Guild Wars 2

Flumek.9043:

It wasnt nerfed for pve/zerg reasons, thats filler argument

Yep. I don’t even have blighter’s equipped, I’m just running some random garbage build I threw together of a mishmosh of soldier/berserker with only adept Reaper traiting, and I’m effectively immortal in zerging anyway. Blighter’s Boon was complete overkill, and absolutely worthless in these situations compared to the extra damage (and permanent RS with Vital Persistance) that Onslaught gives.

Tim.6450:

So how is a melee spec going to survive in a group fight (especially if the foes can focus) when most of it scaling defense is so little that it is basically irrelevant?

This is the problem I’m seeing. A teamfight focused Reaper needed high sustain because we have, count them, still NONE of the negation tools that every other bunker in the game has. Yes Rise! is nice, but all it does is mitigate, and at a certain point mitigation just flat out never scales as well as a defensive tool as full on negation does. We’ve been saying this for years, and we’re still there.

Also, too much PvE zerg sustain? That’s an awful balance point, next we’ll be nerfed because we could survive infinite fall distances even though revive orbs were abused for that anyway… wait a minute.

So besides the nerf, it still works like it always has, each stack of boon you gain (now from self only) you gain 1%, or the healing. So YAAW giving 10 might = 10% LF, or Unholy Feast giving 5 stacks of Retal = 5%.

Muchacho.2390:

I wouldnt really consider that a nerf. It more that in certain situations bb becomes better and in other worse.

It is just sad that spite now becomes even more important for bb.

Do you have Spite? Its fine.

No spite? Pretty mediocre trait.

Might as well have added a note that said Blighter’s Boon is only equipable when Spite is slotted. They already nerfed YAAW’s interaction with BB, so if you don’t have Spite I don’t know that this can be considered a GM worthy trait.

Nemesis.8593:

on metabattle

While I can’t speak to this specific build, I have no clue if it is better or what, using metabattle as a source for good builds is a bad idea. It is stuff people copy from big names, and is really just there to serve as a really basic starting point for people who want to copypasta without thinking. It is also community moderated primarily, so if you don’t like it go argue with them directly and change it.

All non-self transforms kill minions, including PvE transforms, and the reason for the PvE versions is because minions are permanent and quite strong, so they could abuse some of those transform mechanics. That said, yeah its super obvious moa shouldn’t kill minions.

Okay, so a few specific builds are a hard matchup for Reaper, which shouldn’t surprise us while playing a profession that has hard countered all condition builds since launch. Bad matchups will happen, they are the result of builds that are focused on niches, with those niches happening to have a really bad face to face matchup.

Kulvar.1239:

That’s exactly why I suggested that Unholy Martyr added effect could be a change to marks. Exploding instead of fading when reapplied.

The problem is Unholy Martyr isn’t a fitting general use GM for Blood Magic. It really doesn’t fit the trait line at all, Transfusion already fills the support role and VR is niche to well builds. So the last GM needs to be something that a non-support non-well build can use and fits Blood Magic. Even if this fit marks, marks are not something we see all over the profession, many builds in Blood Magic would literally have one meaningful source, that’s it.

Edit: Reaper’s Shroud ressing works exactly the same as Death Shroud, but the non-res healing only affects allies within Soul Spiral’s shorter range, the tradeoff being an extra few ticks of healing.

I think 3 is fine as is, too many flashy animations is bad, and the skill, while fine, doesn’t warrant a flashy animation. It applies vuln/gains LF, not something big like a massive hit, big field, or pull.

pierwola.9602:

Can you tell me how you want to time hydromancy sigil with gap closer skill, or 9 sec CD from sigils with Speed of Shadow trait ? This change is stupid and unnecessary.

If Engi, Ele, and Warrior have all figured out how to use sigils, I think we can too.

Been enjoying it, though after this round of midterms I need to go farm out some hero points I guess.

Pce dude, enjoy whatever you go on to do, we all need breaks sometimes.

Its unlikely to be fixed until a bigger bug patch rolls around.

I mean enjoy it while it lasts but I wouldn’t be investing in class specific runes for an obvious exploit that’s going to be fixed.

Anchoku.8142:

The thing about horror movies is the monsters often look like perfectly reasonable people until they attack!

That is extremely dependent on movie.

Morfedel.4165:

Dude, it was a joke. Lol

I’ve seen dozens of serious requests like this, hard to tell sometimes.

With HoT came a new feature that, when enabled, allows you to change targets while casting/channeling an ability. I would highly suggest enabling it, as it allows you to swap targets on some of our longer cast/channel abilities for the not uncommon situation where your initial target has become unfavorable before the cast has finished.

Only 3 minions would need anything flying, since Shadow/Blood Fiend both float and Flesh Wurm can’t move. And for those 3 it would make the most sense if they grew wings, but frankly they magically teleport all the time anyway, so unless we had mid-air combat its nbd.

Not if you are taking lots of shouts. Only time I would trade for Chilling Nova is PvE on a build that doesn’t need the CDR on shouts, and probably only has one-two shouts (which is all PvE would use probably).

It won’t be on the beginning of cast, it’ll only be when it affects someone. Nothing in the game (that I know of) allows you to begin casting a skill, gain some kind of effect, and cancel the skill before it has finished casting and have the skill not go on its standard CD.

You can’t put marks on the GM to give it a more general options, because marks = staff, which isn’t going to be universal, it has the same issues that a utility-specific GM would have.

As long as you don’t care about the lore conflict between Necros/Reapers and fire, it looks pretty awesome yeah.

I think it makes sense as is. It isn’t a high-quality hood that would have embroidery, fringing, or anything aesthetic like that, its basically just a tattered rag.

Flesh Golem has, on many, many occasions, outlived entire zergs in Mad King Lab farming. Its pretty common for a ton of people to die, and then the few level 80s are left trying to take down the boss, and Fleshie is right there slashing away with us until he gets focused (and still takes a solid few hits due to really high base HP/armor).

I think people forgot that he has base stats similar to a Warrior (22k HP base in PvE, with heavy armor), so with basically no AoE taken he can face tank pretty well.

Transfusion is absolutely amazing, and it isn’t what’s wrong with the line. Unholy Martyr arguably isn’t particularly great as a GM, not because it is weak but it doesn’t have a good general purpose “Blood Magic”-y GM trait to balance out a tier that is otherwise full of really niche traits.

Ara.4569:

The 360 range on the 1 sec chill is just adding insult to injury.

Oh…

Suffer had its CD reduced by 10s. It is now a 20s (as low as 13s traited), condition transfer, so it can now beat out Plague Signet depending on situation. Though I still think its bad that they directly compete and are chosen one over the other solely based on numbers and if you have traits for one over the other.

Condition duration is great, until conditions are cleansed before that extra duration causes more damage, which is going to happen in WvW/PvP.

Obtena.7952:

The problem isn’t that the model doesn’t match the actual; The problem is that the model is too simple and doesn’t cover more scenarios, leading to promotion of the ‘optimized’ meta in situations where it’s not. A great example is when people promote the meta for openworld map completion on a Guardian. The current meta is not optimal for that content; it never has been as a matter of fact.

It covers the scenarios it was meant for, being taken out of context isn’t anyone’s fault other than the morons who do it. There is nothing you’ll convince them otherwise, they’ll always stick to their unfounded views, so why bother changing what you are doing because of it.

Honestly don’t see a situation where expertise would be wanted except to maybe hit some duration thresholds that are important (like if you need just a tiny bit more duration for 100%, or 100% after minus effects or something), though its worth seeing if it beats out sinister in certain builds for PvE.

Decimate is amazing so long as you can build the vuln, which basically means any RS build using Unyielding, any spite build, or just PvE group in general.

All duration effects like this are additive, both positive and negative.

Obtena.7952:

Nemesis is challenging the establishment to explain how their calculations match up with actual ingame experience. It’s not an unreasonable ask, especially since so many people rely on what they are being told to determine how they act ingame. What you are doing is focused on minutia and attempting to diminish the value of his work. Frankly, if people weren’t so scared of what he had to say, they would address it instead of dismissing it outright.

The establishment has always said that theoretical DPS doesn’t match up to in game. The point of theoretical DPS is simply to provide a meaningful benchmark, and because the combat in this game has thus far been easy enough that the gap between theoretical and experimental, and the differences in those differences between builds, are low because there is little to throw you off ideal rotations, theoretical is the most easily used and compared. Basically, if you want to be able to compare a wide variety of builds and their effectiveness, it is extremely helpful to do so with a quantitative base to work from, which requires a set of standardized conventions to base them on. For DPS, this happens to be a 30s repeatable DPS rotation. This isn’t something people magically came up with for GW2, all science and engineering disciplines, based on hard data, use conventions as well, even if they don’t exactly match real world, because they’re way more convenient and deemed close enough (like all of Newtonian physics which is known to be wrong, but such a good approximation due to all the simplifications it makes that it is more than sufficient for a ton of real world applications).

Further, Nemesis himself does the exact same thing he accuses “the establishment” (as though we have some PvE illuminati) of doing, which is cherrypicking numbers, situations, and results to match his statements, instead of the other way around and allowing data to inform results. The problem is the establishment has generally proven themselves right, or quickly adapted when wrong, because they have the personal investment of speed run records. If Nemesis wanted to prove all that empirical data wrong, he could do so by beating their records and maintaining his own, but he can’t.

Simply put, if Nemesis wanted to prove himself right, he could do so. He could set his own records (and then hold on to them for more than a few hours until someone had the spare time to reduce it by minutes), he could do so constructively, without the attitude of someone whose head is so far up their own posterior they’ve come to believe their own crap is the only thing there is. But he doesn’t, because inflating his own ego gets him more views and followers, and like any other cult they don’t realize how ridiculous they are until they step outside for once and detox the kool aid.

The split would be the same, but I believe that is exotic.

Reaper has break-bar reducing abilities on almost every button press. RS has it on everything except the AA (assuming you pair 4 with 5), GS has it on 1/4/5 (4/5 both double up on it), then utilities can give it to you on every slot as well.

In PvP I think its pretty reasonable, irremovable stun + chill + field + potentially high damage. PvE it definitely needs lower-HP damage boosts.

No one is taught to kick necromancers, and almost no groups do. The only ones that kick Necromancers are either the extremely rare “4 war 1 mesmer 5k AP ping gear or kick”, which barely ever happen, or speed groups who are aiming for that top optimization that we just flat out don’t reach.

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

There isn’t much difference between Marauder & zerker , is there ?

Marauder has, imo, a worse allocation of stats. Not by a ton mind you, but you don’t need vitality as PvE MM really, it is the worst of the defensive stats for you, and you give up damage for it. Take Valk until you don’t die to mobs, then berserker, and slowly swap in more berserker until you are at the point where you can survive mobs while having the least defensive stats possible.

Mobius.7041:

Yeah, but full Berserker Reaper is a waste of stats with Decimate Defense. A mix of Berserker and Valkyrie is your best bet IMO.

Reaper MM isn’t going to have great Decimate Defenses synergy, you won’t be stacking up huge vuln since you can’t afford to go Spite, and you can’t camp RS 1 paired with Soul Reaping (if you even have that line as an MM). So your vuln is extremely limited. You also have no fury, so you are going to need the base crit chance. Valk is a much better option for normal Reaper for sure, with enough berserker to get your crit chance to cap, but that doesn’t apply to Reaper MM.

Trooper runes aren’t all that necessary now that Suffer is a hilarious amount of removal (though with both the removal is insane, removed over 500 conditions in a PvP match yesterday). Trooper is more for support with some selfish cleansing, whereas the Reaper runes were supposed to be thematic, they add chill, and they do so in a way that is a much better effective increase in chill duration, since 600 AoE chill is really difficult to remove.

The runes are fine I think. Yes there could have been other cool flavorful options, and I don’t think they’ll be required because there are a lot of good shout/chill/nonspecific runes, but I think they’re okay.

He charges towards your target, so target something and he’ll charge it.

For PvE you’d still run Berserker, or whatever next highest damage with the minimum defenses to survive.

Aktium.9506:

I don’t think anyone takes Speed of Shadows

Really hard to justify the trait overall because of its competition, but yeah that’s why its taken.

@OP you are correct. And no if you have any permanent speed boost you don’t need any others.

Had it happen in PvP just now, really obnoxious and the situations where you use GD often tend to be ones where you’re likely to be interrupted (low HP/downed enemy).

spoj.9672:

my golem caused problems by being practically immortal

#FirstWorldProblems

Regardless of my personal opinion (which is that we don’t need this kind of control, the fact they even follow our orders is a huge AI step up from GW1), ANet is extremely unlikely to ever give it to us, because they’ve specifically stated that pet controls are Ranger-exclusive. Yes it will cause minions to have issues in some situations, but I don’t think this is a particularly big issue.

spoj.9672:

Yeah minions are actually really useful now. Been using them quite a lot in fractals. Able to completely faceroll Mai Trin solo with them as well.

The meta is changing at an alarming rate.

FYI there is nothing forcing you to use Reaper while it still isn’t fully unlocked. Non-Reaper builds are going to be much better at soloing champions, and standard MM should be able to solo them easily.

You don’t. You can just equip the Reaper spec in the elite spec line, which is the bottom one. I’m not sure why so many people didn’t get that (they announced it multiple times), but you can only equip it in the bottom line.

The shoulders are unlocked via mystic forge and collections. This should get you started, but be warned they are pretty much legendary-tier effects, and a cost to match. The starting item is ~300g if you don’t have any components yet.