Guild Wars 2

Mikau.6920:

The real problem for me with this trait is the Might cap. The only viable boon to use with this trait is Might, but I often get 25 stacks and there are Might from allies as well which will make my own Might to not trigger.

We should get the LF/heal from Might even if we have 25 stacks.

You still get LF, it only counts whether a boon is applied, and just like conditions new might overrides the old might. Also, technically any boon can work just fine. Stability for example has up to 10 stacks on CttB, 8 on Infusing Terror. Retal from UF/SS also works nicely, with up to 5 stacks each. What works is basically anything that applies multiple stacks per spell cast, which turns BB into a small heal/LF gain across many skills. It just needs to have a number of our boon-applying (and things that could be turned into such reasonably) things looked at to properly scale into multi-enemy fights, since 1v1 BB is fine.

The cap is 100% bonus duration to the base duration a condition applying effect inflicts. So kitten bleed can max out at 10s, no more. However, there exist a few things that increase the base duration of those condition applying effects, which can then further be increased by the standard up to 100% condition duration.

CCLegion.5936:

It’s only logical to remove the source of both problems and allow Reapers to control their own trait. And that’s really the only thing that’s missing here. Some more scaling boon generation is needed so that Reapers can trigger their own trait reliably without being forced into other traitlines or Chilling Victory.
Now ANet has the chance to properly balance it. Given that Chilling Nova and Soul Eater are currently somewhat lackluster, those are good places to start. Maybe even give some to Shivers of Dread to have some baseline effectiveness. Personally, I’d like to see some fury and retaliation somewhere in the Reaper set.

Yeah, if Blighter’s Boon is going to go in this direction (which in concept is okay, yes its annoying allies don’t help us a ton but w/e we’re Necros get used to it) we need to have some reworks on our boon-giving things. Great news for ANet though, most of our boon-granting mechanics (or weak trait lines) are prime for changes. Spectrals as a whole are in need of work, Death Magic is a great line to set up better defensive boons (like protection), and as long as we have a decent amount of self-booning that scales according to enemies hit we’re not only fixing core issues with the profession scaling but also helping Blighter’s Boon.

I also don’t like it when people use meaningless examples to try to say a trait is fine when it isn’t. Having a high HP/s in PvE is completely meaningless, I mean I’m happy that you are enjoying it but that isn’t an example of the trait functioning properly. Just like the dev’s example of PvE zergs or WvW having “too much sustain” (as though we can’t get it already without Blighter’s Boon) was ridiculous.

Oh man, a whole 600 HP/s in PvE. Welp we did it boys, nevermind Blighter’s Boon is obviously amazing nothing to do here wrap it up.

Honestly, make Unholy Feast a blast finisher, take power away from some of the less useful parts of the skill (the cripple, up the CD a tiny bit) if needed, make the trait have no ICD at all, and its a solid trait. It has to do something fairly unique, like a blast finisher, or it conflicts with Signets of Suffering too much.

I don’t think I’d run it in a power build, BB (even nerfed) or RO should be better still because its base is so low.

The trait is amazing, but yes it “only” applies vuln for Reaper Shroud. However, it has great synergy with Corrupter’s Fervor and most importantly Decimate Defenses, and it works well with all the shroud focused builds which really like the vuln. It also applies the vuln quite a bit faster and in a more reliable AoE cleave.

Berullos.6928:

Greatsword is great in pve. However if you look at it carefully its a hybrid weapon due to the fact chill can damage.

That’s not really how hybrid weapons work. Everything about it is a power weapon, and while that one trait happens to make some abilities deal condition damage that’s like saying Barbed Precision makes dagger a hybrid weapon. GS is pure power.

Blighter’s Boon was nerfed for the builds that needed it most: shroud-based soldier teamfighting builds. They relied entirely on Decimate Defenses/Death Perception to have enough damage to be at all relevant as a bunker (since we still bring very low support), and Blighter’s Boon was absolutely necessary to have the sustain to bunker. The trait is still just fine for 1v1 builds, though it definitely pushes you towards having Chilling Victory. But 1v1 builds didn’t need any more sustain, and as I listed in another thread we have far more boon sources that don’t at all scale with enemies hit than we do that scale. And our best source of scaling boons used to be YAAW, until it received a 50% nerf to how much might it can generate per cast, which again heavily hurts Blighter’s Boon based teamfighting builds.

We asked for scaling defenses, we got scaling defenses, and they were nerfed because apparently we’re not allowed to be teamfight bunkers, and very specific builds on other professions were making us OP. No attempts with ICD, nah let’s just remove an entire type of Reaper build because Herald spams 10 boons every 3 seconds.

Mallis.4295:

How was Blighter’s Boon changed? I think I missed something.

Your allies can no longer proc it at all, only the Necromancer’s own boons can grant LF/heal. In return for losing a massive amount of its teamfighting strength, we got an extremely mediocre buff to the heal.

Putrid Explosion after the delay fix now no longer self-combos with Death Nova. I haven’t heard anything as to whether or not this is a bug, but at the very least it is a large change in function that would be good to have an official word on either way.

Ramoth.9064:

Hey Bhawb, are you making another But of Corpse anytime soon?

I’m planning on it, I was just swamped with midterms for a while, and now that I have a break I have to get plat in League before the season ends. I want to give myself a solid week of really playing HoT a decent amount before I make a BoC since atm all the playtime I’ve put in was just screwing around in Mad King. Stuff like being able to test out Blighter’s Boon a lot to see how I really feel about it, and if Chilling Victory might be able to “make up” some of the difference.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Too busy with HoT, I’m sure :p

I wish.

Just tested it again, it won’t stack over 25 but it does proc just fine.

The second I saw the change I knew it would happen. Putrid Explosion no longer self-combos the weakness, which is a very significant nerf to Bone Minions. Can we get confirmation if this was intentional or could possibly be returned?

Yes, the problem is for a sustain-granting GM, it doesn’t actually do its job except in very small combat.

The problem is Blighter’s Boon was obviously designed with and mandatory for teamfighting Reapers to function. With the trait as it currently is, it is pretty awful for anything short of very small fights, the exact opposite use of the builds that needed it the most; teamfighters. So sure, if you used it for 1v1 its slightly buffed, but the trait was never designed for those, and 1v1 builds didn’t need BB, they’ve had good sustain for ages. Necromancer needed a teamfighting sustain trait, and it was removed NOT because it was too strong on its own, but because two specific NON NECROMANCER builds made the trait OP, and in every other situation it was working just fine. So cool, Herald crapped out 10 boons every 3s, better nerf Necromancer.

And no, you shouldn’t need 2-3 trait lines just for a bunker to function. No one else has to use up every single tree and GM just to not die in teamfights.

zapv.8051:

If you use SOV and then proc lesser signet of vampirism, the cap is at 25 stacks I’m pretty sure. Is that what your asking?

Last time I was using them they added to each other, actually.

That’s nice for some situations in PvP, but doesn’t fix PvE’s huge problem.

What do you mean? Lesser Signet of Vampirism is its own proc. It acts similar to how you’d expect SoV to, but only applies 5 stacks of the debuff and has no healing on use. They don’t interact with each other at all though.

Jackalrat.5493:

Speeding it up ISN’T an option
It’s been made very clear the greatsword is supposed to be a slow, powerful weapon. If you speed it up, it will become very generic. Unfortunately, its slow speed makes it very non-viable in PvP. How do we solve this?

I’d like to point something out, you can get the feeling of being slow without actually having every ability be slow. Gravedigger fits the slow just fine, plus 3/4/5 all have the feeling that GS was supposed to deliver. I don’t think we need to then also have an extremely long AA chain that is unrealistic to finish. Furthermore the AA is entirely backloaded, if you don’t get the third hit you lose most of the power. Range won’t help this, only taking a bit off the last hit and speeding up the attacks a little bit will.

Now, if they refuse to speed it up, which I guess I can understand, then at the very least it can’t be the case that you have to land the last hit for the AA to even be worth using. It has 60% of the LF generation, all of the chill, and the hardest hitting attack.

They’ve specifically said that PvE transforms are meant to kill all minions in order to prevent exploiting, so actually you’re anti-exploiting

Ragion.2831:

actually we do need it for transfer, allows build diversity. The last thing we need right now is more pressure on utility skill slots.

Its not that we should get rid of the transfer, but that since launch we’ve been given a ton of easily accessed transfers/removals. MM has minion transfer, Death Magic has Shrouded Removal, Curses has Plague Sending, then we’ve got Plague Signet, Well of Power, Suffer!, and a decent variety of other transfers/removals, all of which are far more accessible now than they were at launch, where we relied pretty heavily on staff/dagger OH/consume conditions.

Which basically means that the once extremely important burden of condition removal isn’t really a burden to many builds anymore. This comparatively exposed the fact that dagger OH doesn’t really do much besides act as a removal option.

I’d have to test in game, no offense to OP but I learned to not trust people too much when they are testing potential bugs.

If you buff the range you’ll never be able to buff the damage to what it should be, which would result in a bad set. Make the skills better not longer range.

+1 OH dagger needs some help

Because runes that passively spawned completely passive and uninteractive pets was an extremely common complaint from PvPers, and didn’t promote any interesting gameplay. Unlike MM/Ranger who have a lot of interplay with their pets, these spawned mobs don’t interact with your build in any meaningful or active way, they just passive add damage that you don’t have control over.

Really no big loss.

Pelopidas.2140:

WvW we are good.

Only in zergs do we have a true unique role, and specifically because we very uniquely had ranged AoE direct damage, a role that very quickly could be taken away from us. Roaming we have a much smaller margin of error, but it isn’t a big deal since anyone can 1v3 underlevels or bad players. The only special thing we have is good 1v1ing, but a lot of professions have just as good 1v1 while being much safer.

Pelopidas.2140:

In PVE utility could be buffed, we already got projectile defense we were lacking, we got sustain we were lacking+vampiric aura and the ressing-role from transfusion/general survivability is a good enough niche for me, i have carried alot parties in fractals.

Show me any optimized groups setting records that are using Necros and I’ll concede my point. The gap was closed, but res-duty isn’t a unique niche, and we get out healed by plenty at this point. Vampiric Aura also doesn’t compare to what others give. The issue isn’t as bad as before, but we still get out DPSed by DPS builds (at least to my knowledge there hasn’t been proof that Reaper is better), and out supported by support builds.

Pelopidas.2140:

Gimme specifics about weapon/traits that are mediocre, i think everything works atm, except very little stuff(terror-fear duration trait merge, dhuumfire improvement).

Works != not mediocre. Axe works, but it is still a mediocre weapon. So is focus, I’d personally argue staff, and offhand dagger as well. In fact, the only weapon without obvious weaknesses is warhorn. Traits is too many to list, literally every single trait line has traits that need work. Spite/Soul Reaping are the only that are largely solid, and those still have glaring issues.

Pelopidas.2140:

And we can’t facetank?

Non-face tank defenses is what I said. 100% of our defense is based on taking every single hit thrown at us (outside base dodges), and doing some combination of making those hits hurt less (weakness, % reduction, protection), using Shroud/LF to absorb the damage without hitting our HP bar directly, or dealing with the effects afterwards like healing or condition removal. But this doesn’t always work.

Pelopidas.2140:

So you say build play is what matters but we are skilled enough to escape the fact that we have subpar builds due to low/bad competition… ? That doesnt make sense to me.

In roaming yes. You can’t argue that roaming in WvW gives you a high level of competition when you can’t even guarantee the people you fight are even level 80. So by and large you can “get by” because those players are, the overwhelming majority of the time, worse than you. In PvP build is secondary, important but the difference in power between builds of similar types across different professions isn’t nearly big enough to make up for how important team play is. Basically, a great PvPer who understands team and map play will beat a player with superior mechanics but no game sense.

spoj.9672:

Thats an exploit!

Nope, transforms are meant to kill all minions remember? Its a feature™.

striker.3704:

Rune of the Lich just got removed from PvP, probably to nerf MM reapers. Something literally nobody complained about and it got removed.

Lich was really bad runes for MM. These runes were removed to reduce some of the completely passive AI play, but these didn’t affect MM’s power at all. MM should be running more like Vampirism/Pack/Scrapper/any general offense or defense runes really, Lich however gave a really terrible 6th bonus, and vitality is the least useful defensive stat.

At the moment never, because of school, and also League’s season is ending soon and I want plat, while GW2’s ranked season hasn’t started yet so when I’m playing GW2 its all lab farming which would be awful to watch I think. I’m west coast (best coast) NA though, so if I do start streaming it would be during my afternoons/evenings. I’ll maybe start streaming again now that school is giving me a break, though no promises.

Pelopidas.2140:

Honestly even at higher levels of play (I think you mean more pve here) I prefer a necro who knows what he’s doing over an ele. Also stop these threads people we aren’t bad at all!

Well obviously, but that’s not a good argument. Any top player should be considered to know what they’re doing on their build. But generally speaking between two players of equal skill on their profession, other professions will out perform Necromancer. In PvE this has been true forever, but in PvP map play is so much more important than build that players like Nos can “get away” with playing a subpar build because his teamplay and map play more than make up for it. On the other side is roaming, where build play is of utmost importance, and the generally low competition means you can “get away” with having a subpar roaming setup so long as you are really good at playing it (plus Necro has a long history of pretty good 1v1ing).

But still, Necromancer is, by anything measurable, bad in the sense that it is worse than other professions, and has no meaningful unique niche. This has been getting significantly better over time, with Necromancer closing the gap, but its still true largely because of really mediocre trait lines, non-face tanking defenses, and a lot of weapon/utility skills that need work to be up to par.

Solid idea, its really hard to see when its down, which is a problem for allies and enemies.

I think we’re at that spot again where we need to go back and point out that massive swaths of the core profession are still woefully inadequate. Yes those of use who just got Reaper are still a bit in a honeymoon phase, but having played it through the BWEs I’m back looking at the core profession, and noticing all kinds of issues.

Reaper alone still has plenty of problems (though thankfully Shroud really only has one, with the strange stopping at the end of RS2). GS really needs its AA improved, and some QoL fixes here and there. Shouts are looking nice, but we really need a second stun break across the skill type (on Rise most likely, considering it is the longest CD and defensive one). And the traits still need improvements, especially Soul Eater and Blighter’s Boon, along with a slight adjustment to Chilling Victory imo.

Then we’ve got to look at the base profession. Corruptions are still in need of fixes, Spectrals not only are often weak on their own, but also don’t properly interact with the trait always, Minions still need QoL changes. We’ve also got issues in every trait line, some bigger than others, weapons are still a bit lackluster in some cases, and the ever present Death Shroud, which is so obviously inadequate compared to Reaper Shroud.

Hopefully during this time of rapid followup we can get some work, because while we’ve been receiving good changes here and there, the reality is this expansion was great, but also allowed for months of ignoring huge issues on the base profession because of how shiny and great Reaper was.

Can we get his stability upped to a reasonable amount? He’s been left alone since the stability nerfs, and frankly its a fairly important part of the ability, especially since so many AoE pulsing CC skills were put into the game with HoT. But he went from having 15s of ignoring all CC, to 15s of ignoring a whole one CC, while every other stability granting elite was given significant stability changes.

Yeah, definitely not healing through shroud, I just tested it with base and reaper. You’re seeing Vampiric/Vampiric Aura proccing, which can proc up to 45 times over a full Life Transfer, but Transfusion would be healing you for 6k regardless of any targets hit.

There is already a thread about this on the front page right now.

Reaper MM is just fine, and soloing with minions is probably the best solo build we have right now, though I’m not sure if it involves reaper or not.

I’ve seen some kinda huge numbers off Death’s Charge while screwing around in lab farm, but its hitbox is really wonky.

People don’t think Necromancers are unfun, but when you try to play at the higher levels of play, the differences in professions become more distinct, and Necromancer tends to lose out.

And you weren’t going to be proccing it if you were in shroud anyway. So the only time that this actually “costs” you the healing is if you go into shroud, consuming the proc without healing, and then leave shroud and weapon swap, all within 9s of first entering shroud. If you stay in shroud for at least 9s, you’ll proc it again on exiting, if you weapon swap before there is no change, and if you weapon swap after 9s from entering shroud there is a net gain. In most situations you’d have to go out of your way for it to be a loss compared to not proccing the sigil at all.

There are plenty of ways for it to increase your HP yes, but not through Transfusion. It could be proccing vampiric, for example, but you’d noticed if Transfusion was working, considering its as strong as a healing skill.

Spite, has the best overall synergy with minions (though Soul Reaping works for PvP just as well if not better, Spite is better for PvE).

You’re not missing out on anything unless you are in shroud for sub 10s and for some reason can’t swap after leaving. That said, I do think these kind of things should work through shroud.

Because Vampiric Master was a really boring trait that once existed at the master tier, and did nothing but allow minions to siphon HP, so they nerfed it while rolling it into the minor trait. This was because they really didn’t have anything else to do with it, and moving it to Death Magic would have made MMs too strong. Vampiric Rituals on the other hand had every direct well trait rolled into itself, and anyone wanting to specialize in wells really wants VR anyway. So sure, if you want your well-siphons to be nerfed by about 30-40% and be a minor it would be possible to roll them into the baseline, but I don’t think it’ll help at all considering you’d have taken the un-nerfed version if you were in BM anyway.

It doesn’t heal you because the only reason the trait is allowed to heal for so much is because it can’t heal you. If it healed you it’d be nerfed massively, and justifiably so. Much better to leave it as an incredibly powerful AoE heal.

Edit: As a side note the wiki is woefully outdated on a lot of Necromancer related things. Augury of Death is still left as its original incarnation, with it listing 7% per enemy hit, with no lifesteal.

Azzumy.7685:

The problem is see is that Reaper’s might has as condition that you have to be in shroud. In order to make shroud a viable option you need the Reaper trait line and the Soul Reaping trait line.

Should there be 3 trait lines that affect the Shroud so much?

You don’t need Reaper at all for shroud, it actually provides very little to shroud compared to other trait lines, besides changing shroud itself. Soul Reaping will obviously be taken in any shroud build, which is fine since that’s somewhat assumed. And still, Spite only has 3 shroud related traits (one of which you don’t take in shroud builds anyway).

Shroud traits:
Spite – 3
Curses – 3
Death Magic – 5
Blood Magic – 3
Soul Reaping – 6 (3 of which are GM)
Reaper – 3

So overall our shroud based traits are pretty fairly spread out. Furthermore, they all are pretty thematically fitting, spite relates to damage, curses is crit/condi, death magic is defense, blood magic is support, and soul reaping has general shroud traits.

The issue with these lines is that unlike spite/soul reaping, they don’t combo well into a full build. Blood Magic wants to support, but it lacks the weapons to back that playstyle up. Death Magic wants to be a bunker, but lacks strong enough defensive traiting to fill that out. And finally, since ANet refuses to give us strong non-shroud defenses (the only exception is MM), Soul Reaping is required on too many builds.

But again, those are all issues that the trait lines themselves should have addressed. As an example, if Death Magic is supposed to be our core defensive tree, why doesn’t it have strong enough defensive traits to enable defensive builds without relying on Soul Reaping?

Nope, love it.

I think they’re all pretty strong, its only that Blighter’s Boon was such a key component of the “main” build that people thought of when they thought Reaper, and it is really weak now except in 1v1s. Reaper was billed as a teamfighter that did well against lots of enemies, and Blighter’s Boon was required for that build to have enough sustain to work. This is especially true because those builds relied on Decimate Defenses to have enough damage to be relevant, because without that you’re a tanky build that does nothing but absorb damage, and other builds fill that roll way better.

GS works relatively well in teamfights, it just needs a few adjustments. Quite a few people have suggested making 5 a skillshot, removing the aftercast on Gravedigger, and speeding up the AA (with the same DPS).