Guild Wars 2

This article is an excellent exposition of the serious problems with Necromancers in GW2. (I have no association at all with the site or author.)

article

My 80 Necro is largely retired at this point.

If ANet does not address these numerous and serious problems in the expansion, they will have failed in their much-vaunted class updates. It’s sad to see the Revenant gaining what the Necromancer should always have had.

One of anet quotes: necromancer are in good spot period ;D

I fought the good fight for necro buffs for a long time, and then gave up and never looked back…

Anet has ignored the class for years, the Death Shroud mechanic was horrible in WoW, and Anet copied it, and it’s horrible here too.

So now the beta is upon us, and looking at the new traits, it’s obvious that Anet still doesn’t get it…

Deathshroud needs a complete makeover. Something along the lines of removing the second healthbar, and making it a buff… like “while in deathshroud you gain stability or protection and heal yourself for 10% of the damage you do.”

and that’s it!.. no extra skill bar…

…and traits like dumbfire could be "while in deathshroud your skills that cause bleeding also cause burning (2 seconds)

…or while in deathshroud you have an additional 50% chance to crit

it’s fixable, but Anet is stubborn as a mule, and refuses to acknowledge it’s mistakes.

I’ve mostly shelved my necro at this point as well. Until DS is completely reworked or the devs make real progress in fixing the class it simply isn’t worth playing. My ele is much more rewarding to play.

Ezeriel.9574:

I fought the good fight for necro buffs for a long time, and then gave up and never looked back…

Anet has ignored the class for years, the Death Shroud mechanic was horrible in WoW, and Anet copied it, and it’s horrible here too.

So now the beta is upon us, and looking at the new traits, it’s obvious that Anet still doesn’t get it…

Deathshroud needs a complete makeover. Something along the lines of removing the second healthbar, and making it a buff… like “while in deathshroud you gain stability or protection and heal yourself for 10% of the damage you do.”

and that’s it!.. no extra skill bar…

…and traits like dumbfire could be "while in deathshroud your skills that cause bleeding also cause burning (2 seconds)

…or while in deathshroud you have an additional 50% chance to crit

it’s fixable, but Anet is stubborn as a mule, and refuses to acknowledge it’s mistakes.

^This. And there are other options that would mostly retain DS and still work, and those are easy too. Well, if they made it like your idea they better add the DS-Skills as F-Skills though

-Why can’t they use utility skills in Death Shroud?
Should be changed, i agree
-Why is the Death Shroud cooldown so long?
Lol it’s not, and you can trait it.
-Why do they offer no group utility?
They offer lots of debuffs, and from the upcoming changes they will pump out lots of vuln. In the current pve the debuff style isnt too useful, especially in a party where vuln/other debuffs are applied from everyone. We need group utility in form of buffing.
-Why are two out of three of its elites awful?
Hahahahha what. All elites are great (maybe except golem when he picks tulips)
-Why does it have so little access to control effects?
All my whats, the guy writing this has never played necro. Golem Knockback, Unblockable Daze Warhorn, and SO MANY FEARS.
-Why does it have so little access to powerful combo fields?
They have dark fields and we have poison fields, which fit necro theme. The correct question is why do we have such unreliable blast finishers and no whirl/fast projectile finisher to use life steal in the dark fields.
-Why is the Blood Magic trait line so poor?
It’s not as poor as it is underwhelming. (Drarnor Kunoram.5180 made the calculations for a full vamp necro, iirc better spam regen on staff 2 than life steal.)
-Why is Life Force so fragile when the profession has no reliable means of escape or defence?
Life Force is hard to balance. Too much and necros are too tanky in 1v1, too less and they cant handle a teamfight. I guess the silver lining isnt found yet.
-Why are minions, their role and AI still terrible?
Minions aren’t bad. Damage is good, they siphon hp, they take conditions/boons, are good meat shields, every minion has its role. AI will be fixed in HoT or earlier.

All in all the article has some fair points. Necro needs improving. But some things aren’t as dramatic as people think, and remember the game is mostly balanced around tpvp, not pve.

Also who wants balance, if everyone cries about how OP/UP something is, the more attention the game is getting

Pelopidas.2140:

-Why can’t they use utility skills in Death Shroud?
Should be changed, i agree
-Why is the Death Shroud cooldown so long?
Lol it’s not, and you can trait it.
-Why do they offer no group utility?
They offer lots of debuffs, and from the upcoming changes they will pump out lots of vuln. In the current pve the debuff style isnt too useful, especially in a party where vuln/other debuffs are applied from everyone. We need group utility in form of buffing.
-Why are two out of three of its elites awful?
Hahahahha what. All elites are great (maybe except golem when he picks tulips)
-Why does it have so little access to control effects?
All my whats, the guy writing this has never played necro. Golem Knockback, Unblockable Daze Warhorn, and SO MANY FEARS.
-Why does it have so little access to powerful combo fields?
They have dark fields and we have poison fields, which fit necro theme. The correct question is why do we have such unreliable blast finishers and no whirl/fast projectile finisher to use life steal in the dark fields.
-Why is the Blood Magic trait line so poor?
It’s not as poor as it is underwhelming. (Drarnor Kunoram.5180 made the calculations for a full vamp necro, iirc better spam regen on staff 2 than life steal.)
-Why is Life Force so fragile when the profession has no reliable means of escape or defence?
Life Force is hard to balance. Too much and necros are too tanky in 1v1, too less and they cant handle a teamfight. I guess the silver lining isnt found yet.
-Why are minions, their role and AI still terrible?
Minions aren’t bad. Damage is good, they siphon hp, they take conditions/boons, are good meat shields, every minion has its role. AI will be fixed in HoT or earlier.

All in all the article has some fair points. Necro needs improving. But some things aren’t as dramatic as people think, and remember the game is mostly balanced around tpvp, not pve.

Also who wants balance, if everyone cries about how OP/UP something is, the more attention the game is getting

On your CC effects, you forget every other class and their mothers have more, and AE at that. All fears except for Reapers mark with its massive cd are single-target (or bullkitten like “when you get downed fear someone”. The WH-Daze is so close ranged other professions can easily dance around it – curtesy of no mobility except dark path…which is slow and needs us to pop DS. Doom is also DS-exclusive. Flesh golem is BAD, and the knock down likes to bug out aka golem running in the opposite direction. Also on a huge cooldown. And where do your “so many fears” come from? doom, Reapers mark. Thats all of the skills. The rest are traits that are way too situational.

So, all in all, we have 4 “real” CC’s, of which one doesn’T stop the enemy from casting.

There has been 0 mention of anything being done about Minion AI and/or their pathing issues.

Dark-and poison fields ARE pretty bad. Sure they fit the theme, but until the “reward” for blasting it is changed, they will be judged as sub-par. And Lifesteal is also disregarded, rightfully so when compared to eg. Might. And having no reliable/spammable finishers just adds insult to injury.

I’ll give you the DS cooldown, but DS is still a flawed design that needs improvement like, 2 and a half years ago. And we need to freaking start with at least 50% LF on spawn in sPvP.

Vulnerabilty can just as easily be stacked by other classes, and they can stack might on top of it. They also can pump out enough conditions on their own, and Condi isn’t even good in PvE to begin with. Maybe the cap unlock will fix some of it, but i doubt it.

As for the elites… They aren’t awful per se, but they would still be balanced on like half the cooldown.

Let alone all the other shortcomings like not being able to lifesteal through DS, losing out utilities in Ds etc. etc.

It would be better, by now, if ArenaNet just removed Death Shroud.

Players: “Necromancers don’t have any useful way to grant stability!”

ArenaNet: “Because necromancers already have Death Shroud, with Death Shroud AND that they would never die!!!”

Players: “Necromancers can’t use utility or healing or elite skills with their profession mechanic!”

ArenaNet: “Because necromancers already have Death Shroud, with Death Shroud AND that they would never die!!!”

Players: “The life stealing traits are too weak! They barely make a difference!”

ArenaNet: “Because necromancers already have Death Shroud, with Death Shroud AND that they would never die!!!”

Players: “We can’t heal decently in Death Shroud! If a party member uses regeneration on us, nothing happens!”

ArenaNet: “Because necromancers already have Death Shroud, with Death Shroud AND that they would never die!!!”

And so on and so on.

ArenaNet is probably afraid of what would happen if necromancers were more resilient in PvP (because LOL esports and etc). However, Death Shroud is far from being as useful as ArenaNet thinks it is.

Group play in PvE in GW2 is very degenerate – the “might plus stack plus spam DPS” meta is rather poor. Necromancers don’t go anywhere close to that meta, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but they still need a big change in order to feel useful and desirable in PvE.

That’s the thing – that article comes to the conclusion that most of what the Necromancer has is good, they just need to get more of it. As opposed to the typical official-forum “everything [game’s developer] does is absolutely horrible and any self-respecting player of [game] who can tell black from white or up from down has no choice except to despise [game’s developer] with every fiber of their being for deliberately setting out to screw over [class/race/’Mech/whatever]”, he undertook a calm and reasonable analysis of the profession and tried to come up with at least the kernels of ideas required to fix it.

Death Shroud replacing your 1-5 weapon skills, rather than your entire bar, would be an excellent start. Death Shroud not blocking healing effects, or potentially absorbing healing effects as increased Life Force while in Shroud, would be an equally good step 2. Blood Magic not healing for peanuts is something that should’ve been in from the start. How is it that Invigorating Precision, one Thief trait, is miles better at offensive heal-while-you-inflict-beatings than the entire Blood Magic line?

A significant Toughness boost while in Shroud wouldn’t go amiss, or for that matter rebalance how much damage every given point of life force gets to absorb. If degradation was stronger/more difficult to trait down (i.e. Shroud didn’t/couldn’t last as long), but every point of LF absorbed, say, three points of damage…? Then, suddenly, relying on DS for protection against spikes or padding out one’s normal health would be less problematic.

What would not be good starts is scrapping Shroud altogether, or completely tearing down and rebuilding the class’ weapons from scratch, so that it gets all the same blocks, dodges, evasions, and invulns as everything else. Necromancers are the facetank class; they’re not supposed to avoid everything you do, they’re supposed to eat it and then keep right on coming after your brains for dessert. That’s their schtick, one of the ways they’re supposed to feel different from Chronomancers or Guardians or Revenants or what-have-you.

Life steals need to be significantly better. Death Shroud should be much more durable, and frankly lowering the stupidly high cast time for Life Blast would go a long way towards making Shroud feel better. Necromancers should gain pretty much unparalleled access to Resistance, so they can draw conditions, use them, feed off them, whatever they want to do with them, much more effectively. They need much more frequent and sustainable access to cripples and chills – don’t give the necromancer more mobility, give it more options to remove its enemies’ mobility.

My Necromancer is one of my favorite characters. I play her all the time even with how utterly awful everyone claims Necromancers are, but I’m also with a very casual, fun-loving guild and tend to do more solo work than anything else, so I don’t run into as many issues as the PvP ultracomps or the Fractals speed-clear guys or whatever do. Clearly I don’t know my head from a pumpkin helm when it comes to things like class balance, but I do know that if I wanted to play a dodgey blocky tricksy thing that evades/avoids everything that comes its way with a plethora of stacked active defenses, I’d play a Mesmer.

I hate my Mesmer.

I want my necromancer to be a tough, unyielding, undying black mage that uses its own pain as a condiment for its enemies’ souls. My necromancer is supposed to survive damage through unnatural vitality (high base health, lifesteals), through condition control and manipulation, and through redirecting damage it takes into Torment (Death Shroud), and which deals with its enemies by sticking them in place and rending their lives until they don’t have them anymore. I don’t want my necromancer to do all the same crap everybody else does. If I wanted to do that crap I’d play everybody else.

‘Fixing’ the Necromancer is no such thing if the thing you have at the end of the process is no longer a Necromancer.

Ezeriel.9574:

I fought the good fight for necro buffs for a long time, and then gave up and never looked back…

Anet has ignored the class for years, the Death Shroud mechanic was horrible in WoW, and Anet copied it, and it’s horrible here too.

So now the beta is upon us, and looking at the new traits, it’s obvious that Anet still doesn’t get it…

Deathshroud needs a complete makeover. Something along the lines of removing the second healthbar, and making it a buff… like “while in deathshroud you gain stability or protection and heal yourself for 10% of the damage you do.”

and that’s it!.. no extra skill bar…

…and traits like dumbfire could be "while in deathshroud your skills that cause bleeding also cause burning (2 seconds)

…or while in deathshroud you have an additional 50% chance to crit

it’s fixable, but Anet is stubborn as a mule, and refuses to acknowledge it’s mistakes.

What Death Shroud mechanic in WoW? Closest thing would be old old Mage’s Mana Shield… I don’t know what are you reffering to since I’m mostly out of WoW since panda release, but still curious…

Is it something with old Shadow Priest’s Shadow Form? There’s some similarity since it too locked you from holy spells…

Warlock… I don’t remember anything similar to Shroud.

@Shiki

I disagree about the warhorn and the golem…you didnt mention nightmare rune for terrormancer, reapers protection and spectral wall…and necros can corrupt stability…the last 2 i dont really consider situational…
Necros are good at CC, if you disagree i dont think i can convince you.
I’d also like a frost field or fire field, neither are coming soon imo. Lifesteal can be effective, blindness and weakness from the respective fields too. In pvp.
Also we can stack vuln and might as well, we just keep the might to ourselves. I don’t even mention conditions in pve//
Half the cooldown on lich…do you even pvp…balance is for tpvp not dungeons…
I think they’ve mentioned they have hired new personell for AI, as well as improving AI of enemies/minions/pets/npcs for the coming expansion

Cough cough can necros get the most attention now? Not selfish but I’m pretty sure this is the perfect after this much dodging and going around the main issue in some cases it became worse. Eventually devs from other games will start noticing 0.o I’ve never seen this much controversy with a class in all my previous games.

Edit: Keep this thread in this section plz.

this makes me so depressed. it’s making me hate the revenant much more when they as a class is just shoving necro further and further away.

Hopefully this isn’t an Ashen’s kind of Excellent Analysis.

Pelopidas.2140:

-Why can’t they use utility skills in Death Shroud?
Should be changed, i agree
-Why is the Death Shroud cooldown so long?
Lol it’s not, and you can trait it.
-Why do they offer no group utility?
They offer lots of debuffs, and from the upcoming changes they will pump out lots of vuln. In the current pve the debuff style isnt too useful, especially in a party where vuln/other debuffs are applied from everyone. We need group utility in form of buffing.
-Why are two out of three of its elites awful?
Hahahahha what. All elites are great (maybe except golem when he picks tulips)
-Why does it have so little access to control effects?
All my whats, the guy writing this has never played necro. Golem Knockback, Unblockable Daze Warhorn, and SO MANY FEARS.
-Why does it have so little access to powerful combo fields?
They have dark fields and we have poison fields, which fit necro theme. The correct question is why do we have such unreliable blast finishers and no whirl/fast projectile finisher to use life steal in the dark fields.
-Why is the Blood Magic trait line so poor?
It’s not as poor as it is underwhelming. (Drarnor Kunoram.5180 made the calculations for a full vamp necro, iirc better spam regen on staff 2 than life steal.)
-Why is Life Force so fragile when the profession has no reliable means of escape or defence?
Life Force is hard to balance. Too much and necros are too tanky in 1v1, too less and they cant handle a teamfight. I guess the silver lining isnt found yet.
-Why are minions, their role and AI still terrible?
Minions aren’t bad. Damage is good, they siphon hp, they take conditions/boons, are good meat shields, every minion has its role. AI will be fixed in HoT or earlier.

All in all the article has some fair points. Necro needs improving. But some things aren’t as dramatic as people think, and remember the game is mostly balanced around tpvp, not pve.

Also who wants balance, if everyone cries about how OP/UP something is, the more attention the game is getting

Some of your points make me think your necro is just an alt you play once a month.
Some of the best were: “All the elites are great”, “Golem”, “SO MANY FEARS”, “minions arent bad”.
lol… you CANNOT be serious. Because if you are, you are either blind, maybe watching Game of Thrones on your second monitor while playing GW, or just plain flamebaiting.
I am not sure what class you are mainly playing, but i hope anet decides to give you those amazing minions, and spare us necros the headaches. Imagine when mesmers lose their Time Warp and get a Flesh Golem instead. The rage and tears on this forum would reach epic proportions.

Rym.1469:

What Death Shroud mechanic in WoW? Closest thing would be old old Mage’s Mana Shield… I don’t know what are you reffering to since I’m mostly out of WoW since panda release, but still curious…

Is it something with old Shadow Priest’s Shadow Form? There’s some similarity since it too locked you from holy spells…

Warlock… I don’t remember anything similar to Shroud.

I’m talking about Metamorph for the warlocks… you’d plink away at bosses with your shadowbolt (same as necro staff 1 spamming) and them pop metamorphosis and plink away with with a higher damage version (DS 1 spam)

and in both games you end up having a sub-par character 90% of the time, just to transform into a better than average character for a short while….

..but by necessity the character has to be sub-par when not thansformed, or else you get a class that is completely over-powered.

Like in wow, you cast your damage-over-time attacks, tell your elite pet to charge, which stuns your opponent and you run away/kite. Necros really are re-skined demonology warlocks, except in WoW, warlocks were a real attrition class.

In GW2, necros are a watered down condition class. You can cast your dots, and run away, but no one is going to die from that. At best some noob will be distracted by the dots and not notice the ranger’s arrows hitting them before it’s too late….

…sigh, I just depressed myself with that hard dose of reality.

This is a better look at the profession. Nemisis says allot of the same stuff but goes into greater detail.

Before I quitted GW2 last year, I spent a lot of time analysing and talking about the Necromancer. Very little changed. I am not going to bore everyone by repeating everything I said. So let me just say:

Necromancer in GW2 is boring as **** to play. Everyone more or less uses the exact same build. Because there is zero build diversity. All non-standard builds just sucks. That’s why I quit the game.

GW1 necromancer was a thousand times more exciting to play. High risk high reward. All or nothing. Sacrifice everything. And there were so much more build diversity. I spent hours designing my skill bars.

2 of the necro elites disable their whole skill bar. Terrible. How about some elites that “works with” the rest of the skills, instead of disabling everything?

Who in the right mind created a class that have zero mobility and zero blocks? Mobility allows a player to avoid 20 attacks. Blocking for 3 seconds can arguably do the same. How much defence is needed to face tank 20 attacks?

Change DS back to the necro down state, like it should always had been.

I can go on and on. But I would be ranting just like before.

Pelopidas.2140:

@Shiki

I disagree about the warhorn and the golem…you didnt mention nightmare rune for terrormancer, reapers protection and spectral wall…and necros can corrupt stability…the last 2 i dont really consider situational…
Necros are good at CC, if you disagree i dont think i can convince you.
I’d also like a frost field or fire field, neither are coming soon imo. Lifesteal can be effective, blindness and weakness from the respective fields too. In pvp.
Also we can stack vuln and might as well, we just keep the might to ourselves. I don’t even mention conditions in pve//
Half the cooldown on lich…do you even pvp…balance is for tpvp not dungeons…
I think they’ve mentioned they have hired new personell for AI, as well as improving AI of enemies/minions/pets/npcs for the coming expansion

My bad, forgot about Spectral Wall. But that is the only thing I’ll give you. Every profession can abuse the runes.

Life steal could be effective…if it wasn’t balanced completely kittenty, and getting protection or regen would be better 90% of the time. And if it is balanced around pvp, then they need to kittening start making different balances for PvP and PvE…also Necros are mediocre at BEST in sPvP, and Chronomancer looks like it might just compete for the Necros place in WvW, making Necros a “bad” choice in all 3 aspects of the game.

And the AI guys were hired for things like the Wyvern, and thats about it.