Guild Wars 2

I’ve actually found Dhuumfire to be effective on power builds.

It’s like this: on a zerker build, Death’s Perception and Decimate Defenses are redundant. You only need one to cap out crit chance, so you can swap out the other for a different traits. Personally I go with Decimate Defenses, since that works outside of shroud, too. That leaves me with either foot in the grave or Dhuumfire for the SR elite.

At maximum might, which is VERY easy to reach on the Shroud Knight build, Burning does 248 damage per tick. 3 ticks, 25% vulnerability, this comes to 930 additional damage per swipe. Against a 2600 armor target, you’ll be doing about 2.5k / 2.5k / 5.1k per each auto attack chain, so this actually adds up to about 37% / 37% / 18% damage increase.

I’m not sure it is a bug. The animation times for nearly every skill in the game are incorrect. It just so happens that, with Reaper Greatsword, they are literally twice as long in some cases.

I do wonder about the auto attack, though. For each individual attack I’ll admit the error in my own timings, due to the convoluted way in which I acquire the times. But for auto attacks… I’m reliably getting a different number.

What I do is start auto attacking an infinite golem. Then, after completing a few chains, I’ll start a stopwatch, and see how long it takes to complete 20 attack chains. I did it twice, and I got values of 1 minute 0.6 seconds, and 1 minute 0.7 seconds, coming to a total attack time of 3.03 seconds for an auto atatck chain.

Now, I ’m thinking that the auto attacks “flow” into each other, so that their total animation time is lower than each skill used individually.

Well, the problem with reaper now is that it isn’t hard hitting. At all. Just slow.

I’m not sure its the defense that is needed. Though someone should experiment with shroud to see if the damage reduction is bugged.

The issue is damage. The thing with damage is that it is its own mitigating force. It is an observation I made within a week of buying the game. I call it the auto attack war. Basically it boils down to this: Each class has a certain “effectiveness”, which is the product of their damage and durability. No two classes are the same, so when one class fights another, one of them is winning by default.

Anyone who’s played warrior and elementalist probably noticed this. The elementalist has to constantly flip around and disable enemies just to stay alive. The warrior just has to chase people around, since their combined bulk and damage means they’re winning by default. You’re probably asking what this has to do with damage reduction. Well, it works like this: the “weaker” class has to spend their resources evading your abilities and attacking at a distance, only closing in at a precise time. This tactic does less damage, and also forces enemies to use non-damaging utilities and traits.

The Reaper isn’t much of a threat. Our auto attacks are so slow that we’re permanently stopped by blind fields. Our big attacks have such massive tells that people literally walk right out of them. Our aftercasts are so long that we’re helpless against counterattacks. Other classes can negate our damage with almost no investment, and have large windows in which to burst us down.

If you want to look at the statistical side, the Reaper is already bulky. Whether you’re using Decimate Defenses/Death Perception to have zerk damage in valkyrie gear, are using chilling force with blighter’s boon and vampiric traits to amass large amounts of life force and health, are using weakening shroud to inflict long term weakness, or are taking Death magic to add a bunch of toughness, the reaper can definitely take a hit. Especially if, in theory, long durations of chill can lock enemies out of their cooldowns. But with slow and mediocre damage, there’s nothing to use that bulk with.

The design philosophy of the reaper has a big, glaring hole: in order to work, the Reaper has to be the highest damaging melee class in the game. Currently, it is not, which is why other players bowl us over. We have one good burst skill in Executioner’s Scythe. That’s not enough. Once that misses, other players have no reason to run anymore.

Sagat.3285:

Lynnie.7213:

Greatsword really some hard work, Anet.
Only place where it works is Pve.

Anything works in PvE.

The ironic thing is, with the copious amount of self interrupting needed to survive, Greatsword doesn’t work in PVE either.

So… numbers? Because ATM I’m not sure that tempest is a DPS loss. Going with a PVE Fire/Air/Tempest staff build.

A bit about Firestorm: it hits 11 times for 17% more damage than fireball per hit. The important thing is that Firestorm hits 6 times after the animation has been spun up and cast. It is also a whirl finisher, which sends out 8 bolts of whatever field you spin in (little hint, its gonna be fire). So basically it acts like a stronger second lava font that also causes a lot of burning, both by direct action and by the bolts it sends out. The way the DPS rotation works usually goes like this:

Earth Attunement Eruption into Fire, use lava font and arcane skills to blast might. Auto attack after blasting.
Firestorm will be charged immediately after Lava Font recharges, so lay down a second Lava Font and spin up firestorm.
Firestorm’s animation ends about half a second after lava font recharges, follow through with lava font.
You will now be attacking simultaneously with fireball, lava font, and firestorm for the next 5 seconds or so.

Now, I only get out about 3 fireballs per each lava font. So, using my PVP setup (for scale, not for an absolute number), this comes to 7251 tooltip damage per lava font 839 per each fireball, 3 fireballs. I get about 4.5 overload ticks in that timeframe, which does 987 damage per hit with 2.5 seconds of burning per hit, coming to 9175 damage during this lava font, not factoring burning. There’s 0.5 attacks between lava fonts, and then afterward there is 6 attacks of firestorm along with the next lava font and fireballs, coming to 13,173 tooltip damage during this timeframe. But, since we lost half a second on lava font, we can reduce this down to 12779 tooltip damage.

This isn’t factoring in the 30 burn ticks from the whirl finisher + burning, and the additional 11 stacks of might. So, at the moment it looks like there’s three periods of damage: Pre Firestorm which is the same, Firestorm which is 26% more damage, and then firestorm + auto attack which is a 76% increase in damage. Wait, scratch that: direct damage. There is still 30 burn ticks to be accounted for.

So, please tell me how you’re getting lower values.

Overall: the trait line consists of a bunch of subpar overload support traits for the mediocre overloads, spots of obscure and strange buffs for mediocre shouts. So, for my suggestions:

#1: Merge Lucid Singularity and Speedy Conduit as the adept master trait. This leaves an open spot in the master tier.
#2: Add a 20% cooldown trait to Tempestuous Aria.
#3: Increase the protection duration of Hardy Conduit by 2 seconds to 5 seconds base.
#4: Unstable Conduit needs to use 2 auras. First when the channel is started. Second when the channel ends. That way, the ele has 10 seconds of continuous Aura.
#5: Double the base healing and scaling healing of Elemental Bastion.

That’s all for now. Still not sure what to do with Earthen Proxy or Latent Stamina.

I’m more of a numbers guy myself. But, I do have one big, glaring issue with the tempest: The Traits. The other classes provide some versatility in their traits for different builds. But the Tempest seems hyper focused and doing very little at that, especially on the PVE side. So, in my patented arbitrary 1-10 scale, I’ll break it down.

Singularity: Not rated, because it is the gateway to the specialization as a whole.

Eye of the Storm
This trait is good. I’m a big fan of automatic stun breaks, and the AoE + superspeed aspect really make it nice. Synergizes with other shout traits, too.
7/10

Latent Stamina
This trait exists to try and get people out of water/arcane. Which is unfortunate, because water and arcane still do this much better. Not in the amount of endurance applied (after all, 10 endurance is equal to about 4 seconds of vigor), but in overall synergy. The tempest provides no additional on-swap benefits, whereas water and arcane are teeming with them. The short range makes it hard to use, too.
4/10

Unstable Conduit
I’ve always found Auras to be a bit lackluster, but this skill gives you an aura… on a 6 second delay. Now, normally an aura is something you want to use tactically: shocking aura to interrupt incoming burst, magnetic aura to reflect projectiles. On a 6 second delay during a time in which you are mostly helpless… not so much.
3/10

Speedy Conduit
Eles aren’t at a loss for speed or swiftness. Staff builds can already stack long durations of the stuff. For other builds, there’s already Signet of Air, Elemental Attunement, Zephyr’s Speed, Inscription, Glyph of Elemental Harmony, Updraft, Cyclone, Zephyr’s Boon… Yes this trait is redundant, and only serves as a minor aid for people who don’t want to be bothered to use one of the other dozen methods for getting speed.
2/10

Tempestuous Aria
Offensive and defensive in a large AoE. The problem being that shouts are meh, with many of their uses also performed by the arcane line. What is most notably missing is the “20% reduced cooldown” trait that would bump this up an extra notch. If it had that CD reduction, and if shouts were actually good, then this would be a great trait.
5/10

Earthen Proxy
The way this trait is written is deceptive, not showing how bad it really until you actually equip it. Normally, while under protection, you take 66% of the damage you would have. Under new protection, you take 60%. From an effective HP standpoint, this is a 9% increase, which isn’t that potent at all considering how low an Ele’s effective HP is.
3/10

Harmonist Conduit
This trait is basically a vastly inferior version of Elemental Enchantment, whereas instead of increasing boon duration and working always, it only works after an overload is used. This has use in PVE, however, as about half of an overlaod’kittens are after auto attacking, which makes t hem worthwhile to use whenever they are up.
5/10

Hardy Conduit
At least when you’re almost completely unprotected while using an overload, now you’ll have some protection. This trait is decent, in that it is trying to fix a gigantic flaw with the overload system. The long channels effectively mean you’re defenseless, and an Ele’s defenses are in their controls, evades, and heals. Even when used in combat, it just doesn’t feel like enough. Maybe if the protection was 5 seconds long, this would be good.
5/10

Imbued Melodies
Unfortunately, I do not have the expertise to comment fully on this trait. I immediately see a problem at first glance: Warhorn skills aren’t fast. They are slow moving and average-cast speed environmental effects. Still, though, the ability to to stun duration for allies is good, and doing it as frequently and automatically as the warhorn kills puts this into a “useful until proven otherwise” category.
7/10

Lucid Singularity
See, this is what Speedy Conduit should have been. This give Overload’s a much needed utility and actually stops a weakness instead of mildly numbing it. This trait is good, and I’d argue that it should be merged with Speedy Conduits, a nigh useless trait.
7/10. 8/10 if it gets merged with speedy conduits.

Elemental Bastion
Elementalists are good at healing, largely because of the ability to generate and blast water fields. Now this is a rather strange way of healing that is introduced. Is it good? Not really. Unless you’re already running water attunement, the only group auras you’ll be giving out are with the distinctly average shouts. This trait does not make those shouts above average. Even in cleric gear it heals less than a blast finisher in zerker gear. Unless there’s some unknown aura spamming setup that would make use of this, and not in a gimmicky manner, this trait isn’t that good.
4/10

Thread Necromancy at its finest.

Anyway, this is a non-issue. Death is cheap, victory is fast, and the places where this would be a problem would be rare. Just accept some chaos in your life.

Its a well known forum bug. When the amount of replies exactly matches the page limit, it’ll send you to the second page where there are no replies automatically.

The irony is that, by asking the question, you fixed the forum.

Lopez.7369:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

My only dilemma is how much GS should be buffed. Doing a bit of math, I found out that the dagger auto is 25% more damage than the GS auto, and 34% more than gravedigger spam.

If this is true, then greatsword definitely needs buffs. Gravedigger should do way more damage than dagger autoattack. I think it should get you to about 17,000 DPS just to be in-line with engineers and elementalists (at least during an execute phase).

Seems like I’m wrong and the weapon will need DPS buffs across the board.

Reaper’s Shroud, however, seems great. I’m interested in seeing DPS numbers for it.

I broke down the math in another thread. Here is the method I used to obtain the base numbers. Here is the method I used to obtain the attack animation rates.

The results that came back were horrible. And that is the math only. As other people will attest, the long animation times means that their skills get interrupted way to often, whether it is to dodge or by enemy action. So the GS is weaker than the math shows.

For RS, I’m tackling a bug that I do not understand at the moment. When I first took an AA survey, it came back with the same time as the greatsword. Every subsequent trail came back at 49 seconds, whether Reaper’s Onslaught was equipped or not. Anyway, the numbers for RS came back as follows

Relevant DPS: 397, which is 23% less than the dagger AA. The good news is that RS has a myriad of relevant traits that boost it up, such as vulnerability on hit, might on hit, rending shroud, deathly perception or dhuumfire, etc. So, once reaper’s onslaught is fixed and the whole thing gets a 15% speed boost, then RS will be more than competitive with the dagger.

This is moot, though, since RS doesn’t replace the dagger. There is one complaint, though: Soul Spiral currently takes twice as long than listed, lasting 4 seconds instead of two.

My only dilemma is how much GS should be buffed. Doing a bit of math, I found out that the dagger auto is 25% more damage than the GS auto, and 34% more than gravedigger spam.

Immediately I jumped onto “10% AA, 33% increase chill duration, 35% bonus to gravedigger, gravedigger fully recharges”. That would in a perfect world, provide a sense of balance between the two weapons, where the dagger has a higher sustained AA, but the greatsword can match it on enemies at <50% health.

But in the real world, attacks get interrupted frequently, and the reaper doesn’t have invulnerability. So now, I’m not sure if I should buff it more.

The greatsword sucks, but the reaper shroud seems pretty good. It’ll be even better once they work out the kinks in Reaper’s Onslaught.

My list of suggestions so far:

BUGFIX: The tooltips of greatsword melee attacks have 170 range listed while the dagger has a range of 130 listed. They both hit at the same range. Please increase attack range of the greatsword by 30%
BUGFIX: Life Reap currently has a blank number under its number of affected targets. Please insert the correct amount (3).
BUGFIX: Reaper’s Onslaught currently does nothing. Fix when appropriate.

Greatsword Changes:
#1: The auto attack should have their damage increased by 10%, and increase the chill duration on AA to 2 seconds base instead of 1.5 seconds.
#2: Gravedigger should receive a 35% increase in damage, and should recharge 100% of its cooldown instead of 80%
#3: Death Spiral should also receive a 35% increase in damage.
#4: Nightfall should have a consistent size of 300 radii throughout.

Reaper’s Shroud Changes
#1: Death Spiral should have its full animation time reduced from 4 seconds to 2 seconds like ti says on the tooltip.

Trait Changes
#1: Augury of Death: Change this so its base recharge is 15%, and then gives an additional 3% recharge for each enemy hit (credits to Malchior).
#2: Reduce the ICD of Chilling Nova to 10 seconds. Increase the damage it does by 50%

I haven’t tested out the shouts that much. The thing with the shouts is that right now, the base reaper is broken, and the shouts aren’t that good. If the base reaper was good, then maybe they’d be worth the time.

BUG ALERT!: Reaper’s onslaught is currently bugged. I just ran another series of tests to conclude if I got the DPS timing for shroud knight wrong (spoiler, I did), and I did one with Reaper’s Onslaught and without. Started mid combat, the time for 20 attack chains was as follows:

Without: 49.565 seconds
With: 49.555 seconds.

Unless 1% of a second is a 15% increase in attack speed, Reaper’s Onslaught does absolutely nothing!

So, new AA DPS for Shroud Knight is 397. Reaper’s Onslaught or not, doesn’t matter. This means that the shroud also does more auto attack damage than the greatsword. Wow, the Greatsword is really horrendous, isn’kitten Anyway, this would go up by 15% with a properly working reaper’s onslaught, making it actually quite competitive with the dagger. With adjusted crit rates we get a scaled DPS of 846 with Reaper’s Shroud vs. 758 dagger, meaning that Reaper’s Shroud is actually good.

So, out of curiosity I decided to check the sword again. One minute. 0.7 seconds for 20 attacks. So still 3 seconds per auto attack chain.

EDIT: Onslaught tested again for good measure. Got times of 49.46 and 49.51. Reaper’s Onslaught is bugged.

BUG ALERT!!!

The Greatsword’s attacks have a tooltip that has a longer range. The dagger has a range of 130, whereas the greatsword has a range of 170.

The bug is that the greatsword doesn’t actually have a longer range. It has the same range as the dagger.

Maybe I am doing this wrong. I just timed reaper’s shroud to find out how long it takes to preform 20 auto attacks, and came up with 1.01.5, coming to a total animation time of 3.075 seconds. I think the issue is pacing: The last hit of Shroud Knight actually takes forever, it is just all in the aftercast. This is wtih reaper’s onslaught, btw.

Reaper’s AA: 320 DPS.

Death’s Charge: 1.5 seconds
Infusing Terror: Instant
Soul Spiral: 4 seconds
Executioner’s Scythe: 2 seconds.

Death’s charge’s DPS is way too complicated to calculate.. Its a utility skill anyway.
Soul Spiral: 283 DPS. Not including poison.
Executioner’s Scythe: 513 DPS at maximum, 308 DPS at minimum.

here is a caveat, though: While shroud has only 320 DPS, this comes with substantially more buffs. A 50% increase to crit chance, namely. While in the PVP lobby I have 47% crit chance and 216.6% crit damage, so this is a modifier of 1.55. Shroud Knight would get a 97% crit chance, coming to a modifier of 2.13. If we factor in these modifiers, this will give dagger a scaled damage of 758, and Shroud a scaled damage of 682. This means that the Dagger AA is only 11% stronger than Shroud Knight, and that additional barrier can be overcome with various other traits (vulnerability, might stacking, etc).

Overall, shroud knight is pretty bad, unless you specifically trait for it (reaper’s onslaught, mainly). The big mistakes, it seems, are in how Soul Spiral and Death’s Charge are executed.. Death’s Charge is unreliable, and Soul Spiral takes twice as long as it should. Were Death’s charge targetable, and Soul Spiral accurate to its description, then Shroud Knight would actually be good.

This is moot, however, as Shroud Knight does not directly compete with dagger.

So far, it looks like the top DPS rotation will be something like this:

#1: Drop Nightfall
#2: Swap to dagger and carry on as normal.
#3: When the enemy is low enough, use Executioner’s Scythe and quickly leave shroud.

With basically all other reaper skills being ignorable. On a pug build, a reaper’s shroud build would actually be good to use, but in a premade the group precision and might stacking make those bonuses useless.

Alright, I did some napkin math. The time it took to complete 20 full auto attack chains with the greatsword was 1.00.56, or one minute and half a second. This comes to 3.025 seconds for the auto attack. I’ll trim this down to 3.

Comparing this to dagger again. With my base numbers, dagger does 489 DPS. The greatsword, however, does 390 DPS. The dagger auto does 25% more DPS.

Even with bitter chill, the greatsword auto is wholly useless at the moment. Now, a few other napkin math timing:

Grasping Darkness: 1.4 seconds.
Gravedigger: 2.2 seconds,
Death Spiral: 1.7 seconds
Nightfall: 1.8 seconds.

Wow… maybe I’m doing this wrong, but these numbers are horrendous. For anyone wondering, what I’m doing is using this website to time the attacks. I start the watch, wait until 10 seconds (so I can synchronize the event), and then press stop as soon as a second animation begins. I do this a couple of times, and take the lowest number I receive.

So, Gravedigger spam. Adding on the recharge, this is basically 3.2 seconds to use gravedigger and the first auto attack. This is a DPS of 359, making gravedigger spam do less damage than the auto attack in the first place. There is one corollary to this, however, in that gravedigger is a whirl finisher. While standing inside of an enemy, gravedigger will hit them with 3 whirl finisher bolts. As far as now much damage those bolts do… I don’t know. They don’t appear in my combat log. In the PVP lobby a full zerker setup has dark bolts doing 241 damage, so I assume in the overworld this will be added to whatever the target is being hit for. Against the golems in the PVP lobby, this amounts to about a 10% increase. So, in a dark field, Gravedigger spam hits for394 DPS, making it roughly the same as just auto attacking.

The DPS of other skills is as follows:
Gravedigger (skill alone): 366
Death Spiral: 215
Nightfall: 627
Grasping Darkness: 287, not including poison

Overall, wow did Anet mess up the greatsword. The only skill that has higher damage than the dagger’s auto attack is nightfall. Soul Spiral, Gravedigger, Grasping Darkness, all of them worse. There’s no point to anything. You just use the greatsword as a weapon-slot well, and stick with the dagger.

Guess I"ll put this here: I’ve been working on the damage numbers, stripping myself down and getting the base damage of each attack (along with other miscellaneous notes). To do this, I went to southsun cove (level 80), unequiped everything except for dire exotic weapons so there was no contributions to power. I left a picture of my stats and setup below. Now, I can’t get the damage values listed on the wiki, so I took the regular weapons as a baseline. With these stats, this is what I have currently:

Dagger AA: 330, 257, 440. 2 Targets.
Life Siphon: 990, 358 Heal
Dark Pact: 275
Reaper’s Touch: 248, 4 bounces
Spinal Shivers: 165, 248, 330, 413
Locust Swarm: 66
Well of Suffering: 1596
Well of Corruption: 798

Now, we get into the stats on the reaper’s skills.

GREATSWORD

Greatsword AA: 343, 383, 444 + 1.75 seconds of chill. 3 targets.

Gravedigger: 807, 5 second recharge, 80% recharge reduction with effect. 5 targets. SPECIAL NOTE: This skill is a whirl finisher, and sends out 3 bolts each use.

Death Spiral: 366, 12 second recharge. 12 × 10 stacks of vulnerability per hit. 2% life force per hit. 3 targets. NOTE: This skill scales up life force gain per enemy hit, getting a total of up to 36% per skill use.

Nightfall: 282 per pulse. 25 second recharge. Causes blind and cripple per pulse. Dark Field. 5 targets.

Grasping Dead 403, 3 × 4 poison, 4% life force per hit. 5 targets. 30 second cooldown.

SHROUD KNIGHT

Shroud Knight AA: 246, 246, 492. 1% life force on final hit. 3 targets. BUG: final attack has no target listing.

Death’s Charge: 410, 5 targets, 6 second cooldown. 1 × 3 blind on land.

Infusing Terror: 1 second of fear. 20 second cooldown. NOTE: The skill does not persist when leaving Reaper Shroud.

Soul Spiral: 1133 damage, 11 × 4 poison if all hits connect. 40 second recharge. 2 second duration. Whirl finisher that sends out countless bolts on use.

Executioner’s Strike: 615 damage above 50%, 821 between 50% and 25%, 1026 below 25%. Chills for 1 second, ice field lasts for 5 seconds. Stuns for 1.5 seconds. 30 second recharge.

SHOUTS

“Your Soul is mine!”: 133 damage, 3,940 healing, 4% life force per target hit, 20 second cooldown.

“You Are All Weaklings!”: 133 damage, 6 seconds weakness, 4 × 5 might, 1 × 1 stability, stun break. 30 second recharge.

“Suffer!”: 266 damage, 2.25 seconds of chill, 1 condition transferred. 30 second recharge.

“Nothing can save you!”: 133 damage, 5 × 10 vulnerability per boon, up to 2 boons removed, 35 second recharge, 1 × 4 unblockable.

“Rise!”: 133 damage, 40 second recharge.

“Chilled to the Bone!”: 532 damage, 8.75 seconds of chill, 2 × 10 stability, 2 second stun. 120 second cooldown.

END OF DAMAGE NUMBERS.

Now, this is only half of the equation. The animation times listed for each attack are trimmed down guesses. The hard part is, I don’t have a recording utility that I can put a stop watch to, so everything after this point becomes napkin math.

Chilling Nova’s original incarnation was quite strong when combined with Bitter Chill. It was going to get a nerf eventually, but I do think it was drastically overnerfed.

spoj.9672:

I dont think we have much to worry about. I suspect GS is going to be weak when foes are above 50%. And if not it will be better to do a dagger + greatsword rotation until 50% where you can start spamming gravedigger. The bigger question is will RS auto-attack out damage dagger. Because thats what we should be worrying about. Then again it might be better for us if it did. Even if it makes the playstyle boring and renders dagger useless.

Well, the issue currently is that even with gravedigger spam, it still does less damage than the dagger AA.

Shroud Knight being best DPS actually makes dagger more important. Necro DPS then becomes about managing lifeforce, and the dagger is the best weapon for accumulating it.

Shroud Knight Build.~ Gear: Valkyrie. Utilities: not set in stone.

The basis of the build is extremely simple and straightfoward: stay in shroud for as long as possible. The combination of Rending Shroud, Death’s Embrace, Unyielding Blast, and Reaper’s Onslaught means plenty of vulnerability to go around, and with Reaper’s Might + Siphoned Power there is plenty of self-stacking might as well. The main feature of this build is the ability to hit 100% crit chance without a single point invested in precision, which is why Valkyrie is the gear choice. Should the shroud fail, the utilities and weapons will be chosen to get the shroud back up.

There’s a lot that’s up in the air, though. Blighter’s Boon + Zerker compared for durability. Celestial + Dhuumfire for a hybrid variant. Also whether Speed of Shadows is a necessary addition (though I’ll probably be using spectral walk + d/wh, so swiftness won’t be a problem). But all in all, with this builds ability to cap crit chance, combined with immense vulnerability and might stacking while behind a formidable wall of shroud makes this a force to be reckoned with, in PVP or PVE.

On the PVE side, my question is how much DPS the Shroud Knight Auto does with Reaper’s Onslaught. If it is higher than GS or dagger, then valkyrie might become meta for the necro.

Gimmicky Leeching Build.~

I call it gimmicky because I don’t expect it to work that well, but mostly this is to see how powerful the recharge reduction with Soul Eater is. The combined vampiric traits will give GS a total lifesteal of 121 per hit, with 113 health recovered. I don’t know how well this will scale with healing power, so gear prefix is still up for debate.

The strength of this build lies in how flexible it might be. The version I have posted up now is the minion version, but it can also be easily tweaked to use wells or signets. The big thing to watch is Soul Spiral, which hits 6 times on up to 3 enemies. The gravedigger + soul spiral combo might be strong… or it might not. But that’s what these tests are for.

Flashing Knight~

This is the most generic, and probably most effective PVP build. The trick to this one is to flash in and out of Reaper Shroud as frequently as possible. When going into RS on this build you use enfeebling blood and unholy feast, and gain fury. Its actually quite the combo, inflicting weakness and cripple while gaining fury and retaliation. It makes this build frustrating to fight overall. Gear Prefix includes anything with precision.

Otherwise, it has all of the must-have goodies that a PVP build needs. Plague Sending, Path of Corruption, Blighter’s Boon, Chill of Death, etc.

I don’t know the aftercast of Life Siphon. It isn’t listed on the wiki. But, if it is anything like any other skill in the game, it means that life siphon has a total animation of anywhere from 3.8 to 4 seconds. Going from those numbers, life siphon will have a tooltip DPS of 227. The dagger AA has a tooltip DPS of 448. Therefore, Life Siphon does 50.6% of the damage of the dagger auto.

But lets do the unrealistic thing and say that Life Siphon has no after cast, and that the 3.5 number is accurate. Then, life Siphon does 58% of the damage of the auto attack, making it only slightly higher than half.

Life Force actively prevents you from being dead, so additional life force can be counted as additional health. The more life force you have, the harder you are to kill. You also haven’t taken into account scaling: Life Force scales with both vitality and toughness, whereas life siphon scales with toughness and healing power, and quite horribly with healing power. You also haven’t taken into account that life force grants greater access to Deathshroud, which comes with its own set of utilities that can’t be accessed via regular health generation.

You’re nitpicking. The fact is that you get more durability and do more damage with the auto attack than you do with life siphon, which makes life siphon an utter failure of a skill. It has two jobs, and sucks at both of them.

Jackalrat.5493:

Also, you kind of lost me at, “Dagger isn’t a good weapon.”

I have a hard time thinking of a main-hand melee weapon that does less than the Necro Dagger. It has a decent sustained damage and good life force generation, but Life Siphon is generally a waste and Dark Pact takes too long to use. This is coming from a PVE standpoint, where Dark Pact and Life Siphon contribute almost nothing to any fight. But even when I used to PVP, Dagger play consisted almost entirely of chasing someone with the auto attack.

Compared to other main-hand melee weapons, I would probably rank it about equal to Guardian Sword, and technically better than the Ranger Sword due to the high technical skill needed to not get killed by it. But compare it to thief sword/dagger? Thief is better. Mesmer Sword? Lower damage, but does so many more things. Guardian Mace? Potent defensive weapon. Warrior Axe/Mace/Sword? Higher damage, or chain stuns. Elementalist has too many benefits to list.

Silverkey.2078:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The thing with the dagger is that it needs buffs, too. Life Siphon should do twice as much damage (or 1.45 more damage and a 2.5 second channel), and Dark Pact should have a much shorter activation time.

Currently life siphon is not that much lower DPS than dagger AA (about 50% less), so considering it also heals + has a longer range, I think its DPS is just fine. Dagger 3 is somewhat underwhelming (useful but underwhelming) …

“50% less” is not “not that much lower”. Its half. You spend 4 seconds to heal for 2682 health, doing half damage. The dagger auto will generate 2061 life force minimum assuming one target. Since DS reduces damage by half, this is the same as getting 4122 health. Overall, you do half damage, to generate 65% of the health you would have received doing full damage… assuming minimum HP. As HP increases, the dagger AA generates more and more life force, while Life Siphon remains static.

This is unacceptable. The 600" range is not a meaningful compensation. Life Siphon needs to do more damage.

The problem with Dark Pact is that it takes a full second to cast, not including aftercast. This ties it with Zealot’s Embrace for the slowest immobilize in the game, and Zealot’s Embrace is a piercing projectile. There are already immobilizes in the game as strong as Dark Pact that don’t have such a lengthy animation, so the animation should be reduced to at least 0.75 seconds.

The thing with the dagger is that it needs buffs, too. Life Siphon should do twice as much damage (or 1.45 more damage and a 2.5 second channel), and Dark Pact should have a much shorter activation time.

Anyway, the real wild card here is Nightfall. Currently, Nightfall has 548 tooltip damage on a 1/4 second activation time. But, it isn’t clear whether this is per Nightfall, or per pulse of Nightfall. If it is per pulse, then Nightfall is actually quite high damaging. For PVE, anyway. In PVP an enemy will just walk out of it.

TheLastNobody.8319:

what if they redesigned gravedigger? Make it so if you hit an enemy below 50%, it reduces the cool down of all GS and RS skills by….idk, 50 to 75 percent?

Reapers already have a trait similar to that. Its called Soul Eater. Each time Gravedigger hits an enemy, all other greatsword skills recharge by 3%. It also adds lifesteal to greatsword attacks.

As a trait, Soul Eater would be alright, were it not for the fact that it competes with Chilling Force (Might and Life Force per chilled enemy hit) and Decimate Defenses (2% crit chance per vulnerability stack), both of which are extremely powerful. In PVP you’ll want chilling force for the extra might stacks and life force + blighter’s boon synergy, and in PVE Decimate Defenses will give cap out a zerker reaper’s crit chance. Those two traits also work with every weapon. I guess maybe if there’s some pre-made group that manages to nearly max out precision, then Soul Eater would be preferable.

A simple fix would be to put Soul Eater at another tier. The hard part is that it seems like no matter where I stick it, another combo gets broken somehow. The best candidate is Reaper’s Onslaught, since in PVP you’ll be taking Blighter’s Boon anyway. I guess the theoretical Curses / Soul Reaping/ Reaper condi shroud knight build will take a hit by losing chilling force, but the Reaper line is so tightly packed that it is hard to make a change without breaking a combo.

I think that the reaper feedback section needs to be constructed ASAP. I fear that by the time we get the solid numbers, it’ll be too late. I already have a few comments.

#1: Augury of Death is a badly designed trait. While most traits give a 20% recharge bonus + additional effects with no strings attached, this trait only becomes effective when scaled up. In PVE this isn’t so bad (except that wells are better, period), but in PVP it means you have to be surrounded and thus about to die to make use of this trait. You have to hit all 5 targets for this recharge trait to be on the same strength as every other recharge trait.

When necromancers asked for things that scaled up, we didn’t mean “horrible unless scaled up”. Change this trait to something like 20% recharge reduction + additional effect, like 2% life force per enemy hit.

#2: Chilling Nova: if this triggers once per enemy I would understand, but as it stands this trait does less damage than spinal shivers, even if it hits 3 targets. Also has less chill, too, and doesn’t remove boons, and is dependent on crits… This trait was nerfed 400% from its previous versions. Reduce the cooldown to 10 seconds.

#3: Deathly Chill: This trait is fine for now, but give it a proportional condition damage scale of about 0.2, keeping in mind that chill stacks in duration and not intensity.

#4: Reaper’s Onslaught: The first portion is fine. The second portion is useless. Death’s Charge has a cooldown of 6 seconds, and recharging early because of a killed enemy isn’t going to produce anything meaningful. I’d change this to 5% per enemy killed for Soul Spiral, or something like that.

I’ve voiced a concern on these forums a few times. I get the feeling that Anet has a similar concern. They haven’t made this concern clear, however, so now it is time to make a topic about this.

The big concern, of course, is that the reaper will utterly eclipse every other necro build out there. This has further problems, particularly in regards to having to buy the reaper, but I won’t go into those.

The focus of this concern is damage. The reaper introduces two more forms of melee combat, with Shroud Knight and the Greatsword. Now, while Anet wants these to be powerful, Greatsword is going to be heavily restrained by the simple fact that the dagger cannot become obsolete. This is why in the most recent videos we’ve seen, the greatsword does relatively terrible damage when compared to other weapons of similar speed. Shroud Knight isn’t as much of a problem, because it is tied to life force. This lets Shroud Knight be as high damage and bursty as it can be. But the greatsword can be used indefinitely, and so it has to be balanced with the dagger over prolonged combat.

The worst part is, the dagger isn’t that good of a weapon. The only notable thing about it is the lifeforce generation. Otherwise it has middling DPS with low cleave, a low DPS slow life siphon with a moderate heal, and an immobilize skill. The dagger has been in need of a buff for a long time, and now the ineptitude of the dagger is forcing the greatsword down.

While I share the same concerns, I think Anet has made a mistake here:

#1: The Dagger is a defensive weapon. The burst and utilities of an offensive weapon shouldn’t be restrained by the auto attack of a defensive weapon.
#2: The high skill required to make use of the Greatsword means that it should be scaled to have higher damage, assuming that a large portion of that damage will miss.
#3: The Dagger has been in need of a buff for a long time. If the greatsword properly scaled to other slow weapons eclipses the dagger, then the dagger should get a buff, since it means that the necro dagger is currently eclipsed by other weapons of a similar speed. The Necro community is getting pretty kitten tired of this “one step forward, one step back” balancing that we’ve received over the years.
#4: The Necro is already an extremely slow class, with all of our skills taking forever to use in the first place. If the dagger skills take forever (3.5 tooltip time for life siphon and 1 tooltip time for dark pact, basically meaning it is 4 seconds and 1.4 seconds respectively), then to make the reaper actually unique the dagger should be made faster.
#5: The Greatsword is currently being made obsolete by the dagger. The Greatsword simply doesn’t have enough unique utility to justify its use.

Greatsword Auto: Does less damage, only benefit is chill.
Gravedigger: Does less damage, contributes nothing other than damage (and is bad at it)
Death Spiral: Just causes vulnerability for more damage (Focus offhand also accomplishes this)
Nightfall: Maybe in PVE this will be useful, but a long delayed blind is useless in PVP. Enemies already walk right out of our wells, and they’ll walk right out of this, too.
Reaper’s Grasp: Its a pull. Its basic function is exactly what dark pact does, and even does it on the same length and recharge.

The only advantage that Greatsword has is cleave. On 2 or fewer targets, you loose out on offense and defense.

While I would like to give a bunch of suggestions on how to improve base necro, Malchior already has a better thread on the matter.

Honestly, I’m not that hopeful at all. “Notes” isn’t a guarantee of anything, and notes being gated behind a long beta means even less. We have to wait longer to maybe see fixes to issues we’ve been waiting forever for in the first place. We don’t even get to see these notes. Gee posted basically to tell us that he’s too busy to say anything else.

From the looks of the balance choices they’ve made, it seems like the devs are so in denial about how badly they’ve botched chilling darkness that they’re gutting every other trait just to make us run chilling darkness.

It is really hard to be optimistic about a class when the balance team is taking away all of the goodies before Reaper hits the shelf.

I actually don’t have many plans for the dragonhunter. PVE, Zeal/radiance/DH.

One of the issues I have with guards in PVE is that the third line is always kind of “meh”. Virtues adds a bunch of utility that I already carry and a boon related damage buff. Honor adds vigor, a bit of group might stacking, and hammer support/shout support. Valor… sucks IMO.

Dragoonhunter first adds a long range option that isn’t scepter, makes virtues pretty strong, damage bonus against crippled enemies, and then either AoE protection spam or additional vulnerability stacking. Other taits are unimpressive. The traps I don’t care for, since pretty much no matter what I’m running shelter, wall of reflection, purging flames, and Stand Your Ground. Maybe if one of those aren’t needed I"ll run a damage trap instead of Bane Signet

Personally, I kind of like the way the game is designed now, with each class being a wholly contained unit. My biggest issue with the trinity system is that it isn’t a system of strengths. Its a system of weaknesses.

DPS: Too frail to stay alive.
Tank: Too feeble to do damage, still too frail to stay alive.
Healer: Too feeble to do damage, exists only to make the tank more frail, too frail to stay alive.

And so on. I’ve only ever liked one trinity game, and that is an asterisk because it was really a dodecahedron game where the various classes weren’t inept at everything else.

GW2 isn’t without issue, though. With the way that stats are set up, a player is still highly restricted in their abilities. Your condition damage sucks unless you specifically build for it, your party healing sucks unless you build for it, boons and debuffing conditions require particular investments in order to be truly effective, etc. and so on. You can still build yourself into total ineffectiveness.

Were I to design an MMORPG, I would initially start with a normalized offense, and then diversify classes on additional functions they provide. I would never take away from damage, except to exchange it for another unique kind of damage. That way, a class can only be defined by its strengths, and not its weaknesses.

This is one of those features where, no matter how much I think about it, I can’t find any reason as to why these things exist.

#1: They make gearing out a full set of any kind of armor difficult, because you cannot craft or choose stat prefixes for them.
#2: Since they replace your helmet while underwater, it’ll ruin rune bonuses, so you have to buy an additional rune for the helmet slot.
#3: If you have multiple sets, you’ll have to buy multiple aquatic helms for UW combat.
#4: The only way to get an exotic helm is to be around on wintersday. Otherwise, you have to buy a rare helm from the TP.

They exist solely to nerf you underwater.

Unless I miss my guess, that “less damage” thing is only against a single target. The sword AA only cleaves on 2 out of the 3 hits. The Greatsword cleaves on all 3 hits, and also Maul can hit 5 targets at once.

Last I checked, LF generation on any weapon that isn’t the dagger is bad. I’m also assuming that this is in PVP circumstances, since in PVE the target rich environment means maximum scaling on Death Spiral, Reaper’s Grasp, and “Your Soul is Mine!”.

But really, that is a question that will have to wait until the beta. The reaper already has a couple of LF traits that might be quite strong. Blighter’s Boon is an often overlooked trait that, when combined with Siphoned Power and Chilling Force, essentially means 2% per second per target hit. With additional team support, this can becomes quite substantial, especially when doing something such as standing in a guardian’s symbols. A lot of reapers will also be running spectral skills and the soul reaping line, which can add even more LF depending on how much is needed.

Finally there is this strange notion that everyone will be running dagger/offhand + Greatsword. I don’t see why someone would, given that Greatsword and Shroud Knight already fulfill the role of melee damage. It is redundant and stupid. A not-so-stupid build would run either Staff, or Scepter/Axe + offhand. Now the staff exists mostly for utility, traps, and field control, but soul marks will add more lifeforce generation if it is needed. I haven’t played around with the idea of celestial reaper, but the scepter could work as a ranged offensive weapon there. The Axe is more of a last resort for builds that want to use focus/warhorn, but want to go full power instead of celestial. Unholy Feast is a useful skill, though, and the large health pool makes retaliation quite deadly. Also the cripple + LF generation helps. Little known fact, the AA from axe at 600 range actually does more damage than Life Blast within the same range, traits not included.

#1: They aren’t meant to be a substitute. The problem is, everyone ignores them completely, even though they meaningfully contribute damage and provide all sorts of additional utilities.
#2: So basically you’re defining gap closers to be of such a narrow definition that it is meaningless for the case you are applying it to. When I say “gap closers” I mean skills that help you get to your target, whether you slow them down, speed yourself up, leap or pull, or prevents you from being stopped.
#3: Chill is actually quite good at stopping leaps and teleports. You may have forgotten this, but chill causes skill recharges to triple in length. This means that the timing between leaps is 3 times longer than normal.

Take that into account when factoring in how relentless the reaper will be. You’ll be pulled + chilled, stunned, followed by a poisonous leap, feared + chilled, fear + chilled again, chill + stunned again, poisoned + pulled again, followed again by a poisonous leap, and in all this time you’ve been blowing your cooldowns just to get away from an enemy with up to 70% stability uptime who will win in a melee. Then, to your horror, you realize that all of your skills are on cooldown, your heals are nerfed by poison, and you are a very slowly walking punching bag who’s only defense is to auto attack. This combination was so strong that Anet saw to nerf several things about the reaper before even opening it to the public.

Also, in numbers, toughness can be equivalent to active defense. The only difference between avoiding 33% of damage and taking only 66% damage is ancillary effects. Thankfully, the necro is already good at condi transfer and conversion.

Highlie.7641:

I’m going have to agree that acro is probably the worst trait line i have seen in awhile.

From a pvp standpoint:
What arena net failed to understand is sometimes you had to chain dodges. I’m all for active dodging but This game is flooded with AOE, High damage channel skills (Vs squishy thief’s anyway) and random proc’s. When you boil it down, thief simply lacks enough damage to down a target (s/d) when you trait Acro. You do not have enough evades to live long enough to down an opponent.

My concern mainly is that, as a defensive line, acrobatics is really poor at it. Compare it to Shadow Arts, the other defensive line.

Merciful Ambush: Has use in PVE to drop aggro of a hyper focused enemy. Thieves aren’t that bad at reviving, though, so it gets bonus points.
4/10

Concealed Defeat: Good defense trait in teams. Makes stomping harder, blocks projectiles, makes rezzing easier. Also increases deceptions, which are all really useful defensive skills for the thief.
7/10

Last Refuge: This is a mixed trait. On the one hand, it can save you. On the other hand, it can kill you.
3/10

Shadow’s Embrace: Currently bugged, but this makes an excellent condition cleanse, making the dubious task of condi pressure against a thief even more difficult.
8/10 once unbugged.

Meld With Shadows: Usually buys 33% more time in stealth. Given all of the stealth utilities in this trait line, it basically makes everything better.
7/10

Hidden Thief: This trait is a mixed bag. It conflicts with other traits, and usually you’ll just chain Cloak ’n Dagger to steal for stealth anyway. But still, not completely useless
3/10

Shadow Protector: Thieves aren’t known for their healing, but this is alright. Due to the slow nature of Shadow’s Embrace, this helps with condi damage. Also works on groups.
5/10

Leeching Venoms: This is part of the venom duo that a lot of PVE and WvW builds use. This is a solid trait overall in that it gives might for damage, leeching for damage, and also surprisingly substantial amount of healing.
8/10

Resilience of Shadows: Though the function of stealth is to avoid damage, this really helps against those random cleaves that people throw out when they know you’re around. Also works on allies.
7/10

Cloaked in Shadows: This is pretty decent. You can trigger minutes amount of fall damage to escape, and this provides additional defense when using stealth.
7/10

Shadow’s Rejuvenation: The healing it provides is substantial, the initiative is minute but adds up over time. Combined with all other stealth traits and you’ll be getting around 420 HP / Second with condi cleansing, and reduced damage, making a stealth spamming thief much tankier than they appear to be.
7/10

Venomous Aura: This is what you play thieves for. As a group trait goes, this is monstrously dangerous. Combined with Leeching Venoms it is an AoE might stack + substantial heal + substantial damage. This turns venoms from “nice bonuses” to “OH SHISH KABOB”. In condi builds, Spider and Skale venom do immense damage and vulnerability. In all builds, Devourer Venom and Basilisk Venom lock people down. Skelk Venom Provides even more group healing. With Chill changes, Ice Drake Venom has fallen from grace.
10/10

JaeleCt.3967:

Rain.9213:

I would say make Flanking Strike and all other evade skills basically a dodge roll in that it forces the game to cancel all other animations and prioritize Flanking Strike. I can’t count how many times I’ve been auto attacking, anticipate an incoming stun, hit flanking strike only for it to delay because of auto attack animation and me thus getting my kitten handed to me. It’s pretty bad. Also happens with Withdraw and Roll for Initiative which is really dumb considering these are skills we should be able to time properly to be rewarded. Well, how can you time them when your auto attack makes you have to wait like half a second for it to cast? Ridiculous.

the only problem with this would the possibility of cancelling recovery frames to attack slightly faster, kind of like the lightning whip, weapon stow thing, only much much less abuseable. the solution would just be to make startup frames cancelable and recovery frames non-cancelable. either way this would be a huge quality of life change (this would probably go for ranger sword aa’s too).

Honestly, I’m not sure that is really that big of a problem. The damage increases from cutting off an auto attack are negligible. But, your idea is a good one, should dodge canceling prove too powerful in the future.

From what I can tell, most of the complaints about the reaper (and in part the necro) are fairly narrow minded. Instead of taking everything into account, they only take one or two things into account instead of, well, everything.

#1: Damage. People are only looking at the static mods, but that isn’t all of what damage is. You have to look at damage mods, crit chance mods, as well as the ability to stack might, fury,, vulnerability, and additional conditions. Taking that into account, lets see what the necro has to increase damage.

A)Reapers Might
B)Spiteful Talismen
C)Bitter Chill
D)Death’s Embrace
E)Chill of Death
F) Unholy Fervor
G) Rending Shroud
H)Siphoned Power
I) Close to Death
J) Barbed Precision
K)Furious Demise
L)Target the Weak
M)Deadly Strength
N)Mark of Evasion
O)Lesser Signet of Vampirism
P)Vampiric
Q)Vampiric Presence
R) Vampiric Rituals
S)Unyielding Blast
T)Strength of Undeath
U)Death’s Perception
V)Dhuumfire
W)Chilling Nova
X)Chilling Force
Y)Decimate Defenses
Z)Soul Eater
AA)Deathly Chill
AB)Reaper’s Onslaught
AC)Spiteful Spirit

So there’ s an alphabet + change worth of damage increasing traits. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “But you can’t pick all of those traits!”. That’s the part I’m looking forward to the most. At this point, the reaper is the class that has the most potential build diversity. Even in a single idea (I.E. a shroud based build), there are multiple ways to accomplish the same goal. This works to the reaper’s advantage, since even upon seeing one you aren’t sure what they are going to do.

#2: Gap Closing. I think everyone is really underestimating how easy it will be for the reaper to get to you. With a built in leap and multiple pulls, as well as countless ways to inflict chill, and ending with the ability to grant swiftness to themselves, the reaper isn’t going to be as easily danced around as everyone thinks.

A)Chill of Death
B)Spiteful Spirit
C) Chilling Darkness (It sucks now, I know, but it still exists)
D) Quickening Thirst
E)Banshee’s Wail
F)Speed of Shadows
G)Foot In the Grave
H)Relentless Pursuit
I)Shivers of Dread
J)Cold Shoulder
K)Chillblains
L)Reaper’s Mark (with Shivers of Dread)
M)Unholy Feast
N)Grasping Dead
O)Dark Pact
P) Spinal Shivers
Q)Locust Swarm
R)Bone Fiend + Rigor Mortis
S)Signet of Spite
T)Signet of the Locust
U)Spectral Grasp
V)Spectral Walk
W)Death’s Charge
X)Infusing Terror
Y)Reaper’s Grasp
Z)Suffer!
AA)Chilled to the Bone

Again, pick and choose depending on build. I suppose that Spectral Grasp will be the most necessary, being a 1200 range pull + LF + chill. Combine that with Reaper’s Grasp, Chilled to the Bone, Death’s Charge, and Infusing Terror, and other players might just find it nigh impossible to escape the Reaper. Just layer on chills, pulls and stuns like all the other classes do.

The best thing about the reaper is that it has arguably the highest combination of damage and effective HP in the game. Thanks to traits like Decimate Defenses and Death’s Perception, the reaper can hit 100% crit chance without a single point in precision, meaning there is very little damage difference between a full valkyrie and full berserker.

Then comes the defenses. This is all highly build dependent, but thanks to cold shoulder, incoming damage is reduced by 10% against chilled enemies. In Death Magic you gain a further reduction with Putrid Defense (10%), Corruptor’s Fervor (up to 300 toughness, 20% condi reduction), Beyond the Veil, Armored Shroud, and Unholy Sanctuary for additional health. In Curses you get automatic condi transfers and Weakening Shroud for permanent weakness. Blood Magic gets vampiric traits and other spots of automatic healing. For reference, Vampiric Presence + Vampiric +Soul Eater comes to 121 damage and 113 health gained per hit. Soul Reaping adds more life force, Last Gasp, and Vital persistence.

Unless I am missing an important detail, when it comes to an all out melee brawl 1 vs. 1, the reaper will win no matter their opponent. The only thing another class can do is try to dance around at range or in stealth. Otherwise, the reaper wins.

imsoenthused.1634:

Sifu.9745:

What about Mesmer?

Not enough burning. Same for Ranger and Necro. The only ones that are getting treated as pseudo meta are the ones that can throw down lots of stacks of burning, so Elementalist, Engineer, and Guardian. I’d personally love to see some of the other conditions pumped up to the same level of effectiveness, but it hasn’t happened yet and for all we know they may end up nerfing burning.

Double Torch trap rangers stack burning like a madman.

This wasn’t untraited. I was in Marksmanship/Skirmishing/Beast Mastery. I didn’t have any further damage reductions other than the additional toughness from Pack Alpha.

Consistency is a “only in a perfect world” kind of thing.

I had a similar idea awhile ago. Though technically Necros already have an aura. Its called Vampiric Presence.

To be fair, this isn’t the silliest complaint I’ve seen today. No, that honor earned a several paragraph list explaining why it is wrong.

As it just so happens, I was in frostgorge earlier, and I did a test. Against Jormag, his spikes hit my ranger with 2085 armor for 3839 damage. Against my cats, it hit for 2998. So, a bit of algebra…

3839 = X / 2085
X = 8004315

8,004,315 / A = 2998

A = 8,004,315/2998 = 2669.88

So, the Jungle Stalker and the Jaguar Have about 2670 armor. Now,, each of them on that same build have 1674 toughness, so this means that the cats have a base armor of 996.

They probably won’t buff them. Due to the myriad of complaints about A.I. builds, spirit weapons are probably going to be a second-class utility forever.

That’s odd. I’ve been playing since beta, and I haven’t been ripped off. Maybe you guys just aren’t doing it right.

sephiroth.4217:

Having played the game for 6-7 thousand hours and investing over $1000 into gems, it’s hard to walk away from that.

It is things like this that infuriate me. You have no idea what kind of luxury you are in to afford such a disposable income and also afford the ignorance on the nature of investments as a whole. Sit down, grab a pen, and take notes, because I’m about to dump a whole bunch of real world advice on you.

#1: Any transaction places no further requirements on the traders beyond the immediate exchange. What this means is that, should you buy something, unless the product has been explicitly misrepresented or the terms of the trade were not fulfilled, the seller doesn’t owe you anything. For example, if you paid for 800 gems, but only got 600 in the mail, you’d have a case. But, because you bought 800 gems and received 800 gems, you have no legitimate reason to complain. You were not ripped off, you just have buyers remorse from your own bad investments.

#2: The reason why it is legally like this all over the world is because the markets are dynamic, chaotic, and unpredictable in the long term. You can’t place a long term guarantee on a product, unless that long-term guarantee is explicitly part of the product (I.E. a warranty or insurance). There is no gem insurance in this game, and if you feel that there should be gem insurance, then you shouldn’t have bought gems without it.

#3: Virtual economies are even more chaotic than real ones. Because of this, nearly every MMO or heck even multiplayer videogame has a lengthy contract that you sign to play. I’ll give you the brief of this contract: you don’t own jack squat. The game is licensed to you for use. The characters are the game maker’s property, and not yours. You have no entitlements to what happens to these bits and bytes. If Anet wanted to, they could replace each of your toons with a .png of a kitten stain, and there isn’t a thing you could do about it. You signed the agreement when you purchased the game.

#4: Virtual economies are a bad investment overall. Nothing you buy in the game is liquid. It is all immediately perishable, with no returns on investment. Everything will capsize; it is a matter of “when” not “if”.

#5: Any compensation that Anet provides to you for their changes is out of courtesy, and not because they are legally indebted to you. If you make a bad gamble, no one owes you anything for it.

This isn’t just a problem with videogames. All the time, people will complain that their investments are “worth less than they owe” because the market downturned. That is the nature of capital investments: while you can make a killing, there’s no promises. Just be happy that there are players out there who have benefit from the way the market has changed.

So, funny thing: flame trap inflicts 5 stacks of burning, not 4. It’s weird, I know, but whenever I test it out, the first hit stacks 2 burning, and then afterward it pulses 3 times.

In my experience, the only weapon that gets you shunned in a PUG is the shortbow.

swinsk.6410:

Don’t use acro? It’s useless unless you are maybe in wvw.

That’s really not how balance works. If something sucks, you improve it. You don’t just leave it to fester.