Guild Wars 2

Jackalrat.5493:

Just need PvP changes for the greatsword. It doesn’t need more damage, just something to help actually land those attacks on players /slightly/ more often.

Gravedigger does about comparable damage to hundred blades or coalescence of ruin, but I find it far harder to land in PvP than both of those skills.

It needs chill durations to be longer.

Pretty much. Even the Reaper is behind, and, using greatsword is a total glass cannon (the defensive value of a pull and a blind field I very small).

Necromancer conditions poison, bleed, & torment barely scale with condition damage.

You are better off taking almost any other stat.

The greatsword is a slow melee glass cannon. That is all.

You’ve got to adjust your Playstyle.

Focusing on staying in shroud doesn’t work on reaper.

Instead enter shroud hit #3 immediately (if you get the full duration that’s a 1k heal with blighters boon), then leave shroud 9 seconds later.

Of course you would think this is great if you mained an elementalist. Chill is great against elementalists.

Chill, in the real world against every body else, has zero effect against thieves and hardly by effect against most other classes.

Chill durations, even in Grenth rune ice sigil builds aren’t long enough to chill an enemy, catch up to them and hit them with a greatsword attack (and two of Reaper’s 12 possible traits count on you being able to do just this but you can’t).

Wishlist?

I am in love with the kodan hammer skills on necromancer. Give me that skillet please. It’s a perfect chill necromancer spec.

As for existing weapons?

Focus needs love. It’s in bad shape and anet has decided to increase the range (which is meaningless) rather than fix the skills in the past. The weapon is balanced for a different game than Guild wars 2.

Axe needs more damage.
Scepter needs to scale with some stat.
Staff needs 100% finisher on axe one.
Offhand dagger could use life force application.

There should probably be slow application somewhere (I suggest to put it on lingering curses)

There should be a blast finisher somewhere on a weapon (axe 3 is te best place to put it).

Chill durations are all 1-2 seconds too short.

Greatsword damage may still be too low. The weapon is a melee glass cannon. It shoud hit like one.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Cogbyrn.7283:

I thought people had been clamoring for a range increase for months. Now it’s here, and people claim it’s unnecessary.

Different people.

Pretty much this.

Axe’s short range was a Learn to pay issue. You learned axe & the short range didn’t matter much.

The problem with axe is that all three skills are bad because they don’t scale with power damage well enough.

And the 8 stacks of vulnerability that axe 1 can upkeep are pretty pathetic considering how much vulnerability has power creeped into the game. Once the problem with vulnerability was “since vulnerability is on warrior greatsword 1, it will hit the cap automatically.”. Today not just warrior greatsword, but a bunch of classes hit the cap themselves without even trying.

Neither power nor conditions scale with scepter anymore,.

I would love to test scepter with nomads’s amulet (not available). I think you don’t lose all that much by losing condition damage and power, but do you gain anything worthwhile with toughness, healing, and vitality?

Yeah there’s really no justification for, say, engineer turrets, not getting destroyed by moa while necromancer minions do get destroyed.

And.

Some necromancer minions aren’t destroyed by moa (Rise minions, lich rune minions, Lich summoned minions, , jagged horrors). So the way moa works is inconsistently applied.

This ought to be rethought.

Since minions root themselves to attack, they rarely hit moving players & are mostly useful for their active skill and for the minion traits.

I’m bearish on the healing potential of Druids. Thier healing potential is gated by a life-force like mechanic, and their form has a cooldown.

I think raid healing will work like it does now. Water field blasts providing the healing.

If the content truly is difficult, then group blocks and/or protection will be more important than just heals.

I note that the Ventauri heralds and the Druids don’t provide that much group boons. I think the healing meta will end up elementalist/guardian/engineer.

I had a couple of ideas. Ranked in order of which I’d prefer.

(1). Change field interactions

Well of blood (which is bad) would be a lot better if necromancers had better finisher access. (100% finisher on staff 1, blast on axe 3, etc), but….

field interactions with well of darkness are wonky (what is the point of blasting blind to get blind?). (What is the point of whirling through well of darkness if the effect doesn’t do anything?)

Anet might want to look at how poor dark field interactions are, unless the whole point of dark fields is “powerful skills but they overwrite your better fields.”.

Better dark field + reasonable access to finishers = probably an ok skill

(2) Zero cast time. The ability to safe stomp some classes (not really) is the only reason why this was ever taken. Anet might want to tweak this into the necromancer version of take this skill to get a safe stomp.

(3). Merge it with well of power. One skill does both things.

(4). Make it apply chill on pulse, like it used to do when Traited.

(5) Add damage. Well of corruption level damage is good enough.

(6). Make it a well for condition users, have it inflict damaging conditions.

This change was much needed.

The changes were a case of changing 5+7 = 12 into 6+6 = 12

The weapon is no better now than it was before. It is however, now a pure condition user weapon which makes it easier to balance.

The auto got more bleed stacks, but shorter duration. It’s the same damage. Maybe it is more damage if your enemy uses a lot of cleanses, but I always thought that the long duration bleeds preventinkitteneals were the best feature of the weapon.

2 lost a lot of damage and cripple from lingering curses.

3 lost the power bonus damage and gained torment.

The power damage scaled at an average rate, the torment scales at an awful rate. This means that if you were using Nomads this is a great change for you. If you were using an amulet or armor that includes power, you are probably losing DPS overall. (and with diamond skin still out there the loss of power is a problem).

I trust that the life force change is a buff in actual game play, even if it is a nerf in theory crafting.

nearlight.3064:

Longbow ranger death from afar is only of true concern on legacy of the foefire, and you can typically LoS them on a side node until they get close enough to to try and contest the tiny capture point where you can fight them.

And in Stronghold……

You are a sitting duck in stronghold against anybody with a ranged weapon

And mid point in silent storm, and side points on Kyhlo, and center area on Nifhel. Pretty much every map has areas where you can’t rely on the map to save you from the fact that you have bad ranged defenses and no ranged counter pressure.

Robert:

Thanks for replying.

Much appreciated.

I think you just listed two very good reasons to completely redo axe 1 from the ground up, unless you can instead disable stow weapon in pvp or something similar.

The Reaper is in pretty bad shape as a power based class with no access to a power based ranged weapon.

Hopefully you guys can spare the development time.

Ranger autoattacks can hit more than one enemy.

10% is awful.

Here’s what shoud be done.

Figure out what lifeblast DPS is then apply the formula:

(Death Shroud rotation DPS). * (120%) =. (Axe 1 + Axe 2 + Warhorn 5 damage rotation)

Then play with the numbers however they want.

ZDragon.3046:

nekretaal.6485:

Reaper isn’t solid… it’s hard countered by anybody with a ranged weapon.

Life blast and doom are gone & scepter/axe/staff provide next to nothing damage.

Until the weapons are fixed, reaper is garbage.

Thats called being fair reaper converts necro into a high pressure melee brawler. You cant expect it to have ranged pressure anymore of course its countered by range play. Thus its actually is solid.

The problem is baseline necro not Reaper.

“High pressure melee brawler.”. —→. No defenses close ranged slow highly telegraphed glass cannon, with no other means of pressure. (and middle of the pack DPS in optimal circumstances)

This game shouldn’t be throwing around hard counters so generously.

You’re right that scepter is now the pur condition weapon that it always should have been.

But the fact remains that scepter scales on nothing right now. The power coeffients are the worst the the game & the condition coefficients are even worse.

Are scepter users supposed to be running Nomad’s?

Serious question.

Reaper isn’t solid… it’s hard countered by anybody with a ranged weapon.

Life blast and doom are gone & scepter/axe/staff provide next to nothing damage.

Until the weapons are fixed, reaper is garbage.

If people had been reading comments on the twitch on thread that read “wait for the actual changes, not the preview.”

I found two differences.

Axe 1 got a 10% damage buff.

Hopefully that is a coefficient scaling buff and not a base damage buff. Even with a flat 10% buff, the skill Isn’t really worth using as it neither stacks vulnerability nor does damage well.

This just brings axe 1 (but not 2+ 3) to the pre axe training nerf status quo. (Axe was horrible and the worst weapon in the game then too).

Scepter 3 got its bonus damage removed.

So the average power scaling damage was replaced by really poor condition scaling torment. I think this is a nerf for most of the builds actually using scepter (like celestial signets), unless your amulet had no power on it at all.

PS. Guardian shield got fixed. Axe now unanimously the most neglected, worst weapon in the game.

I would have preferred scepter and axe (and focus) get buffed to the point where I had choices of what weapons to use instead of dagger/Warhorn & staff in every build.

… But it looks like that’s not going to happen.

Pretty much all of the might stacks are in the spite line. Might stacking is actually pretty sad outside of the line, which is pigeonholing.

It’s nice to have might available on skills.

But it doesn’t work well.

The vulnerability stacking from axe is pathetic. (Not enough stacks, too short duration, too long cast time.

Will axes and scepters and daggers still nerf your damage in death shroud?

Power.

Condition necromancer will not be a thing.

None of the conditions that the necromancer/reaper has scale well. This means that additional stats from gear don’t really help you.

(Unless they do something unexpected like turn the greatsword trait from a lifesteal trait to a condition trait).

& before anybody says “but dhuumfire…” understand that reaper RS uptime is tiny because of all of the extra damage that you are face tanking. Dhuumfire is still a bad trait.

Will zerker Druid be good?

Plays like zerker ranger, except now you’ve got extra self heals (not that important tbh) and an extra CC on your bar.

Dropping a traitline to get the new traitline will be really easy to to.

Blaine Tog.8304:

nekretaal.6485:

Menadena.7482:

I would LOVE to see the axe get a better range. I plan on running a reaper with GS and axe/dagger.

I would feel naked without a good ranged weapon though.

Axe with a better range isn’t a good ranged weapon.

It’s still the worst weapon in the game.

I dunno, I’ve been playing around with the Axe for the last few days just for a change of pace and it isn’t that bad under certain circumstances. The skills all fundamentally make sense and Unholy Feast is downright cool, it’s just their numbers that are lacking.

Increasing the range is a decent start. I just hope Anet takes it a bit further as well.

Absolutely. It’s fun to play.

Why a fun to play weapon is not allowed to be good, forcing all necromancers into boring staff is a great mystery.

It’s too bad our necromancer wells aren’t unblock able.

A warrior with Riposte (which blocks only one attack) can run around in a necromancer well forever and never get hit.

Zenith.7301:

The numbers for axe in particular need to go way up

You know how Greatsword and Dagger are better than Reaper Shroud by 10% (Dagger) or (20%) Greatsword?

Take the best Death Shroud DPS rotation, then add 10%. That’s where Axe + Focus needs to be. That’s the minimum number.

(And even that minimum may be too low, because Death Shroud lags behind most characters for damage).

Anet is fond of moving DPS from one skill to another and calling it a change, even though total DPS is unaffected. That’s what they just did to scepter (changes to #1 are a wash, torment on #3 offset by damage loss on #2). That’s not going to cut it.

Menadena.7482:

I would LOVE to see the axe get a better range. I plan on running a reaper with GS and axe/dagger.

I would feel naked without a good ranged weapon though.

Axe with a better range isn’t a good ranged weapon.

It’s still the worst weapon in the game.

Wait for HoT. Pretty sure new gear stat combinations are coming with it.

We used to have trait that let life blast heal allies.

Unfortunately, life blast is really clunky

Did you miss the preview?

They ignored all the issues and increased the range, which is what they did when focus sucked.

Hint: it didn’t help anything

Not enough.

You are still below Ele, which means that as a glass cannon offering nothing to the raid but damage, you aren’t wanted.

fully buffed, you are doing about PS warrior level damage (OFC the PS warrior is nerfing himself to provide support for the team).

Bhawb.7408:

Glyph of Unity isn’t a weaker retaliation. Any time you take damage, you deal damage to everyone tethered to you. So if 5 people are attacking you and those 5 are tethered, each one of them actually gets hit with 5x the retal damage they’d normally take.

On the note of Spiteful Spirit, it just doesn’t do much as a trait. Cripple is negligible, the damage won’t really add up compared to Close to Death, and the boon corruption is worse than a single Signet with the signet trait. The only thing this brings that is special is retaliation, and getting some retaliation on a trait that is otherwise entirely mediocre just doesn’t fit a GM tier trait.

Axe 3 is just really underwhelming since the cripple nerfs.

I know that the same patch with the cripple nerfs also changed a boon rip into a boon corruption. It wasn’t enough.

All 3 axe skills are bad

What about pvp? The Druid can heal the team and The stronghold Lord. It’s a trinity.

No way the necro is tanking anything without blocks or vigor.

Silverkey.2078:

Wow so much negative reactions…

Necromancer has been worst class for 3 years. Some stuff (axe) was broken at release and is still broken.

We even got the whole pvp and reddit communities to agree with us & help us shame anet on this constantly since May.

If something is a “buff” that doesn’t result in a useable skill it doesn’t count.

Axe: Still the worst weapon in the game

Scepter: Still one of the three worst weapons in the game

Corrosive Pouson Cloud: Still not good enough to take in a build. Wolnt be good solo (cooldown too long) wolnt be good team (other classes do the same thing better)

Focus: not even looked at

Minions still hard countered by moa.

None of these changes result in anything that will be used by anybody in the actual game.

And reapers will be hard countered by anybody with a ranged weapon.

The big picture is that the reaper is coming out and doesn’t have necromancer death shroud skills (ranged DPS), and doesn’t have a kiting Playstyle and so needs defensive abilities similar to what warriors have.

Let’s preview the changes:

Corrosive Poison Cloud: Duration decrease from 12s to 8s. It will now destroy all projectiles that pass through it. It will also now pulse every 2 seconds instead of every 3s.

Axe skills (Rending Claws/Ghastly Claws) going up to 900 radius.

Scepter – Scepter 1 and 2 skill bleed duration going down from 5s to kitten . Scepter 3 get a poison duration increase to 6s and kitten bleed.

Feast of Corruption – It apply a base 2 stack of Torment and a max of 5 more stacks of Torment, one for every condition for the target.

Lingering Curse – Condition duration effect is now 50%.

Lich and Plague forms will no longer destroy your minions. Other transforms (i..e Moa) will still destroy them.

Yikes!

These are the tweaked axe and scepter (and focus) changes!

First of all, no changes to focus, which is still bottom tier.

Second, anet basically listened to the wrong people for axe and scepter changes.

Axe didn’t need a range increase to make it a cruddy warrior rifle… It needed damage or utility. It still has neither. The range increase was especially horrible because the animations aren’t super telegraphed and look silly the longer range you go.

Scepter needed its condition damage back & to keep up with condition power creep in the game. The scaling changes and poison no longer duration stacking removed most of the power of the weapon. Scepter still has neither good scaling condition or power damage. If they had to put a condition on scepter 3, torment is the wrong one.

Both weapons are still single target & the worst main hands overall for damage or utility.

Both weapons still nerf death shroud.

Both weapons still generate life force poorly.

Reaper is going to be a near gimmick because its fun to play, but the profession will quickly find itself bottom tier (another 3 years of bottom tier incoming) without ways to handle skirmishers.

As for the other changes, at least the minion master elites were buffed (do plague and still remove spectrals?), but anet put the projectile block on literally the worst utility skill in the necromancer skillset and then nerfed that skill.

For everybody who said, reaper is in trouble unless they fix necromancer….. Did they?

Which class is the tank?

Get shadow Abyss instead.

Life shroud looks bad, except for the CC. Rangers are still squishy, and a healer still isn’t necessary if everybody has a strong heal and difficulty is based on OHKO.

Where is the. On demand condition removal and protection spam?

Are the new raids going to take place in constant degen zones? Are heals going to get nerfed? Are enemy attacks going to hit through dodges?

He means the well of blood, which would be more useful if the necromancer could use finishers in it to remove conditions.

Death Shroud is the Only non pathetic ranged damage on the class.

Reaper shroud has a couple of nice tricks. You will not camp it however. You will pop in, do your tricks, and get out.

What are the tricks?

(1) Pop RS 3 when entering RS for a 1k Blighter’s boon heal while continuing to damage
(2) Pop RS 4 for whirls. Get in a fire field for max effect. (tons of burning!) (or use your spectral wall for big confusion stacks).
(3) Pop RS 5+ RS2 for frost aura 10% damage reduction
(4) Spam the auto (Traited) for quick mights stacks.

Reaper shroud drops too fast to stay in it since you are still mostly face tanking damage (and the pure damage isn’t great), but popping into shroud to quickly get small heals, might, and a lot of burn stacks is pretty nice.

Now that stab has been nerfed, it’s time for static field and similar effects to get nerfed.

Nearly every chill that the Necromancer/Reaper has access to is 1-2 seconds too short

Knighthonor.4061:

1) Chilling Nova how effective is this?

2)Shivers of Dread isn’t this counterproductive to the next minor trait, which is Cold Shoulder?

3)Chilling Force, Any thoughts on this trait?

4)does RS have damage reduction baseline at all?

5)Deadly Chill How does this damage calculated? thats whats confusing to me.

6)Executioner’s Scythe is RS#5 skill. So how effective is this chill for Chilling Force, and Cold Shoulder?

7)Death Charge which replaces Dark Path as RS #2 no longer chills for the longer duration chill.

8)Chilling Scythe is GS third auto attack, with 2 second chill. Which is slightly longer duration than the auto attack. Not sure about after cast delay.

9)Grasping Darkness is GS 5. Has 4 second Chill which is pretty good. I still believe the Single Target range on this should be increaded

1. Chilling nova isn’t effective. Chills are too short for your slow self to run over and actually hit something that’s still chilled.

2. Yes

3. Chills are too short for the trait to be effective

4. RS has the same damage reduction as DS, right?

5. Wait for spoj to post the exact mechanics. His posts are gold. I think deadly chill works like old burning, but, again, wait for the spoj post to make exact sense of it.

6. The chill on RS 5 is the Reapers best chill. The tooltip duration of the chill is actually the amount of chill on the field which pulses. Plus, RS 5+RS 4 is the only real long duration chill most reapers will have other than chill of death trait in the spite line.

7. Reapers will miss dark path.

8. I think anet wanted to eliminate hypothetical “100% chill uptime from autoattack,” unless you specced or it with duration runes. But that’s not even very strong when the GS chain is so slow, does not have native swiftness, and the chill attack is super telegraphed. So the chill is too short now. 100% chill duration even without those limitations isn’t very strong now that swiftness and even uncounterable super speed are everywhere.

9. GS 5 is such a disappointment with its wonky targeting and short range. It’s so niche that greatsword overall becomes Something of a vanilla all damage glass cannon.

Still slowest.

Can’t really use the leap for land speed because you lose 4% shroud per second & have a 10 second RS cooldown. & in-combat your RS uptime is less than half of DS uptime because the shroud melts so fast.

Plus, since you are theorycrafting and not game experience crafting, I do remind you that DS #2 has a much longer range.

zapv.8051:

1) Says necro gameplay is too passive
2) Lists skills that have to be landed on opponents to work
3) Lists how to counter the skills with things like blinds, blocks, and invulns which necros largely don’t have.
.

4) Makes long post about how o counter a build which has been dead for a while now
5) Ignores Burn Guardians which literally burn you to death then channel blocks so we can’t transfer conditions more than once.

Goldenrevolver.4371:

they shouldnt completely change everything. i mean both weapons have 3 skills and also traits associated with them so they need to consider that too.

maybe im just argueing about the definition of a rework but i think we shouldnt expect and wont get a complete rework.

Axe is actually really fun to play. The play style is fun, but the weapon sucks.

Scepter just needs its condition damage back.

A lot of development time shouldn’t be put into this. The weapons are fine:

Axe just tweak the scaling numbers on all 3 axe skills and put a blast on unholy feast.

Scepter Baseline the duration increase from lingering curse, add an additional poison stack to #1+#2 & have the new trait put an interesting, but non damaging, condition on #3 like fear or slow

(Necromancers really should be masters of slow because Faintheartedness hexes were necromancer skills, but fear is interesting too because it gives curses users a choice between damaging fears or a relatively low cooldown fear).