Guild Wars 2

What is the rationale behind the Solar Beam change? It feels really bad and awkward, please revert it.

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Traits

As far as minors go, they do feel a little less impactful than most other traitlines. Nothing to say about Shroud Knight, Shivers of Dread is pretty forgettable considering that we don’t really have that much access to fears, and while Cold Shoulder is nice it is pretty hard to keep our chills up in a PvP context.

Both Chilling Nova and Relentless Pursuit seem pretty good in PvE and PvP respectively. Augury of Death feels less impactful considering how unimpressive shouts are anyways.

The second tier is actually pretty good and I don’t feel like there’s any real clear winners. I could see myself using any of those traits in certain situations, although Chilling Victory seems like it’d be relegated strictly to PvE.

The grandmaster tier is a bit disappointing though. Blighter’s Boon right now is the only choice, considering how I’m pretty sure Reaper’s Onslaught is bugged and Deathly Chill is just totally undertuned damage wise.

Shouts

Shouts are, even more than greatsword, the big letdown of the reaper spec IMO. Audio (human female) is serviceable I guess, but it doesn’t sound very scary or imposing like I feel a reaper should.

The cast times in general feel really awkward and none of the skills feel good enough to really justify them.

Your Soul is Mine feels too weak to compete with Consume Conditions, although I will say I do like the LF generation on it.

You Are All Weaklings is probably the best of the shouts, but again I feel like the cast time ruins an otherwise acceptable utility that I may have used occasionally.

Suffer doesn’t feel like a particularly useful condi transfer. I do think it could be buffed to transferring two conditions and would be a lot stronger without being OP.

Nothing Can Save You does feel good, if situational. I could see it getting some decent use in PvP, but unless HoT brings enemies with good amounts of boons it’ll be useless in PvE. Again, the cast time really hampers it.

Rise is just awful. Even a potential five jagged horrors is pretty meh, especially on such a long cooldown. I dunno if there’s technical limitations keeping it at 5 horrors total but I do feel like buffing it to two or three horrors per foe hit could maybe make it good for minion mancers. It would be flavorful and fun either way though.

Chilled to the Bone is again hampered by the terrible cast time, even more than all the other shouts.

Please do consider ditching or shortening the cast times on these skills, because they are not fun at all and really do make it a lot harder to use some already lackluster skills.

Hope this helps you guys balance stuff, I do really enjoy the way Reaper feels and plays so I want to see it in a good place.

Been playing reaper and using GS and shouts pretty extensively the past day and wanted to give my take on them. I’m not the best necro but I hope this is useful as far as what an average player feels.

Greatsword

Aesthetically I’m really enjoying the greatsword. The (human female) animations are great, I love the way they look and I do feel like my character looks like they’re this scary heavy hitter. The skills don’t really seem to back this up though.

Greatsword 1 is particularly disappointing. The numbers feel very low for how slow the weapon is. The fact that the chill is on the last autoattack in the chains mean that even in a best case scenario I am not getting an initial chill onto a target before the 3 second mark, and that best case scenario does not happen very often due to how slow and recognizable the animation is for the chill. It is very easily avoided or blocked and does not feel like it has much of an impact in a fight. I also feel like some LF generation could be added to the AA, as overall the greatsword’s LF feels rather bad.

Greatsword 2 also leaves a lot to be desired. The damage is not good at all for how recognizable and long the cast time on this skill is. The one second cooldown after hitting a foe at 50% feels clunky and I’m often unsure exactly what I should be filling that 1 second cooldown with. Letting it be spammable doesn’t seem like it would be particularly problematic, considering that it takes over 3 seconds to cast one of these.

Greatsword 3 again feels undertuned damage wise. That said, aside from the numbers I do like this skill and I am enjoying the 12 stacks of vulnerability on what feels like a reasonable cooldown. I do feel like the LF generation on this skill could be buffed as well though.

Greatsword 4 is hands down my favorite one of the weapon’s skills and actually feels pretty strong, if a little situational. I do think the radius could stand to be a little bit bigger though, and please, please add an AoE indicator to this skill so I can see exactly what it’s effecting.

Greatsword 5 is terrible. The cooldown is too long, it’s very clunky feeling and hard to land, I’m not sure why poison is on it because it doesn’t seem to fit either mechanically or thematically and having most of our weapon’s LF generation tied into this skill feels exceptionally punishing. I’d suggest giving it a ground targeting indicator, cutting the CD a bit, replacing poison with something like weakness or chill and moving the LF generation to another skill altogether (maybe the autoattack?).

Reaper Shroud

Reaper Shroud, again, looks amazing. I feel like the designers and animators really did quite well there. I’m also quite enjoying how the Reaper Shroud actually plays, although I do think there are some places where it could use some improvement.

I’m not sure if Reaper Shroud gets Death Shroud’s baseline damage reduction, but it definitely does not feel like it. Please take a look at that to make sure it’s working if we’re supposed to be getting it, and if we’re not please consider giving it to us. I feel quite squishy in RS.

Reaper Shroud 1 feels undertuned damage wise, and the LF generation on the final AA feels like an afterthought. Also, the Spite minor trait Reaper’s Might activates on every AA while the tooltip indicates it’s only supposed to activate on the final AA in the chain.

RS 2 is amazing, and the added mobility really is something I feel like my necro has needed for a long time. The blind and projectile blocking just feels like icing on the cake. However, this skill is rather cumbersome to use. I’d recommend changing it a bit so it works like warrior’s GS3 and allows us to choose what direction to go in and also allows us to stop short.

Not much to say about RS 3, it’s a good skill. Maybe consider giving it .25 CD before activating the fear for us fat-fingered folk though.

RS 4 also feels like it’s in a pretty good place right now. Maybe the CD is a little bit too long considering that the AA feels lackluster, but it may not need a reduction if that gets buffed.

RS 5 is very hard to land with the slow animation, but other than that it does feel quite impactful. I actually wouldn’t mind seeing it put on a longer CD if the casting animation was sufficiently sped up.

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Well I ran a repair, went back in game and ran around one of the offending areas for a bit and it doesn’t seem to be happening anymore. Hopefully that’ll be the end of that issue.

Thank you very much!

I was in a pvp match when all of a sudden large portions of my screen were covered with a black and white checkerboard pattern. After I got out I ran around a bit seeing if I could reproduce it and I managed to snag a screenshot of it.

Any idea what this could be, and what some possible fixes for it are?