Guild Wars 2

I actually love the fact that gravedigger recharges 100% when a mob is below 50%. It feels so satisfying to me in pve and is one of the main reasons I enjoy Reaper. It feels like a minigame where I try to hit every single gravedigger I can while still avoiding attacks, and when I was testing it out soloing dungeons it was a great way to kite certain bosses when they hit the 50% threshold. Chill + Gravedigger weaving was awesome, I really hope that it doesn’t change.

The biggest issue I had with reaper had to do with greatsword auto attacks not feeling worth it at all. Maybe make it faster since the damage output didn’t feel worth the amount of time it took to swing.

-Necros bring 100% weakness uptime with with very little trait investment (15 curse) +| offhand dagger to start fights and you are set) even with power builds.

-Necros have great aoe boon stripping which makes the most annoying fractals much less of a pain (Anything with the gong dredge and honorable mention to Ascalon 25 might stacks).

-Power necros are usually going to be using dagger/warhorn which means you have a 3 second AOE daze and a strong way to survive with warhorn 5 + DS. Warhorn 5 is also useful for the cripple uptime on certain mobs that need to be locked down (Volcanic and Reactor oozes come to mind).

-Speaking of which warhorn daze is unblockable which means you can CC mobs even when they go into block mode. This is useful vs the ooze in reactor and the boss in ascalon during the melee phase.

Now I’m not saying necros are perfect, it would be really nice to have a cleave but the class is far from useless in high level FOTM. As long as your team is covering the reflects having a dagger/warhorn necro along is pretty sweet. 3 seconds of aoe daze + 100% weakness uptime helps against trash a lot.

Probably too late but here are a few changes I think would help out necromancers in pve. Keep in mind these are just some ideas I’ve had so if something sounds too crazy feel free to point it out.

Furious Demise: Grant fury to yourself and allies when entering Death Shroud. (keep the same otherwise). Necromancers are way too selfish of a class, tie in group buffs to class mechanic so that if a necro wants to “spam” death shroud on cd they can help the group out but sacrifice the defensive part of it some.

Dagger auto attack: Make first and second part of chain cleave up to 3 targets, keep the 3rd hit single target. Mimics engineer toolkit 1, hell you could make it hit 3 targets all together but I haven’t run any numbers to see if thats too good. Possibly make a dagger mastery trait in Spite that gives dagger a cleave and +10% damage with the weapon. (A friend of mine came up with the first two autos cleaving idea)

-Alternative to that for dagger, make dagger 2 a cleave and up its damage a good chunk. Not sure how many targets should be hit by it. At least then the siphon might be useful.

Axe: Remove vulnerability from the auto attack and buff it’s base damage. Give it a cleave and tie in the vulnerability with Axe mastery. This weapon just deals such bad damage on autos is kind of crazy. This is a 600 range weapon… it should be able to output more than it currently does imo.

Wells: Not really too sure about this one, but I do know the cooldowns are too long. A few seconds of aoe blind? Not bad but thief pistol 5 and guardians in general outclass that. Maybe make each well do some kind of separate group buff. Maybe tie it into the theme of corrupt boon.

Well of suffering – 1 stack of might per tick to yourself and allies (5 targets)
Well of darkness – x seconds of fury per tick to yourself and allies

Bhawb.7408:

Ghostextechnica.3270:

How do you see this working out for the condi Necro in PvE?

I really can’t see how they could improve condition builds in PvE without doing something about the condition cap! This is a hint? Or have they found another way?

However, the condition cap is not what kills condition builds in PvE. It is an issue, yes, but only when you have 2-3 condition users in the group that center around the same things (Mesmers and Engineers, for example, tend to have very few bleed stacks, but focus on other conditions).

Actually, zerk grenade engineers can easily self sustain 15-20 stacks of bleed while cond specs easily do 25. Mesmers also take up tons of bleed slots because of the trait Sharper Images, which makes each crit done by a phantasm also proc a bleed. This means that the current PvE meta mesmers which use sword pistol / focus ramp up bleeds extremely quickly… and that’s just zerk build. Oh and phantasms have perma fury so they will crit ALOT.

So really the condition cap is a huge issue. 1 zerker mesmer or grenade engineer greatly diminishes a condition user in the same group as them.

There are a lot of great changes in here, but please make sure to separate pve skills more from pvp. Nothing is more frustrating to have a pve build destroyed / heavily nerfed for pvp balance even when said build wasn’t even considered top tier to begin with.

The #1 issue I have with pve at the moment is how condition stacking works. It makes absolutely no sense that having 1 berserker mesmer in your group completely nullifies another condition class. If condition damage caps were based on a per character basis pve would be a much more diverse environment for class builds.

When I first started playing the game at launch I came in excited about leveling up a necromancer and going full condition spec. By the time I hit around level 60 I started to realize just how bad it was going to be for me in dungeons / events so I scrapped that idea and started playing different characters. It is really disheartening that over a year from launch this issue hasn’t been addressed yet. It pretty much breaks the game for condition spec characters in pve.

For PVE

- Copy all current boons to other party members
- Tons of reflects, really good support and a must for fractals.
- Mantras are actually good. Cleansing 2 conditions off of all party members (2 charges on it) is great or giving stability x2. Not sure how that could be selfish.
-Boon rip / condition cleanse aoe. Situational but still really good.
-Speaking of boon rips the sword auto attack does it.

That’s off the top of my head. Mesmer is pretty good at support while still being able to go all in on dps.

Are illusions by design not suppose to be affected by condition duration? I don’t remember seeing this in game, I of course found this out after assuming it worked and finding out after spending a good chunk of gold that sharper images doesn’t benefit from it at all.

If it’s a bug thats a pretty big deal to fix.

Warden hits 12 times, and it is not uncommon for it to have a 85% chance to crit (if you use ravage set, different for pvp but can still get crit high). That means you get 9-10 bleeds per target in it’s aoe under optimal circumstances, which you can force on people with focus 4. Assuming your bleed even deals 100/sec 10 bleeds for 4 seconds is 4k damage right there.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that warden is to a lesser extent our source of condition damage.