Guild Wars 2

Torolan.5816:

*There was very few exclusive gear in GW2 until HoT. I think nobody denies that.

There was exclusive gear in GW2 pre-HoT. Dungeon armors and Ascended Rings are examples. Over time they made them available through other types of content, but they stayed exclusive as long as the content that awarded them was new.

I don´t want to improve in games. I see no necessity to improve in games. It´s fun time, not play time.

And here is the main problem with gaming in general, not just Guild Wars 2. Players not wanting to use brain power to get better at playing them, leading to more and more dumbed down games. And now the only way to find a worthy game is through a kickstarter campaign, an indie developer or some miracle. Most of them devolve into a bazillion cutscenes with a few interactive moments in-between and QTEs. If I want to watch a movie, I’d watch a movie, there is no necessity to play a video game for a similar experience with far worse graphics.

In GW2 you don’t have cutscenes in most content, but it has the same difficulty as watching a cutscene in other video games. It’s a “watch this bar move until you get your loot” kind of experience. I can understand how for the “newer” generation of gamers who want to watch their game and not play it, HoT would be frustrating because you can’t put it on auto-pilot like in Core Tyria. But is “watching” really “playing”? I’d say not. You’d probably disagree.

As a self proclaimed casual player (very few achievements, erratic schedule, hardly any farming done), this is what I believe is the issue:

Over three years in Tyria, people fell into a farming pattern that was easy, efficient and fast. You pretty much needed gold to get anything you wanted, and farming it happened at “on demand” content such as dungeons. So people got all their shinies essentially by having no roadblocks whatsoever. Open world content is also (with some exceptions) extremely easy, even things like Orr. As a result the zerker-meta appeared, where you stacked attack attributes, stacked on each other, pressed 1111 and won while half asleep. And they could no-life it for as much as they wanted, and 2 days later they’d have their reward.

Fast forward to HoT and finally people are starting to see some resistance. They need to play the actual game content to get rewards, tied to specific currencies. More things are now account bound, meaning you have to earn them instead of converting gems or farming 1 specific place (CoF1) for gold and buying them outright, hence all the complaints about “time-gates” and “grinds”. People are actually complaining they aren’t done with the content 1-2 months into the expansion, so they can get back to their familiar farming patterns (which ironically many of them are now defunkt, hence even more cries for “ruining my favorite content”).
The content is harder, so you actually have to think about your build, or (god forbid!) your defenses and survival. And people look at the rewards at the end, and they feel compelled to get them no matter what. Newsflash: If you feel that way, you are probably less casual than you think.

To be honest, I love it. Going into a map and having to adapt to the environment, makes me feel like I am in a living world, instead of a themepark. HoT is the right direction towards building a persistant world, instead of a series of activities in a carnival. The carnival is still there (old world), but now we have something other than sheer tedium and mindless famring. But in the new content, the world is moving in its own pace and it’s your option to join in on not (i.e. timed metas). Could they have done a better job in providing variety? Sure, but this is a decent start.

If nothing else, HoT is the most Anet-like content they’ve produced in years. Their motto was all about a “living world”, right? Well, we got it.

All in all the nerf only hurts because it was the only way my pvp buddy could heal me well I was in shroud.

I’m still of the opinion that if our job is to just eat damage that we need to be able to be healed in shroud. Ideally we would build LF well mitigating incoming damage as best as we can they go shroud and get our life built back up and just toggle back in forth as needed. On paper this is how we should play with things such as blood magic and blighters boon and the multitude of other siphons we have. The problem is most of them don’t help your life bar enough well in necro mode and only some of them do anything well in shroud.

Robert Gee.9246:

I’m fairly confident that boons will still apply their effects to necromancers even if this trait is not equipped.

Except Regeneration doesn’t heal you while in Shroud… Not to mention any non-boon healing allies put out while you’re in shroud…

The problem with the change you made is that the necromancer’s only frequent boon self-application is Reaper’s Might (spite adept minor), which ONLY WORKS IN SHROUD! This means Blighter’s Boon is now significantly worse at building up life force. If you already have enough LF to stay in Shroud for awhile it’ll give you a decent amount of healing, but it’s no longer much use for getting you to the point where you can enter Shroud to begin with.

The only way to make BB generate LF now is to combine it with Chilling Victory and go with GS, which might be OK in WvW zerg fights and big pve events, but it’s not very useful in pvp due to its lack of range and mobility. Plus, not being able to pick Decimate Defences because you need that slot for CV severely limits build variety, pushing people back to Celestial amulet to get decent crit chance. Decimate Defences opened up a huge number of other amulets as viable options. If you want to be tanky you could take Soldiers instead of Celestial. If you wanted to go glass cannon you could pick Valkyrie over Marauder/Berserker. And if you wanted to go condi you could pick Carrion over Rabid. It was a choice that opened up possibilities and build variety, but now if you choose BB at GM level, you basically HAVE to take CV at master.

The thing I loved about BB up until this change was that it solved a fundamental design flaw with necromancer, which was that it’s a snowball profession: up until you have sufficient life force, you’re basically as harmful as a snowball, and you melt just as easily. Once you’ve built up a sufficient amount, you become an avalanche, and very hard to stop. This is really bad design, as it frustrates both the player, who feels impotent at the start of a fight and needs to hang around the edges being useless, hoping you don’t get jumped because you have no damage mitigation and no escapes, and for the necromancer’s opponents, who blow all their cooldowns to get the necro low only to watch them pop into a full shroud, and they have to do all that damage over again.

BB solved this problem by allowing you to build up life force quickly at the start of a fight, but with yesterday’s change it’s become significantly worse at LF generation, although it’ll still provide decent healing for you while you’re actually IN shroud. This makes it a “win more” trait: if you’ve already got enough LF, equipping this makes you even harder to kill. If you don’t have enough LF, equipping this now does pretty much nothing! Sure you might get a few sigil procs and Strength rune procs off it as well, but Reaper’s Might is still the only consistent boon self-application necros have and it’s gated behind Shroud – meaning BB is a practically a blank trait slot until you’ve built up life force through other means!

I strongly think an ICD would have been a better way to balance this. If you think that wouldn’t be enough, and that pre-buffing would still mean necromancers get to the fight with too much LF, you could also change it to only work while in combat. Making it only proc off self-application is a very limiting change that closes off build variation and exacerbates the design problems with Death Shroud, namely its preventing the necromancer from benefiting from ally healing and its frustrating snowball gameplay.

I’m curious if the main concern is the over the top healing and LF gain. If that is along the lines of thinking, I’d happily sacrifice getting LF from ally boons, to just self boons, and keep the healing from ally boons while in shroud. The healing while in shroud is the most useful benefit as it allowed us to have more interaction with our allies. That or allow healing while in Shroud.

Well if it has to be selfish switch it to Conditions Applied instead of Boons received. We have no consistent source of Boons but we don’t lack for condition application.

Blighter’s Boon

Gain life force when you apply a condition. If you are in reaper’s shroud, gain health instead.

Healing: 133
Life Force: 1%

It isn’t really weak. We could maybe add a blast to it or something but its a very large cone unblockable hard CC.

HardRider.2980:

Seriously are people still moaning about this and not thinking about it… If dots n dashs weren’t happening then Reaper would be OP as he11.

I doubt that is the case even if it was so, it was a problem of the reaper not chill and certainly noy cripple.

We dish out tons of chill and other effects… for the enemy to not get away would basically mean you’d have to range us to deal with us..

Of course the reaper does dish out tons of chills because we are devoted around. Nefing necause we are devoted around it would be stupid. Also we need to have lots of chill to make it stick because chill is the second most easiest condition to remove. Also never heard of teleports, shadowsteps,…?

And we’re not rotted.. we can walk run and travel as well.. Plus they will still be chilled… We’re not doomed.. we’re not screwed..

It’s still stupid design, they made reaper with the thought of keeping the enemy close with your chills, we even got a close range deathshroud. Base necromancer was made with low mobility because of cripple and chill and then they negate that advantage.

you just have to be a smart player instead of mashing skills in one place..

The same could be said about the foe.