Guild Wars 2

Ramoth.9064:

As a power reaper, your fears will also chill, and corrupting stability is quite common. More so than corrupting resistance anyways. There’s also suffer and cttb.

Suffer is certainly a reasonable chill applicator. But 600 radius is hardly ranged.

Also simply landing a chill is not going to miraculously make you stick to a target. As I mentioned earlier, chill means nothing to teleports, leaps, and charges, and those are the primary disengage skills of most classes.

Also our chill application is too infrequent, it takes very little cleansing to keep free of necro chills. Even power rev can keep ahead of our chill application, and power rev hardly has any cleansing compared to other meta classes.

The greatest irony of reaper is that the class most vulnerable to our chill application is other reapers.

And the thing is, if you are going to force someone into disengaging and going to range, you can easily get the decap in spvp.

If they kill you shortly thereafter that decap means little next to the free snowball the enemy team gets from the 4v5 while you are on respawn.

Also decapping with a necro isn’t even realistic, and what is realistic is that the node will be contested by a scrapper, DH, or druid that just has to stall for the 5-20 seconds it takes the thief or mesmer to +1 the fight and murder you because necromancers are completely incapable of defending themselves against any of the roaming classes..

what, that would put the expansion release dead smack in the middle of the season.

That surely isn’t intended. Perhaps it’s just a automated system rolling the seasons over?

Ramoth.9064:

Somehow its expected a power reaper is able to corrupt boons, apply chill, AND gap close constantly?

Tell me what sources does power reaper have for chill?
-GS auto #3
-Shroud #5
-Grasping Darkness
-Spinal Shivers

Of those sources, Spinal Shivers is the only one that works at range, and even then it only procs below 50% target HP.
In order for us to chill a foe, we have to melee them first. In other words we have to gap close first, before we can apply target control.

Moreover Chill (and cripple) aren’t even effective at range control. Most meta builds use combinations of teleports, leaps, and charges for primary combat mobility. Neither chill nor cripple effects tele/leap/charge distance. Oh, and so help us if the person actually cleanses our chill.

Power Reaper’s range dictation is horrendous, we do not have the tools to control our target’s mobility, and since we lack mobility ourselves we cannot force a fight. We are completely dependent on our opponent willingly putting themselves in our range, and we are completely dependent on them staying there long enough to die.

Ramoth.9064:

I’m still not getting why people expect one class to have all the advantages of another class, and then some.

Except in a little over a month this thing called spellbreaker is coming, and Spellbreaker offers better boonhate than power reaper, better mobility than power reaper, better range dictation than power reaper and Spellbreaker can actually survive a +1 unlike power reaper.

Even excluding PoF specs and only looking at the current meta, the only thing power necro offers is boonhate, every other function is better filled by other classes.

Mesmers and thieves suck at bunkering a point in spvp, do we expect them to have changes done so that they can bunker?

Except necromancer can’t bunk a point either, and unlike thieves and mesmers we can’t roam. The only thing necromancer can do is 2+vs 2+ and only if his companions can provide heals and ideally hard support.

Rising Dusk.2408:

That said, depending on what kind of DPS a condition Scourge is able to deal, it’s entirely possible it could use its excessive barrier mechanic to serve as an ideal tank as well.

Not really. Scourge will never make a good tank because it lacks hard mitigation which means it will require significantly more healing to keep alive.

If scourge does anything, it will be as a druid replacement for very specific fights. Barriers are better than druid’s raw healing for fudging specific boss mechanics. While it lacks gotl it does provide notable might generation (via this, this, and this) which may allow a group using scourge to ditch the PS in favor of another full DPS. (note scourge probably can’t solo generate 25 stacks on 5 people but it should generate enough to make distributed might generation practical)

The character select music was a bit of a letdown, but the rest was good.

Stand The Wall.6987:

hmm just read up on the wiki and it says that shroud degens at 3% baseline. I remember it being way higher when I looked at my life force bar. I’m not sure of that number at all.

The original degen rate of shroud was 4%, the pre-nerf Vital Persistence lowered that to 2%. The devs put in a hotfix patch a few days ago that changed the base degen rate to 3%.

XxsdgxX.8109:

Both are, they still are incredibly popular classes.

popularity has nothing to do with how strong the class is.

Necromancer is trash in solo queue with the current meta, yet it’s still popular on NA.

SPESHAL.9106:

I won’t say anything…I’ll let you figure it out yourself. Just record one PvP match and re-watch it. Count how many times you RS 4. Remember, you need to build Life Force to even get to RS and RS4 has a 30 second cooldown. Thus, it has an even LONGER effective cooldown than Consume Conditions.

I record every match I play. Vuln stacking with Bitter Chill is extremely easy and extremely potent.

Moreover, wasting a entire trait just to clear the self-condi from Consume is silly.

The only time I would use Spiteful Renewal is on a YSIM build. Since on a YSIM build you can use the trait to clear stuff that’s actually dangerous to you.

Stand The Wall.6987:

wut
explain to me the benefits of surviving in team fights without vital persistence
double wut
the minors that are pretty much fillers?

Your survival is coming from the 15% increased LF pool size from Strength of Undeath, and the increased LF gain from Gluttony. Vital Persistence’s change barely changed anything.

The speed of shadow’s nerf however was brutal. I’ve die at least once a match from circumstances where I would have lived with the old Speed of Shadows.

Samnang.1879:

Yay, the first depression in the GW universe. Looking forward to it.

falling mat prices != depression

Life moves too fast

Waisenpai.6028:

Second Scourge is battle condi bunker with aoe, spike heals and barriers. Dont forget the boon corruption of nercos are still on almost every core skill.

Scourge doesn’t have boon corrupts. Scourge has boon rips that apply torment on the boon rip.

So if scourge rips your stability, you won’t get feared.

Probably to stop every single intractable npc from being hidden behind a wall of giant mounts?

ZhouX.8742:

“I cannot kill anyone with ele”

“I run mender’s”

I think you answered yourself.

Marauder’s if you want to kill people and learn to play fresh air

There is actually a mender’s FA scepter build that is extremely good at 1v1.

Axl.8924:

Hrm so i should use life blast in pvp instead of reaper?

No you should stay with reaper.

The only skill on core shroud worth the time it takes to cast is Doom.

I saw the thread title and got all excited thinking we could dual wield spears now.

The high-end raid necro build uses a GS for a condi build. PvP has GS used on a number of power builds.

Lord Velar.1509:

It got nerfed today? Happy now?

Like seriously if i see another thread about condi thief after today I’m gonna start telling people off cause after this nerf

It’s really your fault if you die to one

Where are you seeing these nerfs? I see nothing in the patch nor in the thief subforum about any nerfs to condi thief.

Exedore.6320:

Side effect of changing stuff for PvE.
From reading complaints on Reddit and Necromancer forums, it looks like PvE utilized the old Speed of Shadows (lower cooldown on entering death shroud) and Vital Persistence (life force lasts longer so you need to generate less) for damage bursts in a rotation.

While Vital Persistence and Speed of Shadows are taken on PvE necro, the nerfs didn’t even affect performance. Raid Reaper takes Vital Persistence for the 20% reduction on shroud skills not because of the degen. Speed of Shadows is only taken because there is literally nothing useful in SR adept tier for PvE. Raid Reaper always enters shroud ~11seconds after leaving it last in order to fit into the weapon swap cooldowns, thus Speed of Shadows is irrelevant.

None of the necromancer trait changes affected meta PvE necro. (the food changes did however slam raid necro) The PvE’ers complaining where open world casuals that like to run perma-shroud builds (which aren’t used in high-level PvE because the damage is trash)

Spiteful Renewal on a Consume build provides a reliable benefit yes. But that benefit is tiny and only occurs once every 30seconds at best. Bitter Chill provides a reliable benefit and that benefit occurs frequently.

I cannot overstate the usefulness of Bitter Chill for rapid vuln stacking particularly with Executioner’s scythe. Moreover I cannot overstate the usefulness of vuln stacks to power necro both in terms of damage increase for the necro and his team, but also for the baseline damage modifier that Axe2 gets per stack of vulnerability.

As for ArenNet’s changes. I’m hardly the only necromancer to state that the VP “nerf” was irrelevant. Of course reddit disagrees, but reddit has a tendency for mob mentality bereft of reason.

SPESHAL.9106:

I tried to watch your review of the recent changes and it was painful. I shut it off as soon as you said consume conditions doesn’t benefit from Spiteful Renewal. You literally can take 1.25 seconds to see that it DOES remove the vulnerability of Consume conditions.

And I have since made note of that mistake in a subsequent video.

However you missed the point of why I said it’s pointless to use with consume conditions. There is no real advantage to clearing the measly self-vuln applied by consume conditions. You much better off taking Bitter Chill on a consume conditions build compared to spiteful renewal.
Spiteful Renewal is only really worth taking on a YSIM build. The only time I would ever touch Spiteful Renewal with a Consume build is if I was running Master of Corruption, but there is zero synergy to support a spite/curses MoC build.

You also claim that Spectral Mastery is worthless because they buffed the base times, so the trait “isn’t worth it”…roflmao. You’re SERIOUSLY going to take spectral utilities and NOT take Spectral Mastery. You’re advising people to take +180 vitality versus getting huge life force everytime you use a Spectral Skill, longer durations on those skills (i.e. 24 seconds of Lich), PLUS shorter cooldowns.

Necros ran spectral heavy builds without touching Spectral Mastery even back when Spectral Mastery was 50% duration increase. Vital Persistence in both it’s new and old form has always been a better pick even for spectral heavy builds.

steelheart.7386:

So all the people that complained about the vital persistence nerf are bronze level players? Thats the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. When 90% of a community of players complain about something it is a problem. At least they listened and applied a fix although it still won’t be as good as the old vital persistance. Do you even play Necro you sound like an idiot Shroud is the core of the reaper spec even for glassier condi builds its your main defense.

If by 90% of the community you mean a handful of people on the forum then sure. The VP change was blown way out of proportion.

You don’t die in PvP as a necromancer because of shroud degen. You die either because you where spiked while shroud was on cooldown, or because you where getting tunneled so hard that you where forced out of shroud. In neither of those cases does the shroud degen rate matter.

The only time shroud degen matters is for players that like to sit in shroud for enormous spans of time. However shroud-sitting is suboptimal play and makes poor use of Necromancer’s toolset.

Turk.5460:

Crinn.7864:

tbh the change should have happened. With the removal of all pulsing stability sources, steal always taking stab was insane. Basically meant that steal was a one-button counter to stability generation.

The removal of most pulsing stability was for the purpose of things like Steal being able to counter it. Pretty sure the patch notes from that stab patch even mentioned it was to re-introduce counterplay to stability.

This is a huge nerf, as Steal was our way to confidently break things like rez’s, stomps, and get pivotal interrupts. If this bug is true, it needs to be fixed.

No the purpose of the removal of pulsing boons was to make boon hate skills worth taking. Prior to the removal of boon pulsing Necromancer was the only class that could even consider taken boon hate because of how pointless boon hate was with all the pulsing boons. Even Necromancers will all their boon corrupts could not keep up with the boon pulsing.

The removal of pulsing boons made boon hate sigils and utilities. worth taking on some builds, while also making the handful of boon hate available to certain classes more desirable.
However it also made thief’s deterministic stab rip absolutely bonkers since a thief can now completely deny stability to most classes and since stability sources have much longer cds than steal does.

And don’t tell me thieves needed more counterplay options, d/p thief can currently shutdown every class except guardian and scrapper with extreme ease.

Ramoth.9064:

Crinn.7864:

Ramoth.9064:

The 3 second cooldown is useful in a very specific scenario. This condi removal has more uses and indirectly buffs traits like shrouded removal. I’d say the trade is about even.

That scenario isn’t as specific as you would think.

The primary cause of death for necromancers in PvP is getting spiked while shroud is on cooldown. old Speed of Shadows meant that necromancer had a lower vulnerability window.

The thing is, Adept SR has soul marks, unlike Master SR which really only had VP worth taking. I’m sure as hell there are a lot of necros with soul marks, and still are, all with 10second cds.

And they are much easier to kill because of it. Power shouldn’t even be using staff since greatsword (especially with the new Soul Eater trait) is vastly superior in both utility, control, and damage. Condi builds of course use Soul Marks and Staff, but condi builds are trash in solo queue.

Ramoth.9064:

The 3 second cooldown is useful in a very specific scenario. This condi removal has more uses and indirectly buffs traits like shrouded removal. I’d say the trade is about even.

That scenario isn’t as specific as you would think.

The primary cause of death for necromancers in PvP is getting spiked while shroud is on cooldown. old Speed of Shadows meant that necromancer had a lower vulnerability window.

The VP change was fairly trivial. The only real nerfs of note was Speed of Shadows and Signets of Suffering.

Although I do get some of the frustration particularly from a sPvP perspective where necromancers have completely fallen out of the meta and are generally a handicap for most comps compared to other options. However this was just as true prepatch as it was postpatch.

Brigg.3961:

Typically those who didn’t need SR were those who played braindead Condi based builds (to include hybrids). This was supposed to be the patch that buffed power reaper, not nerf them into oblivion.

Every relevant condi build uses Soul Reaping with Vital Persistence.

Soul Reaping is more important to condi builds than it is to power builds because condi builds can’t afford to take blighter’s boon.

Elessaria.9142:

You literally just got a trait that allows you an extra 270 Power whilst in Shroud, and you think it’s unfair you can’t stay in Shroud as long.

You clearly haven’t looked at what Signets of Suffering is competing with in that grandmaster slot.

Signet builds are not a thing, and are even less of a thing now.

The Vital Persistence change was fairly trivial. It only heavily effected shroud-sitting playstyles, but shroud-sitting is bronze level play anyways. The biggest benefit of Vital Persistence has always been the shroud cd reduction. Soul Reaping’s potency as a traitline has always come from it’s minors particularly Gluttony and Strength of Undeath.

The saddest change was honestly the change to Signets of Suffering, since it completely killed the effectiveness of Signet builds in PvP. (not to mention equipping Plague Sig with the new Signets of Suffering is extremely hazardous to your health.)

The only nerf to meta necromancer was the fact that Thieves didn’t get any nerfs.

tbh the change should have happened. With the removal of all pulsing stability sources, steal always taking stab was insane. Basically meant that steal was a one-button counter to stability generation.

The Speed of Shadows change was definitely unwarranted.

Justine.6351:

I have never used soul reaping.

So happy about the spiteful spirit buff.

I’m still tilted about the change to Signets of Suffering. Killed off signet builds. So much for clutch Psig corrupt plays.

Honestly I like the change. Firstly for classes that are limited by a resource (in this case LF) traits that make resource managing easier will always drown out all other options.

Secondly having the vitality buffer from the trait opens up our amulet options. Berserker necro might be a thing. Also toughness amulets like rabid and demolisher might be worth playing with.

They are probably just refitting core traitlines to work with the new elites. This could be a buff or a nerf, it’ll probably break some existing builds and require some new theorycrafting.

Kokoro.8437:

Attached pic is the best we have. Stats from gw2efficiency.

given this, a very rough estimate is that for rank distributions are the following.

Legend – <0.5%
Plat – 10%
Gold – 40%
Silver – 40%
Bronze – 9%

comes down to 99.5%, but that last >0.5% is probably floating around near plat, or near bronze.

Probably bronze, since bronze should have the same population as platinum since glicko distributes across a normal curve with a mean of 1200.

Also remember than gw2 efficiency will tend to have a mild skew upwards since super casuals are less likely to have gw2 efficiency accounts compared to more dedicated players.

Chaith.8256:

Too early to tell what’s broken, the most broken sounding elite spec could just be undertuned and totally useless, the most lame sounding elite spec (Renegade) could just have super low aftercasts, a few overtuned abilities, and totally obliterate.

inb4 Soulbeast can merge with pocket raptors

I thought it was ok, it didn’t have all the crap of s5, and the population was better than s6.

Got a little tilted toward the end though because of being a necro main queuing in platinum where everyone else is a Thief/Mesmer/power rev with a spattering of guardians and scrappers.

MoZing.1594:

Maybe you lazy developers should have built a new engine for your 2012 game instead of recycling DX 9 Garbage?

The DX version has absolutely nothing to do with collision handling.

Jekkt.6045:

berserker – marauder

Berserker is better off with either Demolisher or Berserker, not marauder.

duster.7013:

but it’s basically a free kill to my thief.

Everything except scrapper engi is a free kill to a thief. I fail to see what this has to do with the balance among the other 8 classes.

Same reason soul beast doesn’t have pets. Because there has always been a small but vocal section of the necro community whining for the removal of shroud.

With Scourge coming, those people can stuff it now, and the future elites will go back to shroud.

Zuko.7132:

Lol if you think menders is good for an offensive build we need to have a long talk XD Power is fine. Only 560 precision so about 30% crit chance. No ferocity. No condi. Menders is a great sustain amulet. Damage? Not so much.

I’ve seen several core eles in platinum running mender’s builds generally focused on 1v1 (basically doing the same role as scrapper) FA Mender’s scepter is particularly nasty in that it’s practically impossible to win a 1v1 against because it’s damage is sticky and it’s nigh impossible to kill.

The Ele community needs to realize that you don’t need “zomg huuge crits!” to make a strong build.

Twyn.7320:

it’ll be better than Daredevil in longer duels as long as you can land a hit every couple of seconds.

Why are you dueling on a thief? There are so many better (and more useful) things for a thief to be doing.

Also Deadeye loses steal teleport, which really hurts it’s +1 potential.

mirage will not replace d/p daredevil, it’s not anywhere near as good as a +1 as d/p. Deadeye will probably not enter the meta period unless it’s so good that having both a deadeye and a d/p daredevil is optimal.
The jury is still out as to if scourge will replace reaper in the meta.

When Kalkrakatorik first came to the desert, all the dervishes united to bring him down but got eaten instead. So now there are no more dervishes.

Ithilwen.1529:

That would take a fair amount of rotation math ( slow.)

Not really, raycasting is extremely cheap compared to most of the other things the server is handling. The effect on performance would be negligible to the point of being irrelevant.

I realize that this will be void in just over a month. But I’ve been playing around with a lot of different builds and I came up with Valkyrie build that works absurdly well (by necro standards) for solo-queue. Well enough to get success in platinum ranked matches with it.

Here is the build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBHhF6kZToyGszGwcTgeTsgLYQXtAwCgqL0GeWxVxvYYE-TJRRABb/IAA/MAAw+DjUGAA

Here is some gameplay:
match1
match2
match3

Youtube monologue on the build
TLDR for those that don’t like youtube monologues
-Maxed boon and LF generation to make the best use of Speed of Shadows and the massive shroud pool provided by Valk
-Lyssa rune provides extra boon on heal skill for blighter’s and also a cover boon for your might. Lyssa will also give useful boons like Prot, Aegis, Fury, and Vigor
-Lyssa also provides a burst condi clear that does not require hitting a target.
-The combination of the precision from Lyssa with Decimate Defenses gives enough crit to make good use of Valk’s ferocity.
-The two signets where taken for the instant boon rip from Psig, and the might gen for blighter’s boon.
-Locust Siggy provides a secondary heal so you can better refill your 28k hp health pool.
-Suffer is useful for all sorts of things. Provides vuln (for decimate defenses), chill (for anti-kiting), condi clear (to get rid of those pesky condis Psig’s passive picks up), instant peck damage, and/or instant blind clear so you don’t have to cancel a major cast because of blind.

Pifil.5193:

one of hundreds maybe thousands of free to play games there, lost in a sea of garbage.

This. Steam is a oversaturated platform. You’ll get a couple days of visibility at best after a release, and then you’re lost in the bottomless abyss of the steam library.

The animations are fine, the particle effects however……

Ragnarox.9601:

Cast times are bad all 3/4 that can be interrupted.

The necromancer subforum says “#&%$!@ you!”

3/4th second cast is fast by our standards.

Sarrs.4831:

We might be able to be more reliant on our friends for mobility; stuff like the holosmith’s jump pad can help with our Swiftness shortcomings.

IRT Stability, Foot in the Grave might be crazy with Scourge.

But we don’t even need swiftness. You can already get permanent swiftness just by slapping on centaur runes.

However permanent swiftness while exciting for our rotation speed, isn’t all that meaningful in combat.