You know you are playing a Reaper when...

[Runiir.6425]

It is like they really don't know what they want Necromancer's to be. Our shroud has no defenses... which is bloody stupid, while in shroud our defenses against /everything/ should INCREASE, an enemies goal in life should be preventing us from using shroud to avoid the high defenses and secondary health bar.

The Necromancer needs something. Every time they create a niche for Necro we get the Niche taken from us. Base Necro was originally the condition master...applying AND corrupting. Now? Everyone can spam conditions like crazy, and our corrupting ability (outside of Scourge) is nothing special.

Reaper was supposed to be this movie monster thing but...what is a huge part of movie monsters? Their ability to take load of punishment and keep right on coming while ripping through everything. Bruiser is a great term for the role that Reaper should have maintained, able to absorb and dish damage well, but slow. It was BALANCED. Thent hey took away our ability to take hits and left us with the slow hits... which is decidedly not balanced. Turning us into glass cannons that can't do the primary aspect of a glass canon, hit fast and repeatedly.

[DeceiverX.8361]

You know you're playing a reaper when you're useless at literally everything and lose fights you previously had a chance to win.

 

And

 

... No matter what you do and how you build, you won't have enough LF left for the next fight, and even if you did, you won't be able to flicker shroud fast enough because your only defense is on a 10s cooldown with no way to reduce it.

 

SoS and VP nerfs destroyed this spec. Please just reduce my damage again so I can actually survive things and rotate skills and flicker shroud properly to stay alive.

[Dadnir.5038]

> @"Runiir.6425" said:

> It is like they really don't know what they want Necromancer's to be. Our shroud has no defenses... which is bloody stupid, while in shroud our defenses against /everything/ should INCREASE, an enemies goal in life should be preventing us from using shroud to avoid the high defenses and secondary health bar.

> The Necromancer needs something. Every time they create a niche for Necro we get the Niche taken from us. Base Necro was originally the condition master...applying AND corrupting. Now? Everyone can spam conditions like crazy, and our corrupting ability (outside of Scourge) is nothing special.

> Reaper was supposed to be this movie monster thing but...what is a huge part of movie monsters? Their ability to take load of punishment and keep right on coming while ripping through everything. Bruiser is a great term for the role that Reaper should have maintained, able to absorb and dish damage well, but slow. It was BALANCED. Thent hey took away our ability to take hits and left us with the slow hits... which is decidedly not balanced. Turning us into glass cannons that can't do the primary aspect of a glass canon, hit fast and repeatedly.

 

Well, they gave to the "power reaper" wanabe what they asked. I'm sorry if some here were from this crowd but they wanted more power damage and less condi damage on reaper and that's what reaper had. All those power damage came at the cost of reaper's defense and reaper condi damage. We had 5% damage reduction from chilled foes, we got 5% increased damage on chilled foe. We had a performant whirl finisher which reliably loaded our foes with poison and chill but had medium power damage and we got a slightly high damage whirl which is now way less effective at loading condition on foes. We had a shroud auto-attack which was neither great nor bad and now it does good damage yet it was given at the cost of our shroud uptime.

 

All of those petty power damage were given at the cost of defense and condition damage. All of those were given to the "power reaper" crowd. It's not like we didn't knew that the reaper was already only effective in PvE thanks to a core condi skill. It's not like we didn't knew that we needed all possible passive defense possible to survive in PvP/WvW, yet players were happy to see the reaper traitline lose it's passive damage reduction in favor of an increased in their damage output.

 

Can we really blame anet for what we got? The necromancer's community asked for it and continue to ask for more power damage which will probably come at an even harsher cost in the end.

 

The necromancer just can't grow with the tools he got. The shroud mechanism, life siphon, epidemic, boon corruption, even minions... all of those are shackles that prevent the necromancer and reaper to be effectives power dps, yet the necromancer community still try to push it's luck and expect good result.

 

The reaper have lost it's identity when anet's gave in from the complaint in sPvP about chill and reduced chill duration all across the reaper's tools. At that moment they should have steadied themself and either reduced the reaper's damage or moved the spec out of it's reliance to chill. They chose to not do it and struggle to find a frail balance that they shattered as soon as they introduced scourge.

[Anchoku.8142]

I wish Reaper could get back some of its chill duration from the post-HoT nerf. The shroud decay nerf should allow it.

[DeceiverX.8361]

The only thing the power reaper community was really asking for was a buff to RS1's power coefficient. It was more efficient to AA with virtually every other weapon.

 

The changes to SR as a whole, LF degen rate, ICD bump on CV with reduced chill application, removal of SoS's shroud CDR, and Onslaught's cooldown-resets-on-kill removed it from viability in the PvP formats. The asinine buffs to damage on skills 2-5 at the cost of all defenses make the entire spec a "blow your load and either live or die" setup with no room to outplay your opponent which for example even signet thief has. The powercreep from everything else renders the damage bonuses pointless, and you're left with a spec that can't deal damage or sustain when its entire kit premise is based on the need to sustain in order to deal damage and stick to its target.

 

I don't think necro will ever be a top DPS because of shroud, but had they just buffed RS1 by around 20-30% like a lot of people were asking, we'd be in a *much* better place.

[Dadnir.5038]

I got your point DeceiverX but you are minimizing thing when saying that the community only asked for RS1 to deal more damage. The community asked for a reaper that deal more direct damage and less condi damage. The community primarily asked for _deathly chill_ to become a power trait so that reaper stop dealing condi damage and deal more power damage. The RS1 thing was barely suggested in the ocean of "buff power reaper! Change _deathly chill_ in such a way that it allow us to deal more power damage!"

 

Honestly, what limit the potential of the reaper is the fact that the shroud's defense and offense have the same ressource "Life force" and the defense spend this ressource way faster than the offense can take advantage of it. The shroud defensive nature have always been the limiting factor of both the offense and support of the necromancer, scourge changed that a bit but ended up with such a poor balance of it's skills and mechanisms that it's just a pain to look at this thing.

[DeceiverX.8361]

I meant it more as of the targeted fixes. I honestly don't recall a lot of people suggesting for Dchill to be made solely into power but rather reworked entirely again. From what I read, most people wanted more on GS/Soul Eater. Requests which simply state "Buff our damage" without specifying what to buff, by how much, and the reasoning behind them are imho not worth considering as real feedback imho.

[Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046]

Give me skills that work, a reduction on cast times, cough cough reflect, useful utilities that sync with traits that create diversity and I wont hurt the Quaggan!