400 isn’t nearly as hard to get with the expansion though. At this point I’m not bothering, I’m trying to get the shoulders.
Reaper definitely gives a raid-boss feeling, its a lot of fun, and I don’t feel it is unbalanced because it still feels “fair” with our lack of other mechanics. It is really good design, we are extremely strong in the things we are strong at, but with defined and exploitable weaknesses.
Nightfall (Greatsword 4) grows rather dramatically in size over its duration. I don’t remember that from the last Beta Weekend. It definitely makes the skill feel better.
It was the case, still cool though for sure.
Anything on BLighter’s boon? I haven’t had the chance to play, but with these undocumented changes I REALLY wanna make sure this thing wasn’t killed.
No change to BB. After a quick glance and trying to remember what they were BWE3, I think the only changes were buffs, and YAAW shifts.
So, there were a number of changes made to Reaper between BWE3 and now. Suffer now 20s CD, YAAW having its might duration doubled but total might halved, Rise minions being 25s without decaying, Augury baseline 10% + 5% per person hit, probably some others. Can we get official notes?
Yeah, honestly a buff to most reasonable and viable builds. Most of the builds that would have wanted these minions didn’t want to waste parts of their build just to keep the minions alive, and while the “army” thing would have been fun, there is no meaningful content it would have been great in anyway. Also net buff to basically every shout build.
Love the change. It now makes it much more possible to proc sigils while still using shroud, whereas before any kind of shroud use would completely destroy your sigil use. The timing takes a bit to get used to but it isn’t too bad, and it allows you to proc swaps without forcing yourself onto a bad weapon set, as well as having two different set of sigils, while still proccing either set at max.
The best news about this is it is officially recognized as the way it is meant to work, rather than being a potential bug to be fixed.
#Geelieve
BiP is complete garbage with MM
Alright well compare Vampiric Aura to Phalanx Strength and get back to me on how it’d be too much to throw a little love its way.
If there are changes we’ll find out soon enough.
Leeching effects do bypass invincibility effects like Endure Pain/Defiant Stance/Signet of Stone/Renew Focus/Obsidian Flesh. I think they bypass blocks as well, I’m not sure actually. Someone should test it, I can’t be bothered.
The reason they skip some invulns is because some invuln is actually like gaining 5 million armor (or some other ridiculous amount), similar to how an ability that gives condi immunity could just be coded to reduce the durations of all condis applied by 1000%. Except in the case of life steal it doesn’t matter if you have 2k or 20000000000000k armor, which is why it can go through depending on how the invuln is coded. Blocks are a separate issue though, I’m fairly certain blocks are coded in a way that makes the hits not hit, but I wouldn’t know for sure without dev confirmation on how they coded all these things.
On topic, I think Vampiric (the minor) is pretty well situated right now. It could maybe use a very small increase to the Necromancer’s siphoning and take the same amount off the minion siphoning, but overall its fine. I don’t think scaling really matters on the damage, they might as well just have it not scale and increase the base. However, Vampiric Aura just isn’t that good. It doesn’t add all that much.
You do recall at this time that plague signet and Lyssa rune got reduced from all to 5. People were quite worried CC would be reduced to five as well. Compounding that fear was that signet of stamina was at base 45 seconds and it’s effect was arguably worse.
I would argue that the condis prevented CC from affecting only 5 conditions or having an insane cooldown like SoS.
Those had nothing to do with each other. Plague Signet’s number of transfers went down because its CD was halved, Consume Conditions was nerfed because ANet did exactly what they said they wouldn’t do and had an entire patch focused on fixing, which was skills balanced around traits, not the other way around. They didn’t change Shelter or the Mesmer heal, but they nerfed Consume Conditions because it is now a corruption.
If it wasn’t a corruption, it wouldn’t have been nerfed.
I don’t think any minion except Flesh Golem is likely to show up. Rise! might happen if ANet ever delivers on forcing players to go truly heavily defensive builds, but it is unlikely.
That is something that could be debated. All MM traits favor having more traits over having stronger traits (i.e. Flesh of the Master, Necromantic Corruption, Death Nova, Vampiric and Vampiric Presence, alright VP can only be considered an MM trait when soloing, but still…). I think both have their place. But I can’t really think of situations where you have to choose between the two. The Shadow Fiend and Bone Fiend are both inferior to both the Wurm and the Minions.
Shadow Fiend and Bone Fiend are both heavily superior to Wurm/Bone Minions. Bone Minions have their best DPS when summoned and blown up immediately, with absolutely no attacks launched at all, and even when they do this they still only have 75% of the DPS of the other minions. If you leave them out to attack, their DPS is more like half. Bone Fiend and Shadow Fiend both make superior use out of traiting, they have the same attacks per second of Bone Minions, but do so with higher DPS. The only thing they are worse on is a meaningless loss of toughness.
Its debatable whether Flesh Wurm is better over Bone Minions, but that’s about it.
They aren’t balancing around power builds it seems.
Condi Necro isn’t a thing right now, way too much removal spam. Even then I don’t see CPC being an option when you really want double stun breaks.
PvP master race, I get to play Reaper all I want from day 1. Only annoyance will be mastery farming for the skins.
Sure all of them except CPC can be ignored, though Plague suicides is a massive case-in-point for why corruptions are badly designed, but that’s still bad, self-harm skills SHOULDN’T have ignorable self-effects, they should be something you have to actively think about every time you cast the skill, with an appropriate power payoff.
And no, CPC is never ignorable. Necro bunkers heavily rely on offensive pressure, because they don’t bring the support of other bunkers. A Necromancer bunker not doing damage is going to lose. So a CPC-weakened Necro bunker will lose out to a spectral/reaper/MM/signet bunker which can all keep up high damage without neutering themselves, while still bunkering.
Flesh Golem is definitely better overall.
Bone Minions however are only better for general roaming. Longer fights Flesh Wurm is superior by quite a bit.
Necromancer isn’t a bad roamer because of discrimination, but mismatch between design and role. Its like saying Thieves are discriminated against because they aren’t part of the hammer train.
Also Necromancer can roam fairly decently, you just have to be more aware than normal of groups so you don’t get caught. But land-speed wise we’ve got it really easy, SoL, WH + trait and/or runes, Quickening Thirst plus D/x or x/D, Traveler runes. The only issue is getting away from a bad fight.
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It won’t be the imbued greatsword, though it might or might not be the GSs we’ve seen Reapers use for promo art.
I only care about PvP so I’m good to go from the start.
instead of argueing, how bout you just play the game for fun.
It isn’t fun to use abilities that are complete garbage (though CPC thankfully isn’t there anymore).
Only conditions on the scepter skills themselves are increased, not any other condition.
Yeah let me just never use one of my own utilities until I get hit with a very specific condition even though it has a very specific type of defense, that right there is great design.
The fact that other comparable skills are even close in power just shows the corruption isn’t doing its job. Even the bad sacrifice skills in GW1 used the sacrifice to completely ignore CDs or energy cost compared to the non-sacrifice skill, and the good versions were so powerful the entire build revolved around their use; there wasn’t some small “oh its like 10% better”.
Pretty much. But they already scale really poorly, having them left behind by the ascended power creep is just piling on that.
Another problem with minions is they are still balanced off exotic, not ascended.
How much less DPS do minions actually bring compared to, say, Well of Suffering, over a long fight? The well deals high damage for 6 seconds every 35 seconds, while minions keep doing damage with no cooldown. And the guaranteed projectile finishers from bone fiend and flesh wurm might actually be useful now, for a few extra burn stacks.
And I assume this change would make Blood Fiend easily our highest dps healing skill, when the heal isn’t needed, putting it above SoV.
I’d be interested to know the comparison between Lich and Flesh Golem over long fights, Lich would need to be a 7k DPS increase over its duration (no buffs) to beat out Flesh Golem, roughly speaking. But I doubt other minions would out DPS, their damage is ~200 DPS unbuffed, so they definitely lose out to Well of Suffering.
I’ll agree that your changes (at least in concept if not math) are at the very least the better version of a forced mechanic of self harm. I’ll just argue myself into the grave though before I accept corruptions being forced into self harm though.
Step 1) Remove all self-harm from corruptions
Step 2) Make Blood is Power worth taking ever
Step 3) Make Master of Corruption totally different
Step 4) Recycle self-harm as an elite specYou say this…
The first thing I said was remove all self-harm, your “fix” just changes the self harm, without addressing everything else I’ve been saying about Corruptions. The self-harm is still unnecessary, unless you used invisible ink to write the buffs to corruptions. At this point corruptions are too important to a wide variety of builds (CPC has our only projectile defense, CB is needed for a lot of burst applications, Consume is our best heal) to make the self-harm so meaningful that it has to be built around.
Joel said Reaper was approved for launch after BWE3, and that he’s been testing it a lot. Maybe that helps easy your anxiety?
I wouldn’t trust that too much, since he isn’t on the same team, and we’ve had cross-team mixups before. Chances are though Reaper won’t see many changes, the spec isn’t perfect but I could see them releasing it as is, despite the issues left.
However I’d argue that the power of Corrosive poison cloud is absolutely there for a corruption skill and its worth the weakness 10 fold. Other corruptions such as Corrupt boon, Consume condition and blood is power are not quite at that power level to justify the extra condition.
On any other profession CPC would exist without weakness. It is balanced without the weakness, which means the entire setup is badly designed.
Also, too many of corruption skills are necessary. Consume Conditions is required on too many builds to make the self-harm well designed on it, CPC is our only projectile defense, Corrupt Boon is needed in a variety of burst. These skills are too widely needed to make both the positive and negative effects meaningful enough to build around.
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I think devs are a bit scared to give us easy access to burning, because of some secondary aspects.
We don’t have access to burning (outside of Dumbfire) largely because of theme, same reason Guardians don’t apply tons of conditions.
Don’t forget “Rise” if it’s taken. I was playing a funky clerics MM in BW3 that could consistently keep 20+ minions up, that damage, vampiric and lifesteal add up including supliment damage from the MM himself. It’s certainly no icebow/staff ele but it’s ALOT of incoming damage.
I don’t have numbers for Rise!, didn’t test it.
What’s the DPS of a minion master? Anyone got the numbers?
Minion – Base – Vampiric – Vampiric Aura
Blood Fiend – 80 – 114 – 127
Bone Fiend – 191 – 259 – 285
Bone Minions (each) – 53(attack)/86(if summoned/blown up immediately) – 86/88 – 99/89
Flesh Wurm – 238 – 267 – 277
Shadow Fiend – 233 – 300 – 326
Flesh Golem – 589 – 673 – 705
That’s baseline with no crits. Base 4% crit chance, 150% crit damage. They’d also get 25% from the trait, then master DPS, fury, might, etc. all add too.
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New idea for Corruptions/Master of Corruptions.
Corruption skills sacrifice 5-10% of maximum HP. Master of Corruptions adds a 5-10% sacrifice of Life Force. If you don’t have at least 5-10% Life Force, you are Dazed for 1-2 secs.
Yay. Corruptions are fixed. Still thematic. Not counter-intuitive/‘pita’ to build around.
That’s an interesting definition of fixed.
Minions not dying to minions being meta is a massive jump. Realistically they’ll just be okay and sometimes used.
So does this mean Flesh Golem now goes on everybody PvE bar?
Solid point, since he’ll decimate Break Bars with cripple on every hit + CC on active.
I think you overestimate the cost of getting a few transfers, the other adepts in curses are pretty much a wash so plague sending is a given anyway. Dagger offhand or a staff, a given in any corruptions build will take care of the rest. I think personally they should extend the durations of the self condis, but it is worth noting that your condi duration extensions do count on self-inflicted condis.
In my hybrid build I generally bring CPC/BIP, and can easily spam them every 20 seconds if needed, only occasionally needing the D4. If I bring more than that it may start to be a little troublesome, though, but it works well for me.
Dagger OH is heavily subpar to WH if transfer isn’t needed, not all builds take curses (or want to waste Plague signet proc on 5 vuln from Epidemic) plus the fact that curses has no options is really just bad Curses design. Corruptions are desirable outside “corruption builds”, which don’t always have access to extraneous transfers, and would definitely lose power to pick them up.
You can only control yourself, if you choose to play a profession that doesn’t contribute to the group in any meaningful way (which Necro doesn’t), then you are at fault for the lack of buffs, especially since it is so easy to swap classes and go from 0 might to perma 25. So yes if you were on any other profession and did the same it is your fault.
None of those are anything special though. The major points he goes out of his way to make are largely wrong, and then he gets small facts right. Which is exactly why I made the examples I did, they get the small facts right but their overarching conclusions and arguments are wrong, just like the assertions about ice bow abuse, dps calculations, and pugs being largely wrong.
Also want to say something about pugs: if you are in a pug group and there aren’t enough buffs and you are on Necro, you are directly responsible for the lack of buffs. Don’t bring up “well there are no buffs so its fine I play Necro since DPS won’t matter as much”, when the fact is if you swapped to PS you’d immediately cover those buffs solo.
Cool change, no one get too excited because minions are still largely subpar but at least they are usable.
All corruptions are just normal skills with a condition tacked on, its why they are badly designed.
There are quite a lot of transfers, i think the self harm with the number of transfers is pretty interesting design. Think about it, if you were to design something else for corruptions and you wanted it to be not the usual “X skills are reduced by X%” how would you do it in a way to fit the whole corruptions theme?
You take your off hand dagger, you take the plague sending trait, you can take plague signet, or you can take boon conversion stuff like well of power or lyssa runes which synergizes well with Blighter’s boon.
Here is the thing, if I take any of those transfers, I don’t take something else, there is a measurable economic cost to my build. If I take CPC, I get a skill that is otherwise balanced, but also FORCES me to take more transfers than I need in order to get rid of that weakness. In your example, I take a corruption, and then am forced into Well of Power (or Plague Signet/Plague Sending/etc.) over something else.
The only situation where corruptions become “beneficial”, is where I have so many transfers that it is just completely irrelevant to me if I apply one. But no matter the case, you end up with one of two situations: corruptions apply conditions that weaken the rest of your build to deal with, or those conditions are so meaningless you can ignore them. And both of those situations are awful design, and in both situations removing the conditions is a net improvement both in power and design.
Well-designed self-harm should have costs that completely change how you play, and should be worthwhile. GW1 BiP is an example, the self harm was so significant that you had to be careful to not kill yourself, and often required a dedicated healer, however the benefit was that you allowed another player to spam high cost high power skills far more than normal. High risk, high reward.
Corruptions are just badly designed. They don’t gain power through the self-harm, and the self harm is either not worth building around (skills aren’t strong enough), or so meaningless it doesn’t matter. That is bad design, it should be shelved (since all but BiP are just fine without self harm) and redone with an elite spec that properly deals with the risk reward.
Reaper isn’t remotely OP. Is it strong? Absolutely, but it is strong within its niches, which is great. Shout Reaper becomes very strong in teamfights, where it is meant to be strong, but not outside. That is just good design, strong in its niche with reasonable counterplay.
Let it play out a bit, Reaper from BWE wasn’t good enough to nerf.
Conditions are meant to deal damage over time.
There has never been a single point in all of GW2 where condition builds in PvP have ever been good because their conditions did strong over-time damage. Every single build that was ever strong was strong because of condi burst. This is because bleeds are cleansed all at once, if it takes you 10s to build up your full condition damage, they’ll be removed, and deal fractions of their damage, whereas a burst condition build’s conditions stack up so quickly and deal their damage quickly enough that only large removals can deal.
Burst is simply high damage in a low period of time. Conditions and power both have burst and over-time.
Also, Condi Necro has the worst offensive condition bursting of every profession with a condi build. Our max burst is ~15 bleeds, 10 torment, and some poison, whereas condi warrior can see similar bleed bursts with 1-2 skills. Burn builds can stack 20-25 burns, which deal 60-75 bleeding stacks worth of damage. Condi Necro can 1v1 other condition builds only because we abuse THEIR strong conditions. The fact is it isn’t the condi necros conditions that are winning the duel, a Signet Soldier Necro can do the exact same thing. Saying that we can 1v1 condition builds in a condition build isn’t a good point of balance, since nearly any Necro can abuse transfer mechanics.
i’am very curious if some of the haters here will have the balls to do that. After reading the posts regarding your videos i doubt it.
It’s like being issued a debate challenge by a climate change denier or Creationist, why even waste your time by taking them up on it.