While dhuumfire is a bit of an anathema for necromancers both from a lore and damage perspective, removing it will only have a significant effect in 1v1 situations, and your odds of finishing a true 1v1 in pvp are incredibly slim. In group situations, someone else will happily apply burning to the necro’s target and once epidemicced there will have been no net change in the situation. If you actually want to tone down the necromancer’s single target condition “burst” then you probably need to change terror. Something along the lines of “fear now applies 2 stacks of torment per tick,” with a 4 second duration on stacks will provide basically the same overall damage as prenerf terror provided the target stops moving after the fear, and more if they don’t. You’ve now added a damage ramp up, however, and the ability to remove the torment during the duration, while providing synergy between fear’s forced movement and torment procs.
The other possible source of the issue is probably in force multiplication. Necros have consistent single target condition pressure through all damaging conditions save confusion, and moderate aoe condition pressure. As blood red arachnid pointed out in a series of excellent posts, however, the raw pressure of a necromancer does not exceed and in fact trails that of an engineer. We have something that an engineer does not, however, and that is force multiplication. There are two methods at play here, condition transfers, and aoe spread through epidemic. Condition transfers: dagger 4, staff 4, and plague signet, all contribute heavily to our class flavor, affect only our current target or in staff 4’s case a random target in the radius per condition, and perhaps most importantly, are reactive. You can negate the benefit of 2 of these 3 skills by choosing not to focus condition pressure on the necromancer.
Epidemic, conversely, is an aggressive aoe force multiplication tool that benefits from the necromancer’s applied conditions, any transferred conditions from the aforementioned skills, and any other conditions applied by your teammates. Its effect radius basically covers a point, and it can be used to effect aoe dps in the 5k range, something that really doesn’t exist for any other profession. Others have done a very good job of pointing out all the contributing factors that go into landing epidemic, no dodges from target or recipient(s), all targets remain in the skill range and effect range, neither the target nor the recipients are immediately cleansed, etc. Despite all these caveats, however, epidemic can generally be used to spread to at least one other target, and if someone on the opposing team brings a tanky ai companion, a ranger pet or a flesh golem for example, you can often create a full condition stack and transfer without player reaction. In my opinion, it is this ability to spread the sum aoe pressure on a target every 15 (12 traited) seconds that is proving simply unmanageable for existing aoe cleanses. Epidemic is allowing necro players to take the realm of condition application, which is predominately single target, and force it into an aoe mold. Additionally, unlike the overall condition landscape, which tops out quickly with the bleed cap limit and the number of conditions that stack duration rather than intensity, adding more necromancers with epidemic provides a linear increase to your ability to recreate intense aoe condition pressure, and results in 2 necromancers rotating epidemic use being able to very easily overwhelm the aoe condition removal you can bring in a typical 5 man group. You could fix this easily in the short term by doing a skill split and disabling epidemic in pvp while figuring out what to do with it, but disabling it in pve as well would be catastrophic to open world and wvw uses.
