Guild Wars 2

After playing a N/Me (Curses with Domination) in Guild Wars for a number of years, I’d like to think that I have an idea of what a Necromancer is in the world ArenaNet set up. The Curses/Domination spec was what I primarily played but, for a change of pace, I had a few nice vampiric, plague-spreading and minion-master builds that I liked to use. It was pretty clear to me what the overall theme for the profession was and it was something that I found enjoyable to play across the various facets of the theme.

But here, now, in Guild Wars 2, I have no idea what a Necromancer actually is supposed to be.

Minions are utterly uncontrollable and, while this existed in first three Guild Wars campaigns and G:WEN, there is a real problem here with the minion AI. It’s not at all uncommon for minions to do absolutely nothing if the player isn’t getting attacked and it’s not at all uncommon for minions to do absolutely nothing if the player is getting attacked. Sure, players would have to micro-manage their minions to keep them alive, buffs up and what not, but the minions actually attacked in a reliable fashion. But not here. This makes Minion Masters, Necromancers with real control over the dead, an absolute bust.

Vampiric builds do not offer any meaningful survivability and other players with significantly greater familiarity and willingness to test these issues to the Nth degree have already brought this up. I won’t attempt to add further detail, instead I’ll just give their work a nod and say that the ‘your soul is mine’ play-style that kept Necromancers alive in the thick of battle in the first Guild Wars games is another absolute bust in Guild Wars 2.

Hallmarks of the Necromancer theme are fundamentally broken and this is undeniable.

I’ve come to thinking to myself that Necromancers have been silently re-envisioned and that I should look at them as some sort of dark sorcerer. This makes sense seeing Death Shroud has nothing whatever to actually do with the old Necromancer theme. This new dark sorcerer theme is something I’d be able to embrace were it not for some glaring issues.

The Necromancer as a dark sorcerer sees their greatest power come alive from pure power builds. This is because conditions cap incredibly quickly in group events and can be removed without much trouble, irrespective of PvP or PvE play, leaving power builds as the only reliable source of damage. The problem then comes from the fact that the power-focused weapons are the dagger and the axe: short- and mid-range weapons that are ultimately melee weapons. So, all things considered, we have a dark sorcerer playing at close range with melee weapons and lacking in survivability.

I took me about a year to come back and try Guild Wars 2 and…and I’ve seen that there has been no meaningful change in the class that I’d long since found the most interesting. When it comes down to it I don’t know what the Necromancer is supposed to be and it’s astonishing that ArenaNet would choose to look at the Ranger instead of a class with not only horribly broken mechanics but lacking an overall coherent theme, generally speaking but especially in direct relation to all but the Warrior and the Warrior v.2 (Guardian).

There’s nothing polite I can say about the situation. The only thing I can do is ask ArenaNet, with all sincerity, what is a Necromancer supposed to be?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/PHEW/first#post612396

here’s an idea of what theyre imagining the necromancer to be. the reality is different tho.

As for the minions: they will try to attack what youre attacking. Ground target skills dont work for that, you have to attack an enemy with a targetted skill for them to become active. Exception is the Golem, its AI is much weirder than that of the other minions.

Vampiric builds: yes and everyone knows that. Anet had some sort of ‘Blood magic love’-update, but it was a kittening joke.

It’s not just necromancer, I have the same feeling for every profession. Only reasonable build for damage is power melee, doesn’t matter if you’re warrior, ele or >ranger< (oh the irony). I thought that GW2 will be a game where everybody can play how they want (ie pistol thief), but I realised that everyone can be just a wannabe warriors. With lower survi. And damage. And worse utility. And useless pets.

sPvP balance kinda dictates that melee does more damage than ranged.

Where it kinds of fail in PvE on top of it is that due to the lack of tank, ranged classes cannot really afford to fight completely ranged because the bosses will kind of move all over the place then which is chaotic and a recipe for disaster.

I get the whole play-it-safe-PR thing and, at the risk of sounding antagonistic, ArenaNet really does need to play it safe because they’ve cashed it a large amount of their goodwill. After reading comments by Valve personnel about bad communication being more damaging than no communication I can’t help but come back to this thread and add a bit more along those lines because, truly, this is a question I want ArenaNet to answer.

What is a Necromancer?

No communication for a protracted amount of time is bad communication. It is communicating a lack of presence and even a lack of care. There is nothing at all wrong in creating a sticky post that says something to the effect of ‘ideas that staff are interested in or express positive sentiment toward should not be considered to be things that are going to be included in the game in the future, considered for inclusion in the future or even in development. This is conversation and the only way to have an open dialogue is if this is accepted’. Granted, very few people seem to be ok with accepting such but this sort of thing needs to happen.

Please, what is a Necromancer?

The lack of meaningful change since launch, the amount of money no doubt ear-marked for development of truly passing content when that money could have been better spent elsewhere (cf. all sorts of well-constructed posts I need not reference here), the long-standing design issues (ibid), long-standing profession bugs (ibid) and now this oppressive silence is really disturbing. Some will say this is a cry from entitlement, while others will understand the real frustration and how terrible this situation looks. There are times when silence simply allows negative sentiment to build in intensity and, for a lot of people, people who don’t even look at this forum, that negative sentiment is incredible in size. I’m one of those people and it’s not my fault.

Someone in a position to comment meaningfully on this issue from ArenaNet…please let us know what a Necromancer is supposed to be. The Ranger at least has an identity even if it is in a bad position mechanically, the Necromancer (not counting the seemingly redundant Warrior/Guardian situation) is the only profession that doesn’t have a clear theme connected to it’s mechanics. We don’t manipulate death and the dead, we don’t manipulate the power of blood or our enemies (hexes don’t exist and health siphoning is incredibly weak), other classes share our conditions and more meaningfully, but we have a Death Shroud. And while that Death Shroud has exactly nothing to do with death it is a cool mechanic fit for a dark sorcerer type. But this cool mechanic is drained quickly in the presence of conditions and doesn’t protect us from any conditions or even purge conditions on use. Effectively, we have another health bar with new and cool skills attached to it.

For my part I’d like to see the Necromancer made coherent and around the idea of Death Shroud, renamed of course, to fit the theme that it seems the Necromancer is supposed to actually have. This, of course, is conjecture because I don’t know what the Necromancer is actually supposed to be…I just know, like so many others, what it can be and what it isn’t.

Necromancer class needs more weapon choices for new builds. As you can see,
when traits and utilites are taken into consideration, necromancer is a condition-weighted character. But conditions lose their viability with every patch, so proper power based equivalents are needed. Current power based weapons are melee or mid-melee range without cleave or aoe option, this makes them impossible to be used against zerg fights in wvw or pvp since necros are so vulnerable to damage and cc without even having mobility for being a melee fighter.
Clearly, 1200 ranged power based, at least one single target and at least one aoe based direct-damage weapons are needed for necro. Also, more direct damage based traits and utilities are needed to remove dependency to conditions.

As for minions, they have terrible AI even worse than ranger pets. Most of the time , flesh golem just waits afk behind player while he is attacking/fighting. This is why minions are unreliable source of damage.
For minions these fixes are needed first.
1. A real fix for minion AI and attack problems.
2. Extra shortcut control buttons and/or on screen UI for minions to give orders like attack/defend/don’t attack. This UI will appear when at least one minion utility is equipped.
3. Underwater equivalent for flesh golem(possibly a dead shark) with same kind of huge cc attack.(underwater rush maybe?)

While I personally wouldn’t advocate a focus on necromancer a over rangers as a necro main myself, the point is well made.

Lack of meaningful sustain, finishers and group support, cleaving weapons and rather large bugs have all plagued the class since launch. Pun intended. Then dhuumfire came in and changed one spec hugely, resulting in nerfs to other great skills.

I do think they need to open up to the idea that perhaps they need to rethink some issues with necros. It doesn’t seem to me that the class is terribly far off from getting what it needs, but there needs to be an effort to change that. The necro forums certainly have plenty of ideas for improvement.

It was to my understanding that Death Shroud is a more balanced version of Life-Stealing, without allowing a player to regenerate massive amounts of health.

As for our role, the Necromancer is currently being balanced as a PvP control class, similar to how Curses functioned in GW1.

In PvP, a Necromancer focus is placed mainly on restricting movement and controlling the battlefield. This is made more obvious by the ability to use Marks (visible traps on the battlefield), Wells, frequent Chill, Immobilize, and Fear, and punishment (such as Locust Swarm damaging foes staying near us.)

Unfortunately, as genius as the Necromancer may be for PvP, they do not translate well to PvE.

Necromancer does suffer from quite a few issues.
For one they have lots of bugs.

Minions die when you transform: It’s a bug, “hotfixed” by a tooltip that warns you that forms destroy minions…
I remember the “bug” being introduced near launch because Necros slotted Minions underwater and brought them on land while having other Utility skills on ground.

Skills get locked for a while if you exit Death Shroud by letting it run out of Life Force.
At the same time Death Shroud seems to get no cooldown if you do that, so it’s both a buff and a nerf in the form of a bug.

Aside from bugs a lot of traits make little sense.
For one the Death Magic trait tree has Minor traits relating to Minions.

Why doesn’t the Warrior have Minor traits relating to banners?
Because not every Warrior uses them.

Likewise not every Necro uses minions, so the Minor traits feel almost like an insult.
There’s little point to gaining some Toughness for each minion you have, if the only Minion you have is the Jagged horror from an another Minor trait…

Some traits are just outright bad.
Spite 3rd Minor Trait: Gain 1 stack of might for 5 sec when below 25% health.
I get that Necro having high base stats is meant to get weaker Minor traits than squishier Professions, but this is still awful.

The only worse Minor trait in GW2 that I can think of is the Thief one that often reveals them and gets them killed.

And in design Necro’s role just isn’t wanted in PvE at all.
Being good at controlling things doesn’t matter when the toughest opponent have Defiant anyway and DPS and Boons are all that matters.

The one place people want Necros at are the Husks at Wurm, for Fear, Bleeds and Epidemic.

Being slow means you play catch-up when people move forwards in dungeons or Guild Missions.
At least Guardians get compensated for it by being extremely tanky.
Necros sure aren’t. They are as slow as Guardians yet not so tanky, deal a fair bit of damage but not even close to Warriors. (who are also much, much faster)

Even though Necro can take a lot more “stray hits” here and there or light AoE than most others can the Death Shroud instantly melts under heavy damage from mobs in PvE.
Meanwhile Invulnerability and Blur that other Professions have works really well against mobs or even bosses…

Blood Magic as a whole is just underpowered and tricky to balance.
Life Stealing ignores armor, so if they make the numbers too big Necros eat through heavily armored targets in seconds, if they make them small (like they are now) then it plain sucks against most targets.
If Life Stealing dealt more damage and Healed more but didn’t ignore armor it’d probably work much better.

The only strong Life Stealing belongs to Vampiric Minions.
The actual Dagger Life Siphon and the on-crit trait are very weak.
Furthermore if Dagger is meant to be tied to Life Stealing I think it’d make sense for it’s auto-attack to steal some Life as well, instead of just a long channeling skill that’s easily interrupted or dodged.
Alternatively the Siphon could be so crazy strong you actually need to dodge it.
Would make it useful in PvE at least.

Also… Vampiric Signet is useless.
It deals little damage and doesn’t heal much either.
Well of Blood heals much more, and Consume Conditions is still king.

Axe’s Auto-attack is weak.
Otherwise I think it’s solid, though!

But really, I think that the biggest issue is that Necro’s design in of itself doesn’t work in PvE.

Nobody wants a slow moving attrition class in PvE.
You want damage, speed and Boons.

Be it Dungeons or just farming Frostgorge being slow is just annoying in PvE.
It’s only truly a balancing factor in PvP and WvW.
And heck, in WvW’s case it makes Necros pretty bad at roaming because people can just run away.

Necros are great at WvW Zergs, however.
In general Necro’s one strength is their condition AoE.
Everything else is done plain better by an another Profession.

In an ideal Profession balance a Blood Magic Necro would be as wanted as a Bunker Guardian, and a Power Necro would be a slow-moving clumsy, but extremely dangerous force.

Currently Blood Magic Necros are meh and why would you use Power Necro when a Warrior moves WAY faster and deals WAY more damage?

3 days and closing on 600 views in a thread asking after the design concept of a class because it seems to (1) bear no resemblance to its predecessor from Guild Wars and (2) doesn’t have a clear concept in the current game, as evidenced by some comments from folks here and a plethora of well-constructed comments over the years in the Necromancer section.

We can say that very few of the issues with the Necromancer have been meaningfully addressed from launch. (Sadly, yes, from launch in August 2012.) What we can’t say, unfortunately, is that we received a meaningful, well-constructed commentary from the developers on this issue.

I understand that from a PR standpoint this is not something that you folks at ArenaNet would like to touch -then again, perhaps some of you do want to address this issue- however we really need a response in respect to just what a Necromancer is supposed to be given the long-standing state of affairs for the class. Again, while the Ranger is not in a good place it at least has a coherent theme that functions through its mechanics and the Warrior and Guardian, while arguably redundant, are two sides of the same coin: the Necromancer is just a large question mark.

Can we please have a response?

No one here is looking to argue why things haven’t changed meaningfully since launch for the Necromancer, the only question at hand is just what exactly the Necromancer is supposed to be given the long-standing state of affairs in respect to the words used to describe the skills/traits and the mechanics of those skills/traits conflicting and/or being quite underwhelming.

All i can say is that every single question asked about necromancer in a serious way is been ignored last post on necro’s was 3 months ago and only stated, “We know and are tracking it”
Even direct questions to the “community Q&A whatever title”is being ignored..

Pm’s don’t work either.. sending cake doesn’t work..

fug it..

play warrior.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

All i can say is that every single question asked about necromancer in a serious way is been ignored last post on necro’s was 3 months ago and only stated, “We know and are tracking it”
Even direct questions to the “community Q&A whatever title”is being ignored..

Pm’s don’t work either.. sending cake doesn’t work..

fug it..

play warrior.

Have you considered that in most MMO forums, trying to directly address the developers gets the post removed entirely? And/or nets you temp ban if you do it a lot?

It’s for a reason. Forums are mostly for player <→ player communication. ANet is actually really weird in that they have some dev <→ player communication. You usually do not do that, as your forums are one of the worst sources of information about the state of your game.
They are ok for rough pointers where to look at something (though never to what the specific issue is!), but that’s all you use them for. They’re also ok for announcement (pure dev → player communication).

In other words, “We last got information X time ago” is really pointless as an argument of class state. How about “No one in my guild of 120 active players, 30 active necromancers 1 year ago, now plays Necro. Not in PvE, not in WvW, not in PvP.”. That’s something which makes devs look into why players don’t play Necro – though again, their result might not be what you wanted them to see, they only use the input for a general pointer where to look.

Why all this?
Because forum-goers are a terrible source of information.

cheers for your responce.

We been on that road many time though, many many times.
Many people have asked very decent and reasonable questions the last year many people dedicated their time to get bug reports in, discuss traitlines, suggest fixes, point of flaws and tried to keep positive.

since the amount of responce we had over the period of one year in regards of bug’s and broken mechanics is 6.
4 resulting in a fix over a peroid of 6 months.

If you look into reports made they are clear, truthfull and spot on when it comes to description.

That said, if no dev visits the forum or bothers to read the reports or answers what’s the point.

I doubt they don’t visit it. Rather, they have no obligation – and no reason – to reply. As the CDI topics show, any comment the devs do make only make things worse, a result of the rather specialized playerbase on the forums (i.e., largely the angry people) coupled with the Hype Train syndrome on anything which can be misinterpreted as a promise.

Most dev studios don’t actually have the devs read the topics, btw. They have community managers who send in “summaries” of forum activity and active topics. This in turn gives the devs the topics to talk about.

That was why Ghostcrawler in WoW was so … well … weird. He started talking to the playerbase. And see what it got him, the guy was universally hated, people started huge campaigns of approval when he left, kept criticizing him after he left, and kept insisting that any class currently overpowered must be what he plays (funnily enough, he played Holy Priest – the one spec no one expected, even though that was in turn the clearest indicator of it being his main, it was never overpowered much, he would risk being called out on a power abuse).

The ANet devs are risking the same route. Interaction with a MMO community is… not a good idea.
Or rather, if you could interact with the community, that’d be good.
Problem is, you never do. The forum is filled with the hardcore smallscape PvPers, the angry people, the l33t people and the ones who always seek to blame someone for their misfortunes.
Do you really want to take any input from these people? Might as well throw the game out of the window right away. :P

Do not expect an answer when there isnt any.
Also this is the only game that PUNISHED people for asking legitimate questions about the necromancers yet they leave the forum hatemongering against necros unchecked.
Need i say more?

Carighan.6758:

I doubt they don’t visit it. Rather, they have no obligation – and no reason – to reply. As the CDI topics show, any comment the devs do make only make things worse, a result of the rather specialized playerbase on the forums (i.e., largely the angry people) coupled with the Hype Train syndrome on anything which can be misinterpreted as a promise.

Most dev studios don’t actually have the devs read the topics, btw. They have community managers who send in “summaries” of forum activity and active topics. This in turn gives the devs the topics to talk about.

That was why Ghostcrawler in WoW was so … well … weird. He started talking to the playerbase. And see what it got him, the guy was universally hated, people started huge campaigns of approval when he left, kept criticizing him after he left, and kept insisting that any class currently overpowered must be what he plays (funnily enough, he played Holy Priest – the one spec no one expected, even though that was in turn the clearest indicator of it being his main, it was never overpowered much, he would risk being called out on a power abuse).

The ANet devs are risking the same route. Interaction with a MMO community is… not a good idea.
Or rather, if you could interact with the community, that’d be good.
Problem is, you never do. The forum is filled with the hardcore smallscape PvPers, the angry people, the l33t people and the ones who always seek to blame someone for their misfortunes.
Do you really want to take any input from these people? Might as well throw the game out of the window right away. :P

There is a difference between input and simply reporting Bug’s known to every single player in a profession and even people not playing that profession, especially when the dev’s asked for bug reports. this was 6 months ago.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

cheers for your responce.

We been on that road many time though, many many times.
Many people have asked very decent and reasonable questions the last year many people dedicated their time to get bug reports in, discuss traitlines, suggest fixes, point of flaws and tried to keep positive.

since the amount of responce we had over the period of one year in regards of bug’s and broken mechanics is 6.
4 resulting in a fix over a peroid of 6 months.

If you look into reports made they are clear, truthfull and spot on when it comes to description.

That said, if no dev visits the forum or bothers to read the reports or answers what’s the point.

I stopped playing over a year ago because of the state of affairs in the game in respect to design issues generally speaking and the Necromancer specifically -it was the class I played for years in Guild Wars and what I wanted to play here so I’d like to think this makes sense. I was polite but forceful with my criticism and the ArenaNet response was that ‘I quit’ threads weren’t allowed, nevermind the fact that I was giving them valuable input as to why I was no longer going to play. It wasn’t some ‘kitten u all suckzorz’ thread, it was feedback.

A little over a year later I came back and saw that things didn’t change…but somehow I was able to have fun. I had to push myself to be able to find that fun but, truth be told, it can be found, though not easily, given the number and quality of very real issues.

The state of affairs here is appalling and, unfortunately, it truly is par for the course in respect to MMORPG development. The most positive thing that can be said is that while other companies charged a monthly fee with the same issues GW2 has while working through those issues, there is no monthly fee charged here. This means that the players don’t have to suffer the indignity of paying to support a studio that has real issues when it comes to design. I’m very pleased by the fact that ArenaNet doesn’t visit that indignity on the playerbase, it’s one of the few things positive things going for them from a critical point of view.

At the end of the day it’s long-standing issues like this and silence in respect to serious-minded, legitimate questions (e.g. What is a Necromancer?) that make it so frustrating to play. It’s not a bad thing for developers to interact with the community in a way I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread. It is a bad thing for the silence to remain because it just lets all of the negative sentiment fester and that becomes the only voice that the community hears.