Guild Wars 2

I for one love the idea of the staff Thief.

I won’t promise that it will be amazing in PvE, but some of its skills are extremely situationally powerful, particularly Distracting Daggers. I’m also fairly confident that damage numbers on the autoattack chain will see buffs after the coming BWE, and with that it may be enough to usurp the value of S/D. It will also depend heavily on how exactly the Staff 4 skill works (it apparently inflicts blinds for 3 pulses, but we don’t know much more than that).

Anyway, I’m excited. At a minimum I’ll PHIW and run around with it in open world and have fun with the class.

People play PvE together all of the time together in dungeons, world bosses, you name it. Anyway, for solo play at max level:

• Elementalist
• Warrior
• Thief
• Engineer
• Guardian
• Mesmer (If you’re talking just boss solos, this is actually higher)
• Ranger
• Necromancer

Of course this changes if you’re talking about team value in PvE for speedclears, or if you’re talking about soloing 5-man dungeons (but not by much), or if you’re talking about leveling up a lowbie in the open world (the heavy classes are king there). Anyway, this is pretty darned close to good for all PvE.

I’ve always rounded 0.5+ up and 0.499- down as normal. I’m also in agreement with Spoj. Who cares? If your record gets usurped by 1 second at any point we’ll compare milliseconds to determine the record holder, and at that point rounding doesn’t matter anyway.

Bukkebruse.2810:

I’m sure Usain Bolt wouldn’t mind if you rounded his 9.58 second 100m sprint up to 10 seconds. :P

Video games are serious business.

I appreciate the need for an ICD, but as it stands this trait is horribly useless with kitten duration Might. 10 seconds minimum is necessary for this to actually feel valuable and worth taking, and that’s assuming people have Facet of Nature activated to bring it to 15 seconds. If we wanted this to be a full DPS support in PvE, then it would need to last 15 seconds baseline so that between Facet of Strength and this a permanent 25 might could be built up over time at the cost of camping Glint as your legend.

We are still recruiting, I’m just really bad at remembering to post in this thread, haha! If you’re interested in any of the stuff we do as a guild casually and together, then let one of the officers know! We’re extremely casual and laid back, so if you’re looking for a hustle-and-bustle guild you won’t find it here, but we’re great friends who know how to have fun.

I really think Alacrity is still a bit undertuned in general, but I can understand the worry about how powerful it could be. Also, I think I see this side of Chronophantasma now, although it really does suck that they get dazed in melee range of the enemy you attack (makes them prime for a quick cleave).

I’m strongly opposed to the Illusionary Reversion nerf. I think just a short ICD to prevent rolling the F-keys is far better than this nerf. I would recommend a 3 second ICD; that’d be sufficient here. I also still think the cast times for the utility wells are too long and should be shorter and that some traits need a little bit of work, but otherwise Chronomancer is in a great place.

Also, I personally like the listed change to Gravity Well, but if it’s too weak or something we can always provide that feedback in the next BWE.

Thanks for the hard work, Robert!

These changes are great. Thanks, Robert! I still do think that Soul Eater will need some love, Chilled to the Bone will need some cooldown reduction, and that Augury won’t be competitive with other options in that slot despite the other changes to shouts, but these are overall incredible and fix countless of the major issues with Reaper.

Bhawb.7408:

I love the changes, and I’m really glad to see that some of my feedback was listened to. I can’t imagine anyone isn’t a Geeliever after all this work you put in so quickly.

I told you that your thread featured heavily in my report, although Robert did read it even without my report either way.

One day, my friends, everything on that list will say “HEALS”. I am hopeful.

Khristophoros.7194:

What’s wrong with either of those things?

Staff is a horrible weapon to get stuck in. It’s okay for fights where you are forced to range because of either a bad party or a lack of mechanical skill so you get the bonus damage on DS1, but otherwise it’s bad for PvE. You get far better mileage out of D/F + D/W.

For the second, stacking in a corner is an outdated tactic. The fastest way to do things is to just stack on top of wherever the creature spawns and murder him there. Corners were only used for the FGS meta, which is long since dead.

Ranael.6423:

I partially disagree with what you say. The challenge is not necessary to be able to find the optimal comp/rotation on a paper but rather to challenge people skill playing their build optimally, (almost) independently of their build. That GW2 philosophy from the beginning I think : play what you want but play it well then !

I agree, but it should be about both things. It should have high demands on a player’s mechanical skill and ability to react, but it should also require strict planning of what classes are the best to fill what role for a particular encounter so that other classes can better perform their role. A lot of classes might be able to fill a lot of roles, but never with equal efficacy or ease; you will need to find the best class for the job so that other requirements of the encounter can be met even easier.

Ranael.6423:

To me the most challenging thing you can add to video game is the need of rapid adaptation to a situation you cannot predict 100%. You can also think about daily gambits on a monthly rotation or as I said in a previous post boss skills activated depending on team composition/playstyle.
Working on team / rotation on paper is not challenging after the guides are edited on the web.

You have a good point. This is particularly why fractals started out how they did, and ANet knows that randomness is important. And while randomness is important, it’s also important to keep it reasonable. Too much randomness will—randomly—create situations that may not be beatable or may require class skills that no one anticipated. The result would be team compositions based around being jacks of all trades since you have no idea what to expect. A better way to do this is to incorporate some randomness into it, but not too much.

A good example might be if there were an Arah themed raid, you could have a particular boss summon a squad of 10 elite Arah enemies of any of the types available in the dungeon. This means you might get spawns of 5 Illusionists, or 5 Hunters. In this case, your team can plan to handle whatever combination you might get, while most of the rest of the encounter progresses in an orderly fashion.

Also, while randomness is very important for replayability, there’s a reason Arah is still so popular after ~3 years and it’s because it’s fun. Making even repetitive content enjoyable is going to do a lot more for replayability than just making it a perpetually changing experience.

tl;dr: You’re right, but randomness, like all things, must be tuned carefully to keep it meaningful

It’s a ranged weapon. If you want it to “compete” with Dagger for BiS for PvE, it never will nor should it because it’s ranged. What you should, instead, be focusing on is how to not allow it to be outclassed by a Dagger build simply spamming DS1. Putting a blast finisher on it enables functionality otherwise impossible without the Axe, and giving it a slight damage nudge coupled with a blast finisher will do wonders in PvP formats. With 900 range, you might even see some WvW players use it seriously.

Let me just be forward here. You’re not going to see a full revamp of the weapon. If you want to theorycraft it, by all means do so, but it’s a naive venture. What you will see, however, is adjustments made to the weapon to keep it functionally near-identical to how it currently is but more useful.

Think of it this way. If you put a blast finisher on Axe 3, every single good Necro in PvE will carry one if not at all times, then at least in his inventory. If you give Axe a 10% damage boost either in raw power numbers or via increased attack speed and maybe expand the Unholy Fervor trait a bit so it isn’t terribad, then we’re talking about a ranged power option that isn’t horrifically outclassed by the likes of Life Blast.

cthaeh.2168:

Oh, man! That’s gonna be so much fun! I can’t wait to spam “LF2 Cleric Guard then gtg” for an hour before I get frustrated and go back to SW!

Just remember kids, if you can beat the “challenging group content” with any group composition, then it’s not challenging. This content is not for the casuals who farm SW to buy shiny skins, this content is to challenge people to really put head-to-paper to figure out optimal compositions, optimal load-outs, and optimal strategies.

Honestly, if ANet does this right, the very idea of pubbing this “challenging group content” will be laughable unless you get some seriously epic pubs.

EcoRI.9273:

It’s probably going to be “meta” for the first few months as I believe it is meant as a crutch. When people figure out all the details of said raid, berserker/dps gear will slowly transition itself back to meta. Unless of course they nerf the kitten out of the base heal on water field blasts and made it scale incredibly well with healing power and force party wide degen mechanics.

Maybe! It’s hard to say. Short of a toughness or vitality check (ie. Boss does exactly 30k damage at some point and its fully unavoidable), there may not be a way to “force” the efficacy of tanky gear. That said, I certainly wouldn’t mind some mechanics that at a minimum make us think of using it.

I sure hope no one can beat the content out of the box. If Clerics or PVT gear finds its way into successful runs, I hope it is because it is a necessary component of the success and not because they’re bad players using training-wheels-gear.

I am totally okay with tankier gear being necessary for success. Imagine a boss with an attack phase where it hits everyone in the raid who’s visible with a beam of energy that does a crapton of sustained damage and pretty much murders anyone in glass gear, but not everyone can stealth or else the boss resets. The one successful strategy might be 9 of the 10 people stealthing the entire phase while 1 cleric’s Guardian tanks, invuls, and blocks through the attack. Maybe it should be so much damage that there’d need to be two of these cleric’s Guardians that switch back and forth during this phase, moving into/out of the stealth blasts.

I’d call that kind of strategy awesome, especially because it would incorporate some tanking without killing the active gameplay of GW2. Hell, if we saw that exact strategy come to pass, I’d love every second of it.

Here’s to hoping.

voidwater.2064:

Likewise, that there are people posting about how much they care about prestige doesn’t mean that it matters at all.

Sure, you’re absolutely correct. I’ll just hide the discussions I have with devs in a box faaaar away from this thread so no one treats those as reliable information.

Shaogin.2679:

This was taken directly from the build’s discussion page. All of these things go through a voting process and are constantly monitored and updated. If anyone feels anything is inaccurate the proper thing to do would be to join discussions and contribute to the site to make it a better resource for everyone instead of putting out such a discrediting statement.

I agreed with MetaBattle’s “meta” ranking back when it was simply representative of the most common great builds you’re liable to see when playing PvP and encountering that specific class. For a good long while now it has simply represented what gets used in tournament level play and is not indicative of the actual arena metas. It was argued against a long time ago and the MetaBattle community felt the current approach was better, so here we are.

I only use that website for a build reference, so at this point it doesn’t matter enough for me to start and try to fuel discussions about what is or isn’t meta. All I did in my previous post is call it like it is; meta on MetaBattle is what is used in tournaments, not what is actually the best or what is actually used most frequently in arenas.

• 900 range
• Axe 3 is a blast finisher (works with Spiteful Spirit)
• Axe 1 attack speed increased by 15%.

This is really all the weapon needs to be valuable. The following two are nice-to-haves.

• Axe 2 AOE increased by ~30 radius.
• Axe 1 animation made attractive (purely aesthetic, but come on!)

While we’re at it, let’s make Unholy Fervor apply its damage bonus to any weapon.

deSade.9437:

I want to look cool, but I do it for myself (and my friends’ approval, I suppose). I want to wear cool stuff, stuff I deem cool.
Got a problem with that?

I mean, nope, rock what you like. All I’ll say is that just because a bunch of people in this one particular thread post that they don’t care about prestige doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still matter a lot.

I guess I just see skill as it’s used in a video game as something that takes time to acquire. I’ve taught some pretty abysmal video game players how to beat some pretty tough stuff in games, all with varying amounts of time, but it always just came down to time.

Skady.5916:

My point was that GWAMM just takes certain amount of time invested. Fractal weapon collection on the other is elusive and can take you any time between 10 hr and infinity.

All things just take time investment. Even the hardest raids from the hardest games you can possibly think of just take time to learn and master and beat.

I can’t promise it won’t be linear to some extent, but I can promise that what they’re announcing here isn’t new world bosses. Beyond that it’s anyone’s guess. Let’s hope they’re actually challenging, though, with dynamic content; that’s the real key IMO.

Zenith.7301:

I don’t think prestige is dumb. I think the idea of designing a game around bragging and basing your enjoyment on some perceived superiority is dumb, especially when that superiority is not skill-based.

GWAMM is prestige. A spvp tournament champ with his tournament rankings and finishers is prestige. It’s good to feel proud of your accomplishments, but asking that a game not fix kittenty RNG just so you can feel special is stupid.

For every person obsessed about how others perceive them, there’s someone who could quite frankly not care any less. They play this game to have pretty characters with pretty effects in gameplay they find fun, and others’ positions relative to them has no bearing on their enjoyment/goals for the game. And they don’t appreciate arbitrary barriers to what they play the game for, aesthetics.

Well said. I agree entirely with what you have said here, and by no means should the notion of prestige force painful acquisition methods for items upon players. I’m very happy with their solution, and have been pushing for it for a long time, I just wanted to make sure that some of the people (not yourself) who were arguing against prestige in this thread understood that it does serve a purpose when generated correctly.

And you’re absolutely right. Nothing in GW2 has thus far felt more prestigious to me than my GWAMM title and 50/50 in the HoM.

I’m at 18/19 after an excruciatingly long time of trying to get them all, and I’m happy with whatever cost they put just so I can finish it off. That said, I was hoping for around 30 pristines for each skin, so I think 20 is a bit low, but that’s not a big deal. Don’t delude yourselves into thinking 50+ is a reasonable number, however.

I do want to dispel this notion that “prestige is dumb”, however. Prestige matters a lot, and even if RNG is a factor (or the only factor), it plays hugely into how “cool” a person feels and how “cool” other people think that person is. It doesn’t matter if you can throw 2g worth of rares in the MF and score Dusk, when you see someone with Twilight you make certain assertions about their wealth, their status, their time playing the game, so on. Maybe you, specifically, don’t, but a lot of new players absolutely will. That feeling is what prestige buys you, and maybe Fractal weapons are all RNG and you can get them all in 19 back-to-back runs of L29, but when newer players see them they carry certain weight. The number of times in different game formats people go “Wow those weapons are so cool, you must have played a ton to earn those!” to me over my wielding all Fractal weapon skins is astounding, even after I explain that they’re RNG.

So please, don’t make insane claims like “prestige doesn’t matter”. Malediktus is not necessarily communicating efficiently to make the case, but the case is there regardless that prestige matters. This is why ANet is taking the suggestion to have higher tier Fractal weapons that really will serve as elite skins for people to “Ooh” and “Aah” over, this is why they’re adding the Fractal legendary backpack, and so forth. The Fractal skins we have now will carry some small prestige weight, but will be nothing by comparison to the new stuff. That’s the whole point.

Enko.6123:

Uh sure. I’ll send Wethospu a message.

Only if you’re interested. I only mentioned your name because I figured you could ask someone from your guild if they were interested. There’s certainly no requirement for it.

It’s not meta at all, it was just used by the Abjured during their win in Cologne. Metabattle users decided that one team using it to win the WTS means it’s a frequently used build lots of players should use, and thus named it meta.

This is a great summary post, thank you for this. I will remark that a lot of the feelings you posted I would agree with in the context of PvP and WvW, but not necessarily in PvE. (NCSY is garbage in PvE, for instance) That said, I’ll definitely be incorporating this thread into my report that I’ll send sometime this week.

Okay that’s good clarification. I wasn’t quite sure from the GDoc outcomes what that exactly meant. That would mean that our current guild representatives are:

spoj – [rT]
Saix – [DnT]
Deathly – [qT]
Jerem – [SC]
Fennec – [vC]
Zui – [DnT]

…with two not belonging to or representing any of the voting guilds:

Rising Dusk
Wethospu

This means that either Zui or Saix will need to step down as an approver, seeing as that’s the only case where two or more of a given voting guild are listed as approvers. Also, it would still be cool to have someone from [LOD] approving… Enko?

The results of the meeting seem to indicate that the only people who can approve records are the collection of all voting guild representatives, 1 per voting guild. Does that mean the rest of the approvers will have their rights revoked since they do not represent any current voting guilds?

As far as I can tell, this means our approver list should be:

spoj – [rT]
Saix – [DnT]
Deathly – [qT]
Jerem – [SC]

I do not believe anyone from [vC], [HeX], or [LOD] is a current approver, so they would need to find someone willing. Does that sound right to everyone?

Therodin.2970:

…which is just one pristine.

…and the chance for ascended gear, fractal skins, etc.

Your feedback will be included in my report, along with that from the other thread. No worries there. That said, don’t expect responses here.

My only statement here is not to assume that swamp will be the easiest in the new system. It’s possible the easiest might be swamp for one of them, molten duo for another, and like aquatic for another.

phys.7689:

He said youd choose from a pool of scales.
So if the pool is out of 4 fractals you will be doing the easiest fractals each day.

Since there are onlly like 12? Fractals that means by and large you will end up doing the same 3 or 4 fractals over and over. People will never select the harder ones because there will almost always be one of the easiest 4 in a pool

There was no mention of a “pool of scales”. My understanding is that it will be like “Daily Fractal Scale 57” and you would do 57, whatever it is, or not get it.

Therodin.2970:

But if that rotating achievement only gives you something like a pristine or a vial of mist essence or even if it gives you something good but it rotates to like a 24 level fractal, there is no way that doing a 24 will give you better rewards than doing a 100. At the very least it shouldn’t. So what im worried about is that the award for the rotating achievement is ok but that people will only deviate to do it if its higher than 80 or so.

I agree, the rewards must be compelling. I also don’t expect something so low as to not have an instability at all would get chosen for this daily scale. This is a good question I’ll ask them in my report.

phys.7689:

They said you can pick from a grouping of fractals. This means always the same boss always the same easy and always the same mid level.

Only for those particular dailies. The extra special daily will always be a different fractal scale every day, creating diversity because you’ll want to get that extra special daily reward every day.

phys.7689:

Because they instabilities are designed like the new system instead of the old system.

They perfectly illustrate why the new system will have zero diversity just like people doing instabilities.

Except now every facet of it will be like that

Exactly, but see my previous post. I’ll even quote the relevant part from the blog post:

“There also will be a new daily recommended fractal achievement that will rotate to different scales each day, giving you a focal scale to find other players looking to organize for a group.”

This means that you’ll have daily rewards for the “tiers”, but also a specific daily for a specific scale that you’ll want to do for “best rewards” that day. This scale will change daily, and so you’ll get diversity.

phys.7689:

Actually you are wrong. The previous fractal setup had no guaranteed best answer except for picking swamp

If it’s true that I’m wrong, then why was Fractal level 39 never done, but everyone always does 40 instead?

EDIT:

dutchiez.7502:

Right, but as it is right now, after swamp there are still 3 random fractals you have to complete which are different every time.

With the new system, if there is one scale that is always the absolute best for rewards, people will only ever run that scale, and since every scale now always has the same island, we would be running the same fractal forever.

There has to be some mechanic that randomizes reward or something to keep this from happening.

No, I totally agree with you need something to encourage playing different fractals. I think they talked about dailies being linked to specific levels, and these dailies would offer a chance for fractal skins and ascended chests. In this regard, every day they can have a different tier for that fractal daily, and that would encourage people to get “best rewards” by moving to different tiers.

Note that this daily I’m talking about is different from the daily tier rewards they’re also talking about.

dutchiez.7502:

So instead of farming Swamp forever, we will farm Cliffside forever?

If all you care about is rewards, there will always be one option that is more lucrative than all others from a time cost/reward perspective.

NikeEU.7690:

Literally the only barrier is how much practice you’re willing to put in.

I just want to put it out there that this is not entirely true. There is at least one other barrier, and that’s the stress of a tournament setting. It is extremely stressful to join a tournament that people watch, and this is magnified if you’re an introvert in general, regardless of your skill level in the game and what kind of content you want for it.

What you, personally, do has no effect on what is canon. That’s just how it is in every game.

Iris Ng.9845:

Bounty: Giganticus Lupicus
Gambit: At least one member has to be level 5, active and not dead during the whole fight.
Ban: Spoj is not allowed to participate ‘cause he won it and may win it again :’(

This is a really fun idea too, but the only problem is how to reward it. While it would be fun to just do, it’s not going to encourage randoms to try it unless there’s some tangible reward. It would be fun to have a “level 2 player team doing a level 1 fractal” and have the people who do it fastest “win”.

Iris Ng.9845:

Just curious, did you play PugQuest as a team or as Free Agents. The difference of playing quality between premade teams and free-agent teams is like Heaven and Earth. Nick has been criticized quite a bit for his policy of making 4 decent ESL-quality pug and 12 crappy pugs just to raise the viewing quality of the stream. But he has the point!!! No one would want to watch mediocre teams fighting each other and the good player has to suffer for he couldn’t carry his whole team. If we were to do PugQuest format, this issue really needs to be addressed.

Also, you can only milk gems from ANet if the tournament has more than 8 teams actually playing :’(

The number of times I played I pugged and got pretty good teams because the PugQuest admins seeded me really low compared to my skill. I frequently ended up with Wakkay or Phant or Gengar or whatever and wrecked premade teams with our pugs. I do agree that it should be all free agents and no premades because premades are generally better than crappy pug teams, but many times a good pug team would floor those premades anyway.

I think there are team limitations for gem cards, though, yeah. They don’t want to feel like they’re just handing out gem cards for participation. ;-;

Aradox.6140:

Why don’t you just let each player apply individually and then randomly make teams out of 5 players, that have one month to come up with their own tactic for one path.
In the end all the “big names” are split up on smaller groups and people don’t have to be shy anymore.

This sounds good!

This is a brilliant initiative. I have always been wholly supportive of the tournaments, and want nothing more than to see this community have fun “activities” to do that Anet promotes. I guarantee, if you can’t do it yourself already, that I can get you gem cards for weekly tournaments. I’m sure with Nike’s involvement that isn’t a problem, but at a minimum a gem card is worth like 200+g right now so that’s probably the best possible reward system you’re going to get. I’ve pushed for more, but we can’t have nice things for, you know, reasons.

I really would enjoy the monthly path idea, and would offer my services to any NA guild who wanted to participate in them as a “free agent” (lol). I’m good, I swear! I think that would be the most likely to get people involved who tend to be “camera-shy” (this is a real thing), as they could just work in private with a group to do it. I also think a month is a reasonable time frame for things like this. Weekly tournaments are stressful (I played in/won a couple of the PugQuest ones) and would do better by being spread out more if that format is chosen.

That said, participation is hard and savacli.8172 raises among the best points presented thus far: why should pubs participate when guilds are SO MUCH BETTER? This is the same exact problem monthly WTS has with its dwindling group count, it can’t motivate people to compete with the big names because the big names are so much better than they are. This is why PugQuest received a huge participation list; there were rewards and people could not only feel like they had a chance but also participate alongside the celebrity players.

I’m sort of all over the place here, but I’m just trying to draw attention to what demonstrably works and hopefully from there we can spitball a way to merge it all together into something meaningful for the community.

Zenith.7301:

Oooooh~ Another reveal?

Heh, sorry, I don’t speak for ANet, I just wanted to make sure I had the Tempest’s report out before I had to start working on another report for the next reveal. Since it doesn’t appear at this point there will be a teaser, I may have more time than I anticipated to finish the Tempest report.

This sounds like something that would get me to actually use this heal skill. It’s sad that, even traited, a nerfed and untraited Consume Conditions is better than WoB.

Fixing a forum bug and noting that I’m caught up on this thread. I plan to get my report out to ANet before the reveal this week.

I want everyone to know that I am stalking this thread like a hawk. Your feedback, both positive and negative, will be read and compiled into my report that will go directly to the ANet balance team for all game formats.

Overloads:“http://i.imgur.com/vQpO8Qr.jpg”
Warhorn:“http://i.imgur.com/QSiy4Qn.jpg”
Shouts:“http://i.imgur.com/DINheC5.jpg”
Traits:“http://i.imgur.com/3fx3wzX.jpg”

For my first impressions, I’ll have to quote someone else:

FrownyClown.8402:

based on the ready up, tempest is bad.

My thoughts follow.

• The first big problem is that Warhorn literally offers nothing over Focus or Dagger. Arguably, both of the current offhands have greater team support through more blast finishers and utility, whereas Warhorn just has line spells that will be ineffective after they fly past enemies. The only good skill it has, truly, is Heat Sync, and even that is unnecessary when boons are so easy to get otherwise with decent team compositions. For a support weapon, it even lacks such basic support functionality as projectile absorb or condition removal.
• Overloads are DPS losses, apply small effects, and really don’t have the oomph to make up for the cast time they have. They will see zero use in PvE.
• Shouts apply auras, which are useless, and have other functionalities which are trivial at best, easily replicated by weapon skills, and have long cooldowns.
• There isn’t a single damage modifier in the traits list.

I really think they dropped the ball on this trait line, but I’d like to hear what everyone else thinks before I send a report to ANet on the subject. Any opinions are welcome, in favor of or against the elite specialization.

Apolo.5942:

Really with the kittened up balance we have now is hard to convince pvper to do pvp, what makes you think you would have better luck with pvers?.

PvE players tend to be more motivated by rewards than by good matches, which is what PvP players tend to favor.

Liewec.2896:

its good to see that most of us agree that PVEers should keep their unique rewards, shame PVEers don’t share our mentality, you’ll see a request for our Tribal Armour every dam day in the general forums!

If you made it only available via a PvP reward track, PvE players would still be happy and would play PvP a lot more just to get it. P.S. Even current-day PvP players want the ability to get Tribal armor, since not everyone played PvP religiously way back when.

Anyway, to the OP: No, you should not get a fractal skin from PvP. Ever. If you want a fractal reward track, the only way I’d be okay with it is if the final reward were a pristine fractal relic and not a skin.

Bhawb.7408:

Stances would be cool, something I’d like to see in the future for sure.

Rise! is honestly pretty bad as is from a design standpoint. Forces MM builds to do things MM builds otherwise hate to do (fight multiple targets), and in everything except some cheese condi builds using DN it is just a worse version of Bone Minions.

I do think shouts should be useful outside of big fights though. Which is why Nothing Can Save You is probably the best designed shout, as it is strong 1v1 and then in teamfights scales well without being reliant on multiple enemies.

I agree, shouts should be useful outside of big fights. As for “Rise!”, you’re likely correct, even though I really like the principle of the skill. It should likely be more like the following:

“Rise!”: Strike nearby foes then summon 1 bone minion at your location and 1 more bone minion at the location of each struck foe. All of your minions are healed for some decent amount. 40 second cooldown, instant cast.

You generate a lot of LF in PvE as a Reaper. It will be rather difficult to connect with GS3 with all hits to generate LF in PvP contexts. I genuinely still think that WH5 is going to be necessary to build LF to a starting point before trying to generate it with GS3.

Anyway, I fully expect GS to be viable and meta in PvE for the Necromancer. It will not save the class, nor will it give them Elementalist-level DPS, but it will be better than what we’ve got now.