Guild Wars 2

Personally, I think a hit can get too high. What I believe, and I realize this differs a bit from Bhawb here, in terms of how Life Blast’s cast should be handled, but here’s my list of thoughts:
- Life Blast damage is too high to cut the Cast time in half.

- Life Blast DPS is too low, and as a resource driven class mechanic, much like the soon-to-be Berserker, it should feel rewarding to trigger, even if that means a minor dps drop on weapon skills (I have little sympathy for those who think Dagger 1 spam should maximize DPS, playing both to their maximum utility would be best, though, more Greatsword with Grave Digger being used at optimal times as dagger is purely sustain).

- Cast time should be halved to .5 second cast +.2 after cast (effective .7, doubling the cast speed from 1.4 seconds.) while reducing damage by 40%, resulting in significantly lower burst damage, but a higher sustained output. The “super slow at everything” niche is dated, and slow, hard hits can remain a Lich Form niche that you can opt into.

- Rather than making it a two-hit channel, as a few are suggesting, to allow some traits to hit twice and others only once per cast (likely Reaper’s Might being the biggest issue), those traits that are seen as too strong when coupled with a faster speed (RM, possibly Unyielding Blast) need to be “nerfed” (see: rebalanced) to have lower durations instead.

Note: The reason this needs to happen is because Reaper already has this faster attack speed. If it’s a problem with a .7 cast Life Blast, it’s an issue with Reaper as well. Not to mention Reaper’s Might vastly over shadows Chilling Victory as a might mechanic, holding non-spite reapers back. Plus for a minor adept, its just a touch too good anyways, especially if Life Blast were to be a stronger DPS option.

- Lastly, Life Blast needs to have a baseline pierce. Piercing is already harder to control than cleave and Life Blast is currently lacking in DPS single target, let alone on multiple targets, this limitation and added Soul Reaping semi-mandatory trait should just be taken away. Also, with the piercing part removed, the trait would no longer appear to be half-effective for Reaper and future shrouds.

Sorry if its a bit wordy, I plan to make a write up following BWE2 and will have it cleaned up and discuss with some other Necromancers before hand, but I want to test some things first with Reaper before I get too deep into suggestions, but these are my general thoughts right now.

TL;DR: Baseline Piercing, Double Cast speed of Life Blast, Reduce damage by 40-45% to bring it in line with Reaper’s capabilities, rebalance non-reaper Traits to compensate for the new speed that fits both Shrouds.

ronpierce.2760:

Personally, I think a hit can get too high. What I believe, and I realize this differs a bit from Bhawb here, in terms of how Life Blast’s cast should be handled, but here’s my list of thoughts:
- Life Blast damage is too high to cut the Cast time in half.

- Life Blast DPS is too low, and as a resource driven class mechanic, much like the soon-to-be Berserker, it should feel rewarding to trigger, even if that means a minor dps drop on weapon skills (I have little sympathy for those who think Dagger 1 spam should maximize DPS, playing both to their maximum utility would be best, though, more Greatsword with Grave Digger being used at optimal times as dagger is purely sustain).

- Cast time should be halved to .5 second cast +.2 after cast (effective .7, doubling the cast speed from 1.4 seconds.) while reducing damage by 40%, resulting in significantly lower burst damage, but a higher sustained output. The “super slow at everything” niche is dated, and slow, hard hits can remain a Lich Form niche that you can opt into.

- Rather than making it a two-hit channel, as a few are suggesting, to allow some traits to hit twice and others only once per cast (likely Reaper’s Might being the biggest issue), those traits that are seen as too strong when coupled with a faster speed (RM, possibly Unyielding Blast) need to be “nerfed” (see: rebalanced) to have lower durations instead.

Note: The reason this needs to happen is because Reaper already has this faster attack speed. If it’s a problem with a .7 cast Life Blast, it’s an issue with Reaper as well. Not to mention Reaper’s Might vastly over shadows Chilling Victory as a might mechanic, holding non-spite reapers back. Plus for a minor adept, its just a touch too good anyways, especially if Life Blast were to be a stronger DPS option.

- Lastly, Life Blast needs to have a baseline pierce. Piercing is already harder to control than cleave and Life Blast is currently lacking in DPS single target, let alone on multiple targets, this limitation and added Soul Reaping semi-mandatory trait should just be taken away. Also, with the piercing part removed, the trait would no longer appear to be half-effective for Reaper and future shrouds.

Sorry if its a bit wordy, I plan to make a write up following BWE2 and will have it cleaned up and discuss with some other Necromancers before hand, but I want to test some things first with Reaper before I get too deep into suggestions, but these are my general thoughts right now.

TL;DR: Baseline Piercing, Double Cast speed of Life Blast, Reduce damage by 40-45% to bring it in line with Reaper’s capabilities, rebalance non-reaper Traits to compensate for the new speed that fits both Shrouds.

+1

I can see Reaper bringing in tears. So for joking purposes only,

what if one of our Shouts was a skill called
“Nerf Me!”

And you were the game developer, what would you have this skill do?

• First the health circle should show ‘prospective damage’. You can’t visually see how much you are being damage with little numbers in stacks. It should appear visually in the health circle. For example, the future damage will appear colored pink/magenta like degeneration from bleeding or hexes in GW1, replacing the red. If your whole health circle goes pink, that means the conditions you have on you will take you down if you don’t remove them.
• Then, condition removals should give priority to the condition that would have a bigger prospective damage. Not merely the one doing more DPS, not just the one that’s going to last more, the one that will color a bigger chunk of the health bar based on DPS and duration.
• Additionally, healing from regeneration and other heal over time effects would also colorize the bar, making the ‘prospective healing’ look yellow if the total net regen/degen is positive. So if your regeneration can outheal conditions on you, you’ll see yellow chunk in your HP circle, and if regeneration can’t cope with it (which will obviously be most of the time), you’ll see the pink chunk showing how much health you are going to lose.

Pink and yellow and two decent colors that won’t be confused with red too much by colorblind, based on some colorblind palettes I’ve googled. But they are just examples, they could be other colors.

These two changes will make sure people can actually see how much damage they are taking from conditions, and help them deal better with it by prioritizing the most troublesome condition first, without RNG nonsense.

We all know with the upcoming of reaper the base necro is looking a bit stale and crusty. It needs some love so here is one big thing that bothers me.

DS-1
Aka life blast

Its good, it hits hard, it tracks very well, and has nice range, and even has amazing projectile speed.

Here is my problem.
Why is the start up cast time so freaking long after all this time its never been adjusted to be better.

Why is it that underwaterDS-1 “Plague blast” nearly the same thing as life blast shoots x2 as fast. Its cast/startup time is literally 100% faster. The damage is still great along with all of the other features. IT EVEN XFERS A CONDITION PER SHOT OHHH MY GOD THATS SO GOOD!!! But how often are we in underwater combat…. not ever hardly not often enough anyways.

Why cant life blast be equaled up to plague blast in at least terms of cast time. For an auto attack in DS its incredibly too slow. If we cant have that can we at least get the transfer per shot. Sense its pretty clear that devs don’t want to give necro more condition variation and want them to be all about xfer and boon conversion I don’t see why this is not a base line thing. IT would make the base line necro something really great if we gained one of those 2 options on life blast alone and while this is not the only thing I really think needs to be looked at it would be an amazing start.

Take the DS-1 Life blast and make it faster or make it Xfer a condition per shot or both just as its under water variation does. :/

I would love to hear feedback on this from all of you guys even more so if a dev would go about answering as to why or why not this has not been a thing with all the skill changes we have seen out there.

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Nyth.3492:

The thing is (and this is one of the reasons I made this topic), is there realistically any good weapon skill that we can put it on other than auto attacks? By design there are abilities with long cooldowns, or abilities you don’t always want to use the moment they are up.

In general the answer is yes, there could be skills designed that could generate LF outside of the AA and be reliable sources of it. An example could be Mark of Blood, it has a crazy short CD (not quite 5s), is really reliable to hit, and wants to be used on CD by design, yet it doesn’t overload a skill. If staff had a comparable LF gain/second from MoB and no LF on AA, it really wouldn’t be a noticeable difference (though people would complain about the AA more, which goes to show why that AA is so lacking).

On the other hand, Ghastly Claws is a bad source of reliable LF, because it overloads a skill; while you do want to use it nearly on CD, it is your main source of burst on Axe, by loading it with all the LF generation that Axe has you end up saying to enemies “Just dodge this one skill and I both don’t deal damage AND don’t gain Death Shroud ever”. Gravedigger would be another example.

So yes, non AAs can be made to function as the source of LF generation, but they have to be low CD, high generation, reliable to land, and can’t be the main damage/utility focal point of that weapon.

So for those that have been living under a rock – we have had a beta. Reaper was tested, some good and some bad. Boils down to – Shroud good, greatsword bad, shouts meh, “chill y u so bad”.

Then some very sensible person asked Robert Gee to be more transparent.

Now we haver this:

Thanks to everyone who posted feedback on the reaper from this last BWE. I spent a lot of time during the weekend reading over as many posts as I could both here and on reddit and taking notes. I noticed a few trends show up that I’d like to try and address before the next BWE and I wanted to let you know about some of the changes that I’m working on.

Greatsword cost/payoff ratio was undertuned
The original intent here was to make GS feel like more of an AoE weapon while dagger felt like more of a single target weapon. We tuned the damage ratios accordingly so that greatsword would have higher dps vs 3 or more targets as we didn’t want to devalue dagger as a melee weapon. However this didn’t account for the difficulty of actually hitting with greatsword skills, and when we took that into account it made sense to increase the damage multipliers on the core damage skills. There are some other QoL changes made for Greatsword as well which I hope will improve your experience with it in the next beta test.
•Greatsword Auto Attacks – Fixed incorrect range facts. These attacks have the same range as normal Greatsword Attacks. Added lifeforce gain to all hits 1/1/3. Increased damage of all attacks by approximately 20%.
•Fading Twilight – Adjusted animation speed to smooth out attack sequence for non-human rigs.
•Chilling Scythe – Increased chill duration from 1.5s to 2s.
•Gravedigger: This attack now has 100% recharge when it hits a foe below 50% health. Increased damage by 50%. Increased recharge from 5s to 8s.
•Death Spiral: Increased range from 170 to 220. Increased width of cone by 33%.
•Nightfall: Changed animation. This skill no longer roots you to cast. Removed camera shake.
•Grasping Darkness: No longer poisons and instead inflicts chill for 4 seconds on hit. This skill now fires at your target instead of using your facing direction. This skill will no longer fire if your target is behind you. •Grasping Darkness is a very complex skill under the hood and integrates programming and art in a very specific way to work the way it does. As a result, changes that would be simple for another skill (like giving it increased range) are very difficult and require coordination from multiple disciplines. I’ve made a few changes that I believe are safe for this BWE that changes the skill to be enemy targeted instead of using your facing direction. We’ll be keeping an eye on this one to see if it needs further tuning in subsequent beta events.

Shouts are weak and feel clunky to use in combat
We were concerned about the possibility of instant damage spikes and trying to emphasize the slow thematics of the specialization when we made these skills. After seeing how things worked out on Tempest we think it’s safe to lower the cast time of these skills as the “slow” theme can be expressed through other methods like greatsword and reaper’s shroud. As a result, many shouts have had their cast times significantly reduced. Additionally I’ve moved some of the reward for hitting multiple targets with these shouts to be baseline, so they should feel a little better when there are less foes around. Also, new minion type for “Rise!”
•“Chilled to the bone!”: Reduced cast time from 2s to 1.25s.
•“Rise!”: This skill is now unblockable and instant cast. Damage increased. Now creates a shambling horror for each foe hit which lose health every second. These minions place Dark Bond on their master when they hit with attacks which causes 50% of the damage from attacks on the master to be redirected to the minion.
•“Suffer!”: This skill is now instant cast. Lowered damage. Increased chill from 2s to 3s
•“You are all weaklings!”: Now grants 5 stacks of might baseline plus 3 per target hit.
•“Your soul is mine!” Increased healing power attribute multiplier to 0.5. Now grants 5% lifeforce baseline plus 3% per target hit

Reaper Shroud 2 has targeting/control issues
Sounds like a lot of you guys accidentally ran off of cliffs with Death’s Charge :P so we’re changing this to be more like the Warrior Sword skill Savage Leap. It will no longer go through targets you have selected, but will go its full distance if you have no target. Because it does very little damage while dashing I’ve allowed it to continue hitting even when you hit walls, we’ll be watching this next BWE to make sure it doesn’t turn into another Fiery Greatsword Rush though. Reaper Shroud has also has a few other general usability and bug fixes.
•Reaper’s Shroud Auto Attack – Fixed skill facts interaction with Unyielding Blast and Reaper’s Might traits.
•Life Reap (Shroud 1c) – Increased lifeforce gain to 1.5%. Fixed bug with number of targets not being listed.
•Death’s Charge – Now dashes to a target, rather than in a direction. No longer passes through your target. No longer stops hitting if the player hits a wall.
•Infusing Terror – Fixed a bug which caused this skill to begin recharging while it was still giving stability.
•Soul Spiral: Reduced recharge from 40s to 30s. Fixed number hits skill fact to show 12 hits. Fixed duration skill fact to list 3s duration.
•Executioner’s Scythe – Made adjustments to hitbox to make the initial attack more reliable. The hitbox for the primary attack is now the entire area of the ice field (still only hits 1 target).
•Reaper’s Onslaught: Fixed a bug which prevented the attack speed modifier on this trait from working properly. This trait no longer recharges Death’s Charge on kill, but instead recharges all shroud skills by 5s on kill.

Chill uptime is difficult to maintain
It seems like we went overboard with how much we limited chill in the last update and you guys are having a hard time applying this reliably. We’re going to tune this up for the next BWE primarily through traits as well as some small increases to baseline chill on skills.
•Chilling Nova – Reduced ICD from 15s to 10s.
•Shivers of Dread – Fixed a bug which caused this trait not function while downed. Increased chill duration from 2s to 3s.
•Cold Shoulder – Fixed a bug which caused this trait not function while downed. Increased chill duration modifier from 10% to 20%.
•Deathly Chill: Doubled damage values.

Finally here are some things that won’t be changing and why:
•Augury of Death – I heard a few good suggestions to make some of the recharge bonus on this trait baseline, however due to the way this trait is set up it’s a little complicated to do this and have the skill facts match up. Along with the other changes made to shouts I’d like to leave this alone for now and see how the other changes affect its value.
•Soul Eater – Similarly to Augury, this trait is heavily influenced by the current power of greatsword. It sounds like it’s a little weak right now, but I’d like to see how the other changes to greatsword affect the weapon before modifying this one.

These changes are all in iterative development so it’s possible that there will be more changes, less changes, or different changes from the ones listed here when the next BWE rolls around. This is just a snapshot of the changes I’m working on now.

The way I see it, almost all the changes we wanted are there. I really feel that most of the issues that the Reaper had that aren’t linked to main profession are there and solved.

So how about we show Robert Gee some love, same as he showed us. You know, maybe a shrine or something suitably necromantic.

Jokes aside, I feel that finally, after long years of waiting the Necro community is getting some dev interest, good times ahead guys!

nearlight.3064:

@manveruppd, what do you think necros will run when ele gets nerfed? Also I heard from a popular streamer that the ele balance dev is on vacation right now so thats why it hasn’t been nerfed yet… but I guess it will be soon since vacations can’t last forever.

They’ve been on vacation for two years? Man I want to work at ANet.

sephiroth.4217:

brannigan.9831:

assassin.7895:

D/D ele even stronger now, I like that. /s

Someone wiz in your cheerios this morning? So anything that does damage that is available to everyone potentially that gets nerfed is an indirect buff to D/D eles? This is why these forums are useless.

Ele don’t use fire+air on weapon sets, but thieves and other bursty classes do, and those extra damage procs is what helps bring down a cele ele… So yes, Indirect buff.

The thinking is a little outside the box but you can see some logic to it.

yep, now the nerfs to the burst classes need to be reverted, this is bullkitten. We are heading back to the previous meta that allow classes to have high survival + sustain again, not fun.

F1 Enter Shroud
F2 Exit Shroud

Problem solved.

Simple feedback here:

Reaper Shroud has a 1s cd when used, before being able to turn to normal form.

This destroys Curses builds that used the trait to gain 5s of Fury.

This was one of the things that makes our profession mechanic more diverse. Please consider changing this to be like Death Shroud, which has no ICD, so that we may “flash” our Shroud for Fury.

Thanks!

Going to add my support for this idea. It is way, way too easy to completely miss your target or toss yourself off a cliff with Death’s Charge, and while it’s a decent gap-closer, it’s very difficult to use in close quarters. Make it like Savage Leap or Leap of Faith (leap forward if untargeted, leap to target if targeted) and it would be excellent.

After playing for the last few hours I completely agree with you Ron. RS2 should function like ranger great sword four. It dashes until you press it a second time to stop for an instant are blind with damage.

This would not be too hard to implement.

So I’ve watched quite a bit of streaming today in regards to the Reaper, and it essentially confirmed a pretty big fear of mine. Death’s Charge is wonky as hell for combat general use, and unlike skills such as burning speed which work relatively similar, it doesn’t include an evade (and if I’m not mistaken, according to the wiki and testing, Burning speed doesn’t travel the full 600 range, leaving it a bit easier to land).

Simple request: Please, for the love of everything unholy, make it a target-based leap, while retaining the animation, similar to a warrior’s sword. I watched grouch and other decent players just flopping all over the place with it, and I’m not sure I was it successfully land once, and it drastically reduces its ability to be used as a defense on point.

Second topic, ideally, and because it is a mobility skill locked by death shroud (and by extension, life force, so not always readily available out of combat), the spell if given the above functionality would do wonders for the class posing as a heavy melee combatant if it was 900 range. And for this, possibly it could go from a 6 to an 8 second cooldown, but as it stands, Necromancer alone is fairly outclassed as a ranged fighter, Reaper being only worse in those regards, a Reaper must be able to close gaps, at least in their shrouded state.

That’s all. If not the second part, the first part is almost dire, the skill is far too wonky as it stands, and since it has no added benefits while flying through the air, such as evading, it really needs to be more reliable and be able to short-stop at its destined target.

Thanks for reading!

I still want Brain Freeze trait somewhere accessible that makes chilling an enemy inflict confusion or torment :P

I just want LB to be like half the speed and about 40% less damage so it feels better in general and traits can be better balanced between the two shrouds. And baseline pierce of 3 with UB raising targets hit to 5.

For the heck of Necromancers please upvote this post relating our latest bugs:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Please-Post-7-28-Bug-Reports-HERE-merged/page/8#post5328409

Thank you

Signet of spite still inflicts only one stack of bleeding and 1 stack of vulnerability(tooltip says 2 bleeds and 5 vulnerability). This skill is very important for condi builds,unholy martyr can be nerfed by 3 %,its not problem but fix signet of spite is so much hard?

Hello everyone

So… I had the build idea since March when Foot in the Grave first became a stun breaker… but only recently managed to find the time to make this guide.

The build is designed to be a solution to the “get the necro !” mentality which is currently in the GW2 PvP meta.

GW2: introducing The Executioner [Necromancer SPvP power support build]

Hope you guys will have as much fun with it as i did.

TL;DR: Axe 1+2, signet of undeath, dhuumfire, foot in the grave, utilities in DS/RS suggestions.

I spent a couple hours writing this and making it stupid-easy to read and understand, so I hope this doesn’t just get buried in the piles of salt

SKILLS

Problematic Skill: Rending claws (axe skill 1); Damage too low, range too low.
Possible fixes: Increase range to 900, increase damage by 15-20%
Reasoning: Axe is our mid-range weapon, but 600 is simply too close due to movement abilities not being affected by chill/cripple, it is too easy for enemies to gap close 600. The damage of course, has always been low on axe 1, due to this, most players do not use it, increasing it will let axe see more play.

Problematic Skill: Ghastly Claws (axe skill 2); Too easily interrupted for the damage it does. No cleave, can be interrupted simply by moving to the side of the player. Making this skill very poor.
Possible fixes: Allow this skill to hit its target despite the players frontal positioning (can be cast while target is behind/to the side of the necro)
Reasoning: Damage is fine, but the ability to interrupt this skill is way too high to make it a viable and dependable weapon

TRAITS

Problematic trait: Foot in the grave; Underwhelming given what we have to give up to take this trait.
Possible fixes: Now also grants protection for 4s.
Reasoning: _To take this trait, we have to give up our only burning condi application, or 50% crit chance in DS. Currently the trade off is not worth it, so often times this trait is not picked. _

Problematic trait: Dhuumfire; This skill will be fine with Reaper shroud, but with death shroud the application is too slow, making this trait very underwhelming.
Possible fixes: Keep its current mechanic (1s) when in reaper shroud. When in death shroud: Applies 2s of burning instead of 1s.
Reasoning: Lifeblast is a slow cast, changing this to 2s while in DS gives a condi necro more choices on what DS ability they use. Increasing playability and choice, is simply good for the game.

UTILITIES

Problem Signets in DS/RS;
Possible fixes: Allow Signets passives to affect all necromancers in RS or DS. Allow utilities to be seen, but not toggle-able in RS/DS.
Reasoning: Having a class mechanic that harshly works against all other class mechanics is cumbersome, creates all sorts of problems, and is bad for playability, the game and the player (especially new ones)

Problematic Skill: Signet of Undeath; This skill has 3 second cast time. More often than not a player is dead before this can be cast. Coupled with the fact that blood magic received some resurrection support and the long cast time with poor passive, this signet sees almost no play.
Possible fixes: Change passive and active. 30s cd. Active: Instant cast: Stun break and 2 stacks of stability for 5s. Passive: increase LF generation of this passive to 5% every 3 seconds.
Reasoning: The main issue as a necromancer we face, being the slow ‘hard’ hitting ‘monster’ we are intended to be is that we are so easily CC’d that we often find ourselves ping-ponged around unable to do very much while burned down through LF and health. This would make this signet see play in most forms of gameplay, and solve one of our fundamental issues.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading, and I hope us necro’s can get some fundamental changes that we need.

Honestly I can’t even express how stupid this is. The good news is with Revenant’s introduction ANet can go back to having an 8 profession game.

Just make it so Lich form/Plague don’t kill minions which they shouldn’t do anyway. No one uses those elites in MM builds, even if they didn’t kill minions you wouldn’t use them.

when the necro dies he gets his dream accomplished- get closer to death
so whatever happens necro always win

“Death is a lover. Embrace the love.”
-Olias from GW1

Can we please convert this into resistance?
I thought we was moving away from having un-removable buffs in the game. Quickness, Resistance..

No counterplay to a warrior smashing into you with his 8-20 seconds immunity to conditions depending on if you have boon removal.

I feel like it’s the one skill holding all the other stances back from getting a CDR trait too.

Resistance currently stops all conditions from functioning on you. A lot of people in this thread seem to be assuming they will still suffer from chill, Immob, blind and cripple which is WRONG.

If your a condition build your as good as dead now.

Edit: This discussion is about BERSERKER STANCE. Please do not derail the thread into rampage/warrior weaponset balance discussions.

Edit2: Arguing against resistance due to boon stripping making it useless are weak. Every other class in the game will pickup boons because boonstripping isn’t avaliable 24/7. The only ones who have a high amount of avaliability are power thief and power mesmer, Both of which resistance is close to useless against.

Edit3: Remember this is a post asking for it to be CONVERTED not removed. Therefore any arguements that say play WITHOUT IT are not giving the experience that you would have if it would be converted to resistance and are a poor representation of the balance.

Edit4: Using “Running away” as a “Counterplay” isn’t a counterplay at all. If running away is classed as a counterplay then surely nothing will ever be OP because we always have the option to run away from it.

Edit5: Please don’t compare zerker stance balance from a year ago, The balance has changed and the damage output is much higher now. Meaning immunitys of any kind got indirectly buffed.

Hey guys,

Kinda been having guild wars 1 nostalgia a lot recently and been looking at a lot of skills of the necromancer and how not only curses but every single attribute had some form of sacrifice to it.

Right now everything is being pushed into corruption alone for that sacrifice theme which although for the time being is fine where I would prefer it being more prevalent among all the specializations for necromancer but corruption right now feel very weak.

Cultists fervor has been translated somewhat into master of corruption but what of other iconic spells from gw1?

How about contagion, virulence, offering of blood and so many other spells that are in curses or not feel they could fix weaknesses curses and vice versa for the other specializations now face.

So lets all hear em folks lets get cracking eh?