Guild Wars 2

it’s to prevent you from spamming the globes, the second minor still “destroys” them but this time you actually profit from it because you pull them in to get the heal.

without the 2nd minor (which you will have all the time anyway because you will have full traitlines all the time) you would just have to walk through the globes to get the heal.

they will never change 1s of regen to 1s of stability because it would be grossly overpowered even in just that 240 radius.

^and no, revenants have poor access to stunbreaks and stability if they are not in jalis. as i have stated before, leave ventari because you want to survive and your allies will die instead because you don’t heal anymore. it’s also not being “near” the table but being right next to it, 240 radius is extremely small and many classes that are not bruisers will never be that close to you on point if they don’t really have to. the reason why shoutbow is so popular is because of the range that shouts heal and because of the banner.

people also tend to forget that there is no access to vigour (afaik) on revenant so after he dodged twice, which he most likely will because of the lame on dodge traits, you can burst him down even without stuns.

and where is your support? the healing from staff auto won’t make the difference and condis won’t cleanse themselves.

another bad thing about the revenant support is the radius, it’s 240 around the tablet and 120 when it moves. try to heal somebody when he gets focused and is trying not to die, he won’t come to you and the tablet range is 900 with a 2s cooldown.

1 stack of stability for a short amount of time and a stunbreak on legendswap won’t save you. a dead revenant is not healing anybody. and if you go jalis your healing is gone for 10 seconds.

if your ally gets focused in a team fight he will disengage or kite and not stand around you or next to your tablet chilling there waiting for the heal.

and while you are in ventari you have no stability and no stunbreak. go out of ventari and you won’t heal allies anymore.
nty. guard > revenant for support.

“it makes sense that thief counter most zerkers”

i don’t know how that makes any sense and how it is healthy for the game in any way.

you’ve seen nothing so far. what you think is op now will be overshadowed by the abominations of thieves and mesmers when the trait update and the elite specialisations go live.

Laraley.7695:

savacli.8172:

Aquatic Benevolence makes more sense as a minor.

It doesn’t. It would only make a sense if they didn’t move dmg modifiers into water and then force you to have a completely useless minor trait if you play dps. It also doesn’t make a sense to have a completely selfless trait in a trait line that should support your own survability, too. They should just merge it with one of the GM traits and bring something new for the GM minor.

it makes more sense as a minor yes but the damage% per boon on you is not worth a gm trait → merge them together for the minor gm trait and the problem is solved.

high mobility zerk with evades and blocks, oh and it needs to counter thieves in some way. that’s all i need to be happy. another thing i want is a useful elite for combat situations, 45-60s cooldowns with a nice effect.

i also want good traits, better ones that dragon hunter got.. do you hear me karl?

will also add this to this thread:

npc:

all guards are too weak. i rush to the enemy gate on start and i take them down in less than 10 seconds.

the inner guards take maybe 20 seconds.

the lord guards deal more damage but die just as fast…

as it is right now you don’t need to care about gate npcs because 1) they die way too fast and 2) if you kill the doorbreakers you won’t need the npcs anyway.

defending guards is impossible, make them take less damage from players on gamestart (a lot) and reduce that defense over time. so the longer you’re into the match the more damage they take. this will shift the tactics from yolo killing guards to actually stun/blind/reflect their attacks for your doorbreakers. this would also make archers more viable.

what i did today was, when i was at the enemy lord and my team wiped / i was there alone, and i was about to die, i made sure that i kept the lord at 1-5% hp, not putting him into downed state. if you res the lord he will get 50% hp so it’s better to keep him at 1-5%, die and go back to finish him.
give the lord a bodyguard, an npc that gives him protection and actually heals him. the npc could even cast swirling winds like the foefire wizzards. the lord needs something that can heal him up again because right now it’s just stupid and player heals are too weak.

spawn:

make the players spawn at the frontgate. not on the pier or in the alcohol house. it’s bad for prestacking and putting down fgs etc.

channel

channeling for mist essence is just wrong. no stability skill in the game should be as long as the channel.

ways to solve this:

- when channeling it halves the duration of stability
or
- when channeling every second removes 1 stack of stability
or
- channeling takes 15 seconds

oh and remove the rampage channel… it’s just lame

players:

respawn times need to increase the longer the match is taking.
for example: 15s respawn on matchstart and +2s respawn for every minute that passes.

timer:

needs to go. let the match continue until the lord is dead or make it a VoD and let the lords clash at 20 mins or so.

if nobody is able to get through the gates people just start going for the spawn npcs or hunt players down, this defeats the purpose of the game mode and needs to go.

updated again with today’s impressions

can’t agree to this. the game mode is perfect because you need to run compromise builds.

conquest builds are more or less not that effective and neither are pure 1v1 builds. you need to find a build that is useful for surviving against players, killing npcs and if needed fighting for the buff.

this is stronghold, it was clear from the start that it was not as pvp based as conquest.

updated my first post

thank you, but sadly stuff like this tends to go under in such threads when people start with “this class op blah” and that’s something i didn’t want, so i made my own thread

i also gave my opinion and experience about things with possible solutions, so i’m not only complaining here.

npc:

all guards are too weak. i rush to the enemy gate on start and i take them down in less than 10 seconds.

the inner guards take maybe 20 seconds.

the lord guards deal more damage but die just as fast…

as it is right now you don’t need to care about gate npcs because 1) they die way too fast and 2) if you kill the doorbreakers you won’t need the npcs anyway.

defending guards is impossible, make them take less damage from players on gamestart (a lot) and reduce that defense over time. so the longer you’re into the match the more damage they take. this will shift the tactics from yolo killing guards to actually stun/blind/reflect their attacks for your doorbreakers. this would also make archers more viable.

what i did today was, when i was at the enemy lord and my team wiped / i was there alone, and i was about to die, i made sure that i kept the lord at 1-5% hp, not putting him into downed state. if you res the lord he will get 50% hp so it’s better to keep him at 1-5%, die and go back to finish him.
give the lord a bodyguard, an npc that gives him protection and actually heals him. the npc could even cast swirling winds like the foefire wizzards. the lord needs something that can heal him up again because right now it’s just stupid and player heals are too weak.

spawn:

make the players spawn at the frontgate. not on the pier or in the alcohol house. it’s bad for prestacking and putting down fgs etc.

channel

channeling for mist essence is just wrong. no stability skill in the game should be as long as the channel.

ways to solve this:

- when channeling it halves the duration of stability
or
- when channeling every second removes 1 stack of stability
or
- channeling takes 15 seconds

oh and remove the rampage channel… it’s just lame

players:

respawn times need to increase the longer the match is taking.
for example: 15s respawn on matchstart and +2s respawn for every minute that passes.

timer:

needs to go. let the match continue until the lord is dead or make it a VoD and let the lords clash at 20 mins or so.

if nobody is able to get through the gates people just start going for the spawn npcs or hunt players down, this defeats the purpose of the game mode and needs to go.

you won’t like this answer but.. send a thief. or send 2 and kill the warrior in the 10 secs.

the reason why you want to take staff/gs with celestial is, when you’re not in shroud you want to have something with what you can 1. chill 2. control 3. still deal damage and build life force. thats why gs is perfect.

i said it is a power/hybrid weapon, so more of a power than hybrid but more of a hybrid than for example dagger (if that makes sense?).

Sigmoid.7082:

In all honesty the GS is a power weapon and thats it. It has poison to help attrition. It cant stack it fast enough to be considered a hybrid weapon. Its essentially the guardian great sword. It maps directly across. Auto > damage > utility > area denial > control.

Staff actually gets a boost on a reaper.

the poison on gs5 and shroud2 is extremely viable for a celestial build because you won’t have to run doom sigil and other celestial classes can’t outsustain you, that’s why it is perfect for a celestial build, the best mix for defense and offense. you can look at ele, you have burn, few bleeds and poison and it is a very good celestial class. gs/staff has a similar amount of that.

flow.6043:

Jekkt.6045:

it won’t.. carrion doesnt provide neither toughness nor healing power which both are needed to go in melee range.

Wrong. If you’re melee in Reaper’s Shroud all you need is good life force regen, and that happens to scale with vitality.

Jekkt.6045:

your direct damage will also be weak because you don’t have the base precision/crit damage of celestial

Since you get a lot of crit chance through traits, the only question here is: can celestial’s ferocity compensate for having less power than carrion? I doubt it.
And then carrion just has a ton more condition damage. So you either have a build that puts out enough condition pressure to make it worth going with carrion, or you’re more on the power side and you’ll go with valkyrie.
Celestial’s only selling point is defense, so unless there’s going to be some huge synnergy between healing power and Blood Magic there’s no way celestial will beat other prefixes for necros.

Jekkt.6045:

furthermore greatsword is a power weapon, why would you ever play this with carrion

And that makes it better for celestial how?
Also, who says you need to have a GS with Reaper?

if you take celestial you want a power/hybrid weapon, greatsword has good power coefficients and poison on it, it’s a great control weapon when you’re not in shroud. with scepter/dagger and staff it will be the same as now, the same classes will farm you and in tfs you will get the stick even harder because shroud is melee now.

it won’t.. carrion doesnt provide neither toughness nor healing power which both are needed to go in melee range. your direct damage will also be weak because you don’t have the base precision/crit damage of celestial. so if you have an enemy that cleanses vul your direct damage will hit like a wet noodle.

furthermore greatsword is a power weapon, why would you ever play this with carrion

if you take carrion you won’t go blighters boon but chill = damage, so your self sustain is bad.

all it will be is a worse condi necro, reaper is hybrid/power, not condi.

i’ll explain it again

if you make use of dhuumfire, reapers might and blighter’s boon -> celestial
if you make use of death perception, blighter’s boon and maybe siphons -> valk
if you dont trait for dhuumfire or healing traits -> soldier

generally it’s power > crit damage.

can’t really say yet what’s best. maybe for pve sinister or valk/berserk (valk because you don’t need crit chance with decimate defense).

for pvp i still believe that celestial will be best, followed by soldier or valk.
reaper is a “frontliner” so you wanna have a bit of defense,

something i always wondered about and am still wondering is, why is it so hard for arenanet to make underused weapons better.

what’s so difficult about making axe 900 range, making the auto attack either faster or hitting harder, the skill 2 could also need the “rapidfire treatment” speeding up the whole skill by a bit.

about the animation.. oh well.. i won’t say it looks better.. but then again you won’t watch your own animation all the time anyway…

sorry but you’re wrong, the whole shroud auto attack takes roughly 2 seconds to complete, adding 3 burn stacks and dhuumfire is 3s per burn so that’s around 4-5 stacks uptime.

so if you have enough might your burn ticks will most likely tick for 250 or more which results in 1k+ dps just from burning. add in the power damage from the chain and we will have over 3k dps.

with hoelbrak might stacks last around 20s, that means 10 auto chains (assuming exactly 2s) and 3 might per chain so we can have 30 might stacks in that time which is a perm 25 uptime. of course you will also use other skills when you need them, death’s charge for the poison for example, or the stability, chill, whirl whatever, but we can still expect 15-20 might stacks.

death perception:

not needed. you have a base crit chance of around 30% with celestial, with the spite trait that causes vulnerability when you’re in shroud + other minors and stuff will give you max +50% crit chance when the enemy has 25 stacks. you really won’t need death perception.

you also won’t need spite if you manage your dark fields, whirls and boons well.

if we kinda try to compare ele to reaper: signet of renewal heals for around 270 per skill use and reaper gets around 450hp/2s from a shroud auto chain because of the 3 might stacks and 1 might/5s from hoelbrak. if we try to calculate that somehow.. we get 255hp/s. we also get a dark field whirl finisher that gives 11x leeching bolts which is 11×150hp every 40s from soul spiral and some others from gravedigger. you also get some life force from shroud auto. then we still have the normal heal and stuff.

so the healing is comparable to ele, reaper just doesn’t have that many dodges and protection but death shroud to make up for it. reaper will also have more damage than ele so it’s kind of a trade off. add a sigil of blood and and frailty and you will have even more heal and more crit chance from vulnerability.

http://dulfy.net/gw2traits#build=AgQBqAb0Bew~
celestial gs/staff, frailty blood on gs, energy/x on staff, hoelbrak runes. consume conditions, spectral grasp, spectral armor, fleshwurm, plague.

blood magic is bad and spite is good, that’s the difference.

reapers might + death shiver + close to death. that’s where your damage comes from + dhuumfire, and also your sustain from the might = heal.

run blood magic and you won’t have any damage but more self sustain. but i don’t think it’s worth it.

celestial will get nerfed in all the stats you currently invest in with your normal build (and a -10% to amulet stats) but they also buff the base stats which means you will get more in the lines you currenty don’t use.

for example if you play a 300 power 300 vit trait setup you will lose those 300 but (idk the actual numbers so this is just an example) your base stats increase by around 80 and your overall stats from amulets will also get a buff.

celestial is just perfect (for the build i made) and the healing you get comes from the gm trait in reaper that heals you for every boon you get (auto attack in shroud) by 133 (+healing from celes).

because direct damage with dire is crap and there is no dire in pvp, + celestial gives healing power.

carrion won’t be better because you will lack healing and crit damage.

you get 25 might stacks in best case so you wanna make use of the power stats of celestial.

celestial + dhuumfire = win

necro is not a support class and will never be a support class. what it does is debuffing enemies with weakness and vulnerability, the problem is that in a 5 man team all this stuff already comes together, from everywhere a bit, even if the necro is the class that could apply these things the fastest.

what necro/reaper will become bery good at is damaging the defiance bar as blind and chill will affect it.

and please.. even if you could have perm aoe vampiric aura (which will not be possible anyway) nobody would care about it. if a monster hits you for 5k per attack you won’t care about a 150 life leech per hit.

engi and warrior have never been weak after kit engi and hambow became popular, d/d was played prior to the big nerfs and became popular again after they undid the nerfs. ele was even stronger back then even without celestial, just in a different way.

it’s not the amulet that is strong but the synergy between the classes and the amulet. try and play a celestial mesmer or a celestial necro and tell me how op it is.

celestial used to be a very weak amulet before they increased the stats on it.

might stacking already got nerfed and they will further nerf celestial by 10%. there’s a limit somewhere.

rather than just bashing that amulet they should maybe try and make other amulets interesting or add new interesting ones, after all that’s how celestial amulet came into play. it’s possible to add new stat combos that don’t exist in the game yet or to buff stuff like rampagers or to add stuff like sinister. best case would be to add rings and accessories to increase build diversity.

you should try and see it the other way round, that way necro can make use of it also without going into blood magic. thief won’t use it anyway and it would fit revenant.
after all light aura can be used by multiple classes aswell and no guards complained either.

the newest aura in the game, light aura, comes form leaps in light fields. blasting light fields gives retaliation though.

it’s very likely that it will work the same for vampiric aura, leaps through a dark field will give this new type of aura but blasts won’t.

Abazigal.3679:

Phil.8901:

What do u want, only zerk amulet? Fine, give to every class teleport stealth and super nice mobility and i’m ok with that.

I think there will be 50/50 opinions on this. Zerker meta would promote watching map carefully, dodging key skills, not engaging some 1v1’s,… Actual meta is slower, but builds are too forgiving. Shoutbow is unlikely going to die to any burst in 3 seconds( even if, endure pain is here), and there is no risk 1v1’ing any build

I personnaly only believes that there should be " easier counters " , since right now there is too few skill difference between an " average " shoutbow/d/d ele/… and a regular tournament player one

don’t make me laugh, the gap between average d/d and shoutbow and top ones is huge… idk how many times i have said this on the forums but people still don’t get that it’s not enough if you don’t die on the point, your job is to not let your allies die and to give them what they need in the right moment.

people crying about celestial when many teams run 3 berserk and 2 celestial. makes sense.

death’s charge is traited on a 5 seconds cooldown, you have a leap for the dark fields every 5 seconds. auras have a duration of 5 seconds so if you manage your dark fields well you will have a good uptime.

gs/staff will be the way to go, not because it deals an insane amount of damage but because of the utility it offers. both weapons are control weapons, very good ones.

staff is an awesome weapon to kite and to play it safe with a 1200 range condi transfer and a chill. the auto could use some love, even now, but that’s a different story.

the same is for gs, even if it is slow and maybe deals less damage than dagger it is a very strong control weapon. chill auto attack, gravedigger being a spammable backstab below 50%, skill 3 a good way to get life force and stack vulnerability for crit chance, skill 4 an aoe denial and dark field, skill 5 a 600 range aoe pull with poison.

your main damage will come from shroud, not from gs or staff. so you wanna make sure that you have something with what you can control the enemy when you’re not in shroud.

they said there will be betas for the specialisations, we can discuss what’s broken and what’s not then.

tbh i’m really disappointed, really really. i don’t play wvw and i dont care about the stuff that they announced today either, i won’t say that they shouldn’t tell us, because there are people that enjoy WvW but all this is, is a “small text” about some cost changes and upgrade changes with tons of unnecessary phrases to get a big enough blog.

and there i was expecting revenant part 2, but hey it’s anet after all.

a little feedback? what robert would have to do to make them viable in pvp is to design them around normal use, no matter how many enemies are around. the trait needs a flat 20% cd reduction and % life force on use.

the cast time on util shouts need to go, heal 3/4 and elite 1s. that’s how you make them viable in pvp.

but say yes to braindead vamp runes? makes sense, because burst meta is why there are so many people running this.

Belial.9350:

Jekkt.6045:

you generally want to dodge the geomancy/doom swap and good shoutbows generally try to make use of it as much as possible so count to 5 when they swapped to sword to know when the longbow swap is availlable. they will try to come close to you so that can be a sign.

So count to 5, then dodge when they’re in range of you?

Jekkt.6045:

try not to tank all the sword autos and the fire aura.

Is it better just to run around and not hit them while they have fire aura up, to deny might stacks and burns? And by avoiding sword autos, won’t that also screw up your own dps?

counting to 5 only really works against players that really try to get everything out of the rotation, against average ones it’s a sign that they try to get close to you similar like engis with overcharged shot.

when they have fire aura up try to use hard hitting skills to trigger the aura less, you can escape the sword autos by using burning speed through them and by using immob and chill at the right time (after the warhorn is good for chill, after warhorn and leap the immob). you need to figure out yourself when you can afford to pressure them and when you need to be on the defensive.

a rotation on war would look about this way:

lb 2 – combustive – auto/pindown (blind when needed) – arcing arrow and switch to sword while arcing is in the air to get the intel proc.

warhorn 4 – leap – final thrust for the last intel proc – auto attacks and warhorn 4 when needed – close to you weaponswap

killing them as a d/d ele is most of the time not possible (speaking of top shoutbows), what you can do is keep the point or keep it at least neutralized.

what you want to do is blocking the combustive shot with ring of earth as much as you can, if possible also the arcing arrow when they cast it right after. if you can afford to dodge the pin down then do it, if not keep your cleansing fire.

you generally want to dodge the geomancy/doom swap and good shoutbows generally try to make use of it as much as possible so count to 5 when they swapped to sword to know when the longbow swap is availlable. they will try to come close to you so that can be a sign.

applying damage is not so easy because your conditions are more or less useless and burning speed won’t really make a difference. you can try and pressure them when they’re on longbow after they used combustive, applying burning after that is also better.

cc is good to interrupt their rotation, for example when you need to regain health or when your ring of earth is still on cooldown.

try not to tank all the sword autos and the fire aura.

first step would be to survive against them, killing can come after and even then it’s very hard or not possible.

the key to winning would be outpressuring them and blocking their stuff so that they can’t outpressure you.

i rather have bad people playing effective builds than bad players playing random builds.

it should just have a base evade like swoosh and burning speed.

if you’re a berserker: it’s not your job to 1v1 an ele.

if you’re a celestial: engi and shoutbow can kill an ele, don’t ever fight a d/d ele when the node is not neutralized or yours.

condi classes can only kill ele if they can cover their damaging conditions. necro can try and kite ele a bit but as ele you can disengage and regain your health faster than the necro to go back and kill him.

tbh the shouts are bad but at least we can use the existing utilities.

what i really like about robert is that he tries and takes stuff from guild wars 1 and creates something nostaligic but still new.

he took some aspects of interrupt mesmers from gw1 and combined them with the utopia chronomancer into something very exciting.

with the necro he created another nostalgic feeling (dervish) and yet still new specialisation.

if he manages to get the shouts right then everything will be perfect.

as a current elementalist player i’m kinda waiting for believe in karl’s tempest but if that fails.. well.. back to my dervish.. uhm i mean reaper.

ronpierce.2760:

Sigmoid.7082:

ronpierce.2760:

Sigmoid.7082:

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

ronpierce.2760:

If it’s ANY boon gained, including outside sources, it’s actually very powerful. This means if there is any pre-buffing, no longer will Necros have to start with 0 LF.

It does NOT need a buff. That said, I hope it doesn’t get nerfed either. At least not with a ICD because they would completely ruin the team-based defense it gives allowing it to fight front lines. It’s the perfect trait.

I hope it doesn’t get nerfed as well but they could put a cap on how many times it can trigger in a short time period. Say 20x in 10 seconds, (ala chilling nova) to keep it from becoming completely insane.

I say this because if you pair it with a staff guardian, or certain types of ele & warrior it could become completely over powered in PvP.

Several builds will result in near immortality. Tank siphons being one.

More like lower/est priority. That’s the whole charm in it. It won’t be amazing alone, but in teams it makes us bulky and lower priority without taking the cop-out way of just giving us a billion CC breaks and mobility. It’s actually genius, even if it’s not their intent.

You should be able to hold on long enough after for people to respawn and its not like even in those builds the damage will be lower either…

I’m not saying it doesn’t need ‘looked at’. I’m saying it doesn’t need a direct ICD because that will ruin it, and the concept is golden.

Beyond that, numbers, maybe a 10-20x cap per 10 seconds or something might be necessary, but it, itself, is exactly what the build needs to uniquely discourage enemies from ALWAYS focusing down the Necro/Reaper.

as long as necro’s own buffs are excluded from those 10seconds because you can stack 20 might stacks in 10 seconds on your own if you just auto attack in shroud.

and then again we shouldn’t be talking about nerfs already when the stuff isn’t even out yet.

and i applause them for this because it’s a perfect frontliner, designed after the gw1 dervish and a mix between avatar of balthatar and avatar of grenth.

spoj.9672:

Yeah its going to be a very strong sustain trait. One we really needed. Wont have much use in most PvE content. But its still a very nice addition.

it theoretically could, scythe is a cleave so you can hit up to 3 enemies giving you 6 might stacks per second (auto attack is 0,5s and might from reapers might) which is 6×133hp.
pretty good to tank trashmobs when somebody can give you protection.

dude, this grandmaster trait is insanely strong, attacking in shroud is already 266 hp/s without any healing power.. this is what ele gets from signet of renewal.

if you combine this with the trait that gives you might when you attack chilled targets it’s 4x 133 hp per second with auto attack..

as i said, i stated my views related to PvP effectiveness and the only good ones for PvP are you are all weaklings because of the stunbreak and nothing can save you because it’s a meh-ish boon rip with flawed unblockable attacks.

the elite cast time is too long
the heal is meh compared to consume conditions with all the random condis atm
rise is useless because AI
and suffer is a worse version of putrid mark on a longer cooldown.

and no they’re not “very offensive” they are “offensive” at best.

as it is now i would take any other guard/war shout over reaper shouts, even if they were affecting only yourself.

necro orders from gw1 would be way better even if you just converted them to the current combat system.

scythe is 300 range so it’s only normal that it’s bigger than a 180 range weapon lol.