Soul Reaping and its abuse

I (along with many Guild Wars players) have found it rather annoying that the Soul Reaping attribute has been grossly abused in the fact that when anything dies (teammates, team-created spirits, enemy spirits, enemies, pets, etc) you gain back partial to all the energy Soul Reaping specifies. I understand that the mechanics ingame are according to balance and skillful talent, but I feel Soul Reaping requires the least talent of all the primary attributes (Strength is pretty lame too). So I've devised a balanced way to fix all the imbalanced Soul Reaping abuse and hopefully bring an end to the already gay and annoying N/Rt bullshit.

Sould Reaping: Whenever a hostile creature within Earshot dies, you gain 1 point of energy for each rank in Soul Reaping.

This is balance in that 1) you may no longer score the energy gain from allied spirits that die as well as your team has to successfully be able to kill enemies in order for you as the Necro to gain back your energy and 2) the huge range of Soul Reaping's triggering was unfair but reducing it down to Earshot makes the Necro push up a little more in order to gain the energy he's starving for.

I don't propose this as a method of butchering Necros because Necros have a lot of high-costing energy spells (especially in Curses). Why couldn't they make Divine favor just as godly as this and make it to where whenever you heal a teammate you gain some energy back. Pretty imbalanced eh?

If you want your Necro to get his energy back from deaths, actually be a good team and kill things. If you can't do that why should you be rewarded for your own teammate deaths?

So in my opinion I think Soul Reaping should be changed to the above description I wrote out.

just an FYI its now only spirits you control/created give you energy, even if someone on youre team created one it wont give you any energy.

Yea I forgot about that, it's only spirits you control. Regardless though, I think my newly created one makes things a lot easier. Anet's been struggling with finding a way to fix it. I just say do what I posted. It's simple. It's totally fair. It's realistic (you feed off the souls of your enemies, not so much your friends/allies jeez haha).

/notsigned

but willing to compromise. the range is fine. its been hit on the range before. used to cover the entire mini-map range. now its half that. and it already has a timer built into it. perhaps have it trigger on non-party member deaths. that way a necro will still receive the SR from their minions.

Nerf it anymore and it will become useless.

Please be a little more specific on where and how SR is still overpowered and how adjusting SR is the only right way to fix the problem.
Remember, SR already got hit by nerf bat earlier this year and while it still might be overpowered I'm not certain if nerfing more is the best way to fix the game without breaking the necro.

Yes, because playing my Divine Favor and Energy storage required me to learn it for 2 years, since it takes so much skill. And I'm still working on mastering expertise. That one is really hard.

????

How exactly is SR overpowered? Where? In PvE? In GvG? RA? AB? Pre-searing? How is it abused?

If you take a look at necro spells, you'll see that many of necro spells are very expensive. Already, many necros need energy management. And if BR and BiP were once for non-necros only, it's quite common to see it applied to necros.

/not signed

Not the best idea I've heard regarding SR. There were far better solutions posted in the massive SR nerf thread from the time of the SR changes.

Well think about it. How lame is it for Soul Reaping to trigger only 3 times in 15 min? I think that gives a more restricted feeling than being able to sap unlimited amounts of energy as long as your team is killing. Thats the note I'm trying to hit on. Why be rewarded when your team is losing?

The range then can stay. That's fine. And with your proposal about non-party members then we still have the spirit problem. There are so many spells and effects that say "Non-spirit allies" so why couldn't this get applied here as well?

I'm just not a fan of the idea that if your team is doing terribly and your party members are dying, why be rewarded with free energy? I see it as a motive to try harder and push with a stronger force to get that precious energy back. Do you understand what I mean?

I just think that where it's at now its not the best way because that's more of a restriction than what I propose.

And my specifications on where it is abused is mainly in the pvp world, with all the lame Spiritway bullshit. I am by no means arguing this because I lose to it because I don't, we roll these builds. BUT I propose this because a lot of brainless thugs who can press 1-8 to place spirits and win are winning fake points in any arena. You can't tell me this isn't happening because it is..... I see it on a daily basis.

I'll be honest in that I think the N/Rt or the N/Mo healers are awesome ways for healing because OF Soul Reaping. However, like I said, your team can be dying and you're getting energy. Why the reward in that? Reward for keeping the team alive and being able to KILL your enemies. Isn't that what the game is about? Forming groups and destroying the opposition?

Well, it would have saved a lot of time, if the post were just "Nerf Spiritway".

As much as I would love it mainly for t hat reason, I cannot justify on those grounds. Spiritway is overly abused and yet nothing recent has been implimented to solve this ongoing problem. I wanted to bring SR before you guys on the grounds of how the mechanics of it should be fixed to better fit the natural element Necros should be (feed off the agressors not your friends).

I'd like to see a change whereas SR grants no energy from spirit deaths, period. It honestly seems like Necromancers are better at playing Ritualists than Ritualists themselves. (On that same thought, I wouldn't mind if they threw Spawning Power a bone for once. And Strength, too.)

Other than that, I liked that one suggestion a while back about SR granting bonus energy regeneration on (non-spirit) deaths; far more elegant than the current model while accomplishing much the same thing. Though reaping the souls of allies still doesn't sound very friendly at all, I can understand if it's necessary to the current balance.

/notsigned

Soul Reaping is allready quite conditional, unpredictible and restricted in its occuring, as something has to die for it to trigger, whereas other primaries always can meet conditions. If allied or neutral creatures no longer attribut an energy gain to the Necromancer, not only would it cut the chance at meeting conditions in half, but it would make the attribute near useless when the team is losing.
As for the range: I think it would be most detrimental to decrease this attribute's range for one of the least armored professions.

I love how the ones who were hardcore against this are core Necros themselves. A little bias are we here? Haha.

But yeah I totally agree with Aethon, seems Necros are better Rits than the Ritualists now. Why don't they give Ritualists the ability to gain energy from spirit deaths and the Necros gain energy from fleshy or near-fleshy creatures (allies, enemies, pets, minions, etc). I would love that if that came in effect.

Yay. Let's keep the nerfs coming until we make it so that necromancers can only get energy from soul reaping which has been nerfed to hell and back.

WTH?!? Didn't they already gimp soul reaping and people are still whining about it? I mean seriously they put that stupid timer on it a while back. Just get over it already and find something new to whine about people.

seriusly if they nerfed soul reaping 1.5 year ago making it work only for player, pet , npc guildwars pvp would be much happier for it

Is this a joke?

Exactly how are MMs going to play if they don't receive energy from their minions dying?

And yeah, you're god damn right I'm biased. I'm biased because the people working for A-net have been hitting my favorite class with the nerf bat for 2 years now, and you want them to get even more trigger-happy?

Bah.

/notsigned

Now, I play a rit (and also a Necro ) and certainly am pissed that 2 builds in the team, using full rit skills, need soul reaping and so are used by necro primaries (though I certainly see why it works best with soul reaping) but that gives you no excuse to demand a nerf that will affect PvE too. That's right. Nerf Soul Reaping and it will carry over to the majority of the player base, aka PvE. Particularly it will hurt MMs.

Whine less, stop trying to get classes nerfed. Soul Reaping has already taken hits. Leave it alone.

/quick rant over

well, for the start they could have lowered most of minion summing skill, then your should do pretty fine with normal regen + mobs dying.

i will also add, even with nerf minion master are still pretty good compared to everthing else (just boring, for that the hero is an awesome mm)

Anet nerfed it to hell awhile ago and some of us are still getting over it, is there a reason people want GW ruined? It almost seems as if there are certain players that are deliberately trying to ruin the game, recently someone decided that the new pve skills needed nerfing. When will this nonsense end? Anet has already nerfed the game so badly that they lost any future sales from me. This kind of posting reminds me of the abuse of the new /report feature, a poor attempt to ruin the game for others because of their unhappiness.

Not signed.

Soul Reaping has already been nerfed to the point where any other adjustments would simply make it usless. According to you the player should not gain any energy from fallen comrades when getting wiped, why not? So they have no hope to turn the favor? You stated " I am by no means arguing this because I lose to it because I don't, we roll these builds. " If you have found a way around the problem then what was the point of this post.

It's because of the Soul Reaping fiasco GW is ruined right now. People abuse the shit out of spirit spamming then getting all the energy back to spam some more spirits. I'm not trying to nerf spirit spamming; it's part of the game and the balance for it is they cost a lot and you don't get energy from them dying (being a Ritualist). On the contrary, the Necro seems to be the better method of spamming such spirits for they will have enough energy to spam some more.

We can specify it where it doesn't screw with getting energy from minions. That's fine.

I'm just entirely against the fact that you're rewarded for an ally or a party member dying. If you can't kill, you fail. Period. I know SR got a nerf but it still hasn't solved the main REASON why it got a nerf: all the bullshit spiritway. It's because of that HA is no longer the profound honor it used to hold. All you do is run spiritway and YAY fame!


Fine, then I have another proposal to end spiritway and all this bullshit. Make SPAWNING POWER the main reason why spirits will stay up longer, meaning you only create level 4 spirits that can't ward against things as much as a primary Ritualist can, because he can actually place points in Spawning, and this can entirely leave Necros alone then. It's actually about time Ritualists get some nerfing then. I know spawning power does that but make spawning power affect it even greater! I hope you know where I'm getting at with this.

In all honesty, before nerfing Soul Reaping, there would have to be a fix to Leadership and Spawning Power

Ruined is nothing more then a personal opinion. GW is fine, honestly its better then fine. And if in your opinion it is ruined, please, move on to something that is not.

In reality they are the masters of death, when you start trying to specify who's death they are the master of (which has already happened, hello nerf) you're messing with the whole idea of necro.

I cant help but find it interseting that the people who are /notsigning are usually necros themselves. I'll be the first to admit that I'm a Monk partisan myself, but if something is broken within my skillset (like SoA used to be) I don't have a problem pointing it out. Necros are still whining about the (totally ineffectual) 5 second timer that got slapped onto SR, despite the fact that they still have a prmary attribute that is not only probably the best primary in the game, and that it also allows them to backline better than a monk or rit. Necros were not designed as backline characters, and they shouldn't be anywhere near as viable in that capacity as they are.

Add to this that spirits shouldn't have souls, and things start to get a little ridiculous. Remove SR from spirits and it'll work just fine. Sure, SR is conditional, but as long as you're spamming spirits there's absolutely no difficulty meeting said condition. It's not really so much that SR is broken by itself, but it is certainly broken in conjunction with spirit functionality. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if I got energy back for an Aegis wearing off? You'd sceam IMBA till the cows come home.

I love how the person who wants necromancers nerfed has obviously never played as a necromancer for very long. Yea, no bias there.

Have you even looked at necromancer skills... ever? Half of their skills are very obviously intended for back-line usage.
[wiki]Blood is Power[/wiki], [wiki]Order of the Vampire[/wiki], [wiki]Order of Pain[/wiki], [wiki]Blood Bond[/wiki], [wiki]Blood Ritual[/wiki], [wiki]Tainted Flesh[/wiki]. All of those skills are clearly for use while not under attack.

Uhh... yeah, nice try but those are midline skills for the most part. I'll concede that Tainted is essentially a backline skill but it has a mixed functionality that precludes it from being purely defensive (since it pressures the other team every bit as much as it protects yours). Blood Bond? Okay, yeah, that one too. But BR and BiP are too open-ended to be categorized as strictly backline. OoP and OoV as backline? Give me a break, they're damage buffs FFS. That's like... midline defined. Just because they're obviously not for use while under fire doesn't define them as backline skills. Actually, if anything, backline skills are meant for use while under attack. That's why they prevent or heal damage.

Using these skills (presumably) as a "Defense" for allowing Necro SR backline abuse is laughable at best. Swing and a miss.

Nadia hits many good points. It's BECAUSE of the spirit spamming in conjunction of soul reaping that necros are playing better rits and even monks at times.

I would revert BACK to the old way of SR if they made it to where you gain NOTHING from spirits. Nada. Zilch. All the necros are crying because they get picked on well guess what, everything has been altered and tweaked with and it's irritated people. Imagine how frustrated some people were when SF lost its long burning duration. Imagine how ANGRY some monks or even SoR flaggers got when Aegis affects within Earshot. Sure I can understand that we're dealing with a Primary Attribute and not skills, but Nadia is right, Necros have the most powerful Primary in the game. Every class would love to gain free energy for deaths.

I think SR was perfect the way it was before MINUS the spirit spamming bs. Removing the gain of energy from spirits won't affect pve especially MMs because they use... uh, what was it again... oh yea, Minions, something designed for Necros to use. At least spawning minions is conditional in that you need a corpse. You can plant a spirit anywhere you'd like to.

ANET, find it in your heart that Ritualists have never felt a nerf as big as anything else. Rit skills have corrupted pvp and nothing has been done about it. The adding of exhaustion for certain spirits was clever! But, oh wait.... reverted back.

Makes you think ANET loves Rits too much.

No one is going to vote for a nerf in sardelac sanitarium, no matter how just it is. Not to mention your solution was pretty fail to begin with...

/notsigned

Soul Reaping had been Raped enough, you can rant on any primary attribute.. why why is the healthgain on devine favor not 3 spells/15sec? why dont energy storage cause degen in energy etc

Oh boy, a nerf for the sake of nerfing something, thats always the worst kind. Now I better declare my interests before I go any further - I have a few necros, but I never play them and I rarely use necro heroes. And I think nerfing soul reaping would be an awful idea. First of all, even if it were a problem, which frankly, it isnt, not to the extent of broken skills like aggressive refrain et al at any rate, it still wouldn't be truly gamebreaking. Honestly, it was never that to begin with. The theory that necromancers shouldn't benefit from their own party taking a hit is frankly fatally flawed as well - they are masters of death and undeath and are not going to have any more sympathy for the wammo who runs in and gets killed only to be turned into a bone fiend, than they are for their opponents. Therefore, they will reap the souls of their incompetent team mates if need be and thats how it should be.

Now; Spirits. The concept of the ritualist class is that of a shaman that communes with the departed and can bind the souls of long dead spirits to the mortal plane in a tangible form - in essence they are of the same variety as the ghostly hero and the various ghosts that can be found and fought across the 3 continents. In that respect, when they lose the chains that bind them to the mortal realm, they depart back to the underworld the same way a creature that has just died would - therefore, SR is justified in spirit energy gains. I know thats a much more theoretical and theological way of looking at it than what you were getting at, but it has some grounds for being mentioned, I think.

Now, in terms of balance, I've seen some of the ritumancer builds that have been popping up of late. The irony is that ultimately, Rits still do a better job of being an MM than necros do...

I don't think that Soul Reaping is the problem. As I said before, Spawning Power (and Leadership, but that's another topic) has to be fixed first.

Binding Rituals are a broken design that allows Necros to exploit them, and I don't think Anet can do anything about it. Anet has to possibly redesign the whole concept of Binding Rituals to prevent this issues, not just nerf Soul Reaping (again).

Ritualist as far as PvP goes are completely broken, yet they have the worst and most useless primary attribute in the game, making them rather stupid in PvE. Binding Rituals were meant to be the big thing of the rit, not the necro, so a change in Soul Reaping to not gain any energy from Spirits might be the answer, but then where does that leave the ritualist?

As I said, Soul Reaping is no the problem. It's the concept of the Binding Ritual Spirits.

Has anyone ever thought of the fact that maybe the reason that people generally playing Necro primaries are opposed to this idea, is because they are the most knowledgeable about how the class works?

Blood is Power, Order of the Vampire, Order of Pain, Blood Bond, midline skills? You have to be kidding me. The BiP or Orders character is the ULTIMATE backline character, far more retracted than the monks.

Backline, midline and frontline are defined by WHERE THE PEOPLE WHO USE THEM STAND. Are you going to stand repeatedly spamming a 33% sacrifice skill in the midline??!! How about a 17% sacrifice 2 seconds cast time buff spell that works for 5 seconds? I guess Order of Apostasy is a "midline" spell by your definition as well, then. "Swing and miss", indeed.

Oh, and...
You'd have to cut every single spell in the necromancer line in half. Somehow I don't see A-net going over every skill in the necromancer arsenal just to accomodate your idea.

And with this we can say: 1, you don't like playing necromancers so you don't mind seeing nerfs to them, and 2, you have never seen a competent human MM. Not to mention the fact that MMs are a bad joke in high level PvE.

Oh, and rits are terrible at real MMing. It's MBing they excel at which is another strategy altogether.

the same people who said MM are not overpowered even if they can beat thirsty river alone, said it was hard to play MM even if a hero can do it easly?
no, only the minion spell are overexpansive, all other most used spells are pretty much balanced with their effect.
i think is more

"i dont like play against spirit spamming stuff in pvp"

Nope. Backline skills are skills that heal or protect the party. Any other caster support skill (be it damage buffs [OoV, OoP] or enery buffs [BR, BiP]) is the goddamn definition of midline. They're skills that support the party sure, but they usually do it in either an offensive (OoV, OoP) or mixed (Tainted Flesh) capacity.

Also, I didn't call Blood Bond midline. Please do try to pay attention.

Don't be a moron (oh wait...). The actual "lines" of combat are really only pertinent in GvG and are used here very loosely. Front, mid- and backline are NOT defined by where the characters stand, and if you really think they are I feel sorry for you. That may be where the terms came from, but as a practical consideration, mid and backliners usually aren't ordered accordingly on the map for various reasons. Ask anyone whos ever "backlined" in HA and they may tell you they've actually spent more time in the front than in the back.

Front, mid- and backline characters are defined by their roles within the party and the builds they're running. Frontline is melee, midline is caster pressure or support, and backline is healing or prot via Monks/Rits/Necros.

All that said, we're straying from the original topic, and various people are attempting to drag me into a screaming match over just what "backline" means-- you're eithe missing or afraid of my original points vis-a-vis Spirit + SR functionality. I think the career necromancers get a little touchy (and perhaps rightly so) when the subject comes off as too open ended: saying "Nerf Soul Reaping" is a bit unfair, since I don't think we need a drastic overhaul of Soul Reaping; I don't think we need to castrate the Necromancer class by making its primary attribute as crappy as the Monks', rather I'm suggesting we remove SR from spirits, since that doesn't damage MM functionality and should balance PvP backlines at the same time.

Again: could you imagine how loudly people would complain if I got energy back for Aegis wearing off? What if I was able to cast a party-wide prot spirit or shielding hands and got an energy return for that too? That's functionality that's almost identical to Displacement, Shelter, and Union respectively.

I must say, I've never heard that definition. Ever. The "frontline" of a team is the part of the team that engages the enemy up close. The "midline" of a team is the part of the team engaging it by ranged attack. The "backline" of the team is the team engaged in protecting, healing and boosting the characters on the team.

That is why, hardly surprisingly, the "backline" usually stands in the "back", the "midline" usually stands in the "middle" and the "frontline" usually stands in the "front".

This is why your nonsense about the necromancer spells struck me as exactly nonsense. You're calling BiP "open-ended"? Well, it goes from one person (-HP) to another person (+E). Would you suggest any character occupied with this job to stand in the midline? How about Orders? Now I understand that this might well just be a misunderstanding caused from different usage of the terms, but still...

I don't need to "ask someone who's backlined in HA." I've done that myself in HA and I've taken Halls a couple of times, though not to the extent that I can claim to be God of PvP as some others do, and while it's true that drawing aggro is unavoidable, it isn't sought, and if I tried to tank you'd bet I'd get yelled at for good reason.

Now, alright, to get back to the essence of this issue, if you will.

The necro/rit and necro/monk healer is a specialized character. Let's take a look at what they can really do. In essence, the necro/monk gives up all the energy management inherent in the Divine Favor primary. His heals won't be as strong as a primary monk, and he's unable to use most of Divine Favor whatsoever (yes, discounting HB if he wants to put that as an elite). This he does on a calculation of the death ratio providing him with more energy. This might be correct, this might be false. If the team decides to provide deaths themselves, then one character is down for that team. It's a trade-off.

And how about the most wanted and used combo, N/Rt? The necro/rit healer is a strict healer. He has no means of hex removal whatsoever. All he can do is heal and mend conditions, plus providing the odd life-steal. He's depending on long-casting, easily-interrupted spirits to provide him with energy. Since the last SR nerf he has to make do with his own spirits alone. In essence, this change is what swept the rug under the feet of the true power of Spiritway. Now, mind you, I am not saying this is a bad build. It does excellently in many situations, but that's a far way from being imbalanced.

In closing, people seem to be angry with spirit spamming builds, and they seem to be angry with N's performing healing duties. These people must understand one simple fact: the meta will never be fair. Ever. You nerf one thing, you create something else instead. It's impossible to avoid this. People who want a "fair" game could go play chess. Then they could complain about the queen needing a nerf because it just captured three of their pawns.

it actually have some condition remover and some prot skill.

^ Please read the post.