Guild Wars 2

This is because of Brutal Momentum turning off due to an ICD, your “normal” crit chance is actually supposed to be the highest value you’re seeing, the one that you see most often though is with the trait disabled.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Renegade-Brutal-Momentum/first#post6707150

Wow it’s because of an ICD? Thank you for being more perceptive than I am. I had made a thread about it here that includes a video: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Brutal-Momentum-randomly-turns-itself-off

edit: not sure it’s actually an ICD doing this because it only seems to happen when you have fury applied to you

Been testing Renegade for most of the day like a lot of you and I noticed that my characters crit rate was wildly inconsistent. Turns out that Brutal Momentum, which is our new Renegade grandmaster minor trait just doesn’t apply half the time. It’s supposed to give us 33% crit rate when we have full endurance, and it usually does, right until we get into combat.

The trait seems to just turn off at random during combat and doesn’t have any negative interaction with Roiling Mists like I had originally suspected. However interestingly enough if you don’t run Roiling Mists you actually lose crit chance when you gain fury.

I’ve put a link to a video below that is showing this bug off, but just in writing as well here is what I tested:

I was using an Assassins amulet with Scholar runes in the pvp lobby and just auto attacking a target golem. Without full endurance I have 61.14% crit chance, with full endurance it is 94.14%, Brutal Momentum is working as intended. Invocation gives Fury on legend swap so I fired at a golem and swapped legend to boost my crit rate by what should have been 40%. For a split second my crit rate does go to 134.14%, but them falls to 101.14%, exactly 33% lower than it should be. Towards the end of the video it once again goes back up to 134.14% before I lose my Fury and it returns to normal. This bug can be replicated regardless of the amulet used and your crit rate will always fall 33% lower than it should be when you gain fury.

As I mentioned before as well, you actually lose crit rate when you gain fury if you’re not running Roiling Mists. When I tested in the same scenario, but Roiling Mists turned off, I dropped from 94.14% to 81.14%.

Video: https://youtu.be/-lT2LnLxU_U

Mike O Brien.4613:

We take your account security seriously and will continue to do everything we can to ensure that our support team consistently applies this security policy and prioritizes protecting you from account hackers.

Mo

Then you’d best be terminating your contract with Zendesk and finding another potential outsource if you can’t handle CS in-house. If there’s one thing that has been consistent in my time of online gaming it is that Zendesk has been a terrible Customer Service provider in every game I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with them.

Not only have I had tickets go completely unanswered for weeks in other games, but even here in Guild Wars one of their agents was nice enough to hand over my account to someone else after having provided absolutely no proof of ownership. My account has since been secured as this happened last year, but not until after a three week long battle with customer service to have the problem corrected. I can count not only on one hand, but one finger, how many positive experiences I’ve had with Zendesk. That’s right, just one.

I doubt their long-term quality will change as a result of anything that has transpired in the last 24 hours; and I believe that long-term quality needs to be the goal here.

Doesn’t bode well for Ad Infinitum, I believe that will be next up to get axed if necessary.

Arenanet, you have built a great and unique MMO that I have had a very hard time finding an equal to. I believe in you guys to keep it being a great game, please do not prove me wrong. I use your game as an example of new, good ideas that can make an MMO successful. I don’t want to have to look for another game to make an example of.

Can I give you like 12 seconds of silence? Someone gave me quickness. I got over the changes already.

Burtnik.5218:

Xytl.8659:

,

Sadly this trait working as intended. One effect overwrites another one which is kinda funny as it doesnt work with Ventari at all. I bielieve the daze effect should be delayed by 3seconds once youre done casting elite. But then again that may be a bit confusing.. would be better to just delete it.

Indeed it is working as intended, and I do suggest exactly what you have said later in that post. Delaying the daze or applying it sooner would fix the problem as it would still deliver the double interrupt that I was wanting to get out of this trait. I’d love to see it not get removed entirely, because it has a rather unique use in WvW/PvP, and basically acts as Dismantle Fortifications from the Devastation line, but allows you access to dodge roll condition clear and blinds, rather than the DPS focused Shiro traits.

I have better information about Momentary Pacification based on some BWE3 testing that I performed. Nothing has changed since I made this post: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/More-Revenant-Feedback/first#post5576499 (about halfway down the page)

copy/paste from my feedback thread

-Momentary Pacification is located in the Salvation trait line as a Grand Master trait. The trait is supposed to apply daze to up to 5 enemies around you in a 360 radius when using an elite skill. Which it does, kind of.
Originally my testing from BWE 2 let me come to the conclusion that the Daze effect from this trait was overwriting any heavy CC that your actual elite skill may produce. After testing this under some more controlled circumstances I was able to figure out that the daze from this trait does not originate from the elite skill itself, but from the Revenant casting the skill. This mechanic has some funny effects on some of the elite skills:

Jade Winds works fine, it will apply both its unique stun named “Jade” and the daze to a target.

Rite of the Great Dwarf works as intended.

Embrace the Darkness works as intended.

Energy Expulsion does not apply the daze at all depending on where you detonate your tablet. This is because the daze will originate from the Revenant. Unless you detonate your tablet in such a way that it knocks the enemy towards you, it will not daze them.

Facet of Chaos will only apply the daze if used within a certain range of the enemy. The trait has a radius of 360, but Facet of Chaos has a range of 450. This means that when used up close the knockback from your Facet will be cancelled by the daze applied from Momentary Pacification, but if used from almost max distance, Facet of Chaos will not apply the daze at all. This is particularly frustrating because it means that running this specific trait will break your Facet by cancelling its own CC effect, or simply be a wasted trait.
I reached out to Roy through twitter for an answer to this about two weeks ago, he replied to me explaining that the player will be under the effect of whatever CC is applied to them last. As a suggestion to fix the interaction between the trait and Facet of Chaos I think that applying the daze much earlier into the cast for the Facet would allow for both to work as intended. As the timing currently sits the daze is applied after the knockback, making the hard CC from the Facet itself completely useless.

Knight Vanir.6921:

price is already going higher. 30s—>48s

so who’s all gonna use this stat?

cough bump

Condition engineer sees a DPS increase by using viper armor and weapons over sinister.

Back with some final updates for this topic. I did level up my Nuhoch Stealth Detection tonight and can now get rewards from mushrooms again. I can confirm that a patch sometime last week stopped people without the mastery from getting credit for the event. Furthermore the spores do not drop from specific mushrooms, but they do drop in alphabetical order. My drop order was Berserker, Chrono, Daredevil, Dragon Hunter, Druid, Herald. I would assume the final three are Reaper, Scrapper, and Tempest, as Terrahero said.

Thanks for the input everyone, I’ll see about putting this information on to the Wiki tomorrow.

Vavume.8065:

glehmann.9586:

If it’s the latter, then I suspect that Anet made an update so you can’t get credit for killing the treasure mushroom if you don’t have stealth detection.

The treasure mushrooms are a daily, you can only get credit for each one once per day, so its more likely that he tried to kill it more than once.

Nope. I was killing them once per day, I knew they were daily. I would also like to add that I was getting nothing, no credit for the event, even though the event popped on my screen. No spore, no medal, no confirmation of the event ending. I know i’m doing enough DPS as I’ve been running Reaper and Herald when I kill them, and i’m attacking from the very second the event activates.

Also I just killed the Auric Basin mushroom, rather than the VB one and still got nothing, although this time neither did another guild mate. The results are very inconsistent so far:

Day 1: All 3 players got credit for the mushroom (Verdant Brink)
Day 2: All 3 players got credit (same mushroom as day one)
Day 3: Only 2 players got credit (same mushroom as day one)
Day 4: Only the player who initiated the event got credit (Auric Basin)

Day three may be where the patch that changed this hit. But that being said, the other player who got credit does not have Nuhoch Stealth Detection either, so i’m not sure what to say. At this point i’m almost done leveling the mastery myself and will just do it on my own.

@Terrahero – Thanks for the info, it seems to line up with what my guild has gotten so far from the mushroom, it does indeed appear to be unlocked alphabetically.

That’s some pretty sound advice, I’ll have to try tomorrow when my guild mate gets back on. Thanks for the suggestions.

Something I’ve noticed over the last few days has been confusing me a bit. I have been working towards Glint’s Bastion and I’m now at 13 of 14 parts complete. The final item i’m missing is the Invisible Mushroom Spore. I know exactly how to get this item, you train Nuhoch Stealth Detection and then you find a Treasure Mushroom in one of the four Magus Falls maps and kill it. Seems simple.

I do not have the Nuhoch Stealth Detection mastery yet, but a friend of mine does. Sometime last week we killed the mushroom for the first time, and I got credit for the kill by tagging the enemy even though I couldn’t see it. So this tells me that you don’t need the mastery to kill the mushroom, but only someone to find it and start the event. The problem is that the spores I did get went towards the Mesmer shield and Berserker torch, not Glint’s Bastion. Ever since then I have done two more mushroom kills, and have not received anything for it. Both previous spores have been sold to a vendor, so there’s nothing in my inventory already. Other guild mates who also don’t have the mastery are still getting credit for the event, and are still getting spores from tagging the enemy.

So my question here is this; has this happened to anyone else? I know I’m doing enough damage to get credit, but have gotten absolutely no rewards for 2 out of 4 kills.

The only lane I’ve participated in so far is Ogre lane. That lane is probably one of the easier ones to complete if I had to take a guess, as luring the Gerent out requires you to smash a bunch of Chak eggs. By smashing these eggs you do spawn additional Chak but you can ignore them for the most part as they’re too slow to keep up.

As for the boss itself I imagine it does indeed take more damage when it has a drained breakbar. Most of the Legendary tier enemies I’ve encountered in HoT so far share that trait. We had about 10 people on our lane yesterday on my last attempt and we maybe took 5% of its health away, but did not remove the breakbar. If you do only get three stages to kill it, there must be something you do to make it vulnerable.

That’s all I have to add, because I haven’t seen the event go much further than that. The Nuhock lane ended up failing about two and a half minutes into the event that we spent two hours setting up, it was quite frustrating.

I’m not sure really why anyone expected to have all of this stuff done after playing for one day. Heart of Thorns is an expansion, it’s not supposed to be over with quickly. Consider that you may have gotten half of an elite specialization done yesterday. So now you need to work on some masteries, it might take you a week to get done with one class. That seems like a long time, but keep in mind that now since you’ve done masteries you can just fly to the hero points, channel them, and move on. This might take you a day per character. I have 11 level 80 characters, so this might take me a little over two weeks? Now you’ve got elite specs done on all your characters, and you have a bunch more content to go work on for months afterwards. I think this is pretty fair, two weeks of working towards something after we waited 270 days for an expansion since its announcement.

Oh and how long did it take you to originally make those level 80 characters of yours? Probably a lot longer than it will to unlock an elite specialization.

Rising Dusk.2408:

This is something that has bugged me a lot too. They should just merge the banner cooldown reduction and banner range increase into the Discipline trait for banners. This would still do what ANet wants because most PvE Warriors don’t take the Discipline specialization, and in order to trait banners they’d have to give up Phalanx Strength. That’s a very fair trade if you ask me.

No. All that would do is make nobody use banners. Utility skills would immediately turn into For Great Justice, Signet of Might, Signet of Fury, and you would just increase personal DPS a little. 25 might is still a bigger DPS increase than banners are, nobody would give up Phalanx Strength.

Right, it’s the end of another beta weekend and time to dump our feedback again. I’ve got a list of issues that I had previously brought up from the second weekend, but seem to have not been resolved, or really even responded to, so this time I’d hope to get a little more feedback, as I believe that some of this stuff is really important.

First off i’ll run down the weapon skills-

-Shield 4 ‘Envoy of Exuberance’ is a skill that deals no damage to enemies, it simply moves to an area, heals, then comes back and grants protection. I do not know if it intended however that the projectile that the skill fires is able to strip Aegis off a player. Furthermore if the projectile is blocked by the player using Aegis, the projectile is destroyed and will not return to the Revenant. This doesn’t seem right as the skill is totally passive from a damage standpoint.

-Hammer 5 ‘Drop The Hammer’ is still playing its animation twice, not much to say here other than it being somewhat entertaining that enemies will sometimes waste a dodge getting out of the way of a fake skill. Still needs fixed though.

-Staff 5 ‘Surge of the Mists’ is able to strip an ungodly amount of stability off of players or nearly remove a breakbar in one use. I realize that the skill will hit multiple times but as mentioned in a few feedback threads from the Raids, being able to remove 75% of a boss breakbar with one skill is a tad overkill and needs looked at.

-Sword 3 ‘Unrelenting Assault’ the changes that have been made to this skill overall since the first time I used it are definitely for the better. I like the completely unique mechanic of what it does, ensuring that you can always stay with your target, and the damage it deals is still less than that of a Warrior Hundred Blades in PvE, and yet still generates might. Whilst there is a lot of debate over whether or not the skill needs toned down, I believe it is in a good place. Furthermore I was unable to replicate the issue of dealing no damage to enemies close to walls that some people have mentioned, so I can’t really comment on it.

-Sword 1 Auto Attack chain. This is where I think some numbers need tweaked, and maybe a little bit of work done to the skills overall. Initially I really liked how hard the auto attack hits, and it’s a welcomed surprise compared to the DPS output of other heavy plate classes. But considering the self generated might output that the Revenant can achieve I think the power coefficients are a little too high. I was able to quite easily auto attack multiple elites to death on my own in Crucible of Eternity at much the same speed that it would take the other 4 people in my group to kill. Seeing 5 target aoe numbers upwards of 6,000 damage per hit is definitely on the high side considering how fast the Revenant can hit when using Shiro with his pulsing quickness. Additionally the second swing of the auto attack was very finicky for me, as it was for many others during this weekend. I believe this is due to the fact that the second attack is a projectile and if used while not targeting an enemy the projectile will simply shoot into the ground and not chain the auto attack at all.

-Utility skill ‘Impossible Odds’; while I think that this is an incredibly strong skill I don’t think much can be done to change it in a meaningful way. I also don’t think that it is the root of the problems with how high Revenant DPS is. The 10 energy per second drain is hefty, and making it any higher would discourage players from using the skill altogether, which is obviously a bad thing. Refer to my comments above about the sword auto attack for what I think about balancing the DPS.

That’s really all I’ve got for the weapon and utility skills, otherwise I think they all work well for what they do, and most of them have been pretty good since BWE 2 when we saw a lot of weapon changes.

As for traits there are only two that I feel need discussed from the testing I was able to do this weekend. The details of what I explain below are a continuation of testing that I performed during BWE 2. At that point I knew something was wrong with these traits but didn’t really have enough time to figure out what it was. At this point in time I believe that I know what is going on and have some suggestions to fix it.

-Momentary Pacification is located in the Salvation trait line as a Grand Master trait. The trait is supposed to apply daze to up to 5 enemies around you in a 360 radius when using an elite skill. Which it does, kind of.

Originally my testing from BWE 2 let me come to the conclusion that the Daze effect from this trait was overwriting any heavy CC that your actual elite skill may produce. After testing this under some more controlled circumstances I was able to figure out that the daze from this trait does not originate from the elite skill itself, but from the Revenant casting the skill. This mechanic has some funny effects on some of the elite skills:

Jade Winds works fine, it will apply both its unique stun named “Jade” and the daze to a target.

Rite of the Great Dwarf works as intended.

Embrace the Darkness works as intended.

Energy Expulsion does not apply the daze at all depending on where you detonate your tablet. This is because the daze will originate from the Revenant. Unless you detonate your tablet in such a way that it knocks the enemy towards you, it will not daze them.

Facet of Chaos will only apply the daze if used within a certain range of the enemy. The trait has a radius of 360, but Facet of Chaos has a range of 450. This means that when used up close the knockback from your Facet will be cancelled by the daze applied from Momentary Pacification, but if used from almost max distance, Facet of Chaos will not apply the daze at all. This is particularly frustrating because it means that running this specific trait will break your Facet by cancelling its own CC effect, or simply be a wasted trait.

I reached out to Roy through twitter for an answer to this about two weeks ago, he replied to me explaining that the player will be under the effect of whatever CC is applied to them last. As a suggestion to fix the interaction between the trait and Facet of Chaos I think that applying the daze much earlier into the cast for the Facet would allow for both to work as intended. As the timing currently sits the daze is applied after the knockback, making the hard CC from the Facet itself completely useless.

-Diabolic Inferno is a grandmaster trait in the Corruption trait line. It works similarly to Momentary Pacification, this means that the burn applied originates from the Revenant. I am listing this as more of a warning to people using the trait than as a bug, because I don’t believe there is anything wrong with the trait itself. Much like the daze, burning will not be applied to any enemies who are knocked back by Energy Expulsion from Ventari’s Tablet, unless they are knocked directly towards you. The same applies to Facet of Chaos, since the range of the Facet knockback is longer than that of the trait, the burning will only be applied if the enemy is close to you when you trigger the skill.

That will mostly end my feedback for the Revenant from BWE 3. I am really looking forward to playing the class when Heart of Thorns releases on the 23rd, and I feel a little bad for my Warrior since he’ll likely be replaced as my main. Thanks for reading if you go this far, I realize it was a wall of text, I apologize.

What it looks like happened here is this:

You instant sold the Bone Fragments for a much lower price than the TP is showing you the item is currently worth. This is because your most recently viewed tab that claims the Bone Fragments are worth 66 silver is displaying the current Sell price, not the current Buy price. If you instant sold the item, it goes to the highest Buy price, not the lowest Sell price.

I think i’m kind of the odd one out here but I really think that in general all of the voices are a little bit lackluster. Back when we first heard about Revenant and all we knew was Mallyx we were led to believe that when you swapped to a legend they would be talking directly to you. Like Mallyx would try to push you to do horrible things, Jalis would be his mirror and push you towards being a hero, etc. But now all we hear is some grunts for all of the legends, and I think it’s a bit disappointing. If they would’ve gone the whole way it would be some fantastic immersion, then to satisfy everyone just put their voices into their own audio channel and give us a slider for ‘Revenant Legend Voices’ in the audio options.

online.1278:

Probably I am one of them who use banner in sPvP, and following are what i would suggests to upgrade banner:

1. Passive stat buff from 170 to 200
2. Effective Range from 600 to 900
3. Sprint range from 600 to 900 just like elementalist’s Fiery whirl.
4. Sprint cd time decrease from 15sec to 5sec just like elementalist’s Fiery whirl. or to 10sec
5. Remove a condition of allies who are in effective area of banner per every 10 sec. But it should be trait, inspiring battle standard.

If you’re suggesting 1-4 as just base upgrades that would never happen. 5 is doubtful because of the warhorn condi clear and further encouragement of using Shoutbow only. Aside from the Tactics banner I think functionality wise they do exactly what they should. They are an area specific buff, which encourages allies to fight close to the Warrior. I’d like to see the Tactics banner get a change to be 10% Boon Duration/10% Condi duration instead of the current healing power. I just want my radius back more than anything. As a mainly PvE Warrior i’ve been able to adapt to the downtime the banners have, because they really weren’t necessary for every fight, only bosses. But the hassle of having to pick up BOTH of your banners one at a time to move them 5 feet to the next trash clear is annoying, because we all know nobody else will help you move them.

I can only hope so, but to be honest it’s something that has been requested so heavily that you’d think it would be one of the traits they went over in their short preview.

Come on. I’ve hoped for the last few patches that they would finally give us either our duration or radius increase back, I’ve kept my mouth shut, even suggested changes to the banners themselves, rather than changing the traits. But at this point it seems that Inspiring Banners is dead. Please join me in the salt mines, fellow Warriors.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Inspiring_Banners

We’re not talking about how Chilled to the Bone cannot be stun broken? Okay.. I guess Reaper will just have an AOE Deep Freeze. That’s cool I guess.

Hey Roy! Really excited to see these changes go in and i’m really happy that the displacement skills have been changed. I thought it a bit silly that you could have an area of denial that ignored stability..

One question though, has the issue with Momentary Pacification been fixed? Wherein the daze applied by the trait would cancel any CC that the elite skill caused. Example being Facet of Chaos knockback was cancelled and only the daze applied.. I fully outlined the bug here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/revenant/Bug-Momentary-Pacification/first#post5460495

LughLongArm.5460:

Not sure about it , but i think break stun effects doesnt work on it(or it might be due to weird lag issues i had last night).

No you’re completely correct. In the second beta Chilled to the Bone is actually just an AOE Deep Freeze. You cannot break the stun, you just have to sit there and take it if you get hit. Because why the kitten not give Reaper a ‘better than Icebow 5’ button?

I’ve been playing Herald in WvW this weekend and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why my Facet of Chaos would not knock enemies back. Having tested a few times in sPvP I can confirm that running Momentary Pacification from the Salvation line will cancel the knockback from Facet of Chaos. The daze is still applied, but only one CC is used, and it prioritizes the daze. If you intend to use your Herald elite for the knockback, don’t run this trait.

Edit: Update to this. The trait also overwrites the stun on Jade Winds, and converts it to a daze.

Dunno how many of you have played Diablo 3, but this elite spec strikes me as very similar to a Dashing Strike Monk build. Which i’m totally cool with, monk in D3 is incredibly fun to play, looking forward to this.

Being able to see a channeling bar would allow you and your group to coordinate interrupts to completely turn off an enemy. Even a break-bar wouldn’t help to combat this issue because if everyone knew exactly when to CC spike an enemy, there would be no risk of failing to do so. Unless you want to turn all of the enemies into useless meatsacks that you break open for XP and loot, this is a bad idea.

With all of that being said there are a few possible changes I would like to suggest.
-I feel that the Greatsword AA chain is almost completely useless as it takes far too long to cast and provides no Life Force. Because of this I would like to see the chill duration on the third hit halved, and the other half moved to the second hit in the chain. this would give better access to chill, but at the same time maintain the currently duration of the chill on using the full attack chain.
-The cooldown of Executioners Scythe needs to be longer. Currently at a 25.5 second traited cooldown, the skill has the potential to nearly one shot kill someone every 30 seconds given the correct (and easy to achieve) situation. The skill is meant to be a finishing move to put down a wounded enemy, not a way for me to one shot kill Mesmers, which I did frequently during the weekend. I would suggest a 35 or 45 second cooldown, this would encourage players to use the skill only when they were sure that it would kill an opponent, rather than using it on everyone they saw.
-The self might generation of the Reaper is incredibly good. So good in fact that it completely overshadows that of the baseline Necro. Without running any boon duration it is possible to generate and then maintain 25 stacks of might just with your shroud auto attack. To counter this and bring the might generation closer into line with Death Shroud, I think Reaper’s Might in the Spite line should be given a one second ICD. This would allow every Life Blast to generate one might, and every other Reaper Shroud auto attack to generate one might. Because the Reaper Shroud AA attacks twice as fast as Life Blast (ignoring aftercast), this would equalize the amount of might gained through auto attacks.
-The sustainability of Reaper Shroud is probably a little bit too good at the moment. This entirely stems from Blighters Boon. The ability for any incoming boon to grant 1% Life Force while outside of shroud is incredibly powerful and is a bit too strong. Giving this trait a small ICD would help to remove the absurdity of LF generation.
My impression of Reaper this weekend was overall a very positive one. I think the specialization is fantastic and provides a style of playing that I have not really been able to achieve before with the builds and traits we currently have. It is a much more mobile Necromancer with the ability to hit like a truck and still get out alive. I’ve not had this much fun playing a Necro in a long time.
Bonus: My highest hit on Executioner’s Scythe this weekend – http://i.imgur.com/2sLmzvW.png
P.S. – Sorry for the wall of text, didn’t realize how much I had typed until I posted it.

Shouts and Traits are on the whole quite good and I will be disappointed with my current Necro once my beta character is unplayable. While some Shouts were completely useless such as Rise! and Nothing can save you!, the rest were very good at what they did. NCSY! is still a very good shout, but I feel that unless you know that you will be fighting Guardians or Warriors there is no point in slotting it over more might generation or a corruption well. In the end I chose to run Your soul is mine!, You are all weaklings!, and Chilled to the bone!. Along with them I ran Well of Corruption and Spectral Walk. The healing shout is a great way to open a fight for some initial LF if you’re low, and while running Augury of Death allows you to use it again when you need it later, since hitting 5 targets reduces the cooldown to 13 seconds. Chilled to the bone is in my opinion the most useful Necro elite you can run for group fighting, as it allows you to lock down targets in the same way as an Ice Bow deep freeze would, except on a shorter channel and in an area. We found this to be incredibly useful when picking at larger zergs and being able to pull then freeze people away from their group. I used You are all weaklings and Suffer almost equally depending on the type and size of group I was running into. While Suffer does only transfer one condition, it has a very short cooldown and allows you to swap in and out of shroud while it is on cooldown. The burst might generation is very useful when paired with Soul Spiral for initial aoe damage on a group if you run YAAW!. Almost all of the Reaper traits have a role to fill as I can see. I was partial to running as many damage mods as I could though, so I wound up using Augury of Death, Decimate Defenses, and Blighters Boon. Decimate Defenses and Blighters Boon are in my opinion two of the absolute strongest traits in the game. The Greatsword is a fantastic tool when paired with Decimate Defenses, because when paired with Death Perception, using Death Spiral then going into Shroud will instantly boost your crit rate by 74%. This eliminates all need for precision stats in gear and allows you to run more vitality, thus increasing your LF pool. Rending Shroud serves as a free Sigil of Accuracy immediately upon entering shroud, and subsequent pulses after that increase your crit rate even further. I found myself at no shortage of crit rate though and chose to run Chill of Death in my Spite line, instead.

Sorry, this is an x-post from the HoT section, but it got buried quickly and it should get some more visibility in here. All of this is written from the perspective of a World vs World player, where Necromancer has always been a large part of group meta, so please consider when replying.

I should preface this post by saying that I did indeed try Reaper in all modes of gameplay this weekend. I was quite comfortable using it as an alternative to Blood Magic in my PvP power necro builds, and was still generally unimpressed by it in PvE, even with the potential for 25 might permanently without having to rely on other group members. This change makes Necromancer much more viable for unorganized PvE, but in a proper group setup (read as high level fractals), the Reaper still offers little to no group ultility and the damage pales in comparison to the likes of an Elementalist or even a Warrior who is running a proper DPS rotation. The vulnerability application of the Reaper is what I would consider exceptionally good, even going as far as to say that with the right traits it can keep up with an Engineer in terms of team damage boost, though with few other offensive conditions at its disposal, there is still no reason to run it in place of an Engi.

With PvE out of the way I want to talk about my focus this weekend with the beta. I come from a small group roaming guild that runs anything between 2 and 15 people; because of this size the type of classes and builds we run are at a premium, and we constantly try to get our builds to synergize as best as possible with each other. This can mean anything from bringing condition clear, useful combo fields, or finishers, to certain group buff traits. But everyone brings something. Usually massive amounts of damage are overlooked in favor of group ultility and helping everyone, but in the case of the Reaper it accels in cleave and spike damage almost exclusively. Many of the skills and traits used with a power Reaper setup have an executioner bonus of some sort, dealing more damage as the target reaches lower health. I found that having these damage bonuses made it very easy for me to step back and pick out a target that was out of cooldowns and low on health, then quickly rush to them with Deaths Charge and finish them entirely. Securely stomping an enemy was also very consistent because of Infusing Terror. The two stacks of stability provides just enough protection from CC to get off a clean stomp and move on, whilst not being such a large cooldown that it puts you out of commission for the next fight you find yourself in.

The in-combat mobility of the Reaper is also much better than what was previously possible with the baseline Necromancer. While I was not able to keep up with the D/D Elementalist in our group, I was almost always the second or third person to engage a fight. The closing speed of a Reaper is similar to that of a Guardian or Warrior using a sword leap into combat. Deaths Charge feels like it is in a good spot as far as mobility goes, and the aoe blind at the end of the skill is just an added bonus, potentially reducing the initial damage spike of the group you’re fighting. I still found myself tethered to Spectral Walk however for out of combat movement. While Axe/Warhorn would have also been a good weapon set to use, I primarily chose to stick with GS/Staff so that I had access to a quick way of gaining Life Force. The Greatsword does lack Life Force generation and I found myself using it much more for Grasping Darkness and Death Spiral than anything else. If you run this kind of weapon setup the Soul Marks trait is absolutely required as it buffs the Life Force generation of your Staff to near unreasonable numbers. Without the ability to rely on my Staff for LF I would have found myself dead much more frequently than I did.

Speaking of survivability the Reaper is quite good at it. I ran full Valkyrie armor with a mix of Soldiers and Zerk trinkets. I only ran about 1200 toughness at most, but because of the inherent tanking ability of the Necro I felt that I could take just about as much damage as my Warrior could before having to back out. Blighters Boon is a large part of this surviability. When paired with a Guardian or Elementalist the Reaper becomes nigh-immortal in sustained combat. Between the boon output of those classes and my staff, I was able to maintain about 80% uptime of Reaper Shroud, only dropping out to clear conditions through the use of Putrid Mark and Suffer!.

Continued in next post, character cap, whoops.

With all of that being said there are a few possible changes I would like to suggest.

-I feel that the Greatsword AA chain is almost completely useless as it takes far too long to cast and provides no Life Force. Because of this I would like to see the chill duration on the third hit halved, and the other half moved to the second hit in the chain. this would give better access to chill, but at the same time maintain the currently duration of the chill on using the full attack chain.

-The cooldown of Executioners Scythe needs to be longer. Currently at a 25.5 second traited cooldown, the skill has the potential to nearly one shot kill someone every 30 seconds given the correct (and easy to achieve) situation. The skill is meant to be a finishing move to put down a wounded enemy, not a way for me to one shot kill Mesmers, which I did frequently during the weekend. I would suggest a 35 or 45 second cooldown, this would encourage players to use the skill only when they were sure that it would kill an opponent, rather than using it on everyone they saw.

-The self might generation of the Reaper is incredibly good. So good in fact that it completely overshadows that of the baseline Necro. Without running any boon duration it is possible to generate and then maintain 25 stacks of might just with your shroud auto attack. To counter this and bring the might generation closer into line with Death Shroud, I think Reaper’s Might in the Spite line should be given a one second ICD. This would allow every Life Blast to generate one might, and every other Reaper Shroud auto attack to generate one might. Because the Reaper Shroud AA attacks twice as fast as Life Blast (ignoring aftercast), this would equalize the amount of might gained through auto attacks.

-The sustainability of Reaper Shroud is probably a little bit too good at the moment. This entirely stems from Blighters Boon. The ability for any incoming boon to grant 1% Life Force while outside of shroud is incredibly powerful and is a bit too strong. Giving this trait a small ICD would help to remove the absurdity of LF generation.

My impression of Reaper this weekend was overall a very positive one. I think the specialization is fantastic and provides a style of playing that I have not really been able to achieve before with the builds and traits we currently have. It is a much more mobile Necromancer with the ability to hit like a truck and still get out alive. I’ve not had this much fun playing a Necro in a long time.

Bonus: My highest hit on Executioner’s Scythe this weekend – http://i.imgur.com/2sLmzvW.png

P.S. – Sorry for the wall of text, didn’t realize how much I had typed until I posted it.

Shouts and Traits are on the whole quite good and I will be disappointed with my current Necro once my beta character is unplayable. While some Shouts were completely useless such as Rise! and Nothing can save you!, the rest were very good at what they did. NCSY! is still a very good shout, but I feel that unless you know that you will be fighting Guardians or Warriors there is no point in slotting it over more might generation or a corruption well. In the end I chose to run Your soul is mine!, You are all weaklings!, and Chilled to the bone!. Along with them I ran Well of Corruption and Spectral Walk. The healing shout is a great way to open a fight for some initial LF if you’re low, and while running Augury of Death allows you to use it again when you need it later, since hitting 5 targets reduces the cooldown to 13 seconds. Chilled to the bone is in my opinion the most useful Necro elite you can run for group fighting, as it allows you to lock down targets in the same way as an Ice Bow deep freeze would, except on a shorter channel and in an area. We found this to be incredibly useful when picking at larger zergs and being able to pull then freeze people away from their group. I used You are all weaklings and Suffer almost equally depending on the type and size of group I was running into. While Suffer does only transfer one condition, it has a very short cooldown and allows you to swap in and out of shroud while it is on cooldown. The burst might generation is very useful when paired with Soul Spiral for initial aoe damage on a group if you run YAAW!. Almost all of the Reaper traits have a role to fill as I can see. I was partial to running as many damage mods as I could though, so I wound up using Augury of Death, Decimate Defenses, and Blighters Boon. Decimate Defenses and Blighters Boon are in my opinion two of the absolute strongest traits in the game. The Greatsword is a fantastic tool when paired with Decimate Defenses, because when paired with Death Perception, using Death Spiral then going into Shroud will instantly boost your crit rate by 74%. This eliminates all need for precision stats in gear and allows you to run more vitality, thus increasing your LF pool. Rending Shroud serves as a free Sigil of Accuracy immediately upon entering shroud, and subsequent pulses after that increase your crit rate even further. I found myself at no shortage of crit rate though and chose to run Chill of Death in my Spite line, instead.

I should preface this post by saying that I did indeed try Reaper in all modes of gameplay this weekend. I was quite comfortable using it as an alternative to Blood Magic in my PvP power necro builds, and was still generally unimpressed by it in PvE, even with the potential for 25 might permanently without having to rely on other group members. This change makes Necromancer much more viable for unorganized PvE, but in a proper group setup (read as high level fractals), the Reaper still offers little to no group ultility and the damage pales in comparison to the likes of an Elementalist or even a Warrior who is running a proper DPS rotation. The vulnerability application of the Reaper is what I would consider exceptionally good, even going as far as to say that with the right traits it can keep up with an Engineer in terms of team damage boost, though with few other offensive conditions at its disposal, there is still no reason to run it in place of an Engi.

With PvE out of the way I want to talk about my focus this weekend with the beta. I come from a small group roaming guild that runs anything between 2 and 15 people; because of this size the type of classes and builds we run are at a premium, and we constantly try to get our builds to synergize as best as possible with each other. This can mean anything from bringing condition clear, useful combo fields, or finishers, to certain group buff traits. But everyone brings something. Usually massive amounts of damage are overlooked in favor of group ultility and helping everyone, but in the case of the Reaper it accels in cleave and spike damage almost exclusively. Many of the skills and traits used with a power Reaper setup have an executioner bonus of some sort, dealing more damage as the target reaches lower health. I found that having these damage bonuses made it very easy for me to step back and pick out a target that was out of cooldowns and low on health, then quickly rush to them with Deaths Charge and finish them entirely. Securely stomping an enemy was also very consistent because of Infusing Terror. The two stacks of stability provides just enough protection from CC to get off a clean stomp and move on, whilst not being such a large cooldown that it puts you out of commission for the next fight you find yourself in.

The in-combat mobility of the Reaper is also much better than what was previously possible with the baseline Necromancer. While I was not able to keep up with the D/D Elementalist in our group, I was almost always the second or third person to engage a fight. The closing speed of a Reaper is similar to that of a Guardian or Warrior using a sword leap into combat. Deaths Charge feels like it is in a good spot as far as mobility goes, and the aoe blind at the end of the skill is just an added bonus, potentially reducing the initial damage spike of the group you’re fighting. I still found myself tethered to Spectral Walk however for out of combat movement. While Axe/Warhorn would have also been a good weapon set to use, I primarily chose to stick with GS/Staff so that I had access to a quick way of gaining Life Force. The Greatsword does lack Life Force generation and I found myself using it much more for Grasping Darkness and Death Spiral than anything else. If you run this kind of weapon setup the Soul Marks trait is absolutely required as it buffs the Life Force generation of your Staff to near unreasonable numbers. Without the ability to rely on my Staff for LF I would have found myself dead much more frequently than I did.

Speaking of survivability the Reaper is quite good at it. I ran full Valkyrie armor with a mix of Soldiers and Zerk trinkets. I only ran about 1200 toughness at most, but because of the inherent tanking ability of the Necro I felt that I could take just about as much damage as my Warrior could before having to back out. Blighters Boon is a large part of this surviability. When paired with a Guardian or Elementalist the Reaper becomes nigh-immortal in sustained combat. Between the boon output of those classes and my staff, I was able to maintain about 80% uptime of Reaper Shroud, only dropping out to clear conditions through the use of Putrid Mark and Suffer!.

Continued in next post, character cap, whoops.

DHawk.2687:

DHawk.2687:

Xytl.8659:

Just a heads up that I would change the sigil of fire on your dagger to something else, probably Accuracy just to be safe. I say this not because your crit chance is lacking, but because Cloak and Dagger still has an issue with popping revealed on you if your on-crit sigil procs. This only happens about 1-2% of the time, but one in every 50 Cloak and Dagger’s is enough to make you notice it. Until they fix that issue, I have stopped using Air and Fire sigils on my daggers.

oh didn’t know that, never happened to me yet ^^
as soon as it happenes to me the first time I’ll take out the fire sigil for sigil of force on the dagger, it doesn’t matter on the bow

thanks for your heads up tho

I just got the flamburst on my CnD but it didn’t reveal me, so I guess it must be a small chance for it to actually screw you are maybe (fingers crossed) it’s fixed

Yeah it’s definitely an inconsistent problem, but one that I have seen no patch note for yet, so i’m assuming it’s still a problem (I last tested it over a month ago). You’re lucky to see this bug happen in every hundred or so cloak and daggers, but you’ll definitely know when it does happen, because you’ll probably get killed by it. From my understanding it’s more of a ping/connection issue than anything else, the game simply doesn’t register the skills in the right order and marks you as revealed because the flame burst triggers after stealth.

Just a heads up that I would change the sigil of fire on your dagger to something else, probably Accuracy just to be safe. I say this not because your crit chance is lacking, but because Cloak and Dagger still has an issue with popping revealed on you if your on-crit sigil procs. This only happens about 1-2% of the time, but one in every 50 Cloak and Dagger’s is enough to make you notice it. Until they fix that issue, I have stopped using Air and Fire sigils on my daggers.

You’re severely misinformed if you think people give out compliments for having a legendary weapon. I’ve never had anyone comment on mine, in fact most times anything is said it’s usually that I play this game far too much, and the GS is proof of that.

Well, there wasn’t much to test, so my opinions are going to be short sighted, not sure any of us can help that though..

First of all considering that this was a beta test concerning game stability I will comment on that first. I know very well that my AMD 8120 cpu struggles with GW2, simply because it’s an AMD chip, and they don’t work well in this game. This gives me a perspective on performance that most people don’t otherwise get, because Intel chipsets don’t seem to have any issues. I noticed that my framerate was fluctuating wildly in the new map. I average right around 65-90 fps in cities, and 45-60 in dungeons or WvW, but even towards the end of the testing time, I was seeing constant mid 30’s and low 40’s for my FPS. I’m not sure what exactly is taking up that much extra processing power, but my game certainly doesn’t like it. As I said earlier though, it’s a beta, an early one at that, it will probably be fine when it releases later this year. I expected this test to be worst-case performance. Something that all of my guild mates noticed is that our pings were consistently about 30 or 40 ms higher than normal. I’m not sure if this was because all of us were on one server, or if there’s some un-polished networking in the expansion. Either way, something else that is fairly minor considering my ping was still under 100 almost the entire time.

Now I will talk about my thoughts on the Revenant and Wyvern… Having played over 700 hours on a Thief, I really like how the Axe works for the Revenant, that being said I think Temporal Rift could use some polishing, as it has a hard time hitting enemies when you’re not on flat ground, and flat out does not follow the ground when you don’t have a target. Otherwise the Mace/Axe set feels very solid and I like how it applies conditions. The Hammer on the other hand feels entirely too anemic to consider using. I’m not sure if it was a lack of traits, or armor stats, or what. At one point I tested my auto attack damage from the hammer against a guild mate who had one of his minions from a necro attack the same enemy. Turns out the hammer auto attack does about the same damage as a bone fiend. I really hope Revenant has a stronger melee weapon in the works, or a trait line that can heavily buff the hammer, because it’s certainly not the weapon I expected.

The Wyvern boss fight is a little boring, to be honest, but I know that we’ve been told it will get harder the more you fight it, and i’m definitely looking forward to that. My only complaint is that his fire breath stripes he lays down while flying cover a much larger area than the texture they have, and it’s very hard to determine where you are safe and where you are not. I think the condi stacking change is very good, so long as it’s reserved for large bosses that require many people to kill anyways, and I’d love to see it encourage some more condition builds in PvE.

Overall, it’s exactly what we were told it would be. I’m looking forward to HoT, but it definitely needs some work before we see it released. So, do we get to play Stronghold later?

Solution: Buy character slot, make Revenant, keep all classes because i’m not a one trick pony. No reason to quit one class just because there’s another, c’mon now…

Signet of Might does have uses, they just aren’t uses you find in normal dungeons. That signet is probably one of the best tools a Warrior has on the Imbued Fire Shaman fractal. You can activate the signet and immobilize the Shaman through his shield bubble.

By the way, there’s nothing wrong with taking Disc and Signet of Fury, especially in a pug dungeon. The normal setup is Banner of Discipline, Banner of Strength, and Signet of Fury.

nicknamenick.2437:

Line of warding is a complete different animation on my human guardian, your sure about that?

I realize this reply is three days late but nobody fully explained why.

Every race has a different animation set that is paired with certain skills. In the case of the Charr; Guardian’s Line of Warding, and Warrior’s Banner summons (including Battle Standard, just slowed down) share the same exact animation. This can again be seen on Charr between a Guardian and Elementalist. Charr Guardian Empower has the same animation as Meteor Shower on a Charr Ele.

As for the human animations, if I recall, the human line of warding and banner summons are also identical, though I could be wrong on that, I do not have a human warrior.

dadjitsu.8730:

Tiffany.8576:

lol, getting mad over the name of a skill. gg.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/%22Retreat!%22

It seems guardian/warrior shouts are occurring randomly from your character. It’ll hopefully be fixed soon. No need to rage or get offended tho.

LOL, my character is a necro, why am I getting warrior/guardian shouts all the time

Because it’s a bug that only showed up about three days ago after the Monday patch.

All this does is punish classes with a lot of multi-hit skills. It sounds a lot like anti-Warrior, Ranger, Thief, and to an extent- Engineer. Not to mention if it procced on hit and not on skill use, you would ideally never have Confusion hit in PvE, because generally you’re trying to blind and evade enemies, rather than face tank their damage.

Confusion already got buffed not long ago, IIRC it does 33% more damage now in PvE.

Pretty simple. I know exactly what armor i’m going to use. I farm CoF 1 and 2 for Flame Legion Charr Carvings, which get me free zerk gear, and the Arah reward track in sPvP for even more zerk armor if I want. That’s all fine and dandy for PvE you see.. But that’s not what I think most people should be concerned about. I think people should be concerned about Celestial gear. Did anyone else notice the 1,100+ damage burning ticks Revenants can do from their mace #2 skill while wearing full exotic Celestial? Also notice that the Invocation trait line has passive traits all having to do with area healing over time? I did. I think Celestial armor in PvP and WvW is going to be the way to go for a Revenant, my quartz crystals are waiting.

This is a result of how gameplay is intended to work in Guild Wars 2 on the whole. You mention that everything up to level 40 is all quite bland and generic, and I agree. What you didn’t mention is that these same weapon skins are being reused all the way to level 80, and there’s a reason for this.

The spirit of the leveling experience in both Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2 is the same: Everything up until level 80 is a tutorial.

Why put that much development effort into the shortest period of time you will have on your character? Sure you may be level 40 now, but next week you’ll be 60, or 70, or even done at level 80. At level 80 dungeon skins become available to wear, karma vendors become an option, and even your concern about the gem store skins is solved with the ability to run dungeons for daily gold to convert to gems (even at that, I hardly ever see gem store armors).

Reusing the same models for armor and weapons over and over allowed the artists and modelers more time to put into the kind of gear you will be wearing for the next few hundred hours on a character, not the next few hours, and in some cases, the next few minutes right now. I think it’s a good system.

1st:
Warrior (Phalanx Strength)
Ele (Staff or Scepter Hammer)
Ele (Dagger/Focus)
Thief (D/D S/P)
Guard (Hammer Protection)

2nd: (Seriously, I love this)
Ele (Staff)
Ele (Scepter Hammer)
Ele (Scepter Hammer support variant)
Ele (Dagger/Focus)
Guard (Protection Hammer)

For OP:

I have played this game for 2,168 hours. I only have one bank tab, to share between 8 level 80 characters, and a storage character. You make sacrifices, but it’s not impossible. Get over it or charge gems.

Jerus.4350:

Xytl.8659:

Jerus.4350:

Xytl.8659:

oxtred.7658:

And if you buff it to something actually useful, it would make warriors even more close to banner kittenes.

Until they give a Warrior any more utility than might and banners, you might as well buff the banners a little and give us some variety in which ones we can use. Right now it’s as simple as Green>Red>Purple>Orange, in fractals it could definitely be of use to have condition duration.

So you want to use 3 banner builds?

No, I want to have another option for Fractals and also for Condi Warriors in WvW and sPvP to have a viable banner to use. In most non-fractal dungeons there would be no need to use a Tactics banner even with my change, fights just don’t last long enough to where vuln decays or blinds are needed.

My point is just that if you made it that, you’d likely want your warrior running 3 banners, unless for whatever reason the other two weren’t good in that same situation. Would you not?

Phalanx Strength warriors (the only ones you see in fractals) will not give up their third slot for another banner. It may happen in regular dungeons, but in the situations that the extra condi duration would actually help, there are already better options. Signet of Fury and Signet of Stamina are already very good skills, and in many cases Stamina is a skill that cannot be lost. In my case Tactics would replace a Strength banner, not my signet.

wauwi.9162:

And i want more than 1 of my 5 Spirits being useful.
I also want more than 1 of my shouts being useful.
I also want cookies to be in my mouth.

I wonder, which of the above things i will get first.
Tip: I only got one of the above during the past 2 and a half years.

Now take a guess what will not happen to your banner of tactics (as well as my spirits and shouts, aka half my utilities) anytime soon.

So go make your opinion heard. You can do a lot more than just sitting here in my thread complaining about it. I never once posted in someone elses thread saying “Aw man I wish I had more useful banners”. I went and made a thread about it. When I didn’t get any replies, I made another one. If nobody ever hears your idea, it doesn’t have even the slightest chance of being considered or even seen by the developers on these forums.

Jerus.4350:

Xytl.8659:

oxtred.7658:

And if you buff it to something actually useful, it would make warriors even more close to banner kittenes.

Until they give a Warrior any more utility than might and banners, you might as well buff the banners a little and give us some variety in which ones we can use. Right now it’s as simple as Green>Red>Purple>Orange, in fractals it could definitely be of use to have condition duration.

So you want to use 3 banner builds?

No, I want to have another option for Fractals and also for Condi Warriors in WvW and sPvP to have a viable banner to use. In most non-fractal dungeons there would be no need to use a Tactics banner even with my change, fights just don’t last long enough to where vuln decays or blinds are needed.