger an extra bit of chill. It’s weak.

I mean, bosses will generally be single target affairs, so you’ve kitten shouts from the getgo in PvE.

More importantly, most of the shouts provide benefits already covered by other classes’ boon sharing ability, without the target limitation downsides. Might, vulnerability, weakness, these already are provided in spades by other means.

Shouts like Rise should function like Illusionary Defender, sharing the mitigation across the team. And these shouts have the greatest potential because they aren’t based around yet more might/vulnerability, which other classes can stack fine without us in a group setting.

spoj.9672:

<snip>
Chilling Force
—-
The ICD per target totally destroys this traits use in a lot of PvE content. Boss fights are mostly one target. Which means the might gain is really poor for anything other than large groups of mobs. Our chill uptime is better so its not as bad as before. But it’s outclassed by decimate defences both when solo and when in a group. Only way to fix this is to remove the ICD per target.
<snip>

Interesting thought. I too am underwhelmed by this trait. However, I was thinking that it should allow might procced by this trait to give might to allies, making in the inverse of the Guardian Empowering Might trait. The might given could probably last a bit longer as well. It would also mean that Blighter’s Boon wouldn’t have to be changed.

Now that BWE weekend is over and the Devs are back to work bumping this thread.. because I think it’s pretty much the best feedback thread and seems to best represent what Necro players are feeding back.

Was planning to write a feedback myself, but Spoj covers pretty much everything I’d have suggested.

Only thing I’d like to add is that I wish the stability on CttB was on one of our utility shouts instead.

Nice to see a positive post by spoj. keeping this bumped for developer viewing.

Very much agree with everything you said spoj.

I will say that it already feels MUCH less clunky than BWE1, but it was a mess then, I ragelogged from my Reaper in a fractal (didn’t quit group just couldn’t put up with the feel of it). That said it still feels like it transitions slowly, it’s one thing to have a big windup but that slow transition is pretty annoying on top of it all. So I’d love to see the aftercasts looked at.

As for more Lifeforce drain on the RS attack, not a bad idea, I’d kinda like to see Soul Spiral get that role more though, take a hit then soul spiral to regain some LF, or just keep it rotating for that leaving the DPS on that alone in return for that ability.

I don’t know just an option I was thinking of, like how Life Transfer works, but maybe a tad more in that you’re much more likely to take that stray hit, esp if you run out of dodges.

Decimate Defenses is working ? never seen it yet, does not matter if dummies in PVP or Fort Panic

Lorechill.7412:

Decimate Defenses is working ? never seen it yet, does not matter if dummies in PVP or Fort Panic

It doesnt display on hero panel because its per enemy.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, right on the dot with this feedback.

I had +1 your post.
I agree on pretty much everything. You seem a bit “too greedy” with the changes you ask, but even with those changes we’ll just reach what can be found in other classes.
So yeah reaper need some “adjustments” and particularly shouts.

Anyway I really enjoyed my reaper and it felt so smooth in comparison to BW1.

I agree with all of the major points here. Although, having the chill on greatsword AA #1 would be exploitable. However, I do agree the AA effects need to be spread around.

I think with shouts, just giving them a single, unscalable effect would help with having no/low targets. The effects would be dependent on the individual skill (YaaW pretty much has this feature already, giving weakness and a stun break)- that’s the kind of things I am talking about but make them a watered down baseline version so shouts don’t become unusable for no or low targets.

• Suffer could convert a single condi to a boon (unscalable) so you could use it between fights to knock off a pesky cripple or something.
• Rise could provide either a small heal or protection to minions and master or maybe a weak cripple to help the minions reach their target
• Chilled to the bone- works decent but for the things mentioned. The cd is waaaaay too long but I don’t think 60 second base is acceptable. 90 base would be fine so that when traited you could reduce it close to 60.
• your soul is mine- really this suffers from poor scaling more than anything, and mostly on the healing end. It should scale up healing based on target hit. The LF scaling was better this time around but could prob use a little tweak too. The main issue with it is the heal scaling, and that should be priority. (note this is not talking about base coefficient, rather a scalable heal based upon targets hit)

And yet what we needed just as much, team support, is nowhere to be found unless the chill stuff is an oversight, it’s all well and good we can do damage, but when we can’t support our team properly then we’re still the same semi-useless profession, why take a reaper when you can just take something with same DPS and 100 more ways of team support that will save your team? (100 is an exaggeration ofcourse)

Good feedback, Spoj.

I hope our dev sees it.