Guild Wars 2

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Maybe if you’re running a hybrid/condi build. As a fellow power reaper player, my advice to other power reapers is to stick with power. Even with no duration I already cap out vuln and have a high AoE chill uptime. If you wanted more chill, I’d just suggest Runes of the Ice. You lose the power/ferocity from scholar runes, but gain chill duration and a 7% damage mod against chilled foes, which is much more reliable than the scholar bonus.

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I’ve been doing a bit of math, and Marauder might be a worthy investment for players who don’t want to go full glass.

It comes down to sheer bulk. While Marauder is basically a Berserker + Valkyrie mix, Marauder has more points. 3,362 total stats as compared to 3,087 of the previous 3 tiered sets (not including runes). This means that, while you could trade off to more durability by mixing Valkyrie and Berserker, it will be less efficient and less powerful then mixing Berserker and Marauder.

With Scholar Runes and no additional buffs, A full Marauder set has 3,497 effective power while a full Berserker set has 3,819 effective power. A difference of 9%. Most min/maxers will pull their hair out over that number, but for low HP classes that extra 579 Vitality is important. For low HP classes it is a 49.7% increase in effective HP. For mid HP classes, 36.4% increase. For high tier, 30% increase.

It isn’t optimal in a perfect comp, perfect play setting. But, 9% lower damage vs. 49.7% greater effective HP is a tradeoff that I won’t blame anyone for taking.

In max might + max fury situations, I’m getting effective polwers of 5,226 and 5,721, or an 8.6% increase by using Berserker over Marauder.

My advise would be to disregard the statement saying if you are a reaper, stick with power reaper. Viper is perfectly applicable to condi reaper builds in GW2 and power vs condi for decision making purposes will ALWAYS be up to the encounter (I don’t think anyone would debate this). Put yourself in a raiding environment (one of the few places where ascended gear really has a chance to shine), viper and condi builds are highly desirable for many reasons.

Look at the first encounter: DPS up time is a major factor in power build DPS. Being a power reaper will require you to stay on boss more often thus losing DPS uptime (blue teleports make your DPS up time go down, you will get hit by these, you will have to evade these). The second encounter: several benifits regarding reaper condi builds – not least of which is epidemic and the DPS/raid benifits that come from it. Having two epi reapers playing off eachother can provide a big boost to DPS, drop tons of adds, and be used frequently to EPI down the walls for the gors encounter.

In short, all builds are viable for different things. This is off topic but a few folks were asking why Viper Reaper was ommitted in builds that would be useful to use Viper’s armor. Condi is VERY viable on reapers and thus Viper’s is as well. It is encounter specific what works best.

At the end of the day, play what you enjoy, if you don’t enjoy the game why play?

I interpreted that differently but makes sense when rereading it a few times.

I wanted to site the below statement from the October 12th news posted on the guildwars website and speculate, and see if A-Net may be able to respond to a concern that I think many players will have, a concern that would have 1000’s of gold for many people at stake.

“The acquisition of precursors in future legendary weapon sets will—like most things about new legendary weapons—be mostly the same as the ones in our first set, but with adjustments. The two differences here are that all precursors for future sets will only be acquired through the precursor crafting journey, and unlike existing precursors, future precursors will not be dropped anywhere in the game”

What is interesting about this, as you have seen in this game with Halloween skins (see Ghastly Grinning Shield Skin worth 2100-3k gold as of today on TP) discontinued items will indefinitely become more and more rare and never stop increasing in value. Being that legendary weapon precursors will be crafted and never again dropped, the tradeable version will become incredibly rare incredibly fast (already rare as most precursors get used instantly).

What I wanted to see what people thought, would you anticipate a near future skyrocketing in a legendary precursor just for the sake of it being rare although it has no appreciable value greater than what people will be able to craft?

My thoughts…discontinued/rare items will always be valuable as the bottom line. If A-Net might be able to chime in if the currently tradeable versions will become account bound at launch of pre-cursor crafting or if they will remain tradeable indefinitely that will certainly change whether I hold pre-cursors that I have now or sell them in the immediate future.

I think this is a fair question to have ANet address as I am sure there are several people like myself if they have a sellable precursor that would want to know if it will become 0 value outside of crafting after the 23rd of this month.

Signed,

Harry The Hobo