I have not tried Rune of the Reaper but it looks like it needs axe/focus/greatsword, Spite, Soul reaping, and Reaper to work. Trait for vulnerability on chill, then crit chance. This should be good for Valkyrie armor.
Personally, I would like more short fear proc’s for the potential interrupt, loss of target lock, and a bit of terror damage.
So basically Deathly Chill is practically useless in a meta event…
I suppose the only redeeming quality “might” be in raid or other pre-made small team settings.
Not entirely true; chill application should affect the break bar though the event boss may resist most or all chills and the stack rotates off in an instant.
Bleed builds, on the other hand, are probably very effective for bosses with strong AoE or mobility skills that make it difficult to deal continuous damage at close range.
Deathly Chill – If you chill a lot, consider claiming some condition damage from your opponents.
The only thing I dislike about Spite is how devoted the trait line is to vulnerability spam. It does mesh well with Reaper, though, and axe is a bit better than it was at 600 range. If Spite supported vulnerability application a little less and another condition or boon a little more…
One of the problems I see with Curses is that the line is focused only on condition damage, not conditions in general. That limits its utility outside of a condition damage build. There is no bonus for condition duration in Spite like there used to be.
Minors seem good enough.
Majors
Chilling Darkness was nerfed too hard and, now that Reaper has plenty of chill access, is just not unique anymore. Off-hand dagger and this trait could use a rework. For a moment, I thought maybe reversing it so it blinds on chill but that would be crazy powerful. I would just change this to a 10% base duration increase on all conditions.
Terrifying Descent, like all falling traits, is largely a waste because you have to go find someplace to jump from and it also has an internal cool down. I wish I could jump and proc this trait without having to find a high place to jump from.
Master of Corruption is tricky to use. Plague Sending is required, in my mind. This is fine because it is the only useful adept trait, anyway.
Terror just needs its damage increased. Necromancer gets so little fear duration that terror needs to be strong. Most fears are gated behind DS or automatic proc’s. I am hoping another weapon besides staff shows up with a fear on it, too. I am not a fan of long durations, though. More frequent or more powerful short durations are my preference. One idea I had was to inflict Terror damage on all interrupts instead of fear.
Lingering Curse should increase condition duration for all conditions. Not as much as scepter but another 10% would be nice.
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and because the endless harvesting tools are soul-bound.
You can actually convert them to accont bound ones. This was changed long time ago and anet offered even a gem refund if you bought multiple sets and didn’t want them.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/infinite-gathering-tools-soulbound
Great tip, thank you!
I ask this because the map always seems 3/4 empty.
I rush to events to find no one else there but me. Sometimes, another shows up but it is an even chance the person sticks around.
Are there, like, 10 copies of every map and the servers try to keep the player density low?
I main Reaper to compare builds with Necromancer builds. I main Necromancer because I know how it works better than several other professions, because that toon has maxed bag slots, and because the endless harvesting tools are soul-bound. No other character can carry so much equipment and still have gobs of bag space.
I briefly maxed at 11 sets of armor (10 in bags) in addition to a variety of weapons and trinkets but 9 was more normal and have been salvaging down to only 6. Will salvage more, soon, as I continue cutting back to make room for some 4-stat armor.
I farm to support crafting and other expensive hobbies.
Anyone running CtD and DC?
Greatsword is not necessarily the best PvP weapon. It does not have to be. Necromancer’s main complaint over the last three years has been a lack of PvE utility. Greatsword helps a lot there.
My thoughts, exactly. If we need to grind for xp, why not make a map for it? Event and instance gating is a lame time gate.
Make a map that forces players to group and coordinate to survive, provide a continuous and unpredictable environment of major bosses with advanced AI and xp to match, and some, like me, will grind it risking wipes for the thrill.
It is great training for PvP and avoids teaching most bad PvE habits resulting from old content where players can flail solo with any skills and expect a win.
Current PvE is too different from PvP. PvP and PvE players get bored with it because there is no risk and no huge reward for team play.
Edit: Bosses should actively interrupt skills, aggro high damage and high heal skills, and dodge red circles.
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Nice patch! Maybe Deathly Chill will be useful, now.
I had given up hope on it after finding scepter bleeds and poisons were much more powerful.
Orr is easy to wander solo and so is HoT. I just want one map where everything is a champ so grouping and cooperation are necessary. Everything else can stay as it is.
It would be kind of a cross between fractals and raids, which are instanced, current meta events, which are scripted and locked into locations, and open world PvE, which has more random encounters based on proximity aggro.
Oh, and while everyone is sickened by the idea of a death map, make sure there are no rewards for low participation like tag and run events or zerging but make the champ loot and xp great.
The condition transfer used to be extremely important for some builds but it is less valuable now with the new removal traits available so dagger needs something more to make it attractive off hand besides the speed boost when traited.
Harder open world PvE, please! Much harder!
Make it so we need to form groups just to explore a map.
Make it so solo play only gives death, not xp.
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Ahh, holy cats! Why can we not have an area filled with roaming champs that own solo and duo players?
Why not just populate HoT with L99 mobs and force players to group? This PvE is still too easy.
What am I supposed to think being able to solo champs?
Make the AI more responsive to player attacks and strategy, please.
Forget range. Make axe more useful in PvE. It is a PvP only weapon.
Please increase staff to 1500!
Talrune, start traiting minions as soon as the game allows. I am not sure if you will get reaper before all other specializations are completed so maybe someone else can clarify.
I agree. Needs LF.
Edit: Necromancer no longer needs OH dagger for condition transfer so it’s value is much less.
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Instead of nerfing Necromancer, why not make PvE much harder?
I ran a Rabid-Torment build in HoT with scepter and minions. It worked all right. Greatsword needs power, though. If you camp out on scepter AA using sigils that proc on crit, the precision is good. Epidemic can sometimes be useful if mobs cluster enough. AoE dps is a lot lower with scepter than with greatsword running berserker, sinister, or rampager, for example, but the range of scepter is very useful.
Overall, Rabid seems less optimal but can be used.
The thing about Reaper is that greatsword really needs traited shouts for LF. Greatsword has no sustain skills and makes little LF by itself. However, if I use utilities and traits to increase LF and other defense measures like condition management, greatsword becomes less hazardous to use and competitive enough against multiple trash mobs.
I still view greatsword as a more PvE-centric weapon but Reaper Shroud has more utility in WvW and PvP because of its mobility and chill. Greatsword relies heavily on close range, target rich environments but is weak to ranged, scattered, Single-boss, or other target poor environments.
Ironically, staying in shroud as much as possible is my goal with greatsword. I use it almost like staff – pop the skills and utilities off and AA or Digger when safe, then go straight to shroud or swap to ranged. Staying with greatsword is fine until there is too much heat. Then I abandon it for Shroud or a ranged weapon.
Dagger is different in that the weapon has sustain; lots of LF, siphon heal, immobilize, and your choice of off hand. Dagger can be camped, except for range. Greatsword needs help from utilities and more active shroud play.
Spectral wall is useless against bosses. I use it to interrupt movement skills on trash mobs and only offer it as a suggestion.
Being able to swap between shouts and Spectral skills is very nice.
Epidemic takes some planning, timing, and the right situation but can be very good so keep it in mind as an AoE you do not need to retrait for like you would to use wells.
I guess I would use different runes and, for PvE, run Spectral wall instead of Grasp for the fear soft CC and Terror damage. Pulls still have reliability problems.
Being able to swap to traited Lich is very handy for some events.
Epidemic can substitute for Rise in outpost defense events.
Edit: you do not need an ascended weapon for HoT. Greatsword is excellent if you can get mobs to cluster close enough, have enough condition management, and enough LF.
In major boss meta events, greatsword is also good if you can stay on target without taking too much AoE. I try to hide behind the boss and dps but swapping to scepter or staff is frequently necessary due to phase changes or aggro. Shroud only gives a moment of safety under fire so don’t face-tank.
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Just a guess based on how I perceive HoT meta events. I have soloed champs, too, but in meta events the AoE becomes much stronger and there is much chaos right now. Ranged damage appears to have superior dps, in practice, and Shroud with Transfusion is very heplful. Stacking is not happening righr now.
In terms of getting the job done, axe is the worst main hand or two handed weapon. The vulnerability is only useful solo MM because there is so much more of that condition, now. It caps almost instantly with even an ally or two around. Cripple does virtually nothing and should be changed to a bind. Similarly, the boon conversion only lasts a moment and the dangerous PvE mobs with boons can ignore the effects of conditions.
The biggest problem with axe in HoT is that it can never be more than a poor party support weapon offering unneeded vuln or a poor solo weapon offering no CC and low sustain.
Scepter’s useless cripple at least includes bleeds, which stack more than 25, last longer than a boon corruption, and cut through husks. Axe felt like the least useful weapon. There is too much vulnerability in game and cripple is a weak condition.
Axe may be balanced for PvP where there is more condition removal and higher boon use but HoT mobs still do not do those things.
That’s just silly talk. Necromancer will be used to heal and res, if it is used at all.
Reaper ranged damage is horrid. It will try to stay behind the boss and heal/res when not auto attacking. None of its conditions or corruptions will be useful and it will be too squishy to tank full time, though it can do so temporarily.
I found axe useless in HoT, by the way.
Slow vulnerability application in an environment where vulnerability is grossly overused and greatsword can give more than 10 stacks in less than 2 sec.
A channel that does only a bit of direct damage and is mainly used for generating LF.
A cripple that does not cripple.
You can AA with scepter and keep 10 stacks of bleeding with more than one stack of poison 100% of the time while kiting.
Compare that to Dhuumfire, which only proc’s in shroud, when you use 1 and connect with targets. Take a guess how long, on average, targets actually have even one stack of Dhuumfire, then start recording an outpost defense.
If you could apply burning 100% of the time, it would be awesome.
I find that dps from hits and crit’s far outweigh condition damage without scepter. Other condition damage is in the noise. You will probably see that direct damage in Shroud outweighs both Dhuumfire and Terror by a large amount.
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I agree, Flumek. Greatsword is a great AoE cleave weapon but dagger has a lot more sustain, staff has more utility, and scepter is the the condition weapon. (There is no axe in this list because it is too soft and useless between greatsword and staff.)
This thread is getting toxic. Both Spoj and Nemesis are correct in their calculations in that Spoj presents an ideal maximum and Nemesis presents a practical maximum.
Both are right I different ways and it is the player’s responsibility to determine what build fits them best.
My own experiments suggest to me that reaper is nowhere close to being over-powered in HoT. I have no numbers I wish to share, just opinion based on playing.
HoT punishes close range combat and combat without automatic damage avoidance. Shroud helps a lot for overlapping AoE but not for incoming ranged damage.
Ranged combat with passive avoidance or persistent blocks has a substantial advantage allowing high dps builds at risk. those highly-optimized, ranged or mobility professions seem to go down when pressured at close range.
HoT reminds me of WvW in some respects. Over-optimized dps builds need support. Necromancer can be a res-bot and wade into some of the mess to do some of that. Many other professions are better at healing or res’ing. Not many players are that interested in doing it under fire.
Group members should always build for enough sustain, add some group recovery skills, and forget about dps when others go down. Once the content stops being stupidly easy the dps question will go away.
Arenanet has been training players to have bad habits by allowing skippable content and making PvE encounters too easy. The result is the zerker meta and poor coordination between players.
Without Dhuumfire, you get Death Perception, if short on precision, or FitG, which is handy with all the hard control effects.
Terror provides small amounts of condition damage in a build that depends upon it.
Both Terror and Dhuumfire add condition damage but neither has enough up-time to rival a scepter build. Deathly Chill seems weak, even with as many ways to chill as possible. Scepter bleeds and poisons outclass everything Reaper can do foe condi damage.
On the brighter side, pretty much everything is better than axe right now. Scepter and corruption skills can help more than axe so if you want to run a condition damage build, it will be better than axe by a wide margin. Even staff feels better dealing with high mobility mobs. Axe offers cripples with Unholy Feast but there are other was to proc cripple and Necromancer’s limited range and mobs’ ability to ignore cripple on mobility skills makes cripple nearly useless!
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^
I entrust the Wiki to Bhawb.
Seriously, Transfusion is the single best group support Necromancer has in HoT as well as the original areas.
After playing PvE, yesterday, grinding mastery xp, the two biggest advantages to Necro are AoE and Transfusion. Lots of other professions (if not all) can burn down mobs faster and / or from range. Surviving to res was my most powerful role.
I spent a bunch of time in the new areas trying out Necromancer builds, today. They all come out pretty much the same. Condition damage is weak with scepter, almost unnoticeable with Deathly Chill. Running a condition damage build is a poor trade on Reaper. It felt like I had better results just running non-reaper condition damage builds.
Swapping between Soldier’s, Berserker’s, Rabid, and Sinister, I was humbled in all cases how other professions like Ranger and Ele could just burn down opponents from a safe distance while Reaper builds had to assume all of the close range combat risks from hard CC and nasty AoE. Condition builds were sort of effective using traditional bleed/poison. Shout builds on Reaper were awful compared to a power/crit build. In turn, power/crit builds were only good for close range AoE dps. Other professions with ranged options did far better, often vaporizing foes remarkably quickly.
Because of the large amount of damaging AoE and hard CC coming from mobs, any advantage Reaper might have in close range combat is quickly negated by dodging.
Minions are fairly strong.
Other professions are getting de-tuned. Read the patch notes. There are more than just bug fixes in them.
Necromancer dps is was not as high in dps as pre-HoT in relation to other professions. I saw this in a drop in champ credit and loot but there have been at least two balance / bug patches since.
I am not overly fond of burning.
Condition damage Reaper is primarily a Deathly Chill build. From there you can add Terror, Dhuumfire, and scepter bleeds and poison.
It would be great to have a poison on chill trait or something similar but right now there is little synergy with old damaging conditions and chill – based Reaper.
You might still do better with a Corruption build using DS and Epidemic focusing on bleeds, poison, and maybe Terror.
I ran Sinister-Mad King for a while but missed the ferocity.
If you run sinister, you have to trait Deathly Chill. Then build for frequent chills.
I have been getting along with straight berserker everything but ran Soldier-Hoelbrak with Berserker trinkets last night. It seemed fine, too.
I think you can run anything you want but watch for tricky hard CC and self-destructs in HoT. When taking on multiple mobs with these skills, spending as much time as possible in DS helps a lot. Scholar runes were not that useful.
I build for Shroud, condition removal, and defense that does not reduce dps too much; E.g., minions or Spectral. Shouts are much safer to use when with a group than they are solo because Necro is so susceptible to hard CC.
If they want Necromancer to be a res-bot, it needs a modifier that boosts dps after reviving.
I ran a full Sinister-Mad King shout condition build and it was not great. Switched to zerker-scholar shout might. Later wished I had just stuck with zerker-scholar mm.
Edit: There are a number of PvE mobs with powerful AoE that seem to bypass the point of Shroud by being difficult to anticipate. Full dps builds are very squishy when face tanking an exploding mob. Greatsword requires very close range play where all of the visual effects can hide cues.
I plan to run the old Soldier-Hoelbrak armor on various builds to see how it performs. Rabid-Torment was fair. Almost anything works with MM but minions have zero group utility and do not scale with allies.
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It’s only available on the bottom slot.
Add to the passive a reduction in resurrection time.
Add to the passive a variable base power increase according to the amount of health restored to downed players over the last minute.
Add to the active a one minute AoE diameter increase to Transfusion and Life from Death.
Add to Life from Death a Signet of Undeath cast time reduction.
Scholar is great for older, less challenging PvE.
For ranged, nothing beats Ranger. It is the only profession with dps increasing with range (long bow only). However, the Druid is a monster at healing so there is less dps there in case you do not like support jobs.
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Stopped reading after you wrote that Reaper is supposed to be a PvP upgrade. I do not remember having read a statement like that from Robert Gee or any other Arenanet employee.
Team utility right now consists mostly of short range AoE dps and being a res-bot. I guess I would like to see these two uses scaled up so incoming boons make Necromancer an outperformer and resurrection becomes faster and leaving allies with higher health; perhaps even a temporary dps boost for successful res’ing.
The two “activities” do work against each other. Some extra synergy here would be nice.
Necromancer and Reaper are viable in PvE but we are still sorting out dps comparisons between professions using elite trait lines. There are a few general trends coming out of HoT PvE.
Necromancer and Reaper are both short range dps, Reaper even more than Necromancer.
Reaper, in particular, gets a large boost in dps with boon support from other professions so there is some group dependency.
Condition damage is probably still low compare to other professions like Ele and War.