Guild Wars 2

I ran full celestial on my Necro main ever since the stat set came out. On the plus side, it works with all trait lines and most builds. I very, very rarely ever die. (only addressing PvE here, BTW.)
The downside is that you don’t kill things too quickly.
Most stat sets trade power vs. condi or offence vs. Defense. Celestial trades great at one thing off in favour of “good enough” at everything.

For Reaper I’m keeping about half of my Celestial. My rings are now Sinister and then I’m using enough Rampager’s to get my crit chance to 60% because my GS will have Strength and Torment runes (both proc on crit). I’m also going with Curses for Chilling Darkness (Nightfall and Well of Darkness benefit) which also adds in a bleed on crit.
The half celestial ensures I have some Ferocity to benefit the grits while also having Toughness and Vitality for melee.

I’ve wanted an elite well forever, but I doubt it’ll ever happen. An idea is had a year or so ago is more or less covered by the Reaper’s Rise!
I like Well of Ruin as a name. Apply condi’s to foes (1 or 2 stacks for 1 or w seconds each, but it applies a bunch: cripple, torment, bleed, poison, chill, blind). Additionally, it recharges your DS cool down and you gain 1% life force per Condi applied (so 5 foes would grant 6% life force per foe per second).

Slightly off-topic, but I was trying Well of Darkness with some Reaper builds in the BWEs and it works very well with Chilling Darkness from Curses, especially if you add in Deathly Chill from Reaper.
Using Nightfall, WoD and then another Nightfall is stupidly strong in PvE as it renders does Blind and Chilled for an extended duration. Doubt it’d be too useful in PvP and likely only situationally in WvW (solo camp caps?).
Just wanted to throw it out there that WoD may be more useful on Reaper builds, even in its current form.

I specifically choose the Curses trait “Chilling Darkness” because I thought that it would synergize well with Reaper greatsword skill #4 (Nightfall). However, unlike the “Well of Darkness” utility which shows the Chill, the tooltip for Nightfall does not show the Chill effect.
Testing the skill out in-game, it looks like the Chill is applied in addition to the Blindness, so I think it’s just the tooltip that doesn’t work.

I can totally get “wanting to make it easy for new players to get into the game”. But at the same time, how could nobody at ArenaNet not see how existing players wouldn’t see this as a slap in the face? I’m as loyal a customer and as big a fan as you’re going to find, but I can’t help but read over the pre-order stuff and say “REALLY?!”
If the price point is $50, fine. But then come out with a “Complete” edition that includes the core game for $60, just so that long term players feel like they’re getting some kind of deal. Or, as another poster said, Grant a free character slot if the key is attached to an existing account.
I’ve played since the beta weekend events and the 3 day head start and never felt the need to post here. But this ticked me off enough to post. Hope you do something to rectify this mess.

I was thinking it over and all we know for sure is:
- Marjory has a greatsword that her sister’s spirit now lives in
- I have not seen Marjory use a Shout, but she’s supposedly working towards the new spec
- Ritualists had Summoning, but they also had Communing and Channeling
- There will be “a new way to use Life Force”
- Mesmers got a new Shatter type and a new Boon (Alacrity) so ANet isn’t afraid to put new stuff in

So… here’s my thought / wishful thinking: Ritualist, with a new skill type: Ritual. (Not Shouts!)
Rituals are channeled skills where you hold down the skill and you can channel it as long as you have life force (or decide to stop channeling it). That’s right… the new use for Life Force is to power your rituals! While performing a ritual, you commune with a spirit that grants some effect. This communing ritual is powered through life force. As long as you have life force, you can channel the skill. Since Rev’s now have Energy, this kind of a use (as a resource pool to power skills) isn’t that far-fetched.

And it could work…
Heal – perform a ritual to convert Life Force directly into health. (maybe at 2:1 or 3:1 so that it’s not OP?)
Utility – perform a ritual to commune with a spirit that stacks <insert boon here> onto yourself and/or allies, duration and/or boon stacks grow the longer you channel the ritual.
Utility – perform a ritual to commune with a spirit that stacks <condi> onto enemies, duration and stacks increase the longer you commune.

Spirits could do pretty much anything… mess with the minds of your foes so that they can’t see you (apply Stealth), corrupt an enemies blood (poison), instill courage into your allies (prot/might/whatever). Or they could just attack for direct damage, that scales up the longer you commune for: X + (Y^ritual duration).

Lots of ways they could balance this too… Root you while performing a ritual (would suck, but if they compensated by having low CD’s, I could live with it). Or they could drain life force at different rates depending on how powerful the effect is. Traits could be used to adjust life force drain rate while performing rituals or cooldown on rituals, etc.

They’ve shown with Chronomancer that they like dipping into GW1 lore, so why not Ritualist? Makes a ton more sense than shouts and the mechanics could totally work.

Anyway, here’s hoping. At least if it’s shouts there’s nothing forcing me to use it. And if by some fluke I’m right… joy

@panzer The whole game isn’t ruined; however, some of us have a completionist mindset, which has only been encouraged with the recent addition of reward chests for AP’s. Those chests and the leaderboards make one think that ANet wants you to get and chase AP’s.
So when they add content that is insanely hard, it makes the game very un-fun. I played through a dozen matches of the Aspect mini-game earlier trying to get one lousy kill of a crystal carrier.
Ravious over at Kill Ten Rats actually wrote a good blog about this the other day… When GW2 came out, it was touted as “play your way” with open world and no set Holy Trinity roles. However, with the time-boxed updates and achievements, it no longer feels that way for many players. It’s now “OMG, I have 14 days to get this achievement or it’s gone for good.” There’s pressure (however self-imposed) to play Aspect Arena — not to win or to have fun — but to get the kitten kills of the crystal carriers. That’s just not fun. And for casual players who only get 30 minutes here or there — the message ANet is sending to them is that “if you can’t devote hours to our game, then just don’t bother playing”.

Dear ArenaNet. I like challenging content. Challenging content is good and fun.
Tier 4 of the Trails is FRIGGIN’ IMPOSSIBLE! It is NOT fun. Associating an achievement with something that is so ridiculously, insanely hard is like like holding an ice cream cone a foot away from a toddler who is confined to a stroller… It’s just cruel.
I’m all for a challenge. But after spending an hour and not getting closer than the 3 minute mark… I’m quite kitten ed off with you. Crap like this SERIOUSLY ruins the game because it gets VERY un-fun, very quickly.
Please tone it down for us non-MLG players who would like to actually complete the content on offer.

Late to the party, but I figured I’d add my 50 cents…
PvP and WvW already have leaderboards, so I think that the AP leaderboard should be for PvE only. As such, any points from PvP Dailies/Monthlies/titles and same for WvW should be NOT included so that you get a true measure of PvE accomplishements!
Is that going to happen? Hell no. Since I rarely PvP or WvW, I’m unlikely to crack the top 1000 (although I’m close). Is this the end of the world? No.
ANet was just rewarding dedicated fans of Tyria. If you’re jealous of the extra points that GW1 players got, I hope you’re also QQ’ing about the minis and kites that people who spent money buying gems got because it’s the same kitten thing — ANet rewarding loyal fans.
While you’re at it, why don’t you ask that any points earned during the 3-day head start be dropped too? That was also “unfair” to anyone who didn’t pre-order, wasn’t it?
Oh… And I’m going on a 2-week vacation soon and won’t be able to play, so can ANet please turn off all AP advancement for everyone else because that’s not fair to me either! :P
TLDR version: grow up and get over it!

This just happened to me too. I had 0/5 when it reset ~45 minutes ago. I completed 4 of the Dailes (events, champions, gathers, kills) and then I got Vet Slayer, but getting Vet slayer also got me “gain a level” so I got 5/5 and 6/5 simultaneously.
However, I got no reward chest. No laurel, no silver, no coin, no karma jug.
I tried going to the character selection screen and then back into the game, but no luck.
I then completed the rabbit-killer daily on a different character (for 7/5), but that didn’t trigger my chest either.
:(