Guild Wars 2

What is in my signature.

The next elite specialization is going to have a sand shroud, and likely going to have a lot of sand based powers. Yet they called it the Scourge and not the Sand Witch. That was a lot of lost potential there.

I thought it was intentional so that you could follow up with something like Sword 3 so that Assassin’s annihilation was easy to pull off.

lifesteal barely scales with healing power at all.

Then don’t spend your money on it and buy a new game.

Also it is crying because you called it a mushroom.

Kidel.2057:

https://twitter.com/RoyCronacher/status/637781113126023168
Here our boy is talking about “roles”
We can start theorycrafting about tank, healer, dps and so son. Of course more specific roles (like tank+cc) are a bit different, but just a bit.

Are we really discussing the implications of theorycrafting? Live and let live guys.

It is difficult to theory craft something we know nothing about. We don’t know the boss mechanics, how the mob’s ai will work, how effective CC and non-damage support will be. For example, staff five for revenant may be needed to separate mob groups, or it might just hinder the group like it would do now. Remember at the beginning, the idea was to have groups of five with some being the damage dealer, other being support, and another with CC, but that never turned out as intended, and I do not believe it will start here.

Demented Yak.6105:

I think it’s reasonable to allow for intuitive speculation. Obviously the more information we have, the more accurate we’ll be in our guesses but so what? They say it’s going to be hard and we might need some defence so let’s just explore some of the current options.

To me, all the last two posts said are: “Never think. Never use your intuition or your brain. Just accept what there is and what there isn’t until we’re told what the new conditions and parameters are.”

But they are right, we have no idea what the challenging content involves. However, Arena-Net has a track record of the meta going completely lopsided to their intentions. So I think it is safe to assume that regardless of what A-Net has planned for the content, it is not going to be done as intended by most of the players.

Chances are we will still have the berserker meta, but invest slightly more into defenses and CC now instead of completely pure damage.

I am curious, have we learned yet how Revenant magic suddenly becomes common knowledge? Did they just look at Rytlock and facepalm and go “Oh of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” And then switched to being a Revenant?

Awesome in concept.

Awesome in theory.

For ten seconds, it gives Blighter’s Boon a 1 second ICD

Kidel.2057:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Cool idea! I’ll think about it a bit and maybe try out some things.

I just hope it’s not exactly like thief’s ahah

I think it would look more like Riposting Shadows, or a dodging animation with the effects of skills like phase smash and surge of the mists.

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Cool idea! I’ll think about it a bit and maybe try out some things.

Yay! I hope everything goes well, this would be amazing!

Players: This mechanic is badly implemented, could you change it to something more reliable?

A-Net: No.

Players: Can you fix it then please?

A-Net: We can’t.

Players: Why won’t you change it then?

A-Net: It looks cool, and theme is better than viability.

Rym.1469:

And then, after you add another Elite Specialization? Three Shrouds, four Shrouds?

Because what you suggest isn’t any alternative, so both Shrouds would’ve been baseline, I suppose? You wouldn’t annihilate all remaining non-Reaper specs with such change, wouldn’t you…or would you?

I am not agreeing with this suggestion, however you still need the elite specialization to use Reaper. And you can only have one elite specialization on at a time. So the most shrouds you can have would only be two regardless how many elite specializations are added.

Bhawb.7408:

Dagger is 100% a DPS weapon, it has one of the highest AA DPS in the game. Gaining LF on hit doesn’t make it sustain, and the healing is less a “sustain” weapon and more a “I’m melee and taking a ton of damage I need some way to deal with this”.

Axe, and all the comparable weapons to it, are burst weapons. They have a fairly weak AA with some kind of effect, and a burst skill on 2 that the rest of the kit is supposed to set up. While they borked it, it wasn’t going to be DPS as much as burst.

It has high auto attack damage, which is nice but that is only auto attack damage. If all other profession’s rotations were just auto attacking, then it would be very powerful. However, damage calculations have proven that Necromancers are far behind other professions. And it isn’t just life force, but it also has a pretty decent health steal. Along with it’s fast attacks that creates a wonderful synergy with health siphon on strike.

However, axe on the other hand is all out offensive. Skill one makes opponents vulnerable, second skill was supposed to be a burst skill, and the third gives out a boon corrupt, retaliation along with a cripple. The problem is that axe is too weak to be considered a choice.

But this isn’t exactly where I was going with this. What I am saying is if the damage of the dagger and greatsword are comparable, then dagger will always win hands down regardless of the situation because it is a sustain weapon and a good one at that. Like the axe, greatsword is all offensive except for a bit of defense on number four and a pull on five, so it to be used over the dagger, there has to be a reason to use it over the dagger for at least damage.

nearlight.3064:

TheLastNobody.8319:

nearlight.3064:

TheLastNobody.8319:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

And now we get minions that tank for you. I’m happy ^.^

What you talking about Willis?

Look at Robert Geesus’s Reaper Changes from beta feedback thread thats stickied above. Now “Rise!” is instant cast, unblockable, and instead of jagged horror’s, it now summons shambling horrors, which take 50% of the damage you receive to themselves, much like the mesmer skill, illusionary defender.

As for what a shambling horror is, its this:

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Shambling_Horror

….permission to squee captain?

Permission granted.

I think it could have some serious potential, since MM necro has been actually quite good these days when played by someone whose not a newb, but MM necro was always kinda weak in teamfights since the minions could be cleaved down while the necro could be focusfired without worry of them using spectral armor or whatnot. Now with rise, they’ll get tons of minion uptime and passive defense in larger fights, which I hope turns out to be good.

It will depend on how much health the shambling horrors have compared to jagged horrors, as they’ll still lose health each second making it more of a teamfight oriented minion skill.

Ironically, even though there will be more shambling horrors, I have a feeling they will be less useful the more enemies there are just because they will get AoEd down way too fast for it to matter, like about 1/5 of a second. Also we don’t know if the effects will stack or not, or if they will even split the damage between the five of them.

But if the shamblings have a ton of hp but a lot of self bleed stacks, I can see it as workable so that it can give you a good amount of damage reduction for about 1-2 seconds. How they work will make or break the skill.

I would love these cosmetic effects. But I would love it more if we could have Dhuum’s scythe as a greatsword skin.

Zalavaaris.5329:

Aren.9478:

NeXeD.3042:

No way in hell some of these changes stay.

I don’t know, I think a lot of what Robert said is very reasonable. The chill damage isn’t going to be amazing still. The greatsword will not do more dps to a single target than the dagger, the changes to shouts are necessary to make them viable. I think most, the greater majority, of those changes will stay.

AND IF ANYONE HERE GIVES FEEDBACK ABOUT THE REAPER BEING OP TO ANET NEXT BETA I WILL PERSONALLY CASTRATE THEM -.-

I’ll hold em down for ya

And I will hit them with a spoon.

Thank you Robert Gee for listening to us and making the changes to the elite specialization and it actually gives me hope that Scepter and Axe may become viable now. However, I do have one minor criticism.

“Greatsword cost/payoff ratio was undertuned
The original intent here was to make GS feel like more of an AoE weapon while dagger felt like more of a single target weapon. We tuned the damage ratios accordingly so that greatsword would have higher dps vs 3 or more targets as we didn’t want to devalue dagger as a melee weapon. However this didn’t account for the difficulty of actually hitting with greatsword skills, and when we took that into account it made sense to increase the damage multipliers on the core damage skills.”

Please do not balance greatsword around the dagger, it isn’t our DPS weapon, the skills, life force generation, and blood trait synergy point it toward being our self sustain weapon, it is meant to keep our hp and life force pool up. Looking at the axe skills it is clear that the axe was supposed to be our single target DPS weapon, but it got botched up so much that it is arguably the worst weapon in the game. This caused us to go with our sustain weapon as our main DPS weapon, which is one of the reasons why Necromancer damage is almost non-existent. If balanced around the dagger, then the dagger will still win out as it will always give us more health and life force while still doing about the same amount of damage with less risk.

I would instead take inspiration at more DPS focused weapons that do damage to up to three targets and scale accordingly, along with a few tweaks. While yes, the DPH would be quite high, it kind of needs that type of hit to make a slow type of DPS weapon work. Or increasing the speed of the hits, but I feel like it’s going to stick to the really slow hits.

And also I just love the new Rise, I really need to say that. Unless they melt faster than icecream in a furnace. Please don’t do that, I really want to love that skill.

Nynuwe.5893:

Wintermute.5408:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VDvgL58h_Y

Jackpot

ANet should make a spoon skin for Great Sword.

If it is a greatsword skin, then people will complain that their spoon is too big.

Not quite a movie, but close enough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m39CXLMaybg

Tristan.5678:

I said dozen of time Gs dps will be far worse than dagger …. only deluded minds hoped for something

I think we all knew it, we just needed to have it in our hands and see if they fixed it before pointing fingers.

I miss my Reaper as well, it’s hard to play the base necromancer now. I absolutely loved beating the tar out of things with my giant over sized scythe. I need it as a greatsword skin. I -NEED- IT!

I actually like Augury of Death as it is now. However, I feel we could really use some group support so that they aren’t shunned in dungeons.

15 Power and 15 Ferocity increase per hit to allies within a 600 AoE with a stack cap of 5 for 7 seconds.

Yes.

15 charrs.

I have to admit, I like most of the charr animations except for the auto which looks more like the bull kitty is flailing rather than attacking with a heavy giant sword no one should ever be using. But that is more of a melee greatsword animation for charrs than reaper specific.

Considering Glint is basically a giant dragon, I don’t think she will sound very feminine either, she’d likely sound more like Mallyx.

I prefer the weapon and legend swap being separate. I enjoy using Vengeful Hammers and Unrelenting Assault, then swapping to Shiro to use Impossible Odds and continue attacking with my sword.

Khristophoros.7194:

Esorono.1039:

Khristophoros.7194:

Zalavaaris.5329:

As pve is currently (might change) survivability isn’t needed due to the speed at which meta builds kill things. If survivability is what we bring the viability is only there as much as the community is willing to accept it. Having a spoon is great, having a knife is helpful but when all you need is a fork suddenly the other 2 options may as well not exist.

Ok I really tried to explain this in my OP but I’ll try again.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where necro damage is buffed to be top tier. It’s as good as ele damage.

Now which will you pick, the squishy ele, or the tanky necro? They both do the same damage but one of them is tankier with no drawbacks.

Survivability matters to that extent. When you have satisfied all your other needs, you will then choose whatever has the best survivability out of your currently viable options.

The elementalist, due to the support, damage and survivability with no real drawbacks. The necromancer would be squisher in practice as it has nothing to mitigate damage with besides death shroud, and Vampiric Aura isn’t very supportive on its own. So it would be better to just bring an Elementalist, Thief, Warrior, Guardian, Mesmer, or Engineer.

Necro has by far the best survivability in PvE if built and played right. I’m not even going to explain it. If you’re not playing necro at that level you aren’t qualified to discuss it.

It only has the highest passive defense, but face tanking only goes so far. Then it becomes reliant on your team members to keep you alive because a single hit will destroy death shroud and then proceed to eat the necromancer alive. It has no blocks, invulnerabilities, projectile blocks, or even vigor to help itself. It’s just a sponge. As a Mesmer, I can just use sword two and distort for two seconds, and then sword 4 if things get really bad. If by some horrible travesty, my mesmer is still in trouble, it can just blink out of the way. If it is still in trouble, I can use distortion for another 4 seconds of distortion. On top of that, it can slow down the enemies attacks while increasing my own attacks. And if there is projectiles, just throw up a feedback or a focus four. And that is just on a meta build, fully investing in defense would make it harder to crack open than a fortress.

Meanwhile, Necromancer’s active defense is Warhorn four, Plague two, Well of Darkness, and Staff five. And none of those are going to save you against a boss unless you strip away all their defiance stacks. The rest of Necromancer’s defense is based on reducing the damage taken, and slowly healing back up, which A-Net decided it’s best to make as difficult as possible in Death Shroud.

So in a nutshell, Necromancers are more forgiving, but not the most survivable profession. Though I will give it credit where credit is due for being able to survive Jade Maw’s fail condition by having enough HP to tank it out.

Khristophoros.7194:

Zalavaaris.5329:

As pve is currently (might change) survivability isn’t needed due to the speed at which meta builds kill things. If survivability is what we bring the viability is only there as much as the community is willing to accept it. Having a spoon is great, having a knife is helpful but when all you need is a fork suddenly the other 2 options may as well not exist.

Ok I really tried to explain this in my OP but I’ll try again.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario where necro damage is buffed to be top tier. It’s as good as ele damage.

Now which will you pick, the squishy ele, or the tanky necro? They both do the same damage but one of them is tankier with no drawbacks.

Survivability matters to that extent. When you have satisfied all your other needs, you will then choose whatever has the best survivability out of your currently viable options.

The elementalist, due to the support, damage and survivability with no real drawbacks. The necromancer would be squisher in practice as it has nothing to mitigate damage with besides death shroud, and Vampiric Aura isn’t very supportive on its own. So it would be better to just bring an Elementalist, Thief, Warrior, Guardian, Mesmer, or Engineer.

Elementalists: Oreo. A tasty all around cookie that you can never go wrong with.

Warrior: Vanilla Wafer. Not very impressive to look at and has a bland concept, but is still surprisingly tasty.

Guardian: Chocolate Chip. A sweet cookie that quite enjoyable to most.

Mesmer: Girl Scout Mint Chocolate. A refreshing and exciting cookie with a lot of kick and flavor to it.

Engineer: Confectioner Sugar. Looks great and tastes great at first, but loses appeal after a while, but still tasty.

Thief: That One Cookie Hiding Under The Packaging. Where did it go!? I know there was still one more in there!

Rangers and Necromancers: Oatmeal Raisin. In the cookie bowl mix, you decide to go for a chocolate chip! It looks tasty and mouth watering, then you bite into it and realize it was not what you thought it was, and learn the taste of utter disappointment.

Revenant: NEW! Labeled Cookies. It’s new, you never got to really get a taste of it yet, only the concept. It might taste good, it might not, and it is hard to tell until you get home and try it. Hopefully it will be better than the oatmeal raisin you accidentally ate.

‘Working as intended’ I believe, I wouldn’t be too surprised to see this on the next patch notes;

- Soul Marks: Removed an incorrect unblockable skill fact from this trait.

Kind of, in a PvP standpoint, but even if it had the life force generation it would be too held back by the fact that the skills take half a century to land. But in PvE where mobs will happily stand in your AoE and not bother dodging anything. GS reaper will arguably be better at gaining Life Force than dagger Reaper if just because of two traits, Chilling Force and Chilling Nova. The traits gives one percent of your life force any time you hit something that is chilled, and the other one causes critical hits on chilled opponents to chill and damage up to three mobs per hit in a 180 radius up to 3 times every 10 seconds. Since the auto attack can perma chill and does not currently appear to have an ICD on Chilling Force, it would be quite easy to gain life force after the third auto attack. For example, Death Spiral on three mobs that are chilled will net a 20% life force gain. Then if you manage to keep 5 mobs in a Nightfall for 5 seconds you can get another 25% life force from it. You can also combine it with well of suffering to add another 30% life force. These are all assuming that Chilling Nova doesn’t proc Chilling Force either. If it does, then assuming that the opponent is chilled and you hit three mobs with an auto attack, and crit it will give 12% life force, this can happen three times every ten seconds.

However, if you aren’t facing a horde of mobs. dagger will outshine GS in life force generation and likely damage. And the fact that GS will never see PvP use even if it knocks off practically half health per attack, dagger will be better there too.

But this is all theoretical and I just know once they are released and actually see reaper in action instead of trying to balance it against a single heavy golem in the PvP lobby it will be nerfed to the ground, maybe something like Chilling Force can only activate once per second or something. If that happens, then GS will be pretty underwhelming in the Life Force generation department, and likely overall.

Endless tengu transformation potions. Since we cannot play Tengus, or at least not yet, can we at least have a potion so we can look like one? I would really like one, and I am pretty sure several others would as well.

Also we need playable tengus, but I think I already made at least thirty threads on that in 2010 – 2012, but a bit of a reminder cannot hurt.

I agree with Durian.

Right now my beta Rev’s name is Tengusplease.

Skoigoth.9238:

Well, we already have access to piercing, so what exactly do you mean OP? Ricochet hits? Small AoE-blast on hit? Two/three projectiles per skill activation?
Would be all nice and dandy for us, but it wouldn´t really address any of the more pressing issues the class has currently.

I think I understand what the op is saying. Which is life blast still sending out a single shot, or a volley of three, with the current cast speed it has already. But each shot doing 1/2 or 2/3 less damage depending on the number of hits. It would still pierce, but each time it hits something it counts as two or three hits, meaning it would proc the vampiric and Dhuum Fire traits two or three times. Basically anything with an on-hit effect. It’s actually a pretty good idea considering how much hp we would recover in shroud if we hit enough. Sure it won’t solve all the classes’ problems, but I wouldn’t say no to this one. Though I will be honest, I’d rather have plague blast on land, it would be amazing.

I’d go Dagger/Warhorn and Staff. Don’t use axe, it is really, really terrible. As for tips, I would suggest getting Soul Reaping traitline first and go for a shroud build first, it’s pretty strong for a necromancer build. Also when you go into death shroud, remember to change to staff first, Life Blast gains much more power from it. The next traitline you’d want really depends on if you are feeling squishy or not. If so, I’d suggest going into blood, if not, spite.

Also if you want to use a minion build, remember to make sure all your minions are right next to you before you engage, or they will stand there like kitten s. You can also use spectral walk in jumping puzzles to reset if you screw up a hard jump. Just make sure you cast it before the jump. the recall can be used in midair. If you are in Blood Magic and want to trigger Blood Bond, I would suggest using Staff 2 followed by Dark Path or a dodge roll, blood is power is also good if you have that equipped.

Also, when leveling, feel free to use anything you want. No one can stop you in open world PvE, have fun with the profession and don’t take it too seriously, just build it the way you like it, and try out different play styles. I find myself playing with an axe every now and again just because I like a few axe skins. Try seeing how fast you can kill yourself with corruption skills, go bungee jumping off cliffs with spectral walk, see where you can go using the Flesh Wurm, go into death shroud and follow people while making “OooooOOOOoooOOOOooooOOOO…” sounds!

Akrasia.5469:

Your first idea would be great for us but it is so OP we could never get it. 2sec Invun every 10 seconds is really powerful. Invun skill cooldowns are all 50+ seconds. A block and stability and let us trait a reduced recharge might be possible

I like the DS1 pull but traited only as some people want to stay back. Also it won’t work with Reaper Shroud because of the melee range. I’d love to see a pull on Warhorn 4. Daze and pull cone.

I wouldn’t say it is op, it just seems like that because necromancers aren’t used to having anything decent. Mesmers have a 2 second distortion with a 12 second (or 9 1/2 with traits) on top of a good amount of damage. Not quite the same as invulnerability, but pretty close. With it on Necromancer’s death shroud, it means that now you have to use death shroud, or leave it an unable to use it again for ten seconds, and it would need to take up a trait slot. If Necromancers had other forms of mitigation, it might be op, but since that would be Necromancer’s only true invulnerability, it’s not overwhelming.

I find the skills pretty mostly, and I love the concept of Death Shroud, Reaper Shroud looks even more amazing. I know it isn’t going to replace my Guardian or Mesmer, but I find it a fun toy profession.

Speaking from a PvE standpoint, it’s doable, but other professions will be able to do about the same amount of support on top of doing around 8x the dps of a cleric Revenant with staff.

Aw, I won’t be home until 11:00pm tonight, tell me how it goes and have fun streaming!

Dahkeus.8243:

I haven’t been in game yet to try anything…but what you’re describing doesn’t sound like a “cheat” or “bug”. If the projectile speed is supposed to be increased, the trajectory should be shallower unless you think that engineers and change gravity to make their grenades arc downward faster than normal, lol.

I’d say mechanics are more important than realism in a game like this. I am sure Engineers can handle a bit of break of reality for this change.

It’s alright, we all make those mistakes once in a while.

They changed it so that it cannot be cast in mid-air so that necromancers cannot use it as a parachute.

I can’t really say for certain, but a reaper shroud Reaper with Dhuumfire sounds good on paper, saving they don’t nerf Dhuumfire or burning into the ground. Just thinking of a condi necro with Dhuumfire and Reaper’s onslaught does however give me the giggles considering how strong burning is right now and how easy it would be to apply. But then again, outside of reaper shroud Reapers would be horrible in DPS in conditions. Reapers seem to be more built towards berserker gear overall, but even then if the theories are right about the power coefficients of Reaper dps, it’s going to be worse than the dagger in terms of DPS until half health. To add insult to injury, A-Net believes this is too strong for Reapers so there is a good chance they will nerf it even more to the point of dagger is overall better DPS.

But for open world PvE, I would maybe just stick to a mark/well build for all the tagging. Anything is pretty much viable there, as no one can be kicked out of an open world map and the mobs on those maps tend to be face roll easy.

Zantmar.5406:

To be fair u can trait for chill on blind, since that trait was buffed u can get a long duration chill going

Not to mention you can trait so that chilled foes are also made vulnerable for up to 15 stacks.

Gryph.8237:

my only hope is the fact that some of the streamers indicated that necro felt very weak from a condi standpoint, and did not appear to be too impressed from the power build standpoint.

I missed when Nos was playing, did that show anything positive?

Anyone throw me a bone?

Corrupting boons seems like a good way to deal with Guardians, and Rangers appear to have problem with necromancers as well. So possibly classes that rely a lot on boons and low on condition clear might have a problem.

Zin.6170:

He is about to go over Necro condi but I have to go to class, hopefully one of you clowns can give a recap of it…….plz?

In a nutshell, Shin (playing warrior) could maybe defeat a necromancer with his eyes closed. He only got below 80% health once after about 10 duels with one, and lost once due to forgetting to remake a preset build, and still won with the preset build a few times because it is really just that bad. He had a harder time with other professions and needed to keep on his toes, but most of the time, he seemed pretty bored fighting the necromancer as he was little more than a punching bag to him. He also tried a necromancer condition build and was surprised by how terrible it was compared to other classes. And mentions that Necromancers seem to be the lowest of all condition builds. Power builds seemed a tad mediocre as well. Jebro kept losing to Shin in 2 Vs 2 and Karl and Jebro got convinced that Necromancers are very strong when it was really Shin who was doing most of the damage, though it didn’t help that Jebrow never cleansed his conditions after being hit by a Signet of Spite. Shin also managed to tie a Necromancer with a Ranger and forgot to use any of his utilities, he seems to have a problem with Necromancers while on Ranger and Guardian. But I don’t know what else happened, or happening right now as my stream is acting up.

And in the end, Karl decided that Necromancers do need a bit of a buff, so he made Plague do a long single self bleed instead.