Guild Wars 2

Reaper
This is where I have the most feedback, especially since I play so much necromancer in general. For reference, I tried both a hybrid reaper with Dhuumfire and a power reaper.

First, I am of the firm opinion that there is nothing on reaper currently that should be nerfed, even if it’s not working as intended. Perhaps I’m very bad at reaper, or very good at elementalist, but my damage output felt comparable to my fresh air ele, but more tanky (which is necessary, given that I was forced into melee). This is including the might stacks every RS auto, spinning in poison fields with RS4, et cetera. Once I figured out how to play the synergies effectively, I felt I was actually competing with other classes in terms of effectiveness, something I haven’t felt on my necromancer in the open world since the original beta events.

Reaper, on the whole, was a lot of fun to play. It dishes out a lot of damage, but in a way that isn’t completely mindless. While autoattacking will do its share of damage, I found it very unimpressive until I started taking advantage of all the various synergies I could find.

That said, there are definitely some things I feel could use work.

• Reaper’s Shroud is awesome, and, as the core mechanic replacement for the Reaper, it makes sense that it is given some focus. However, it seems like part of pushing the shroud was undertuning the rest of the class.

• The most obvious problem is with greatsword. The weapon is extremely slow, and doesn’t have the damage output to make up for it. As is, I am led to believe that GS autoattack deals 45% less damage than dagger autoattack, doesn’t generate life force, and is so slow as to be trivial to avoid or interrupt even for the AI. Honestly, using the autoattack feels like a huge risk, as I’m locking myself out of being able to react in combat. In my mind, one of three things needs to happen:

1. Autoattack chain gets a universal damage buff to bring its dps 20% above dagger’s (damage buff ~+150%)
2. Autoattack chain attacks at 1/2;3/4;3/4s and gets a universal damage buff of ~+130%
3. Autoattack chain attacks at 1/2;1/2;3/4s and gets a universal +110-120% damage buff.

Likewise, Gravedigger needs work. Sure, it hits for a reasonable chunk of damage. However, its cast time makes it nearly unusable even regardless of damage, and the damage is nowhere near enough to justify it. At most, the cast-time should be 1 second, and even then the damage needs to be increased dramatically.

• As a corollary, the greatsword’s place seems to be purely as a setup weapon for shroud. Just run up to an enemy, put 3, 4, and 5 on cooldown, then go straight into shroud. While shroud is fun, I’d also like to be able to make an actual Greatsword reaper, rather than a RS reaper who happens to hold a greatsword.

• I haven’t played much with the shouts, but I definitely feel like the heal should have a reduced casting time, maybe 0.5-0.6s, rather than 0.75.

• I like the traits on the whole, but would like to see a couple small changes. First, I feel like Blighter’s Boon would be more interesting if it simply gave life shroud. While this could easily get out of hand with the might-gain available to the RS auto, it seems to me that if the specialization focuses this heavily on being in reaper’s shroud to do damage, then it makes sense for a grandmaster trait to effectively allow you to stay in RS for as long as you are attacking. My initial thought is that it should give exactly enough life force to offset the passive LF drain while autoattacking. Second, based off of what I’ve heard, Deathly Chill should have its Condition Damage scaling buffed significantly.

Howdy!

I figured that, since there doesn’t seem to be a consolidated feedback thread, I’d post all of my thoughts in a post here. A little information: I’m a very casual player who’s been playing since headstart. I’ve spent most of my time on Necromancer, followed by Mesmer, and am slowly working on bringing all other classes to 80. My primary game modes are open-world PvE and WvWvW. I know very little about dungeons or fractals, and next to nothing about SPvP, so any notes I make about those formats should be taken with a grain of salt. I spent the entirety of my time in the Beta playing a Reaper in Verdant Brink.

Open World Content

• The map is challenging and I love it. I spent quite a while roaming around getting killed before I figured out how to survive. For a new-ish casual player who only wants to solo, I can imagine that this could be extremely daunting. However, this map is the first time I’ve really felt the spirit of the manifesto; I can roam around alone and slowly kill things, but I’m ecstatic when I see players around! With others helping, kills come reasonably quickly (rather than slowly and defensively), and events that I actually want to push can get pushed.
• I like seeing all the various locations locked behind masteries, but I would also like to see a few more cool areas simply hidden away for your everyday explorer (akin to that waterfall on the bottom level of the Grove)
• The events are fairly interesting when they work. I do feel like a few of them could be a bit more unique, though; For example, when escorting Laranthir and co. to the ruins, it would be really cool to allow players to help snipe off the vinetenders, perhaps by increasing the number of vinetenders that spawn and allowing players to get a rifle from Laranthir.
• On a related note, many of the events are bugged and need fixed. Obviously. Beta and all of that.

Masteries

• I can’t say too much about masteries, as I only got Glider 1. There are just 2 notes I want to make. First, I definitely feel like there needs to be a brief explanation of how to choose which masteries to push (or maybe I just need to read more carefully). Secondly, progress is just about where it needs to be in my opinion, and may even be a touch fast. Map chat indicated that most people hadn’t even unlocked gliding yet, but I found that, if I really put my mind to it, I could get about a mastery a day. My expectation, therefore, is that most players will get most of their masteries over two or three days of playing each. While this is slow if you really want to just be able to glide, but as far as endgame progression systems go, it makes it feel very rewarding while still giving you easily-visible progress over time.

Feedback on Reaper will be first reply (out of room)

What I would propose would be rather more sweeping than a simple scoring-system change, but ties in so closely to it that I feel it necessary to explain the whole system. I will note, I don’t actually know the capabilities of the game to track certain information, so some or all of this may be impossible.

First, although on its own it would be unlikely to fix any issues and may even exacerbate some (such as snowballing), providing point-rewards for player kills in general would open up a lot of space to play with the balance of the rewards system in order to incentivize certain things. My proposal would be to grant one point per killed player, cumulative with the Bloodlust point in the event of a stomp.

Though, as I stated, this could exacerbate the snowball effect, I believe with some work the numbers could be manipulated to actually work against the same. For example (without any assurance that this is the optimal way to balance the numbers), in the event that your population is outnumbered 2:1, all players in the outnumbered server receive an Outmanned buff, changed at least so much as to include a x2 multiplier for killed players. Note that this would not apply to the Bloodlust point. Furthermore, if a population is outnumbered 3:1, a different buff takes the place of the aforementioned, which includes a stat boost and a x4 multiplier for killed players, also not applying to the Bloodlust point.

This scoring could also be used to incentivize defense at least somewhat. A similar multiplication to the above could be applied to all player-kills that took place within a certain (small, range definitely </= 1200) range of a control-point owned by your server. For example, killing someone anywhere in your tower or within 800-1200 range of any walkable surface of it or in it(not bound by LoS) would award 2 points rather than 2. Of course, another major part of the strong incentivization towards aggression is greatly improved loot, and so perhaps bag drop-chance within the same region could be increased by a factor of 1.25-1.5. Of course, this would make defending against rams more profitable than defending against trebuchets, so perhaps this could be corrected by applying a similar or identical bonus to kills made within a certain range (probably 1200) of a siege weapon that has damaged a structure owned by your server within a certain amount of time previous. As well, all of the above could theoretically be used to also add an additional bonus to defending a location owned by your guild specifically, which would serve to further incentivize guild-claiming, and, more importantly, to incentivize medium-sized structured groups to detach themselves from the main zerg without as much decrease in rewards or impact.

The scoring system would likely want to be changed for the holding of points as well. My suggestion would be to score control-points based both on type and time held. Specifically, my suggestion would be to score points in a logistic fashion based on how many update-ticks the point has been held by that server. On the first update tick since gaining control of the structure, the server gains 20-40% the current base points of the structure-type. Every tick thereafter, this percentage increases in a logistic fashion, capping somewhere around 160% per tick after perhaps 4 hours(16 ticks), the percentage reaching 100% somewhere in the 1.5-2 hour range. While this on the surface looks like it might exacerbate snowballing, I would claim it would have the opposite effect: First, strongly outmatched servers could retreat to their most fortified position and gain points at an accelerated rate for as long as they could defend it, both in terms of the points gained by that site and in terms of the above player-kill points. Second, these same servers could also greatly reduce the points-gap caused by the unevenness by attacking relatively-undefended locations. This would require the leading server to either split its forces (and thus reduce their attacking front, allowing the trailing server to repair and regroup), or suffer a significant penalty in incoming points from those structures attacked.

Finally, one might consider making points awarded for holding structures scale with map-population, and with whether your server was outnumbered significantly, higher total populations and lower population shares each increasing the total points-output by some multiplicative factor. This would serve to decrease the impact of off-hours without mitigating it, in addition to, again, giving some advantage to severely outnumbered servers.

1. Ranger
2. Engineer
3. Necromancer