Guild Wars 2

I think the core feeling of the Reaper’s kit (and yes, that includes the slow-as-[slow thing] Greatsword) is pretty spot-on. Playing it feels like the “unstoppable monster” that Anet pitched with the reveal.

It’s just a matter of tuning the math (damage, cast times, cooldowns) and maybe splashing in a little more stability for the longer attacks. A few mechanics adjustments beyond that (Some people are dissatisfied with the Life Force being on GS3 and RS1, personally I could be fine with both if the numbers were tuned better) and Reaper seems like it will be in a really good spot.

Math is easy to tweak even late in development, over-all mechanics and handling not so much. Reaper is a good foundation and just needs the numbers looked at.

Dakunaito.9602:

Death’s Charge needs 2 things: 1. add collision when hitting enemy. it’s the only charge skill that doesn’t hit enemy and simple pass through,

This isn’t without precedent. It behaves almost exactly like Warrior’s GS….3. GS3 uses a “skillshot” interface and has a small wind-up before executing, but then you spin a short distance and it has zero target collision. The Reaper version moves slower, but doesn’t have the pre-animation wind-up that the Warrior version has.

Leveled a Necro to 80 based on Reaper announcement. Hated almost every minute of the leveling process, but thankfully I was static with a buddy’s GS warrior.

Played Reaper during BWE. Most-fun playstyle (math/mechanics could use some tuning, but the raw feel is fantastic) in the game.

BWE ended. Got some decent gear for my Necro, then sat him back at the bottom of my char list until HoT releases, at which point he becomes my main.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

The problem is exacerbated greatly by the following fact: Reaper Shroud’s auto attack has, unboosted, higher DPS than the greatsword. It his the same amount of targets, but does so faster. So really greatsword has no excuse.

I don’t disagree that the GS could use some love. Either more damage, faster attacks, or built-in stability to increase the reliability of landing hits. However, the excerpt I quoted out should be true. Shroud is a class mechanic that costs a class resource, depletes over time, depletes with incoming damage, and makes you a giant, obvious target for CC and interrupt spam. Shroud should always do more damage than being unshrouded with any weapon.

If Gravedigger were tuned up, with the cooldown reduction set to 100% so you could spam it, and the animation hangs cleaned up (or the damage boosted to compensate) then I could see the logical argument for Gravedigger spam surpassing Shroud damage for sub-50% targets. It would also lend to a nice give-and-take gameplay with shroud: Shroud is better for 50-100% targets, GS better for 0-49% targets, but if you use shroud early in the fight, you might not have it available to use as a defensive tool later in the fight.

The author raises a lot of good points: The shouts are underwhelming. GS doesn’t do quite enough damage to justify its slow speed (or, perhaps rather Necro doesn’t have enough access to stability to reliably get the hits off)

However, the author’s build linked in the update… kind of sucks. He simply took a Metabattle build, ripped out one trait line, dropped Reaper in its place, and presumably replaced either Dagger+Horn or the Staff with a Greatsword. While the build on Metabattle could be the best Necro build available in the live game, swapping out one of its trait lines and likely one of its weapons without making any other adjustments is a pretty bad idea.

He traits heavily for Chill and Chill damage without specifying if he’s a Condi or Power build, but then passes over other options to further enhance his chill. He ignores a lot of readily available vulnerability, and appears to not understand how Decimate Defenses even works as his “suggestion” would actually result in a lower crit chance for the Reaper most of the time. He makes bad choices (on-hit effects versus chilled when using the slowest weapon in the entire game) when amazing ones (Decimate Defenses) are available in the same line. He has an entire trait line devoted to Shroud, but then ignores the complimentary traits available in Spite and Reaper.

Reaper isn’t perfect. The author isn’t totally wrong, and many of his comments are entirely valid. But you can’t build a Reaper using old Necro stuff as a template. Most Necros run Dagger+X/Staff. Dagger attacks very quickly, making it great for on-hit effects. Axe hits fairly rapidly, too, which lends itself some overlap. Many Necros are also accustomed to mostly using Original Shroud for its AA spam or as a defensive tool, because its other abilities are situational (and in the case of 4+5, super-easily countered) but Reaper Shroud can be used much more proactively and offensively.

My original concept going into BWE1 was to stack 3 different life leech traits and stay in GS-form most of the time. Basically, I was going to rip one trait line out of my existing build and drop Reaper in its place. That didn’t work at all because the slow swings of the GS make it terrible for proc builds. Once I re-kitted and re-thought my build, and started weaving Shroud into my rotation rather than using it purely as a panic button, I fared a lot better. The Reaper is a vuln-stacking, auto-critting monster that also has ready access to a lot of self-stacked might.

Is it perfect or even “fantastic”? Of course not, at least not certain situations. But it also isn’t the roaring dumpster fire that people are making it out to be. I heard that the GS was currently operating at “dagger range” for BWE1 and that’s supposedly a bug, but I’m not 100% sure since I only heard it second-hand and didn’t see a dev comment about it.

And the shouts suck. That can’t be said enough. They need to do a lot more damage and/or have a lot shorter cast time.

My testing hasn’t been nearly as extensive as the OP, but one glaring issue that I’ve seen relates to the Reaper’s survivability (both in and out of shroud) and I think the core of this particular problem is the original design intent not matching up well with the implementation in the game.

During the livestream, it was mentioned that the Reaper gets Cold Shoulder partially to help it survive as a cloth-wearer in melee. The salient point from the passive is that “Chilled foes deal 10% less damage to you.”

The problem is, in practicality, this is an extremely unreliable form of mitigation, because Chill is hard to maintain on a target. According to the GW2 wiki, the third hit of the AA sequence chills for 4.5 seconds. However, in-game, this chill duration is less than half of that, with the value sitting at 1.75s and that’s including the extra 10% from Cold Shoulder.

In other words, even if you rune for it (since runes are percentage based and not flat duration increases) it’s basically impossible for you to maintain Chill on a target full-time, unless you do nothing but spam GS1 and then use 1-2 other attacks in a longer-duration window opened by Chilled to the Bone or Suffer or any other source of the condition, all of which are tied to long-cooldown abilities. And in-shroud, the one source of Chill is easily countered/avoided.

Now, whether or not a Reaper should be able to “easily” perma-Chill a target (to make it harder to simply kite or walk away from the Reaper’s slow attacks) is up for a separate debate, but the Reaper’s “extra” survivability for being in melee should not be tied to a difficult-to-maintain condition.

TL;DR: Simply, the 10% damage reduction needs to be unshackled from the Chill requirement. “Enemies within range 320 do X% less damage” would have the same net effect (the Reaper is supposed to be hardest to deal with when toe-to-toe, and a clothie with almost zero mobility needs more durability) but disconnect it from the reliance on Chill. Perhaps have the percentage or range (or both) increase when the reaper is in Shroud, making it harder to rip him/her out of Shroud and further fueling that “Unstoppable Monster” fantasy.

Quested through the Brisban(e?) Wildlands today with a friend. We never saw more than 1 other player in the same place as us at any given time except for one time, when we saw 2 people in the same place as us.

Luckily, we managed to duo about half of the events we came across, sometimes by the skin of our teeth.

HeartQuest Wars is not a very fun game.

alfista.6094:

Again with the under-population?

Yep. The only 3 hours I spent logged in last night were with a friend and across two zones in two different level brackets, we were unable to complete all but 2 of the events we came across.

This game doesn’t work right when the zones aren’t flooded with people. The PVE content for the average player surely cannot be “Just run around and fill up heart quests and ignore events” and I’d hope that ANet is at least aware of the issue that their game simply isn’t any fun when you have to ignore event after event because nobody is around to do them.

I think a time-based system could work for some events, where the target is up and stationary-ish until killed. That way he can’t spawn into “easy mode”, people still ideally encourage others to show up for an event, but when an entire chain is stalled for over an hour because nobody is coming to kill a champion, he should get bumped down a few notches so the handful of people that are there can actually take him.

Can events scale down when there aren’t enough people in the vicinity to do them?

Like, if a champion is up for about 60 minutes, and in that time only 4-5 unique players are in range of the event, could he maybe drop down to a veteran?

If only 2 people have been in the vicinity of an escort quest for the first 5 minutes of it, could the event send fewer than 18 mobs from 3 different directions to gank the escort and fail the event?

This game simply does not work and is not enjoyable when there isn’t enough population to sustain the completion of “dynamic” events.

Jade Quarry tonight with a RL friend:

Spent 2 hours in Essex Hills unable to complete any event except destroy the fissure and the little girl escort because there weren’t enough people around, even when announcing events in map chat and linking waypoints.

Spent another hour in Bloodtide Coast on different characters unable to kill the undead captain on Laughing Gull because only 2 people ever even came to the island despite repeated announcements.

The spark is fading from this flash-in-the-pan game and since the majority of its PVE content depends on having a dense, healthy population to do “dynamic” events, I’d prefer the servers get merged sooner rather than later.

Momo.9230:

According to: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Update-Notes-September-15th-2012/first#post244270

• Box of Berserker’s Draconian Armor and Box of Rampager’s Draconian Armor now reward the proper items.

So… Any update as to what about all of us who did NOT receive the proper items before?

Just want to confirm that the bug is fixed — just popped the box that’s been in my bank for weeks and got the proper armor.

Now they just need to sort the issue for people that opened the box prior to now.

Does this happen 100% of the time with this item box? Does anyone know if anyone has successfully opened the box ?

Yes, to my knowledge, it happens 100% of the time. It’s an error in the game code.

Crafters can make a level 80, yellow/rare quality Box of _______’s Gladiator Armor.

Crafters can make a level 80, orange/exotic quality Box of _______’s Draconic Armor.

The problem is that opening either box generates the ‘contents’ of the yellow/rare Gladiator Armor.

It’s been over two weeks since this thread was created, and we only got forum acknowledgement a few days ago that they’re investigating how to fix it. In the meantime, players that spent gold on this are SOL and just have to cross their fingers that maybe, one day, ANet will either do a gold restore or give the proper items to people who purchased the box.

I snapped one up right around when I hit 80 and was (luckily?) warned by a friend before I popped it open. I don’t dare resell it because it’s basically an exploit to and I can’t open it because I know it’s broken, so I’m just stuck with this box until they get around to fixing it.

While ANet shuffles around not fixing this fast enough, the boxes are still being made and posted on the AH (either by people unaware of the bugged contents or people intentionally exploiting this) and the problem just keeps becoming more and more widespread.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’d cancel a sub over, if this game had one. You can’t screw with peoples’ gold, especially when that gold has a real-world money value thanks to the gem system.

Welp, guess we’re going another week(end) without a fix for this issue.

Lauren Hotson.5068:

Paul.4081:

Hi Lauren,

Are we only gonna see replies to issues you guys admit to? What construes an effective post? How do we offer advice to the dev’s?

Hi Paul,

We are doing our best to respond to posts as we can. Rest assured that we are seeing all of these issues and addressing them appropriately! If you’d like to offer suggestions or advice, please make a new thread or find and comment on an appropriate thread in our forums.

Thanks.

Fingers are so crossed for a Vigil legging/boot fix. It may seem like such a silly, minor issue to some, but the bare ankles and tiny feet nearly ruin the entire armor set for me.

Paladin.5268:

Simply upgrading players armor to the actual exotic armor would not be fair in any way, regardless of how vocal players who bought the armor box may be. They have to be fair to everyone, and giving the upgraded versions for free would raise a larger outrage from the general community, for those who are paying full price of these at 3+ gold each.

How much one paid for the box is irrelevant — any person that bought a box of armor that was orange quality and said “Box of Berserker’s Draconic Armor – This box contains a full set of level 80 armor” should have or be given (or exchange?) a full set of orange quality, level 80 armor.

The boxes only got cheap from crafters exploiting the bug to profit on the TP. Competition and greed over the exploit drove the box prices down. Originally, the boxes were going for close to the same rate as buying all the pieces separately — you saved one or two gold, tops, but that could be legitimately expected when buying the full set at once.

No person that bought and opened one of these boxes was expecting to get anything other than exactly what the box said it contained. There is absolutely no legitimate reason to deny them the intended contents of the box.

Zii The Mad.2563:

They are swamped with bug reports.
Just check this forum, 147 pages worth – sure some are duplicates, but most arent.

Maybe cosmetics just isnt a priority right now.

This has (almost) nothing to do with cosmetics.

People are crafting, selling, and buying a box of armor that says “Contains a full set of level 80 armor” and the name on the box is “Box of Berserker’s Draconic Armor” and is orange (exotic) quality.

When a player opens that box, instead of getting orange (exotic) Draconic armor, they are getting yellow (rare, thus inferior) armor of a different set.

I couldn’t care less what the armor looks like cosmetically, but when I pay for an orange box full of armor, I expect it to contain the armor that the tooltip says it contains, not something far less valuable and less powerful.

The fact that there doesn’t even seem to be official acknowledgement aside from a few canned GM replies is appalling.

I’d like to change my name, too.

When you first make your account, the page implies that “oh, this will only be used for the forums” and I swear it said something about keeping it separate from your game info. I even typed in my “usual” name that I’ve used for over a decade online, then thought “hmm, no I’ll use something else for my forum login” and put in the name I’m now stuck with — After you register, you get an email saying something to the effect of “Oh, hey, you’ve chosen your display name. That’s your name on the forums as well as the primary way for players to contact you in-game and btw you can’t change it.”

The handling of it is just incredibly, super, ridiculously poor in my opinion. You don’t have the information you need until after you’ve locked yourself into a name, unless you happen to visit the FAQ page before account creation. The account creation page needs to say, up front, “This is name that nearly all players will interact with on a recurring basis in-game” and then they need to give a one-time name change to anyone with an account made before they bothered to make their creation page more descriptive.

Still no word or anything about a fix/compensation?

This is the kind of thing I’d be cancelling my sub over, if this game had subs. As it is, I just really don’t have any interest in logging in or giving such inept developers any more of my cash for future product.

Armor Art Issue – Vigil Heavy Armor Legs/Boots – Human Male

Items in question – “Vigil Leggings”; “Vigil Boots”
Heavy armor, level 80 rare, sold by Crusader Eira [Armorsmith] at Vigil Keep.

There seems to be something up with the legs/boots from the Vigil order heavy armor set. Aside from a bit of the neck and face, the only place this armor set shows skin is the… ankles?!?

Many of the heavy boot graphics on Human Male are made up of two separate parts, a ‘shinguard’ and then a ‘bootie’, rather than being one complete unit. On these types of sets, the ‘innerwear’ portion of the leg armor will actually extend down through the shinguard and well below the ankle so that when the shinguard and bootie are slipped over the legging, it unifies into a complete appearance.

This is not the case with the Vigil armor on Human Male and, as a result, it looks really odd. The legs ‘end’ somewhere inside the shinguard, leaving the bare ankles and then the tiny bootie on the bottom.

Possibly related, it seems like the foot portion of this armor is extraordinarily small. Are Male Humans supposed to be that small-footed?

Recommendations: Either have an artist “extend” the graphic for the leggings so that it covers the gap between the bootie and the shinguard, or (preferred) increase the size of the bootie so that it meshes with/tucks under the bottom of the shinguard. The foot seems way too small currently, anyway.

Attached are multiple snippets of screencaps highlighting the issue.

A – Full Vigil heavy armor set as shown in the vendor pane.
B – Full Vigil heavy armor set except different pants I happened to have on me (Level 60 rare “Banded”-type) which shows how the legging comes down to cover the ankle.
C – Full Vigil heavy armor set previewed on a Norn showing that the bootie is large enough that it tucks under the shinguard and looks like a “full” boot without the need to show any bit of the inner legging.
D – Banded pants with no boots, showing how far below the ankle the leggings extend so that it can create a “complete” illusion when a bootie and shinguard graphic are placed over top.
E – Vigil pants with no boots, highlighting how ‘short’ the legging is, preventing it from covering the ankle gap on the Vigil Boots.