Guild Wars 2

The markets for the new legendary weapons will be what is really interesting to see. I don’t think anyone will care about the old legendary weapons once you can get the new account bound ones.

Honestly the whole "meta’ thing is pointless until raids come out.

Who cares if you can steamroll 3 year old content that was abandoned over 2 years ago? Anet could care less about dungeons, and you should to.

There is no meta until we see raids. Once optimal raid comps are figured out then we will have a better idea of what is “meta”. Ele’s could be completely useless in raids if the bosses constantly move and deal AOE consistent damage or if you need to break into small teams where you can’t just stack.

I do feel fairly confident in saying that PS warriors will still be wanted. 1000 power, 20% crit and ferocity are hard to pass up no matter what the situation.

Here is the build/traits/runes that I use currently:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNArYWjc0QzNWdDe3A7NWKGs4e4QMJS1EmC3qoAwAIBA-TByCABAcIAU4EAc8TAALlfXq+zM7Pon+gxUCGA4AY36W3dDM+4jP+4j3u7u7u7ubpAgZZF-e

This is pretty much the most condition damage a necro can currently do. I use rabid gear since scepter and staff have such pitiful direct damage that the loss in toughness is basically never worth the extra 50dps you get from taking sinister gear. With reaper shroud it may be more beneficial to use sinister gear, but I am not sure yet, we will see how hard raids are.

You can swap out reaper for blood magic if you aren’t buying HoT or want more support and less conditions.

This build lets you keep up high poison, bleed and chill damage, with the occasional burn burst. It also has very high weakness and chill uptime for debuffing.

This is my raid build, it is subpar for dungeons because the wind up time for the damage is too long for current content.

You can forgo the infusions, they cost me about 500g in total but I like having the maximum possible condition damage.

Lakshmi.5941:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Metalman.6345:

Noone will get rich from these precursors, they are account bound.

Not what I meant. But that’s ok, i’d rather be rich than explain.

I’ll be grinding COF1 75x upon release! Should take me about 12 hours.

He might mean controlling the market on scraps of gossamer, or whatever materials the new legendary recipes might require. Although he could mean charging for “Dancing with Queen Jenna” — who knows?

It’ll be interesting to see how market-dependent the new recipes will be. The alternative is task-based, or based on materials you can acquire via map rewards or via the new Supply-Line Management mastery.

If ArenaNet are listening, I hope you’ll make it the latter. Many of us who don’t have legendaries yet are in that spot because we don’t (or won’t) play the game to support the market fetish of TP flippers.

Almost certainly some of the collection will involve tradable items. I suspect MOST of it will be task oriented, but there will always be something that can be traded, and that item or items will skyrocket in price. This has held true for every new shiny thing Anet has introduced and I can’t see them doing a complete 180 on this.

Vayne.8563:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Where do people get so many AP’s? I’ve been playing since launch and have ~11K non-daily AP’s and 6k daily ones.

There aren’t really any non-daily AP’s left for me to get… maybe another 500 or so. but there are people with 12k more AP’s than me… where are they coming from? all from dailies?

Some of them were from Season 1 of the Living Story. Did you get those?

I did miss a couple holiday events, and one of the SAB releases. Probably lost 1K points there I guess.

I’m personally hoping that HoT adds another 15-20k AP’s. I’m thinking raids should give some big achievements, like 50+ point ones for downing each boss.

If HoT adds 15k AP’s that would get people up to ~45k which is a pretty good jump.

Current gear sets that do the same damage as zerker:

1. Bezerker
2. Assassins
3. Sinister
4. Rabid
5. Valkyrie
6. Rampagers
7. Carrion

Gear sets that offer slight difference in damage but are still effective:

8. Knight’s
9. Cavalier’s
10. Dire
11. Celestial

So out of the ~20 gear sets in the game, 7 are optimal for various builds, and 11 are usable for speed clearing all PvE content.

If you move outside of PvE, to WvW and PvP the following gear sets also become optimal for various builds and roles:

12. Cleric
13. Magi
14. Givers
15. Nomad
16. Solider
17. Sentinel
18. Zealot’s

So out of the ~20 possible gear sets, 18 of them are used and viable for different aspects of the game… but yeah 99% of everything uses zerker gear i’m sure…

Metalman.6345:

Noone will get rich from these precursors, they are account bound.

Not what I meant. But that’s ok, i’d rather be rich than explain.

I’ll be grinding COF1 75x upon release! Should take me about 12 hours.

They had masteries disabled completely in tyria. It just went back to a normal experience bar if you left VB.

They don’t want people stockpiling the things you’ll need for precursors before hand. If you want to be very rich, ignore HoT content completely and grind out the precursor masteries in a 24 hour binge run on release.

First person to unlock them gets to be very very rich.

Well after the introduction of raids, and the reveal of the so called “linecasting” it is fairly obvious that IB 4 needs to be nerfed by at least 50%, and the linecasting bug fixed.

I think meteor can stay at its current power if linecasting is removed.

If IB isn’t nerfed before raids are added then raids will be a joke and you might as well not even add them.

Where do people get so many AP’s? I’ve been playing since launch and have ~11K non-daily AP’s and 6k daily ones.

There aren’t really any non-daily AP’s left for me to get… maybe another 500 or so. but there are people with 12k more AP’s than me… where are they coming from? all from dailies?

ExtraCosmic.9082:

Specializations are restrictive enough without insisting each grandmaster only be relevant to one build type. Reaper’s Onslaught seems like a power trait, but combines very effectively with Dhuumfire, for example. Doing something like making Chill also cause poison in addition to damage would keep it a very strong condition trait while also allowing for appeal to other builds who want more access to heal-reducing poison. It can still be a condition trait without further forcing players into set paths. Simply making the trait stronger also doesn’t do anything to solve other issues like lack of condition stacking .

There are certainly hybrid traits, but they need to be carefully balanced. Generally hybrid traits are balanced for one type of build and are then fairly terrible for other types of builds. I think the best solution is actually what you mentioned, let chill apply a different condition on each chill application. Either burn, poison, or torment come to mind as good candidates. one stack of burn for 3s per chill, 2 stacks of torment for 5s per chill, or 1-2 stacks of poison for 5s per chill. Unfortunately since the devs refuse properly balance the game for both PvE and PvP we will probably have to nix burning. It would give us meta quality dps in PvE, but would be stupidly OP in PvP. Which is unfortunate since condition necros could actually be wanted if we could get it in PvE.

Of course they still need to fix the underlying problems with chill, the 5 cap, and the immunity bosses have. Otherwise the trait still won’t work 90% of the time.

Specializations

• Were they fun?
  —-I tried the Reaper and the Bezerker specialization during this test. They were both quite enjoyable, and fun to play.

• Did they Change how you play your profession in a meaningful way?
  —-The reaper I played in a similar way to my necromancer, utilizing a full condition spec, which played pretty similar, with the biggest difference being melee in reaper shroud.
  —-The Bezerker changed my play style significantly. I tried out a hybrid burn/bleed spec, which was quite fun, and different from how I normally played Warrior.

• How were the improvements to the previous Specializations? (Dragon Hunter, Tempest, Chronomancer, Reaper)
  —-I did not play the first beta weekend so I can’t comment on how it was compared to then.

• Feedback on new specializations, as well as any changes to the old
  —-Reaper was a lot of fun, but it’s main mechanic, chill, suffered from significant problems. My grand master build defining trait gave my chill damage, but I quickly learned that chill doesn’t work on bosses. This rendered my build pretty much useless in any big fight, which was very sad. Additionally chill capped at a very low 5 applications which meant I couldn’t keep chill on my target because all my applications were for only 1-3s with very long CD’s. So even though I could apply 15-20 chills, only 5 of them mattered, meaning I couldn’t keep chill on my target reliably as a condition user (Scepter/Dagger & Staff). In group battles this was even worse because other reapers, elementalists or a number of other classes would apply chill as well meaning even on enemies chill did work on, my chills did not work because they were at the “cap”.

Finally the damage on the GM chill trait felt low for a grand master trait. It did less than the master level trait terror.

Creatures

• How is the difficulty of the new hostile mobs, and are they fun and exciting?

The new mobs were much more interesting than previous mobs. They used varied abilities, dodged, evaded and made combat much more engaging than before. My biggest complaint here is that their attacks are not always very visible. All attacks should give you the opportunity to dodge, move out of the way. Some attacks did this very well, but others have no indicator at all except very hard to see nearly invisible arrows, or random damage spikes that as far as I could tell came from nowhere.

World

• With the Opening of two new outposts, we are adding in a bunch of new events. Are they fun?

The event chains were a lot of fun. I wouldn’t change anything about the events themselves. The issue I ran into was the number of events. Day light seemed to last about an hour, yet the event chains only took about 30 minutes to complete. This left the map completely void of anything to do for 30 minutes. There were no extra events, no side events, no repeating chains, just stand by the WP and AFK. Most people logged out or left the map once finishing the chains. There is no reason to stay on the map and no reward for doing so. Even if the event chains are perfect, the content as a while will fail if more events aren’t added.

Mastery System

• How is the progression?
  Progression is good while you are actually progressing, however due to the lack of events there was long stretches of time where I was making no progress at all and ended up just leaving the map.

• How is it using the mastery abilities in the current area?
  Using the masteries are a lot of fun. I managed to get gliding, updrafts, and bouncing mushrooms. The map opens up and becomes a lot more accessable after you have bouncing mushrooms and gliding. Before you unlock those however the map is fairly tedious.

• Is the mastery system providing a meaningful area of progression?

Yes, the progression is meaningful and interesting, and a great way to keep the content exciting as you explore with things you’ve unlocked.

• Do you care about experience and mastery points?

Experience is much harder to come by than mastery points, and as such I didn’t really care about the points. By the end of the test I had nearly 20 mastery points, yet I only managed to get enough experience to use 2 of them. There needs to be more sources of experience as mentioned above. When I was doing events the pace of advancement was good, but once you run out of events the progression just stops.

• Does it provide a good framework to add more masteries in the future?
  Yes

• Do you want to learn as many masteries over time to overcome challenges later in the future?
  Yes!!!

Stronghold PvP

• Feedback on Stronghold itself
  Stronghold is getting better as strategies develop and people become more familiar with it. The biggest problem I have right now is the respawn time. A good team can easily keep you stalled at the keep gate until the end of the map because there just isn’t enough time after killing their team to break down the gate or get into the lord room. The enemy just respawns, zergs the door breakers, killing them nearly instantly then dies again. By the time we get more door breakers near the door the enemy is back and kills them again.

Anchoku.8142:

If chill were changed to a fully-stacking condition, then the impairment may be something like this:
1 chill reduces movement (except mobility skills) by 10% up to a 50% cap and skill ICD by 5% to a 50% cap, except on bosses where it takes a stack of 10 to equal a stack of 1.

Then, every profession gets its chill application skills reviewed.

That’s an extreme solution that will never happen.

There are much easier solutions. change the chill to “frost” and have necromancers apply one stack of “frost” every time they apply chill. This requires no rework of anyone and fixes the stacking problem, the damage problem, the cap problem and the defiance bar problem.

Or just remove the cap from chill. The game worked perfectly fine for 3 years without a chill cap, it was never once brought up as a problem, and it never caused any issues. Then they went and nerfed chill a dozen different ways for no apparent reason.

This is a condition trait, if you are a power user you aren’t supposed to take it, it is not for you. It doesn’t need to be changed to accommodate someone it isn’t meant for. It needs to be changed to be useful for condition specs that want to take it.

Power users should always take either of the power options, and condition users should take either the condition option or the hybrid option.

Deathly chill needs to be made useful for condition users. The break bar sillyness needs to be fixed, and the scaling needs to be improved. Condition necros have access to multiple chills through RS5, RS5+4 combo, Staff 4, dagger 4 blind, boon corruption, blind well, sigils, and runes. Even just staff 4 + RS 5 can keep almost perma chill on the target if they removed the stupid cap.

SO to recap:

1. Fix chill
2. Remove stupid cap
3. increase scaling

= winner trait for condition builds.

Depends on the game mode.

I will be using normal necro for PvP still, but probably reaper for PvE.

Ele will stay ele in all game modes as it currently stands

Warrior i’m still undecided. Probably will stay warrior in PvE since I am a support build. May try out bezerker in PvP, where I previously didn’t bring my warrior at all.

It should be noted that in PvE Deathly chill does not work on champ or above level enemies. Anything with a break bar is immune to chill completely. So it is a complete waste of a trait in PvE.

There is very good synergy with chilling victory and blighters boon. So much so that there is a 150 post thread in the PvP section crying it should be nerfed into the ground.

Since we are necros it is fairly likely that it will be nerfed unfortunately.

Do these things and reaper will be great!

We still have some desirability issues, but at least we’d be usable.

I know there aren’t a lot of conditionmancers anymore but just want to keep this up there so that hopefully we can be viable!

Shiki.7148:

Orpheal.8263:

frayon.3984:

I got a kick out of seeing this. I finished up the stealth gliding tier of the masteries late on the first day and was watching how slowly the exp points were making it climb on the next tier. I checked to see why this was and saw 480k (roughly) done exp wise with 4,191,000 (exactly what I had) left to go. My reaction: burst out laughing. I don’t want this nerfed I loved seeing how much time I would have to put in to getting the second to last tier and don’t want that feeling to go away.

Thank you, Anet, that was amazing to see. Now I know when HoT launches and I choose only get mushroom jumping before I grind out my glider, the feeling of finally getting that tier will be amazing! I decided to hold off trying until HoT released just to savor it when I do get to fly around on my glinder without wasting the endurance bar.

this is nothing at all ,when you get already exp worth of a level up nearly everytime you do a Dungeon run !!!

There is just one slight problem: Youw on’t get a single EXP for the mastery track for anything you do outside of Maguuma. Which is annoying as F. However, Raids could, in theory, gain you one million EXP+ per run. Which would be infuriating but it is possible. I don’T have a problem with the mushroom track though, but i definitly have a problem with the gliding and lore tracks. Because the respective last tiers allow you access to the last slivers of the map and last content…which is kittenpoor design.

Actually you will progress the tyria masteries which if you want to unlock legendaries will be quite important.

Setz.9675:

frayon.3984:

Setz.9675:

You are actualy happy about how slow we get experience for leveling masterys OP? Somehow GRINDING, because that is what it is and to get maxed out masterys is endgame? Is this a kittening hoax? Is this next level sarcasm that is just too high for me to grasp? How the flying kitten did you (and Anet for that matter) fabricate the thought process that grinding experience is somehow endgame and using those skills to add new layers of world exploration is just a fortunate side effect? Because to me, that is the message you (and Anet) is conveying to me right now. If it would take me 50+ hours of straight up FARMING experience to max out JUST 1 MASTERY TRACK and be done with collection maguuma items with said mastery in far less time then it required me to get that one line of maxed out mastery I’d feel devestated. It looks like Anet is artificially prolonging the replay time of HoT and lobotimizing its player base by using ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE GRIND WALLS TO LOCK AWAY CONTENT.

Don’t get me wrong, the elite specs are funs, the maps look pretty darn amazing but doing those meta events 10 times in a row and spending hours a day for a week just to get the last tier of mastery is beyond mental. Also, which lazy person couldn’t make a jungle outfit for lord faren?

We will have more than the meta events to level with come launch of HoT (story and so on) plus we are only seeing pieces of the first map and the night events they said are not the ones they currently have in the game. Yeah, it’s time consuming, but that’t what I have missed about the game. Something that feels grindy so that when you finally get it, it feels great knowing you have made it there.

After I finished my first legendary (twilight) I felt EMPTY, there was no accomplishment, there was no skill, there was no pride only the memories of a garbage tier grind.

Just pointing out, the experience you get everywhere like 186k exp from a dungeon path or 23k exp for a skill point in tyria DOES NOT APPLY to heart of maguuma masterys. Only those boring events and kills grant experience towards that.

And if Anet needs to gate exploration behind grindwalls so people wouldn’t finish within a week or 3 then it is fairly obvious the challenge wasnt high enough and the hard too reach areas to easy to reach.

There are skill points in HoT

Also those will apply to tyria masteries.

That’s also not how MMO’s work. Open world is grindy and repetitive to keep casuals playing. If they run into a challenge where they are making no progress they quit. Instances like raids are for more intense people who like content to be extended by challenges.

Kidel.2057:

What if chill is applied but they don’t get the slowdown on movement and cd? Still the damage however

That would be fine, but it would still suffer the same problem as conditions of the past. It wouldn’t stack with other players chills and would be overwritten and hit the stack cap very quickly.

They spent a lot of time and effort fixing conditions and then immediately introduced a new condition that ignored all their progress… I just don’t understand why.

Shiki.7148:

Silverkey.2078:

Zetsumei.4975:

Anchoku.8142:

chill seems completely ineffectual. the damage added is fine but the actual condition hardly seems to make a difference.

Did they increase the deathly chill damage?

They doubled it

They still should make the trait change chill into sth different, like “frost” , which is like chill except it stacks in intensity and deals damage. That way they could add meaningful damage to chill while having the decreased duration as the downside,

I think the major problem is the fact that chill stacks duration and only stacks 5 times. If they could give us an intensity stacking chill effect then I think the damage would be good (even a little high) and it would solve most of the major problems it currently has.

Aleksander Suburb.4287:

What is about the exp-boost? I would like to level slow the masteries, but if i’m left behind, cause other people using the boost and can finish events in seconds (i. q. with jumping mushrooms) while i have to climb the difficult way up. i will be dissapointed

Only takes about an hour with no boosts and limited events to get bouncing mushrooms and then another hour for gliding so you won’t be left behind for very long if at all.

The more advanced masteries offer some cool stuff and take longer, but those 2 intro ones are the only ones you’ll really need.

Love the masteries so far. They are a lot of fun, and are actually meaningful.

I got the basic gliding and mushrooms and they make getting the further masteries much easier since it is easier to get around.

With bigger zones and more events it should be even better.

The two outpost event chains are really well done and a lot of fun. The problem is what to do after you finish.

After finishing both chains there was no more events for nearly 20 minutes until night fall came. I know night isn’t done yet so I won’t comment on the quality/quantity of the night events at all.

I think there needs to be more events during the day after you finish the main event chains. Maybe more defend events, or hunting dangerous Mordrem, or something. I ended up just afking until night, which is probably not a good way to get people to stay on the map.

So basically you think everyone should play a power build and that condition builds should not be viable?

Even with the current state conditions deal significantly less dps than power specs. we need ways to apply MORE conditions, not less.

The exception is the 3 current burn classes, ele, guard and engineer can stack pretty crazy burn burst.

Wondrouswall.7169:

I believe they gave the group condition bonus to Warriors via Deep Strike. Someone correct me if I’m wrong but the description implies that it gives condition damage to allies when they apply fury on them.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Deep_Strike

I guess 25 might, fury, 300 power, 150 precision, highest health, highest armor, and top tier dps wasn’t enough…

Maybe someone can confirm it actually applies to allies?

I dunno today I did a CPC + RS 4 and got 40 stacks of poison onto my target… 7k poison ticks are kind of fun…

Setz.9675:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

That being said if you can grind out the whole mastery track in a weekend then it is probably not grindy enough.

The insanity is strong in this one, endgame content =/= grinding out masterys. Endgame content is using those masterys.

This beta turned me ultra salty like the text below can show, masterys are grindie as hell. If the only way of maxing heart of maguuma masterys are going to be events and killing monsters I won’t be bothering with that entire jungle ever.

Not at all, I enjoy lobotomizing myself trying to get to tier 2 of gliding in the current map. Also I don’t have bouncing mushroom yet and being in the current zone that is just like bliss because it’s not like there are any hard to reach places and the zone isn’t maze-like at all. The thing I enjoy the most of how HoT exploration is locked behind an experience wall. To me it makes so much sense that killing monsters, doing events where I kill more monsters or collect salvage parts, mine/herb/log materials makes me better at gliding… its like super logical totally wauw. Exploration totally sucks anyway, I only want to do endgame content, grinding out masterys is endgame content, using those mastery is no longer endgame, L2P.

Using the masteries you aquire makes it much easier to get around the map and do events, making it much easier to get more masteries.

Additionally you are only playing on 25% of 25% of the maps. There will be much less repetition when you are playing throughout all the maps. Plus there will be the story instances, and other content to help you move the masteries along.

Remember, this expansion replaced 10 months worth of content. You should expect the content to last at least 10 months, not one weekend.

Nyth.3492:

Tim.6450:

Nyth.3492:

Chill damage hits for about 800ish with full condi damage gear and some might/vuln. I didn’t get enough time to thoroughly test it, but I guess that with max might and vuln (quite easy with reaper on a medium+ fight), you should be able to get 850 damage ticks on targets below 50% HP.

I got a tick for 934 in mostly exotic and some of it has celestial jewels.

Good to know. Like I said, i just experimented very shortly with it.

Tim.6450:

Nyth.3492:

I don’t think the skill is super weak. I mean if you compare it to bleeding, it’s equal to about 3-5 stacks of bleeding.
If the trait would have been: “Whenever you chill, you also apply 4 stacks of bleeding” people would be a lot more positive I think.

That’s becuase it would be ridiculous with epidemic . I could stack 20 extra bleeds with it.

I wasn’t suggesting to change it to bleed.
I was merely stating that people see “Chilling now deals X damage” as weak without taking a step back and realizing how much damage it really does. If the condition would have been that every chill application also stacks 5 stacks of bleeding people would have been more content, because it “feels” stronger even though it might not be (disregarding epidemic).

Fun note. Chilling Nova is good fun with Deadly Chill.
Fun note #2: So is Reaper of Grenth the human Elite skill.

Tim.6450:

Well I think its on the weak side because to get your damage to a reasonable amount you have to invest in chill, precision for target the weak and slot lingering curses.

Regardless. I think it could use a little more umph, purely because it’s a GM trait. I think the problem we have now is that the other reaper GM traits aren’t really all THAT strong either. So just buffing Deadly Chill would indirectly make the other 2 GM traits less attractive. (Granted DC is only interesting as condi reaper).

It isn’t really comparable to a similar stack of bleeds. for instance:

1. Chill has a 5 stack limit. Bleed does not. If it applied 5 stacks of bleed but bleed capped at 5 you probably wouldn’t be that impressed

2. Chill stacks in duration not intensity. if it stacked 5 stacks of bleed it would be awesome because they would stack in intensity and you could do crazy damage (obvious too much). But it doesn’t. It stacks in duration, so it is more comparable to the old burn, which was not that great (hence why it was buffed so much)

3. Chill doesn’t work on bosses, bleed does, so again not comparable.

4. Professions don’t have “bleed duration reduction” traits, yet almost every profession has a trait to reduce chill duration by 50-66%.

5. Chill has a base duration of 1-2s in most applications. if you were applying 5 stacks of bleed for 2s people would also call that very weak. Most bleeds are 10-20s in duration. If we were applying 10-20s chills at this damage then it may be ok.

Combine all those things together and chill is currently just not worth it.

What if necromancers lingering curse trait shared the condition bonus with the group?

Essentially the necro equivalent of empower allies/spotter/assassin.

As far as I know there is no group condition buff like this.

Potential group support that is actually wanted?

I think it is feeling grinding because you have to do the same few events over and over. Once we have access to the full map we should be able to run around and do a lot of events and it won’t be nearly as grindy.

That being said if you can grind out the whole mastery track in a weekend then it is probably not grindy enough.

If they fix the break bar bug, and let chill stack to a duration cap instead of an application cap I think it would actually be ok in full ascended gear damage wise.

The biggest problem is that you just can’t stack it very well and it doesn’t even work on bosses at all.

Up until now PvE balance has just been 100% ignored for the holy grail that is E-sports. There is pretty much no balance in PvE since everything is done for PvP.

Now that you are trying to become a raiding game, will you focus on balancing PvE instead? You can’t really have a serious raid if half the classes are useless and the other half are super OP like they currently are. That will mean you either tune it so all the classes can complete it, and the super classes think the content is a joke, or you tune it for the super classes and the other classes get kicked out because you can’t possibly complete it with them in the party.

Is anything going to be done about this before launch or will the game continue to be balanced around PvP exclusively?

Targuil.3741:

I just took 11k chill damage in death log from a fellow cond reaper, while playing cond reaper myself. I wouldn’t just shrug off that damage, but I do admit that blighter’s boon’s sustain may trump it.

Meanwhile guardians GM traits and builds let you take 100k+ burn damage in the death log….

Even if it is ok for PvP, it is not good enough for PvE, where balance is just as important now that they’ve gone the raiding route.

Part of the problem is the chill cap. with a 5 stack limit your most reliable way of applying chill in a full condition setup is with RS 5+4 combo.

Unfortunately the chilling bolts you send out only apply like a 1s chill, but you send out 20-30 of them. with the 5 stack limit you are hitting the cap instantly but only getting 5s of chill.

I would suggest changing the cap to 10s of chill instead of a number of stacks, and add a “chill extended” to the GM trait that allows you to stack up to 20s of chill.

Then buff the scaling by another 40% and it might be worth taking.

I still think a better overall solution is to just change the trait to “apply 3s of burning whenever you chill a target” and rename it “Fire and Ice”.

Azure.8670:

Needs to be changed back, was way better before. Anet loves berserker meta

I’m not sure what you mean by “changed back” this beta is testing an entirely different area with never before seen mobs.

There is no overlap between these beta weekends.

Also judging by the number of people i’ve rezzed so far this test I think people are having a pretty tough time.

Overall I like reaper. The theme and skills are all solid.

I played a condition build but ran into some problems:

NO LF generation. I literally had 1 skill that generates LF and that was it. Pure condition reaper basically just can’t use RS in long fights.

Chill does not currently work on anything with a break bar. Instead it just lowers the break bar. This renders the GM chill trait completely useless in all boss fights

GM chill trait still needs more damage, especially over 50% health. It is a GRAND MASTER trait, yet it does less damage than even terror which is only a master trait.

RS melts like crazy. I don’t know if it is bugged or what, but my RS bar just plummeted in seconds every time I tried to use it.

Damage for condition necro is still low overall. Made a berserker and killed everything I touched in half the time. Bleeds need to be buffed, and scepter reworked (more of an overall issue, but it applies to reaper too)

Limiting chill to 5 stacks completely ruins all synergy from RS 5+4. Chilling bolts are a key part of that combo, yet only 3 out of the 30 or so chilling bolts actually do anything since you instantly hit the 5 chill cap with 1s chills. It is actually better NOT to combo under the current version since the chills from the field itself last longer.

Also having a second reaper anywhere near you means that chill is always at the 5 limit stack and you waste most of your chills. Please remove this cap, it is destroying reaper.

Liked the reaper overall, but chill needs serious help.

There is also no icon for chill damage currently in the game. I thought I saw it in the POI, but it isn’t in the beta. Hopefully they add it back. I had to go into the combat log to see how much damage it was doing or if it was working at all.

Additionally the 5 chill limit is really dumb when using a whirl finisher. RS5 + RS4 sends out about 20 chilling bolts… only the first 5 do anything then the rest are wasted. Either whirl finishers need to change to do longer chills and less bolts or the limit needs to be removed.

Overall it seems reaper is supposed to rely heavily on chill yet chill is completely unusable in the current PvE game.

Crystal Reid.2481:

They will be disabled.

Nice to hear!

I remember people cheesing high level fractals with them, which was kinda of lame.

It doesn’t apply at all. and I actually made a mistake in the original post. you can NEVER apply chill to enemies with break bars. Breaking the bar gives them a ~5s stun and instantly resets the bar meaning no chill ever sticks to the enemies.

This is also true for cripple but it isn’t as big of a deal.

Chill currently doesn’t work on anything with a break bar. No damage, no CD increase, no movement effect.

It does however reduce breakbars by a tiny bit.

Edit:

Overall effect = our reaper GM trait has absolutely 0 effect on every boss in HoT rendering it completely useless.

They specifically said on the stream that the raids take place after the main LS and are only side stories that have no bearing on the main overall story arc.

So you shouldn’t have to worry.

Zerker meta is dead, you can’t jut faceroll everything with max dps. Learn to defend, wear more defensive gear, trait for heals and protection, etc.

Things need to be scaled up further, they are still too easy with more than 1 player.

Well I guess we can safety say we won’t see those specs in raids!

Please fix this somehow!

Servanin.5021:

I’m kind of wondering how big of a difference they really make though. The bleeds all have a very short base duration (2-3 seconds), the sigils and all other conditions have an internal cooldown.

3 seconds + 100% duration if you are properly geared/food/utilities/runes = 6 second duration = 2-3 extra stacks if you have fury and can crit consistently = 4-500 extra dps from the traits, plus a similar amount from the sigils.

They are pretty important, even more important for some builds. Warriors get almost all their bleeds from crits for instance.

It’s up BECAUSE of the beta weekend. They are beta testing Stronghold which you can play with any character, beta or not. They want people to try it so they activate the buff.

I got attacked by 2 guards once. I saw burn appear on my bar, I cast dagger 4, I was dead before it reached them.

I should have taken kitten , it was pretty dumb…

It starts in 3 hours from this post.

This will show it to you in your local time:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=The+Second+Beta+Weekend+Event+GW2+HoT&iso=20150904T12&p1=234

it gives you:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Enchanted_Key

Which is an exotic accessory and is needed for the treasure hunter collection.