Guild Wars 2

JonathanSharp.7094:

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

So we don’t want that attrition class to also have great ways to escape. This used to be the case, and we felt the Necro was just too strong if it was great at attrition as well as movement/escape. We wanted the Necro to be more about attrition, and for other classes (Thief, Ele, Mes) to be more about escaping and mobility.
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The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

For me (build) the main problem with necro right now is that the more you go it to “attrition” aspect of the class the more problem you have with escaping people and without them you can forget about necromancer “attrition” style.
After 5 months with my current “roaming” build i know one thing about chasing down enemies, chill/cripple is useless (same as “attrition” necro) when the foe is out of range. The best (only) way to stop your opponent as a necro right now is to kill him fast after he decided to run and do to that you need “brutal power” not “attrition” gameplay.

Few suggestion how to change it :

Spectral Grasp - Teleport your foe to you, chill them, and gain life force.

For me this is the easiest way to “fix” that skill (no projectile, no invisible walls, full range).
—- —- —-
Tainted Shackles - Bind nearby enemies with your life force, “Tainted” them repeatedly. If enemies move out of range of this ability, the bind will break prematurely.
Taint - You’ve been “Tainted” causing Torment to be applied to you. Work only when the distance between you and the necromancer is bigger than … .
Shackle - Damage and immobilizes nearby foes.

Something like warriors “impale” but the main goal should be stopping the opponents from runing away.
—- —- —-
Dark Path - Send out a claw. If this attack hits a target, you teleport to that foe, bleeding it and chilling nearby foes. Decrease the activation time.

By “target” i mean my target not the 1st foe on they way between me and my actually target. Something like Ride the Lightning, from what i know it don’t stop on the 1st foe.
—- —- —-
Spectral Wall - Fear foes away from the wall not away from me.

pierwola.9602:

Spectral Wall - Create a wall of fear that foes cannot cross.

That actually sounds much weaker than the current version.

Carighan.6758:

pierwola.9602:

Spectral Wall - Create a wall of fear that foes cannot cross.

That actually sounds much weaker than the current version.

Can you tell me why ?

Current Spectral Wall sends people off the opposite direction. As far as getting/keeping distance goes, that’s stronger than just stopping them.

Further, the fearing wall can not only damage targets, it can actually get them off ledges. A raid-1-shot like in the recent video is super-rare ofc. But it’s not uncommon to fear a handful of players to their death or off a wall into the sieging group with it.

Instead of the GM trait for scepter causing weakness with a stupidly long cooldown, making it worthless, it should apply cripple or chilled.

…or maybe a chance for condition damage to cause cripple or chill.

Ezeriel.9574:

Instead of the GM trait for scepter causing weakness with a stupidly long cooldown, making it worthless, it should apply cripple or chilled.

…or maybe a chance for condition damage to cause cripple or chill.

The scepter GM trait changes the base duration of it’s conditions increasing them.
The other GM inflicts weakness on crits with a stupidly long cooldown.

I think you got them mixed together.

Carighan.6758:

Current Spectral Wall sends people off the opposite direction. As far as getting/keeping distance goes, that’s stronger than just stopping them.

Not always. The " fear" direction depends on the Necromancer position, thats why you can’t block enemy castle door(portal) with SW.
I don’t want to stop them i want to fear them in the opposite direction to Spectral Wall (not to necromancer).

Ah true. I think for easy of attributing the condition, what actually happens is then that you invisibly and instantly cast fear on each target touching the wall. As in, your char’s entity runs a script applying it.

Weird stuff.

The problem is that essentially all of the necro’s lock down abilities can be countered at their cast, or counter afterwards…
The escape abilities have no counter or have a counter that can be countered…. (maybe SG is a counter, but is slow and can be countered by invuln, stability, stealth, dodge, etc)

For example…

• any stealth ever
• Blink: stunbreak + insta cast
• Roll for Initiative stunbreak + insta cast + removes cripple/chill/immobile
• Shadow Return instant + removes a condition

Now some necro lock down skills… and their cast times

• Grasping dead – .75
• Unholy feast – 1
• Chilblains – .75
• spinal shivers – 1.25
• dark path – .75
• dark pact – 1
• tainted shackles… – a year and a half til immobilize

Not to mention the instant condi removals for the above or the necros vulnerability to cc. To “lock horns” necros NEED to be successful at locking most of the time. To escape, you only need to be successful once.

They could solve this by making spectral grasp instant, or much much faster, increasing the projectile speed of dark path, decreasing flesh wurm cast time, and I saw a suggestion for a secondary action on tainted shackles that drew targets in range to the necro.

Most of our control and mobility just doesn’t work well, so it doesn’t get used. I mean these changes wouldn’t solve all necro problems but it would increase necro QoL and open up some utility slot options.

All of the above confirmed..

Dude you can get away.. heck you don’t even have to look over your shoulder when the necro is chasing you.

just using the words necro and chasing in a sentence calls for hilarity.

Oddly enough, necromancer has some of the longest swiftness durations in the game, a blink-like ability, the most convenient access to fear, and the second best access to chill. In fact, if you jack up your condition duration, you can get a 10+ second chill off of spinal shivers. This means you maintain more than 50% chill uptime on a target, which is insane to think about. Of course, the opponent will probably have some mechanism of cleansing, but the potential is still there.

In the build you linked, you’re using primarily apothecary gear. You should consider swapping this out if you feel you have trouble killing people. It is a much more defensive stat combination. Additionally, your traits are very defensively focused, meaning your aren’t getting certain damaging or disabling options that you otherwise might have.

This particular build (in it’s semi-complete state in the link) seems much better suited to a task like bunkering a node or providing some measure of group support. If your opponent runs away from you in this context, that’s a good thing because you have won/maintained control of the node.

However, it seems like you’re speaking about WvW specifically, in which case this type of build will not be very well suited for chasing people down and killing them. IMO, no necro builds really are due to the way the mobility options work. It’s just an aspect of the profession that exists, similar to how it exists for guardians and mesmers.

As I mentioned, you might consider changing your gear stats or traits for more damage output. If you have more powerful conditions or a larger number of them, it means that your opponent risks staying in the fight too long, and maybe dies to the conditions even if they do start to escape. You could consider using signet of spite instead of plague signet to “condi bomb” someone, or maybe locust signet to help you be mobile without popping spectral walk. You could also consider building some condition duration, maybe reassigning 20 trait points into spite for chill of death.

Dont actually put much value in what devs say they think professions should do, shouldnt do, or what they design is. They are often laughable.

“The profession you cannot get away from” Necro is the easiest profession to get away from

Its the same laughable joke as “Warriors are vulnerable to conditions”. Or many of the others.

Yamsandjams.3267:

Maybe you don’t know but this is the Design Philosophy of the Necromancer

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

Terrahero.9358:

Dont actually put much value in what devs say they think professions should do, shouldnt do, or what they design is. They are often laughable.

At least i don’t ask for mobility.

Necro isn’t even good at attrition based fights. You don’t have many stun breaks or other escape cards as a necro. This means that the longer the fight has taken, the more likely you are a sitting duck because you are out of stun breaks or other means to avoid focus fire.

Condition based stealth spam builds are the true kings of attrition. I’d argue that necro is more about DPS, control and pressure.

And the dude you CANNOT get away from. Well I think we all know who this one is. They stick like glue :p

the idea of necro being a class that is hard to get away from would work in theory if not every class in the game had stability , speed buffs , mobility , break frees , condition removal , condition transfer , EPIC FAIL !!!!!

He said ele is about escaping and mobility…? Does he think every ele is dagger/dagger with full cantrips?

I agree with what everyone is saying here, necros definitely the easiest class to escape from, when i find one solo roaming I know the battles will end withvme escaping or necro being killed, cause simlply, they cant stop anyone from running away. Devs if you are reading this, just know that there is a huge difference between how you want necros to be, and what they curently are.

Necromancers are designed to be exactly what MMs are, but with different ways to be that. Unfortunately I think they forgot somewhere along the line that not everyone wants to be an MM and they just kind of slapped on some other stuff.

Mark of Blood – Inscribe a mark that bleeds foes when they trigger it, and grants regeneration to allies.
Signet of Vampirism – Heal when struck by a foe.
Spectral Armor – Gain life force as you take damage. Also applies protection.
Last Gasp – Spectral Armor
Spectral Walk – Create a shadowy tether and become spectral, gaining life force when struck. You may return to your initial position by using Spectral Recall.
Vampiric – Siphon health whenever you hit a foe.
Summon Blood Fiend – Summon a blood fiend that transfers health to you on each attack.
Deathly Swarm – Unleash an insect swarm, blinding multiple foes. Transfer three conditions to your target on a successful attack.
Unholy Feast – Cripple nearby foes and remove a boon. Gain retaliation for each foe you strike.
Putrid Mark – Inscribe a mark that transfers 3 conditions from yourself to foes when they trigger it.
Plague Signet – Active: Send your conditions to a foe.
Basically the whole necro is balanced around “when hit or when struck by the foe”.

And now the funny thing " Necro is the easiest profession to get away from" .

When looking at the Necromancer you will see that a lot of conditions of the Necromancer are not damage based and are also/more viable when playing a non condition setup.

These are blind/weekness/vulnerability/chill.

Blind and weekness are meant to support the attrition aspect of the class, making up for the lack of vigor (dodge) and increase his total survivability. This even works AoE and makes his sustain stronger against multiple foes. This could even be his group support.

The chill is filling part of the sustain roll with longer cd’s on enemy skills but is also very important for the Dude you cannot get away from part, as it slows enemies by a lot, so that even the slow necromancer can catch them.

As condition damage went through the roof, ANET increased indescriminate condition removal on pretty much all classes. This reduced the amount of damage taken by conditions and the playerbase went on to critisize the next big thing. What has been completely overlooked by these changes are the other conditions that are not doing direct damage, but instead are used for increased sustain and indirect mobility increase. This is especially true for the Necromancer, as this class uses these conditions the most. The simple “clear 3-5 conditions on use” is not simply reducing condition damage, but also reduces our indirect sustain and indirect mobility through chill/blind/weakness. The even stronger “clear X conditions on all friendly targets” (AoE) take that debuffer roll that the Necromancer could have in group fights away and make conditions in bigger groups even more useless then against single targets (Status Quo WWW and sPvPWith condition cleanses every second for everyone).

A simple solution would be to make condition cleanses more specific like Hide in the shadows of the thief, who cleanses only poison/bleed/burn. If chill and weakness would not be cleansed by condition cleanse skills that clear multiple conditions or would be targeted last, the sustain of Necromancers and the importance of these conditions for other classes would be buffed within the class flair without increasing power creep and could be handled by a more strategic approach of conditions on all classes. A reduce in AoE cleanses would also increase the group viability for Necromancers in sPvP.

In short: The indescriminte condition cleanses introduced due to the condition damage power creep, nerfed Necromancer more than other classes, as conditions like chill/blind/weakness, that are sustain and mobility tools of the Necromancer, have been nerfed in the process as well.
Solution: Make condition cleanses more specific and target either soft cc or damage conditions. This could even be anew niche for the Necromancer that can cleanse these abilities more indescriminate than other classes (except for maybe guardian).

Last but not least PvE:
There is no light at the end of the tunnel for Necromancers without a redesign of how PvE works… sorry.

Just linking a post about global balance for pvp , there are some nice ideas i have seen around , in this chat room

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/SPVP-Balance-Competitive-GW2/first#post3995121

I’m fine with my necro getting tweaked, but lowering how hard it counters certain classes (like eng) needs to be toned down at the same time to keep it balanced.

How does it hard counter engi.

Necro can eat the conds, toss them back, gets a 2nd hp bar (even more resistant to conds and helps them live if the eng tries to spam cc), fear (eng is weak vs cc), knockdown, etc. To have a chance you need to crate and chain cc, but even then if they have deathshroud…

It’s a very one sided fight… unless you’re a minion mancer (lol)

I’m very dubious as far as what A-net says the classes are supposed to be as well. They claimed long ago that wars were supposed to be strong Vs. physical, but weak Vs. conds… yea… lol @ that.