Guild Wars 2

nearlight.3064:

Yeah I could agree to that compromise as spectral bunkers could get a little out of hand that way. I just hate how necromancers have to put so much traiting into shroud that they lose out on other useful things.

Spectral bunker is a bit exagerated, even celestial signet necro gets a significant boost. Protection uptime from 24% to 45%, life force/cooldown from spectral armor/ last gap boosted with 87.5% and an extra 10 life force every 40 seconds.

Well vital persistance has not always been mandatory. Terrormancers could run master of terror instead but I think that was more because it was a wvw build and starting with 100% life force in every fight was possible in wvw.

Now in this meta I think soul reaping is mandatory for 2 traits: last gasp and vital persistance. Last gasp is easily forgotten but the impact is huge: protection, stun break and life force. Removing one of them to baseline may help but we have to consider what can happen to our builds. The biggest issue with making vital persistance baseline is that necro’s may stay in soul reaping because last gasp is there plus they can take spectral attunement which is a huge sustain buff since especially since spectral armor isquite popluar as well.

So I suggest making vital persistance partially baseline. So we degenerate at a rate of 3%/second and vital persistance reduces it further to 2. Cooldown reduction is also boosted to 20% to make trait budgetting fit.

Corrupting one boon every 3 seconds is really beyond what is acceptable for a autoattack even ripping one would be over the top. Right now necromancer lacks a ranged power option something reaper even more pronounces. So I suggest:

Auto Attack:
Rending Claws: 1/2 cast time: Damages and causes vulnerability. (needs a damage boost compared to now).
Tearing claws: 1/2 cast time: Damages and causes vulnerability.
Corrupted Claws: 3/4 cast time: High(er) damage and cripple.
Ghastly Claws: High damage, last hit applies 2 seconds of chill (not sure about this one) and a Combo whirl finisher
Unholy Feast: change cripple to ~1,5 seconds of immobilize and retaliation to swiftness.
Unholy Fervor: change tto deal 10% more damge to vulnerable foes. Axe skills get 20 second cooldown reduction .
Spiteful Spirit: no icd.
The main point is to make the weapon a kitting tool at mid range. 900 range might be necesairy but with all the soft cc I doubt it.

Brando.1374:

Infect.2738:

Brando.1374:

Tim.6450:

nearlight.3064:

Your argument is wrong. The condi damage stat powers up the damage from transffered conditions,

This one is wrong.

How so?
From what I know whatever condition a necro transfers to another player uses that necromancer condition damage.

Funny enough, transfers use the original owner’s stats. That’s why its possible to kill things like engi’s with their own condition damage even though you could be running soldier. Its quite backwards.

And while cele necro isn’t bad, i don’t think its the strongest build still.

but then what would be the point of sending back conditions from power builds as they dont use the necro’s condi damage?

Chill,cripple,weakness, blind.

spoj.9672:

I think most people are in agreement Reaper is too slow and does too little damage. Greatsword is unimpressive. Shouts are also rather uninspired especially against fewer foes. RS is really fun and pretty close to being good. It just needs some numbers tweaks but feel wise its there.

Heres the feedback i wrote and passed along through Miku to the devs if anyones interested.
http://pastebin.com/az4WCN6r

What about the minors?

nearlight.3064:

Your argument is wrong. The condi damage stat powers up the damage from transffered conditions,

This one is wrong.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

New idea for Shivers Of Dread:

Inflict Chill (2s) when you inflict Fear. Fear nearby foes when you break stun.

The first half is exactly the same as it is now. The second half is to not only give us another good source of Fear (and thus Chill), but also references the fact that, when you finally get a monster disabled or contained, the last thing you want to see is it shrug it off.

I’m not sure about it being aoe (if the source can be traced back, it could be only the source) but the idea is certainly interesting.

Elbritil.3817:

Lets start a petition to anet form power/condi/ferocity stat comb

Why? Reaper with decimating defense and death perception has almost no condition application.

It was a bit strange when the chill applied only after 3~4 seconds but for the rest the effect was very nice, it had much synergy with my might/vuln build. I found it better then CttB.

TheLastNobody.8319:

Indeed. They overdid it with the chill nerfs, I know Robert said that they wanted to make it so it wasn’t so easy to have constant chill uptime, but the only way that can happen is if you go all in, even before hand. The movement changes need to be reverted (there is waaayyyy to much mobility in this game already, and not enough counter mobility), the nerf undone on chilling darkness, chilling victory needs to NOT have that icd, (Again, compare it to warrior forceful great sword, not much difference) and finally increas the scaling on deathly chill.

I know Robert said they wanted to create counter play to how much chill the reaper can put out, but there are already a ton of ways to counterplay or ways to compensate for chill, with nearly every class having a skill that can remove it specifically, or just condition removal in general, along with traits like Dogged March. Combined with the fact that GS has no leaps of its own and only a half kitten pull, we need chill to work as advertised. Right now it’s hardly even an inconvenience.

If a person wants to engage us without having taken the necessary precautions, then they should be punished for it.

+1

I’m not sure if summoning up to 5 minions with one skill is going to work since the minions attack the target of the master.So the minion(s) can’t have a significant effect or the enemy is overwhelmed by sheer numbers. On top of that each minion is affected by all traits so they can’t persist too long. If you want to maintain the minion aspect while being a shout, I suggest that rise is a simple minion summoning skill with a shout as an active which uses your duration/traits/runes.

The minion I suggest is an undead raven which would become a cleaving melee minion. The active would be:
“You won’t escape” cast time 0 cooldown 30 seconds
Summon an ice patch on every foe hit:
damage on hit: 500~700
chill per pulse: 0.5 seconds
pulses: 4
duration 3 seconds.
radius:180~240
combo field: ice.
The cast time may be instant but the raven will do the cast instead of 1 second. The chill per pulse may be a bit low but the point is for the fields to either overlap and applying a lot of chill or be spread and leaving little space to manouvre.
I believe this will have some synergie with both reaper and minion master since the minion master is a control spec first with a lack of chill.

I think reaper needs back to the drawing board. They tried making a slow melee specialisation. To counter kiting they promised that chill would be the solution but they give reaper barely any chill because chill is “too strong”. The trait that applies the most chill for necromancer? It’s in curses. The shout with most chill application in comparison to it’s cooldown? “flash freeze” the elementalists one. Our elite? Reaper of grenth applies an equal amount of chill for the cooldown and does not have a cast time of 2 seconds. So I think they have to go back to drawing board to either make less relient on chill or improve chill application.

Raziel.8072:

Anything that dies by being killed (not expiring from health degen or sacrificed) gives LF. So unless there were 5 deaths nearby each time I did it by some happy chance of luck, yes you will get LF when they are killed.

Try letting some bone minions die (not exploding), you won’t get any life force.

Raziel.8072:

• rise! I would like to say first and foremost, I do not hate this skill. Not in a pve setting anyway. It has no place in a competitive one of course, but in pve it has uses believe it or not. Consider this: the more you hit, the more horrors you make right? Well each one of those horrors actually does reasonably good bleed damage and out of all the minions they suffer less from bugged AI because they were meant to be hyper-aggressive since they have short lives. Another thing to consider: each one dies and gives you LF. I’ve used the little rats to replenish LF before by summoning them in heavy aoe so they die to get LF. If you run GS you know LF generation is a big issue for it and this actually helps. I would prefer to see some other type minion or a new minion, but what we have now isn’t unusable in pve. It will never see the light of day in pvp, and in wvw you’d never want to give up that slot for it.

jagged horrors doesn’t give life force.

ronpierce.2760:

Tim.6450:

Chilling Darkness: This trait now activates on all targets that are blinded by a single area-of-effect blinding strike before it goes on cooldown.

That being said I would prefer if this trait with shiver of dread or at least swapped places since the necromancer has inherently more fears while reaper has more blinds.

That’s what I said. They should merge them, allowing either blind or fear to cause a 2 second chill, 4 sec icd per target. This would be perfect as long as they don’t balance around 100% ideal world logic like they tend to do. As it stands, if you don’t run staff, that trait is like a 2 second chill every 20 seconds IF you use the flip skill in Reapers shroud. It’s very very bad. But of course, that’s what happens when you make a specialization ALL about one thing that you don’t want TOO much access to. It ends up being stripped of anything special. Reaper needs to be release of this chill stigma and five them something more than just chill gimmicks that get ruined by massive condi removal.

I actually prefer merging the traits as they are now(so fear still have no icd and blind an icd of 5 seconds). I hope it can make the trait a bit more controllable since our fear application can be a bit unpredictable (on stun, rune, corrupted, mark walking). For reaper it mould mean they can follow up their terrify with death’s charge without losing any proc.

Chilling Darkness: This trait now activates on all targets that are blinded by a single area-of-effect blinding strike before it goes on cooldown.

That being said I would prefer if this trait with shiver of dread or at least swapped places since the necromancer has inherently more fears while reaper has more blinds.

Bhawb.7408:

Reaper fixed a lot of our synergy issues, Shroud and GS are designed well with finishers/fields to play with each other, and I even think a lot of the traits play really well with the rest of our trait system, but it didn’t fix other issues like our overall bad weapon sets and lack of active defenses.

I both aggree and disaggree with this reaper fixed a lot of synergy issues with the core profession at the cost of having little synergy with itself. The easiest way to describe this is with rise! rise has synergy with blood and death magic but the only synergy it has with reaper is the fact that it is a shout. Another example is Shivers of Dread the only synergy this has with reaper is with terrify and that costs u-your stability uptime.

Bhawb.7408:

runeblade.7514:

A 40 second condi removal and a stunbreak can make the 120 second cooldown elite useless.

In a 5 man teamfight five condi removals and five stunbreaks could be used to remove half the effects of one skill. That is absolutely a trade I’ll take.

Or your elite could be countered by one traited tidal surge or one blind.

Greatsword

Auto attack chain
increase damage and/or speed since the damage is a bit lackluster for such slow weapon. The 2nd hit should give 5% life force per hit and the 3rd skill needs an increase in chill duration. If the auto attack is still slow it should cover the full chain.

Gravedigger
Increase cooldown reduction back to 100% (the 80% makes it a bit too clunky) and increase damage. Spamming this should surpass dagger dps by at least 20% non traited.

Death Spiral
At the moment it hits like a noodle even with zerker. So it needs more damage.

Nightfall
seems fine for me.

Reaper’s Grasp
It functions very awkwardly right now. Either make it ground targeted cone or turn it towards the target.

So what do you think.

Shroud skills

Auto attack chain
Life reap life force generation is just weak, even with 5 foes does dagger outclass this in terms of life force regen. So turn it back to 2%.
I also think that the damage could usa a little boost to equal that of dagger #1 while wearing a dagger.

Death’s Charge
The necrocopter is a bit unreliable and I find the radius of the blast a bit to big for my taste. So make it function like warrior leap (stops at the target) and reduce the radius of the blast a bit.

Infusing Terror
seems fine to me

Soul Spiral
seems fine to me.

Executioner’s Scythe
seems fine to me. Though it seems to be bugged.

Shouts

Your Soul Is Mine
It’s a bit lackluster for a healing skill.Give an extra siphon bonus on hit of 500 health or increase life force to 8%.

You Are All Weaklings
Seems fine by me.

Nothing Can Save You
I really wish this one was instant, just to get some surprise factor. Maybe remove vulnerability application.

Rise
Ok you want to have a minion skill in the reaper but it has to be a shout. So how about making the minion the medium of your voice? So in othere words you summon one minion but its command is a shout affected by your stats/traits/sigils.
The minion I suggest is an undead raven which would become a cleaving melee minion. The active would be:
“You won’t escape” cast time 0 cooldown 30 seconds
Summon an ice patch on every foe hit:
damage on hit: 500~700 with soldiers on light armor
chill per pulse: 0.5 seconds
pulses: 4
duration 3 seconds.
radius:180~240
combo field: ice.

The cast time may be instant but the raven will do the cast instead of 1 second. The chill per pulse may be a bit low but the point is for the fields to either overlap and applying a lot of chill or be spread and leaving little space to manouvre.
I believe this will have some synergie with both reaper and minion master since the minion master is a control spec first with a lack of chill.

Suffer
Replace the chill with 1 second of fear. When I heard that we are getting I thought that we could get some fear on our shouts like fear me. I was therefore dissapointed when no shouts had any fear.
So call me a bit biased but I really think that suffer could use some fear.

Chilled To The Bone
If you want to make this to work reduce the cast time 1 second and maybe reduce the cooldown to 90~100 seconds.

Note of the changes
While it seems that the shouts have a lot of chill application it has to be said that you have to sacrifice chilling nova to get augary of death which reduces your chill application which compensates.

After having tested Reaper a bit more. I think I can give a bit more detailed feedback on the reaper and how to modify it.

While the reaper has some elements I particulary like I also feel that some parts are missing or are lackluster.
My changes hope to address these issues with the focus on chill and defense.

Traits

Shivers of Dread
This trait feels at the moment a bit too weak since it requires a heavy focus on fear. Esepecially since terrify resets the cooldown of your stability skill making the usage of fear a bit unattractive. This results in the reaper having not that much fear base.
I suggest merging chilling darkness with this. The base necro has not that much blind application to warrant such icd but the reaper has. So either chilling darkness is op for reaper or too weak for base necromancer.
Important the icd does not apply on the chill on fear part since fear requires some investment. A side effect of this is that both reaper shroud and greatsword have 2 skills that could apply chill , which seems to fit a chill specialisation fine.

Cold Shoulder
The idea is sound bit the numbers are not. The chill duration has to go back to 20% and the damage reduction could use a little boost of 5% but I’m not sure of this.

Augory of death
A lot of risk for a simple cooldown reduction, not only do you have to be surrounded by 5 enemies which is semi-suicide, you have to hit them all in a game about active defense.
So I suggest the following formula:
15% base + 3% for every hit.
Thiis requires hitting 2 enemies to reach the 20% sweet spot which either equires great timing or more foes.

Chilling nova
The icd is a bit high for a chill trait that requires chill. So either remove the chill requirement or reduce the icd by at least 5.

Relentless Pursuit
Seems fine to me.

Soul Eater
Greatsword seems to be to slow for siphoning and in terms of cleaving warhorn clearly overshadows greatsword. The cooldown reduction trait seems a bit too reliant on gravedigger.
My goal is to make greatsword the dps weapon for the reaper/necromancer so a simple cooldown reduction of 20% and a damage boost of 10% on greatsword skill seems fine.

Chilling Victory
A icd of 1 second for 1% life force seems a bit excessive since it has alredy the requirement of hitting a chilled foe(s). I suggest either doubling the life force or halving the icd preferably the icd.

Decimate Defenses
Seems fine.

Blighter’s boon
Seems fine to me.

Deathly Chill
Damage is just too low for it to make any use. I suggest 2/3 of terror for both parts (meaning above 50%: damage of terror when the foe has no other conditions, under 50%: damage of terror when the foe has other conditions).

Reapers onslaught
Seems bugged at the moment , make sure necrocopter is unnafected by the attack speed boost.

Zenith.7301:

Is nobody going to comment the total lack of support for DPS PvE traits? The greatsword as well as dagger gain very little from the adept and grandmaster traitlines.

The minors are all terrible for PvE. You don’t want to tank hits in PvE so could shoulder is bad….

Shivers of Dread is terrible. ABSOLUTELY TERRIBLE FOR PVE. You don’t want to fear in PvE ever, as it spreads the mob stack and lessens your group’s cleave/aoe damage.

And quite honestly, a chill centric kit is of little use to PvE, where chill is useless because bosses pose the most dangers with their autoattacks, whose recharges is little, ad there are very few skills to be affected by chill.

Well vulnerability for chilling a foe (spite trait) sounds nice makes reaper 5 then 4 a nice vulnerability combo.

Malchior.1928:

Deaths charge through our dark fields gives us a useless combo. :/ who needs one blind when the skill grants are blind.

well, it helps on break bars.

spoj.9672:

I was talking about against a test dummy in HotM lol.

And RS auto attack is about 2.3-2.4 seconds repeatable. total coefficient per second is just over 1.1. Which is really really weak. Its only very slightly stronger than GS auto attack. These numbers are far far below what classic DS and dagger has.

A shame I expected dagger #1 dps or higher but thank you for the info.

aggreed the animations look nice.

spoj.9672:

From a PvE perspective its all bad. The numbers are still pathetic. Especially with the atrocious cast times. Im glad aftercasts arent a major problem as well though (1 redeeming gold star for that). I honestly cant see myself dropping a trait line for this right now. We are better off staying with dagger and lich form and keeping blood magic.

But i just didnt enjoy GS at all. Its so slow and slugglish it feels as if im lagging 100% of the time (im not). The damage numbers are still very very weak. Whats the point in playing something so slow that its unfun but it doesnt even pack a real punch?

RS is nice and fluid and fast. But RS 2 is kind okittenward with its functionality. Id really like to be able to actually control where i end up. So making it lock to a target if you have one would be the best solution. It should still work as it does currently when used without a target though (think of warrior sword 2). RS auto-attack is maybe on the weak side damage wise. And lifeforce feels like its draining too fast even when auto-attacking only and using vital persistence (is this a bug?).

Heres the coefficients of all skills. As you can see they havent actually been changed since initial speculative calculations from the stream. Which means our early feedback that damage would be too low was ignored. And it turned out to be true.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aI9lEpPZLiNVf7ibEeVzV1h_-aWWt-JEGW0suFgaewM/edit?usp=sharing

Life reap is only 1% which is too low. Could you also know the exect time of the full #1 chain?

From a pve perspective
-greatsword is bad and confusing.
-reaper shroud is amazing
- RS#1 damage is too low I expected at least dagger #1 at base.
-RS #2 might function better if it were like leap but it is not that important.
-Reaper master minor trait is weak (especially since using terrify recharges cooldown).
-chilling nova is too weak, icd at least to 10
-shouts don’t have a reason to get on my utility bar
-chilling force is a bit on the weaker side , reduce interval time
-deathly chill is weak needs more damage.
-great vulnerability stacking
-life reap life force regen is too low.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Though it’s not that bad for power builds. At 600-1200, it has the same base damage as Life Blast, and though it doesn’t scale off power as well (.66 vs 1.0), it does have native piercing and refills your Life Force rather than draining it. It’s not amazing, but it’s decent enough so that I don’t feel bad spending some time autoattacking if I want to conserve LF and can’t get in melee range.

Since when did power skills have base damage?

Jekkt.6045:

reaper looked insanely strong on stream just now, the only concern i had was the life force regen of gs, it was really bad.

He practically ran away the whole time.

Grouch hasn’t mastered reaper shroud it seems, he gets rekt all the time.

Good news people we can moan again, reaper got nerfed before it began.

Chilling nova nerfed into oblivion, chilling force icd per foe of 1 second → nerfed too but not too bad.

runeblade.7514:

Warrior should get fast hands as baseline.

This way, warriors won’t have to invest in both Discipline and Defense to remain viable. They can just only invest in defense and have two traits spot free.

I’m not a fan of fast hands being made baseline since it does not affect warrior skills/mechanics but a more general mechanic.

I may consider making (parts of) some engineer traits regarding non-kit utilities baseline since they are forced to have at least 1/2 kits.

meow one twenty.4376:

“Additional skills” doesn’t include taking away all existing skills. It’s a transform and the proof of that is that it can overwrite already existing transforms, something only a transform can do. Anyone can call it whatever they please but its function is that of a transform.

If they wanted it to be something different it should have been an F1-F6 mechanic, F1 Shroud activation and F2-F6 for skills.

Death shroud is not a transform since the cooldown is completely different (cooldown doesn’t start at entering) and it doesn’t destroy minions.

It seems that this is all the core profession will get.

TheLastNobody.8319:

… and I wouldn’t hold it pass ANEt to make it so that if we exit reaper shroud during infusing terror, we stop getting stability.

I thought that was said during the stream and that they were debating to remove the stability all together.

Spider.3109:

Some tiny ideas about how fractal rewards should be in my oppinion.

1. I don’t like the fact that you should be able to buy a fractal weapon of your choice. Most of the people only look for 1 skin (for instance sword) and fractals will loose a lot of its charm if you can just buy it for 50 fractal relicts once you’re lvl 50. This can be
compared to the achievement rewards:

You can probably enjoy the first 2 weapons you choose, but after the 20th chest you just choose an ugly skin, because you have to in order to get the chest. Also, there’s absolutely no prestige in this. Compare it to the zenith skins. What does it mean if someone has a Zenith-Greatsword. Eyaxtly: that he somehow managed to get 1000 achievement points.

To prevent this, one could have either have a set order in which skins drop (in fractals and from this chest), or have it randomized. But I think as soon as you own a weapon, its drop chance should be set to 0, while the total chance for a skin should stay constant.

A specific order is not good let’s say you want to have a mace and it is the last weapon so you have to gather every weapon that’s a huge effort for just one weapon skin. Random is equally bad because it can end the same way as my previous example.

Spider.3109:

2. Ring drop chance should be at 0% after frac 50. Even if ascended salvaging gets added to the game. Ring drop chance is atm around 50% depending on level and therefor it will always be a minor drop (i mean a lot of people are already hoarding them because of the announcement, the reward for this cannot be super OP). And everyone knows it getting an (uninfused) ring on frac 50 is just depressing.

I disagree , rings are usefull it’s just that the stats are most of the time useless. So maybe instead of a ring you get a jewelry/ring box which allows you to choose stats.

Spider.3109:

3. The golden fractal skins should be really, really seldom. The world of Tyria doesn’t need a second Eternity skin…

No, the rng disaster all over.

Spider.3109:

4. Wow those changes sound awesom!

Wow, much ego.

Bhawb.7408:

Pretty sure dagger 1 isn’t even the highest DPS AA in the game

You’re right lightning whip has higher dps and rev sword at the moment seems to have higher dps.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Tim.6450:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Just add homing ,increase its velocity and pull fixes. The skill really doesn’t need anything else. Projectile finisher would be fun, but not necessary.

fixed it for you.

I really haven’t had much in the way of issues with the pull failing. If I tried to yank someone over a small boulder, sure, but otherwise, no.

Remember NPC’s can’t fall.

Doesn’t the pull still launches the opponent in the sky at occasions?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Just add homing ,increase its velocity and pull fixes. The skill really doesn’t need anything else. Projectile finisher would be fun, but not necessary.

fixed it for you.

Doesn’t the clipping bother you?

I consider chill rather weak. It’s not that the effect is weak but it has so much counterplay and application is rather low. Immobilize has the advantage of needing a short amount to be and cripple has high amount of application.

ty all for your answers it will be helpfull.

With the prospect of the new fractal system I want to prepare myself by getting myself lvl 50. But now I reached lvl 31 so I have to consider Mistlock Instability. So I’m questioning which lvls are done by pugs and which not and how the Mistlock Instability is negated/migitated (I intend to play warrior).

On a side note at which points in fractals is full ascended practically obligated (since I haven’t a full set for my warrior yet)?

Zenith.7301:

zapv.8051:

Shiki.7148:

Zenith.7301:

A little damage boost? Axe autoattack needs at least 900 range and close to a 50% damage increase.

Also remove retal from it, retal is useless as a boon, especially in PvE. Give it something useful like vigor or fury per opponent hit.

Axe AA needs to be lower DPS than Dagger though. Even if it doesn’t cleave , on 900 range there should be a DPS difference. However, the burst skill on Axe (#2) needs to be a lot harder hitting instead.

I’m pretty sure even with a 50% dps boost axe auto would still be behind dagger auto.

It’s a ranged weapon, it’s to be expected.

The point is to bring it in line with other ranged weapons, not melee weapons. The baseline should be Long Range Shot/Fireball for ranged weapon damage autoattacks.

Anet just sucks at balancing autoattacks for classes, and classes like ranger/necro/mesmer suffer for it.

Increasing damage with 50% would actually make it a bit stronger (16,6666%) then long range shot at max range which I would considering long range shot has a bigger range. Also necro dagger is 80% stronger in terms of damage then axe at the moment so 50% increase would make dagger still 20% stronger.

Nyth.3492:

I’m not convinced that slower hits should automatically mean you need to do more dps, especially not from a weapon that hits 3-5 targets with all its attacks PLUS having executes that can bring some serious burst sub-50%.

That’s the point it doesn’t. reaper gravedigger spam (meaning using nothing but gravedigger all the time) is weaker then dagger 1 spam.

ronpierce.2760:

I still want Brain Freeze trait somewhere accessible that makes chilling an enemy inflict confusion or torment :P

+1

the point does stand though. Fractals may not be exploitable or there is no point in making prestige armor.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

Am i misreading this or is the only way to get a legendary backpack is through fractals?

The challenges are inside and outside the fractals. Maybe you have to do only a portion of the challenges. It is hard to say.