Guild Wars 2

I think Reaper’s damage is appealing, and it’s ability to generate vunrability and might make it feel really good to solo/pug with. However, as RS necro basically requires the Reaper and Soul Reaping lines, the remaining lines feel like choosing between spite and blood magic.

As it stands, I’m worried that this is not a difficult enough choice, mostly because spite contributes much better, especially in power RS builds. This leaves us without Vampiric Aura, one of the only ways necro currently feels like it helps out the whole team and without it feels like a very selfish class again. I wonder how one could make reaper feel like more of a team contributer. A thought would be using Decimate Defences if it effected the whole team (a thought that it might be applied by reapers to enemies on hit), but I would guess that it would have to have it’s effectivness cut in half (which would be fine by me at least)

Half baked suggestions aside, any thoughts on maybe making Reaper a bit more group-friendly so it has more of a niche in currently existing group content like dungeons and fractals (I am aware reaper is heavily involved in testing for raids, so less worried there).

Edit: I am an idiot. You could just make Decimate Defenses an aura. I stand by my comments on a nerf to compensate.

I specifically checked the forums for a thread like this after seeing on Reddit that other people felt this way.
HoT was the last chance for some open world challenge. BW2 was tough, but fair. We need more of that in this game.

Lahmia.2193:

Personally, I feel the Reaper and Greatsword are Anet’s answer to Necros lacking Pve viability. I don’t feel it performs well in pvp at all but absolutely dominates Pve, where massive damage is needed. Greatsword auto has the highest per hit damage of any basic profession weapon and Gravedigger spam can pump out between 10 to 20k damage per hit (zerker of course).

I think it needs to hit just a bit faster to allow you to handle the crowds of trash NPCs that you’re supposed to be able to. It’s reliance on GS2 for DPS gets boring after a while as well.
It just needs tuning and to be a bit more stable.

I think the LF generation from GS should really be buffed by a small margin, perhaps even 1-2% total across the AA chain. As it stands, unless you’ve many, many foes to clear you’ll need Dagger/[Offhand] to generate LF at any kind of rate that’s fun to play as.
Alternativly, they could speed up the AA a fair bit, which would help use the GS in the big mobs you’re supposed to be fighting, even if they lower average dps due to more hits/less interrupts. And would in turn allow the current LF gain to be improved without changing the rate per hit.

I think the autoattack hits too slowly to get good RS uptime on it’s own and to feel exciting to play with.
Coupled with the nerfs to chill, it feels very underwhelming and I find myself running D/W until it’s time to spam ‘2’.
I think a lot of things could be solved by speeding up the auto attack and then reducing the 100%-off cooldown to a reduced cooldown to compensate, so there is more visual variety and more than hitting a single key at roughly single second intervals.

Zietlogik.6208:

I think they should just remove leveling all together, have a mastery system for all traits/specializations/etc.

Start players with the base stats of an 80, but not have traits/etc. and rename the levels of zones to “Easy, Medium, Hard, Difficult” of how the level of zones used to be to represent the difficulty of events and completion.

Add an interesting meta event to every single zone and be done with it.

Then do the same for personal story, but let players attempt them at any difficulty they choose, same with zones….if a new players wants to try Frostgorge, they should be able to, they won’t get 1-shot by a deer but will have a much more difficult time without traits etc.

Definatly an interesting preposal. I still think levels are uselful though for tiering out the experience. Perhaps a suitable compromise would be to reduce the jump in required xp from lv.17-20-ish on so that you level reasonably quickly, but are still encouraged to explore at least some areas fully before wandering into the big, bad orrian/maguuma areas, fresh out of the city.
I think making combat/events more rewarding AND difficult would probably be better though. You risk leaving those maps empty if you simply make their xp rewards not exist at all.

He raises something I’ve been concerned with for sometime.
My initial GW2 experience was to build a mesmer and drop him at around lv.50-ish.
I still find levelling a character tiresome. All the good content is lv.80 or higher level maps.
The only reason I got where I am in the game was rejoining for the halloween event, to get a character to 80 and really experience what the game has to offer. I know it’s going to take a backseat to HoT, that’s fine for the time being (or it isn’t, but I understand why it’s the way it’s going to go down,) but the levelling system really needs to become more engaging than every so often jumps in stat growth or a mission every ten levels of grind.
I’m not quite sure how that’ll finally be achieved and the new specialisation system certainly takes some of the pain out of the grind, but perhaps hardmode instances for bonus xp/rewards, making missions accessable earlyier than your level as an option and similar challanges could really take some of the grindy feel out of 1-80.
This isn’t me trying to get down on the game, or even the intended levelling experience. I just want more people to get to (and stay long enough to,) discover things like the thrill of PvP, the comradare of WvW and the fine-tuned, quick-as-you-can mass glass cannoning of PvE, all of which come into their own when you’ve lv.80 exotic/ascended.
I hope HoT is coming with such changes. If it’s not however, know that I and others hope for a more dynamic levelling experience.