Guild Wars 2

I know it’s a little late to be writing that sort of thing, but i have to.

The necromancer doesn’t feel like a necromancer, he doesn’t really deal with the dead like he used to in GW1.

Think about it, the minions don’t need corpses anymore, they just pop out of thin air, that’s conjuring.

Life siphon, Life steal, that’s a vampire right there.
Conditions, Curses, might as well call him The Witch.
Spectral utilities??, that’s the Ritualist’s domain.

Where’s the necromancy?

Well, its “everything you love from GW” ….so there’s your necro.

Now lets talk about mesmer….and compare him to minion bombers and mesmer from gw1.

Nah…

this is guild wars 2 not guild wars 1

Guild Wars 1 had necros that did curses that did conditions. Guild Wars 1 had necros that life steal.

And in Guild Wars 1, there was a skill that was redone called Aura of the Lich which conjured a minion, even if there was no corpse to conjure from.

Obviously, necromancers were able to do it in Guild Wars 1, so it evolved.

From a game perspective, it’s easy to see why this was necessary though. In an open world environment, the last thing Anet wanted was for 20 necros in a zerg to all be competing for corpses. Let’s say 5 things die and there are 20 necros. That means 15 necros get nothing. There’s no percentage in that.

Some of the changes that were made in Guild Wars 1 were made to compensate for the open world. Instances are far more easily controlled than the open world, which is why necros now don’t have to compete for corpses. In my opinion, this was the right decision.

The lifesteal and the condition builds…they existed in Guild Wars 1 too. I know because I used them.

The Guild Wars 1 skill, Aura of the Lich allowed you to conjure minions from thin air.
At level 18 Death magic, if you had a monk to provide healing, you could conjure up and hold up to 11 minions, no corpses needed.the first picture is of 11 minions, conjured out of thin air. The second is the Necromancer skill bar. The bottom right icon has the number 11 on it. That number shows how many minions the Necromancer is holding at that moment.

Sorry for the blurriness. Took the pictures with my iPad.

yes it was possible to conjure minions out of thin air in GW1, but it needed certain conditions, and it was only 1 type of minion, not like GW2 where ALL minions are summoned unconditionally this way.

also i’m not comparing GW1 and GW2 necromancers per se, i’m just saying that GW2 necromancers are farther away from the definition of a necromancer than the GW1 necro was.

Lifesteal is not as good, minions are created out of thin air, and conditions replaced what used to be profession unique hexes which makes you feel like you’re doing nothing special, so the necromancer feels less of a necromancer now than the necromancer felt like back then.

Everything that made the necromancer a necromancer, has been transformed into a generic caster with green particles.

When I first played the Guild Wars 2 necromancer, I couldn’t stand it. Since that time, many improvements had been made. No, it’s not identical to the Guild Wars 1 necromancer, but I think what makes the biggest difference is nothing you listed.

In Guild Wars 1, necromancers could only wear necromancer armor. Not light armor. Only profession specific. That made each profession feel unique. I don’t personally have problems without how minions work, or how life steal works. In fact, I don’t have a problem with the profession specific armor not being in game either, but yeah this IS a different game.

And if people come into it expecting a carbon copy of what existed in the first game, for any profession, I’m guessing they’re going to be disappointed.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the necromancers of Guild Wars 2…but currently it’s my favorite profession.

Yeah. Looking over the Guild Wars 1 skill bars is an exercise in nostalgia. You could spec yourself for life steal and do tremendous amount of damage. And then there were the other hexes and curses that made this profession so interesting.

On the other hand, going back to play, it seems so clunky and awkward now it’s hard for me to stay logged on for more than a few minutes.

Vayne.8563:

Guild Wars 1 had necros that did curses that did conditions. Guild Wars 1 had necros that life steal.

And in Guild Wars 1, there was a skill that was redone called Aura of the Lich which conjured a minion, even if there was no corpse to conjure from.

Obviously, necromancers were able to do it in Guild Wars 1, so it evolved.

From a game perspective, it’s easy to see why this was necessary though. In an open world environment, the last thing Anet wanted was for 20 necros in a zerg to all be competing for corpses. Let’s say 5 things die and there are 20 necros. That means 15 necros get nothing. There’s no percentage in that.

Some of the changes that were made in Guild Wars 1 were made to compensate for the open world. Instances are far more easily controlled than the open world, which is why necros now don’t have to compete for corpses. In my opinion, this was the right decision.

The lifesteal and the condition builds…they existed in Guild Wars 1 too. I know because I used them.

You know what’d be cool though, if the amount of minions you could summon came out of your life force pool.

Like get rid of them as utilities and make it into a class feature. You still have death shroud but you can also summon minions at your feet for a cost of life force (That is percentage based so it isnt overpowered. So summoning a bone fiend will always cost the same amount of your pool.) Introduce a kind of risk vs reward system to the necromancer. You can summon a lot of weak minions, summon a few really powerful minions, or keep all your life force for a full length death shroud if the fight goes south.

I made quite a detailed suggestion on “Necromancer Minion Acquisition and Management” that would help with making the necromancer actually function more like a proper necromancer with existing GW2 game mechanics. If you wouldn’t mind giving it a quick read I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.

I haven’t revisited it in a while to work out minor details and potential issues as I posted it where suggestions should go; in the suggestions forum. That was probably a mistake, as it gets buried and unseen, and I should have posted it in the necromancer forum to get necromancer players’ views on it.

Personally I would have more of an issue with them if they were the same after 250 years tbh.

The world itself have gotten into industrialization but a school of magic have not been able to advance at all?
Seems quite unlikely.

Well, in regard to the conjuring of minions out of thin air – how fresh does a corpse need to be? Because when you think about it, our own Earth is one big graveyard. I suspect Tyria would not be much different.

Having played both Guild Wars, I feel that by buffing monsters/bosses to ridiculous health pools, Anet pretty much killed the necromancer in GW2.

The necro in GW1 was one of the most powerful classes. With pretty much any good curse/death magic build, a necro could significantly reduce the pressure on the team.

It is not possible to do the same with a necro in GW2 because conditions and minions don’t do jack on bosses. Therefore, no one wants a low DPS necro in the team. Even after speccing with all berserker gear, a necro can only dream of out damaging a poorly specced warrior.

I feel that the necromancer and the other weak classes should be removed entirely, and they should just focus on warrior, guardian and mesmer. They don’t have the attention span to balance all the classes.

mage.3570:

Having played both Guild Wars, I feel that by buffing monsters/bosses to ridiculous health pools, Anet pretty much killed the necromancer in GW2.

The necro in GW1 was one of the most powerful classes. With pretty much any good curse/death magic build, a necro could significantly reduce the pressure on the team.

It is not possible to do the same with a necro in GW2 because conditions and minions don’t do jack on bosses. Therefore, no one wants a low DPS necro in the team. Even after speccing with all berserker gear, a necro can only dream of out damaging a poorly specced warrior.

I feel that the necromancer and the other weak classes should be removed entirely, and they should just focus on warrior, guardian and mesmer. They don’t have the attention span to balance all the classes.

The suggestion of removing the necro because they don’t do as much damage to bosses in dungeons is a bad one in my opinion.

Admittedly there are people who want to run run run through dungeons. I don’t now, and never have believed they’re the majority. I have a bunch of necros in my guild and we run dungeons with them all the time and everyone has a good time.

Removing a profession because a few people focus on efficiency above all else isn’t sufficient reason.

And in Guild Wars 1, for years, eles in PvE were much worse than most professions, so much so that Anet to to almost rewrite the profession. This isn’t something that just happened in Guild Wars 2. It’s not even something that isn’t a problem in most games.

There are always going to be more and less powerful professions, and that’s why buffs and nerfs happen.

I’d be pretty annoyed if Anet removed the necromancer from the game, because I have a lot of fun playing mine.

Vayne.8563:

…
From a game perspective, it’s easy to see why this was necessary though. In an open world environment, the last thing Anet wanted was for 20 necros in a zerg to all be competing for corpses. Let’s say 5 things die and there are 20 necros. That means 15 necros get nothing. There’s no percentage in that.
…

Solution: make corpses “accessible” individually, like resource nodes.

took me like 5 seconds…but that would be too simple, wouldnt it?

Actually, “necromancy” was considered magic that involved the deceased, including spirits. The requirement of “corpses” was only a thing in certain videogames as a gameplay gimmick/limitation. Also sometimes used to refer to general black/dark magic.

The things the Necromancers of GW2 summon are all dead. They’re either spirits or reanimated flesh/bones. Therefore, by definition, necromancy. Additionally, all of the Necro’s magic is thematically dark/black magic and, once again, perfectly coherent with the definition of a necromancer.

If you wanted to be pedantic, on the other hand:

Why do classes even have names? Ranger? Guardian? They’re all psychopathic mercenaries anyways. Their solution to everything is “kill the enemy of whomever is paying me today… And if that doesn’t work, kill their family, wreck their house and burn their land”.

And why “Guild Wars”? There’s only 1 “official” guild in the story, Destiny’s Edge, and it’s actually not relevant at all… To anything…

tl;dr: If you’re going to be pedantic at least be right. Otherwise you just look stupid.

kitten guys, you’ve got it all wrong.
RapidSausage didn’t want to compare to the detail GW1 and GW2 here.
Just wanted to point out that the Necromancer isn’t up to its name.

Now, most of the guys here have given good points to why the Necromancer is what it is now, but you have to consider other things:
- You pointed out that the Necro is doing things that are not its anymore, but you should remember that this professions we have now are the synthesis of all the professions we had back then. So of course you’ll find some Ritualist influence in the spellcasters here.
- Necros don’t have to deal with just dead bodies, but they deal with the sources of life and death, the first one being symbolized by blood and souls and the last one being symbolized by dead corpses. So you have to look at it overall.
- This doesn’t mean that your suggestion is pointless. It’s true that would feel more necroing to see this characters performing rituals over corpses to revive them. But for this, you can look at logistics. Unless each corp could be used by every necro once.
- Black magic has a lot of things to deal with, and Necromancer is just a name to indicate a dark spellcaster in this game. As much as they tried to make it a necromancer, of course it can’t be a true necromancer due to game needings. For example, is very unlikely for a true necromancer to head into a dungeon with a group of people and fight actively because you would expect for a necro to be a very subtle, avoiding person who prefers quiet and loneliness. But ehi, everything for the sake of gaming, right?