Guild Wars 2

Because they are balanced that way; each class has different methods to attain balance, otherwise it all comes down to every class needs to have access to everything.

In addition, they need to actually spec into it, in some way. A thief needs to take shortbow or shadowstep, elementalist needs Blink/dagger offhand, and Mesmers have nothing comparable to what DS 2 used to be. While it can be argued that those are minimal “give ups”, since most of them are fairly good anyway, they do have some marginal economic cost. Necromancers had absolutely no cost for their mobility, it was 100% inherit in every single Necro build.

Just cant get over the feeling that the devs dislike this class so much that they nerfed it into the ground. I have not seen this class one time be OP since launch, while I have seen mesmers blaze right to and remain one of the top pvp classes in the game. Have seen thieves remain the same with minor tweeks, only to end right back where they were at the start of the game. I have seen little if any improvements to the necro but making skills actually work as they were described. I am sorry anet, but you have fallen so short and done such a terrible job with necro, that I won’t buy anything you’re selling until you prove it. You have not come close to helping this class, but changing tool tips and skill descriptions to match the bugged poorly coded skills we do have.

Balance? joke, this class has been underpowered since go, but hey, i guess all we have to do is learn to deathshroud. Yeah, cause that helps us so much in the meta. You poorly designed a class around a downed mechanic, got the bright idea to make it not a downed mechanic but a class mechanic and call it done, while simultaneously nerfing us out of the picture.

Minions are junk and don’t attack unless I do some magical inconsistent rotation to get them to attack. Heck, i can hit the flesh golem’s ability and watch a pebble block his pathing and further render him useless.

Our cast times are so slow that you have to lead the target so far and hope he does not change directions or duck behind the same pebble my golem got hung up on, so i can get a utility skill off, or heck, even a huge radius mark that is dodged through and triggered while giving no area of effect damage.

Our traits are a joke, and everyone uses the same traits in each line because they are the only viable traits to use in that line.

Forget it, you lost me on this class four months in, and are still shoveling the same thing.

To be honest, I feel like they originally meant for Necromancer to go a different way, then for whatever reason changed it into this poor Deathshroud mechanic at the last second. Then they realized, ah maw gherd it’s toooooo powerful, so they nerfed it so hard into the ground we need a bloody Spade just to take a leak.

totally agree. They wont take a wakamol or whatever to the advancement, but they sure will nerf it into oblivion and patch it up with some poorly thoughout class mechanic. Weak. WEAK!

Bhawb.7408:

Because they are balanced that way; each class has different methods to attain balance, otherwise it all comes down to every class needs to have access to everything.

In addition, they need to actually spec into it, in some way. A thief needs to take shortbow or shadowstep, elementalist needs Blink/dagger offhand, and Mesmers have nothing comparable to what DS 2 used to be. While it can be argued that those are minimal “give ups”, since most of them are fairly good anyway, they do have some marginal economic cost. Necromancers had absolutely no cost for their mobility, it was 100% inherit in every single Necro build.

90% of thieves run shortbow AND shadowstep because of the ridiculous mobility they bring and the fact that its a stun breaker. You can make that argument about mesmers and elementalists though.

Let us not go overboard guys. Necro isn’t THAT bad. Sure its probably only above warrior but it can still do some cool stuff. Corrupt boon is a unique and truely exceptional utility skills.

I think 2/3 minor changes would make a necro condi build truely decent since the epidemic “fix” made these builds generally weaker.

I would argue for these changes:
1, Make staff auto attack better by speeding up the speed of the projectile (as was done to ranger bow attacks to stop them missing when people strafed)
2, Make staff have greater marks as default or combine it with staff skills recharge faster (keep it at adept level though) – the staff marks are imo slightly too long cd wise
3, Add poison to feast of corruption as it makes no sense to really have a power ability on a condition weapon
4, Reduce the cast time and increase the number of ticks for corrosive poison cloud (necro should have very strong poison – this should be our “thing”).
5, move the 25 trait in curses into the power trait line as it is a power trait. Then add something like “poison lasts 20% longer” into this position.
6, Spectral armour should give vigor and have its cd reduced to 60 seconds
7, Withering precision trait should have its chance to trigger upped to at least 33%.
8, Jagged horrors! – there need to have their death rate at least halved but probably more than halved. So they die in 30 seconds not 10 seconds or whatever it is!

Necromancer has the potential to be incredibly strong imo, but we need ALOT of fixes, and some rework along the way would be welcome to me as well.

BobJoeXXI.2493:

Rym.1469:

One good condi Terrormancer can wipe out 5-player group in tpvp only If he knows how to position himself.

Bhawb.7408:

A single Epidemic can completely wipe a team. It requires coordination, however, and frankly very few teams show the coordination to actually throw out good Epidemic’s consistently; and most of those teams are EU and don’t run condi cleave comps.

And Thiefs can wipe out entire teams without losing a single hip point…

Don’t make absurd claims. Show video proof. I highly doubt both statements quoted above and would love to see proof.

About halfway through the video you will find evidence of three Necro’s destroy a leaderboard leading team. (Acandis got rofl’stomped)

Take a look Two corrupt boons and 2 epidemics an entire party wiped off the map. That’s what anet is scared of. Video proof is easy. The problem is in a high end tournament game, the players won’t be stupid enough to just get trained there, and The necromancer will need a babysitter, if you watch the same match you will notice that they started splitting us from the pack and killing us off easily.

Getting 2 strong Epidemics, and 2 good Corrupt Boons on any competent group is nothing short of absolute miraculous luck.

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

Getting 2 strong Epidemics, and 2 good Corrupt Boons on any competent group is nothing short of absolute miraculous luck.

It was hilariously funny too. If you watch the fight, and I will try to find the timestamp for that fight. We were all laughing because they were in a massive charge, and it was boom boom boom dead!

JonathanSharp.7094:

This month will be focused on bug fixes, with balance coming in later patches!

OMG I’m soooo excited!!!
We have to wait another couple of months to see any changes!!

…

Necros need some love next patch, whatever to send us a message. That message being: “we are working in the right direction to bring necros on par with other classes”

vicious.5683:

JonathanSharp.7094:

This month will be focused on bug fixes, with balance coming in later patches!

OMG I’m soooo excited!!!
We have to wait another couple of months to see any changes!!

…

Necros need some love next patch, whatever to send us a message. That message being: “we are working in the right direction to bring necros on par with other classes”

You’ll feel what pve necros and rangers have been feeling for quite a while. They’d rather make the deficient classes better at a glacial pace than risk overbuffing a class and have to clean the mess.

Just play something else for a couple of months till the class actually starts being useful as something besides boon stripping and epidemic. At least in tpvp you don’t need to worry about leveling or purchasing new gear sets.

I’m just curious why they’re scared of overbuffing the necro yet the High Overlords of PvE known as warriors have gotten nothing but buffs in all aspects of the game, including those aspects of the game they are supreme in.

Bas.7406:

About halfway through the video you will find evidence of three Necro’s destroy a leaderboard leading team. (Acandis got rofl’stomped)

I wasn’t able to find it in that video. Saying halfway doesn’t help. I also disagree with your obsessive need to advertise your YouTube page and other things and I also disagree with your frequent spamming of the Necromancer forums with your guild and other third party websites.

Bas.7406:

Take a look Two corrupt boons and 2 epidemics an entire party wiped off the map. That’s what anet is scared of.

So what you are saying is that the Necromancer should be nerfed to be subpar to the rest of the classes because when the stars and moons align you get this annihilation?

For this to happen you need:

• Pinpoint, precise communication
• More than one Necromancer
• Time to cast and build up conditions
• The other team needs to have a complete lack of condition removal (which you will never find)
• The team needs to be congregated in a manner that would allow multiple epidemics to land and not hinder the stacking of conditions
• An utter lack of experience on the other team who fail to realize they’re up against Necromancers who are justly subpar to other classes considering they have the end all be all epidemic.

Two not great players managed to do it completely on accident without really trying, against a fairly good team. Unless you are trying to say Bas is better than the top Necromancers in the game, and their completely uncoordinated luck is better than a fully coordinated team that can do things like AoE stealthing and gibbing a guardian.

I’m sorry you disagree with it, but frankly SOAC and BoC have been helping at least a few people in the community. Its hardly spam when we have at most 2 topics active at once per forum.

Bas knows where I stand on that issue, but regardless Epidemic is not strong enough to merit the injustice we receive regularly. I would rather see consistent damage than random inconsistent obliteration.

Anybody know the state of the downed HP bug for non sPvP locations? Jon Peters said this was now an acknowledged bug, but there’s been no movement on it. Sorry to post about it here, but seems like this forum gets noticed more than the necro forum does.

Bhawb.7408:

Mesmers have nothing comparable to what DS 2 used to be.

Mesmers have nothing comparable to a ground targeted teleport?

Bhawb.7408:

Two not great players managed to do it completely on accident without really trying, against a fairly good team. Unless you are trying to say Bas is better than the top Necromancers in the game, and their completely uncoordinated luck is better than a fully coordinated team that can do things like AoE stealthing and gibbing a guardian.

The Necromancer as a class is suffering completely from this hidden potential I’ve yet to reproduce myself. A simple epidemic that is a mere nuisance to those playing tPvP is no justification to make Necromancer weaker than all other classes.

I’ve heard this before from none other than Jon himself. The Necromancer has this hidden power that no one has yet to tap or master. They boast the most HP in the game and for that they need to be weaker. Well, it turns out that Jon had no idea of what he was talking about when a video of him playing Necromancer was leaked. Yet remains is the mess Necromancer is in.

People, who happen to be affiliated with BoC, that are masochistic and tell others to concede to the Necromancers shortcomings are a cancer to the class. We can never improve the Necromancer if you spout poison saying “we are balanced” or “we’re close to our happy place” when there are gamebreaking bugs yet to be fixed and balance issues galore.

Bhawb.7408:

I’m sorry you disagree with it, but frankly SOAC and BoC have been helping at least a few people in the community. Its hardly spam when we have at most 2 topics active at once per forum.

It is 2 topics too many on the Necromancer forum. It either needs to be in the guilds forums or in sPvP forums and has no place in the Necromancer forums as that is for the profession itself. I also believe that it is merely advertising of third party sites and your YouTube page. If you are going to post anything in the Necromancer forum it needs to have complete relevance to the Necromancer as a class – not “check out our youtube” or “look at our twitch” or “we’re hosting a podcast”.

You mean our podcasts that are an hour long discussion every week about Necromancers? Yeah, wonder what a Necro podcast is doing in the Necro forums, or an all Necro guild doing all Necro events.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Hey all! Just wanted to say thanks for keeping this thread so positive and constructive. The balance guys and I are watching this thread, and we’ve really enjoyed some of the ideas you guys are putting out.

So you know (history lesson incoming): There was a time in balance when Necromancers were the apex class for mulitple specs in the game. They were the best tanks (death shroud building + wells giving protection, while also wiping condies), had some of the best mobility (their old Death Shround #2 was a ground targeted teleport!) and they had insane damage/boon ripping with Axe-based bunker killing hybrid builds.

So while we do want to help the Necro to see more play in competitive builds (both in variety of roles and variety of builds), we are being very careful not to give them too much. We will be adjusting them just like all the other classes, and I just wanted to let you guys know we ARE watching threads like this.

The same can be said for Warriors in TPvP, non shortbow-based Thieves, different specs for Engi that are weak, etc. etc. We want all classes to have multiple options, so that’s what we’ll be looking for in upcoming balance changes. This will happen through number adjustments (the multipliers on specific skills), through skill “toolbox” adjustments (like we did with S/D Thief removing boons) and through trait adjustments (Warrior changes to counter condies + boons).

And as always, we don’t want to do crazy increases followed by large decreases. We are employing metered changes as opposed to a ‘whack-a-mole’ approach.

Sorry for no response until now, been out of the office a few weeks to see family.

-Chap

Can somebody fill me in? I have no idea what this guy is talking about.

When were Necros the “apex class” with best mobility, “insane” damage, and tanking???

Was this beta where only a handful of people played, virtually no coordinated teams existed, and nothing mattered.

BTW…if so, how did Thieves get out of Beta??? They were absolutely absurd at release.

Just look at how many nerfs have been needed to Thieves…month after month after month…for 9 straight months and they are STILL better off…as evidenced by how many more people play them versus a necro.

It sounds really good to claim that you want to avoid the “whack-a-mole” approach. However, it’s pretty clear that you guys have taken that philosophy WAY too far (at least for some professions).

For example, how long did it take you to get ele’s addressed? Thieves? Is fighting a Mesmer and Ranger with so much relying on AI how you intentionally planned it???

Here’s the deal…let’s make this productive and stay on topic…it really doesn’t take much.

1. The staff is pretty much a required weapon for all builds. That’s fine to make one weapon a requirement. However, it is near worthless without wasting 10 points on top of that. As a result, Necros have to waste 10 points that most other professions don’t. Plus, the 5 point re-animator trait is totally a waste which makes it even worse.

2. Certain utilities are required for certain builds which leaves most necros with either ZERO mobility or a spec that is not optimized. Bring back the teleport on DS so that necros at least have SOME native mobility. You can’t have a class be a total damage sponge unless their healing is also on par with their vitality.

Right now…a necro who isn’t at full health is immediately kitten compared to other classes. Other may have less initial vitality, but they almost always have some form of mobility and/or methods to evade damage available on short cooldowns. How often and quick can a necro bring both their life force and vitality to full??? Once they ARE at full, then they are only EQUAL to some classes – not better. This is the crux of the problem with necros. Almost always kitten and, at most, on par with others when at full health and full life force.

3. Starting with zero life force is who’s idea of balance??? Fighting a necro without life force is WAY too easy and one sided. If you’re going to have that severe a weakness for playing a necro, then they should be godlike when they have full life force.

As implied in #2, necros seemed to balanced under the assumption of always having full life force. A necro who doesn’t have full life force is no where near as good as ANY of the viable professions/builds in the game.

There needs to be a TRAIT that generates life force passively..maybe you can get rid of re-animator and put it as a 5 pt in the same line with the other 10pt talent that necros must get anyway.

That’s enough for now..you guys should be able to figure out the rest.

He was talking about Closed Beta. Look at footage (there is a bit), and you’ll see what he means. We had the best of everything.

Give it a coupla more months.

Bhawb.7408:

He was talking about Closed Beta. Look at footage (there is a bit), and you’ll see what he means. We had the best of everything.

I’ll say it again, I agree with that we were totally OP on beta. But, to be honest, devs were not fair at all with us…. I mean, they always say that they don’t want to do balance dancing the wack-a-mole style and that is the only thing they did to us before release. They overnerfed us so hard, that now, 9 months later, we are still complaining and the necromancer forum is still the most active of all professions forums and it’s full of topics about new bugs (like Downed HP bar), about analysis of our trait lines, about our skills, suggestions about everything….

If they don’t want to jump the gun again balancing us there is no problem but, at least, we deserve a more focused balance patches to bring us up again to a playable status.

Execrable.1064:

Bhawb.7408:

Mesmers have nothing comparable to what DS 2 used to be.

Mesmers have nothing comparable to a ground targeted teleport?

Actually they get both a ground targeted teleport and our current DS #2, oh and which immobilizes instead of chills.

GankSinatra.2653:

Execrable.1064:

Bhawb.7408:

Mesmers have nothing comparable to what DS 2 used to be.

Mesmers have nothing comparable to a ground targeted teleport?

Actually they get both a ground targeted teleport and our current DS #2, oh and which immobilizes instead of chills.

If you are referring to Swap, it is a better version of our current DS2. It is Guaranteed to provide the teleport, breaks stun, cannot be reflected, as you stated immobilizes (in an AoE)rather than chills/bleeds and does not require secondary resource (Life Force) management in order to access. Still only a 12s CD as well. We will just ignore that it is chained to I-leap which grants additional benefits, because swap by itself is miles better than DS#2, and talking about the extras would just be piling on.

Blink at least has a decently long CD, but yeah, it is another ground target, tele, stunbreaker with a notably shorter CD than any of the Necro stunbreaks.

This isn’t picking on Mesmer though. Every class compared to necro has better gap closers, stun breakers, mobility skills, evades, etc. That was the whole purpose of this thread to begin with.

Really, I think the crux of the issue is the inability to survive on a necromancer. EVERY class that isn’t Necro has Vigor access (don’t talk about Well of Power as if that is a suitable way to get vigor when no one else needs to burn a utility to get it). With only 50% up time on vigor (which most classes can easily exceed) that is an extra dodge roll every 20s. Additionally, every class has some combination of blocks, evades, movement (can be used to dodge/reposition) on their weapons. Some classes even have stun breaks on their weapons. Necro gets none of these either. Now mathematically lets consider what this means in 20s of battle to make the math cleaner I have made the assumption that 0 endurance is the starting state and that “anyone else” is only getting 50% vigor up time.

Necromancer gets – 2.25s of hit avoidance (3/4s per roll) over that 20s

Anyone else gets – 3s of hit avoidance from dodge rolls, at least an additional 3s of hit avoidance from weapon skills if they equip weapons that allow for it or have a primary mechanic or utility with this function, and often more.

As a percentage, the minimum advantage that EVERY class has over Necromancer in hit avoidance is (6-2.25)/2.25 = 167%. Of course there are a vast number of builds out there that greatly exceed this ratio without even making an effort. For instance:
Roll Mesmer, take mainhand sword. You don’t even need vigor to exceed necro.
Roll Warrior, take shield or horn with any weapon that has a single block
Roll Guardian, a 5 pt minor + the passive aegis alone will exceed this ratio
Roll Thief, take sword/dagger or shortbow, gg
Roll Ele, worst case scenario, you have no MH weapon and are forced to use the worst possible off hand (focus). Still exceed this ratio against a necro.
Roll Ranger, there are about 3 combinations of weapons I see that won’t automatically exceed this advantage
Engineer? – Elixir S by itself, gg

You get the point. Now all that’s left is to fix it.

JonathanSharp.7094:

1. So you know (history lesson incoming): There was a time in balance when Necromancers were the apex class for mulitple specs in the game. They were the best tanks (death shroud building + wells giving protection, while also wiping condies), had some of the best mobility (their old Death Shround #2 was a ground targeted teleport!) and they had insane damage/boon ripping with Axe-based bunker killing hybrid builds.

2. So while we do want to help the Necro to see more play in competitive builds (both in variety of roles and variety of builds), we are being very careful not to give them too much. We will be adjusting them just like all the other classes, and I just wanted to let you guys know we ARE watching threads like this.

3. And as always, we don’t want to do crazy increases followed by large decreases. We are employing metered changes as opposed to a ‘whack-a-mole’ approach.

1. first, thank-you for responding but i think that this is factually incorrect. Necros in beta were great, but not Apex, Eles were and still are better even though they have recently received “nerfs”.

2. this is also not true. Necros were nerfed to the ground before release so much so that playing an axe Necro or viable power Necro was no longer viable and left us with just conditions (which were buffed before release), which during beta lagged behind power builds, which i thought was warranted as i thought you devs were going to stick to the talkingpoint of high risk-high reward and making meaningful choices when it came to builds and playstyles.

3. the issue is not whether you make sweeping changes to Necros to help them out, but that you choose to not make any until much later in the year. Necros have been suffering for a LONG time yet Thieves which are very successful in both NA/EU metas and were doing great before the changes you made to them, saw changes before Necros. your priority of Necros is what is disheartening many of us who main Necros. and not helping Necros just so that the next patch is “bugs” only really makes us wonder why the devs act like they cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. no amount of bug fixes will help alleviate the plight of Necros atm. just look at the “sweeping” changes you devs made to Necros before release; Close to Death used to be a 10 pt trait accessible to multiple specs, now it’s an all or nothing trait 30 pts deep with very limited build application. another and i think the most egregious change was 30pt trait Foot in the Grave which went from a stability buff in DS for the duration that you are in DS to just 3 seconds of stability when entering DS but STILL remained a 30pt trait. this is the ONLY way a Necro can get a modicum of stability but requires such a heavy trait sacrifice to do so. things like this need to be looked at.

I would like to point out that Necro’s way of damage mitigation is facetanking and it’s kind of a really difficult tanking mechanic to balance since it is “relative” as in its effectiveness is relative to the number of damage sources that are attacking you:

Some examples of what I mean:
If the facetanking capability is enough for 1v1 then it begins to drastically suffer the more sources are attacking you so it becomes unreliable and ineffective in these situations. If the facetanking capability is effective enough to be reliable in a situation against multiple attackers(let’s say for example 4), then it becomes OP in the situation with less attackers. So as a result the facetanking capability(LF pool, LF generation as well as DS CD) ideally needs to be a dynamic variable that changes depending on the number of attackers if you want it to be equally effective in all situations. We are in a situation where our facetanking capability is not OP in 1v1 and so it’s in the state where its efficiency drastically drops with 2 or more sources attacking you. Facetanking does not prevent you from being CCed in our case either.

As another example I would like to put attention to the soul marks trait. I suggested making it baseline along with greater marks and a person disagreed bringing up an example of it being OP in WWW zergs where 1 or 2 marks give you a full life force bar. Actually this might be the mechanic that takes care of the relativeness of the LF generation but at the same time it’s not quite enough. We still are limited by the LF pool and a 10 second CD(5 second CD if traited which is actually freaking awesome and I personally see it being better than the stability trait), these things ideally need to be dynamic too. I still think the soul marks trait should be made baseline for staff in addition to greater marks.

So you can see that facetanking efficiency is a relative thing. If we talk about blocks, invulnerabilities, evades and other stuff, they are absolute. They ignore all the damage and effects that are flying towards you in a short time and they do not care about the number of damage sources. And we have a game where a lot of classes have these mechanics that are absolute at mitigating damage.

All in all I think that if you want Necro to be in a somewhat ideal spot, the only way to achieve it would be a huge freaking redesign.

P.S. It would be nice to make the stability trait go back into being immune to CC while in DS since we have limited abilities that we can use and our utilities aren’t available to us while inside DS.

Death Shroud should be where the Necromancer gets his survivability from. Right now it’s too focused on damage, where it should be more on the lines with the Guardians Tome of Courage. Everyone uses Death Shroud for defensive purposes, so the skills you get should reflect this:

Life Blast – Blast a foe with accumulated life force, healing yourself the more life force you have. (deals fixed damage instead, healing should be from around 80 to around 110, unaffected by healing power, and only work on a successful hit)
Dark Path – Send out a claw and gain stability. If this attack hits a foe, you teleport to that foe. (the Necromancer already has plenty of ways to chill targets, 3 seconds of stability would be a lot more valuable)
Doom – Make your foe flee in fear. (fine as it is, as it can be used both defensive and offensively)
Life Transfer – Damage nearby foes and steal their life force. Gain swiftness for each foe hit. (should give 3 seconds of swiftness for each foe hit, meaning a maximum of 15 seconds)

This class is not an attrition class. It isn’t even close to being an attrition class with the current skill set that necromancers have. This class gets beat on so badly by the other classes. I feel ANet is putting way, WAY to much emphasis on Death Shrouds ability to protect the necromancer and draw out a fight. The truth is, Death Shroud does not work as an attrition mechanic. We do not have enough ways to generate Life Force (especially as condition builds), and its just to easy for people to punch through it to serve its intended function. Two or more people can rip Death Shroud down in a matter of seconds. Necromancers can’t even defend themselves against two or more people as it is. No escapes, so necromancer just takes it and gets flattened.

Poison. Of all the classes that have poison, necromancers are the worst at it. Look at the duration and cool down of the thief, ranger, and engineer abilities that apply poison. Now look at the abilities and cool downs of the necromancer abilities that apply poison. Do you notice a disparity? Necromancers have the least up time of poison by comparison. You mention that necromancers are supposed to have better access to poison than other classes in your class philosophy. This needs to be addressed.

Traits being spread out among multiple trait trees is also a major issue to me, and for necromancers this is an all over the place problem. “All over the place” in that our traits that serve to improve a certain aspects and utilities are spread out over multiple trees, and so far deep into those trees that you can never actually specialize with a particular utility set (wells) or weapon set (staff) due to the placement and location of those traits.

Necromancers suffer from some majorly egregious trait placement as well. One in particular are the dagger traits for necromancer. When every other class wants to improve their power damage, they put trait points into their power tree. Those classes have obvious power weapons, which have traits in those trees that improve those weapons. For warriors its greatsword and axe. They get major bonuses in damage and weapon improvements from both the traits and the stats gained from the points invested in that tree. For necromancers? We have to go into our Blood Magic tree to get the dagger improving traits. Main hand dagger is a power weapon. Off hand dagger is a condition weapon. What is the logic of putting the dagger traits in the vitality/healing tree, when these stats don’t improve this weapons functionality at its intended role? That would be like warriors having to put points into their defense tree if they wanted to get traits that improved greatsword damage, or having to put points into their power tree to get traits that improve shield defensive capability. It makes no logical sense.

Necromancers are incredibly easy to run away from. The other classes mobility skills out pace our lack of mobility skills, so even our one gap closer and multiple chill effects are not enough to keep someone in combat with us if they decide they want to leave.

Fix it or don’t fix it. I don’t care any more. I’ve stopped caring about this class. I’ve wasted so much time, effort, and in game money on this class trying to make it work in all facets of this game. Rolled necromancer on day one. Its been 9 months. I’ve lost all my patience waiting for the attention this class needs. I can’t wait any more.

One more thing I’d like to bring up. Even if you trait entirely for Death Shroud and focus all of your build on that one aspect of necromancer, you’ll never actually kill anyone with it. Life Blast doing less damage when at or below 50% Life Force really kills any kind of viability traiting for Death Shroud might have. It is so easy to knock a necromancer out of Death Shroud, let alone put them at the 50% mark. There is no reason to stay in Death Shroud other than to flash it to use one or two skills, or to use it as a damage sponge.

Kravick.4906:

… There is no reason to stay in Death Shroud other than to flash it to use one or two skills, or to use it as a damage sponge.

Well said. Also consider that 1s in shroud means 4% damage (3 if traited) in the form of LF degen, and that a single life blast takes longer than this to hit a target. There still isn’t a clean way to convert that to effective health, but supposing that full LF equates to 20000 hp that means you are taking 800 DPS before you get hit by anything (more if the effective HP converts to a bigger number). Using Life Blast one time esentially means you are eating an auto attack before you can even activate one skill and if any one is attacking you, then you are probably eating at least 2 more before your Life Blast hits. Life Blast is a net negative to the ratio of Your Health v Opponent Health pretty much without exception. Life Blast is the equialent of bunting in baseball. Teams that bunt lose. It is statistcally certain.

Shroud is a damage sponge that happens to have our only (albeit a poor one) gap closer, a nice fear and a situational AoE with long CD. Life Blast isn’t worth using about 95% of the time you access shroud. They could remove it completely from the game and it wouldn’t really have a noticable affect on the play of the profession other than most people would become better since they wouldn’t burn LF spamming it.

I keep having after thoughts. More I’d like to see addressed.

The longer the fight takes, the weaker the necromancer gets because of the Death Shroud Mechanic. We have no reliable way of generating Life Force outside of dagger auto attack chain. Condition builds are especially prone to this as they have no reliable life force generation with their weapon and utility skills. Our heal abilities do not scale properly with our inflated health pool. In fact if you look at all of the classes heals side by side, necromancers heal for approximately 1k less than everyone else, but our heals are all on a 5 to 10 second longer cool down. In longer fights, this REALLY adds up. Life siphon has a negligible effect and doesn’t even come close to being strong enough to to allow necromancers the same kind of attrition that ranger regeneration builds have. Speaking of the ranger regeneration bunker build, this is how I see attrition combat working well in GW2. Being able to out heal your opponent, but not having a direct burst heal to do it with is exactly what I love about that ranger build. It easily out attritions necromancers.

I can’t stress this enough. With the current tools at necromancers disposal, there is no way that necromancers can be remotely considered an attrition class. They can’t even 1vX in any situation in WvW or tPvP. My ranger using the bunker regeneration build has no problem taking on 2 and 3 people at once and holding out, a lot of the time even winning those fights. I can survive practically forever because of how amazing Troll Unguent is. I can still be killed by a burst class who knows how to time those bursts, but its amazing how long I can last on a ranger, and how much better rangers are at attrition, compared to the necromancer in 1vX fights.

Necros feel like a big slow heavy battleship, equipped with medieval cannons only, fighting against racing frigates with laser beams.

Mobility was, is and always will be king in PvP. The best damage mitigation is to get not hit in the first place.

And as others said condition damage is pointless with all the condition removal. There’s are reason why classes who can dish out respectable white damage dominate. Even the ranger BM bunker build, because the white damage comes from the pet. But rangers not only have better pets (mostly due to run speed → better uptime on target) they also have way more evasions and mobility to not take damage.

Necros are a waste of time, unfortunately. They lack in PvE/dungeons, they lack in WvW and they lack in S/TPvP.

But yeah, I guess have just have to learn to use DS properly, lol … :.(

woeye.2753:

And as others said condition damage is pointless with all the condition removal.

I can’t believe I forgot about this. Yes, this is also something that desperately needs to be addressed. The amount of condition removals in this game is absurd, to be frank. This might not be such a problem if necromancers didn’t have an “eggs in one basket” design when it comes to dealing condition damage. Bleeding, thats primarily the only source of damage that condition builds have on a necromancer. What is the first thing that gets removed when someone uses a condition cleanse? The bleed stack. This is mainly because of the last on, first off condition removal system we’ve got in place. Necromancers have no way of covering their bleed stack because of the auto attack on scepter. Its completely one sided how condition necromancers primary source of damage is countered so easily.

I know not a lot of Necros try not to use pets, but I do think you should look at the AI.

You don’t see many Wurms, Bone/shadow fiends or Minions, because they usually prefer to watch the fighting rather than help their Master.

In WvW, they are still worthless as they’re still getting blown up by AOE , even after the patch. Once the pets get hit and eventually decide to fight…. Their dead.

@Kravick.4906 & woeye.2753

Agree.
We need way to cover our bleeds, maybe if each stack of bleed wouldnt push our bleed at beggining of stack? ( First in First off but not reseted for each new apply untill condition is still on target). This way Burning also would be easier to clean cause its short condition ( its harder to keep it perma on target).

In other topic: How is it possible that engineer 4th skill on off-hand Pistol is 6sec Burning and only 15 sec CD ( there are range circumstancer but still OP )? When traited its 8,5 sec on 12 sec CD? And its AoE! Where is that Balance guy and what is he doing cause he should start working.

Post it here cause despite the fact it concerns Engineer it also have influence at another Condition builds ( necro ).

Kravick.4906:

woeye.2753:

And as others said condition damage is pointless with all the condition removal.

I can’t believe I forgot about this. Yes, this is also something that desperately needs to be addressed. The amount of condition removals in this game is absurd, to be frank. This might not be such a problem if necromancers didn’t have an “eggs in one basket” design when it comes to dealing condition damage. Bleeding, thats primarily the only source of damage that condition builds have on a necromancer. What is the first thing that gets removed when someone uses a condition cleanse? The bleed stack.

It’s ridiculous that none of our traits add poison, but rather just more and more bleeding. Or even give us some burning.

Barbed Precison = Bleeding
Mark of Evasion = Bleeding
Weakening Shroud = Bleeding
Hemophilia = Longer Bleeding (usually nothing since most of our bleeds are already long and cleansed before the final 20% this adds)
Lingering Curse = More Bleeding (adds very briefly to our short poison)

All these trait avenues to increase our DPS, are actually helping far less than you’d expect because any damage they add is fractionally reduced when our bleed stack goes. Some of these should be adding Poison, since we are not close to having permanent poison coverage on an enemy. You don’t want too much, since it won’t stack in intensity, but we could definitely use one or two more application methods, both for diversity of damage, and cover protection.

akjb.8372:

I know not a lot of Necros try not to use pets, but I do think you should look at the AI.

You don’t see many Wurms, Bone/shadow fiends or Minions, because they usually prefer to watch the fighting rather than help their Master.

In WvW, they are still worthless as they’re still getting blown up by AOE , even after the patch. Once the pets get hit and eventually decide to fight…. Their dead.

None of our passive traits should effect minions IMO. Not only because its an optional play style and not our class mechanic, but also for how continually buggy they are and seemingly always will be. Traits like Reanimator and Protection of the Horde should be axed, or remerged and redesigned into active choices, and replaced with passives useful to all builds. Not everyone going into Death Magic is using minions.

Since we are stating our opinions.

I see a decent amount of necromancers in both SPvP and TPvP. Also Minion Necromancers are incredibly powerful in pvp currently.

Supposedly we have this trait called terror to add a damaging condition to our arsenal, heh. A condi Necro without terror is pretty much a “Bleedomancer get cleansed-o-mancer”. It would be nice to have soul marks baseline so we could actually take master of terror. Some additional poison applications is needed as well.

I’d also like to add that it would be really fantastic to improve and make our staff auto attack a 100% projectile finisher. This would allow reliable confusion stacking through spectral wall, poison stacking through the corrosive poison field, lifestealing through our wells and condition cleansing through well of blood.

Just some quick clarification about Soul Marks. Somebody said that integrating soul marks into basic staff skills would make it too strong in wubvwub. I’d suggest taking a second look at this trait, because the amount of lifeforce doesn’t scale with the number of enemies hit. It is 3% lifeforce per mark.

Apart from that i found Iceflame’s post about the difficulties of facetanking pretty interesting. I think this issue could be adressed by increasing the amount of life force generated and also increasing the degen in death shroud. As an example: an easy to fill life force bar, lets say around 5-10 seconds of combat, coupled with a strong degen (20%) but something like 40k “deathshroud hp” shifts the ability from easy-depleted-by-damage to a strong-but-time-limited-shield. By buffing the amount of possible absorption (40k hp) you get better results against multiple enemies, while maintaining a limit to its usability (5 seconds before depletion).
In addition the below 50% lifeforce “penalty” should be removed, because it feels like a kitten penalty to use DS < 50%.

These few changes would fix the necromancer

*staff’s marks are large by default( but not unblockable/ put this with staff mastery trait. This alone would open up many builds for the necromancer.)

*make staying in death shroud worth while!!!

As it is, staying in death shroud is never a good idea. Good necros dance in and out of ds to get stability/weakening shroud/rental/fury, doom and to take some burst. The traits that promote staying in deathshroud are weak and never worth it ( aoe vul/ 15% speed lol). Rejen doesn’t or any healing doesn’t work while were in ds either. The DMG reduction on life blast at 50% should also be adjusted, or lb to be buffed in general.

*just buff some of our traits. A lot of our traits are lackluster if you comepare them to other classes.

Might at 25% health? 25 into spite
100 power if you have 90% health? 25 pts into BM
100 power if you have 50% Lf? 25 pts in SR

We need something that helps us be that attrition class we were meant to be.

Somebody said that integrating soul marks into basic staff skills would make it too strong in wubvwub.

Who said this and why? If they did this, it would go a long way in solving the issue condition builds have in generating LF. As it is, they have only two ways to get LF in the middle of combat, and thats staff auto (never hits), and Scepter 3, which gives so little return that if you have 0 LF, you don’t even get enough LF to flash for as skill.

Bhawb.7408:

He was talking about Closed Beta. Look at footage (there is a bit), and you’ll see what he means. We had the best of everything.

I suspected he was talking about closed beta even though I just played since release.

In any case, lets assume necros were OP in Beta. How much more OP could they have been than Thieves. Maybe it is him who needs a history lesson. Do you remember at release when they could global someone?

It wasn’t til months into release that they finally started to make piecemeal nerfs to heartseeker, pistol whip, signet, quickness, etc. Here we are 9 months later and they STILL can own a necro despite the nerfs.

Exactly how “insane” was axe damage? Were Necros globaling people? How OP was DS teleport that made whack-a-mole necessary to bring them in line, but not Thieves at release???

Andele.1306:

Iceflame.5024:

Yeah, I’m not saying that it’s enough. I’m trying to say that if they make greater marks baseline for staff, it’s a good idea to make soul marks baseline as well while they are at it. The topics I ran through usually only mention greater marks so I’m just suggesting adding soul marks in there too.

As a replacement I could suggest having something like a trait that makes the 1st life blast instant when you enter DS.

I cannot really agree with it since in both other aspects of play (pve and wvwvw) soul marks is borderline op (from 0 to full ds just from your enemies being piled up), like traited mesmer focus. Rather make Feast of corruption be like underwater feast, pbaoe and just giving 5% pre enemy hit (yes it would reduce max potential you could get in 1v1s, but overall massive improvement).

Thread: “Why necromancers don’t quite cut it (by Zzod)” from the necromancer forums
Page 4

lol

soul marks is borderline op (from 0 to full ds just from your enemies being piled up)

What? This is NOT how soul marks works. It gives a flat 3% when the mark is triggered. It does NOT, I repeat, does NOT give 3% per target hit.

SPESHAL.9106:

Bhawb.7408:

He was talking about Closed Beta. Look at footage (there is a bit), and you’ll see what he means. We had the best of everything.

I suspected he was talking about closed beta even though I just played since release.

In any case, lets assume necros were OP in Beta. How much more OP could they have been than Thieves. Maybe it is him who needs a history lesson. Do you remember at release when they could global someone?

It wasn’t til months into release that they finally started to make piecemeal nerfs to heartseeker, pistol whip, signet, quickness, etc. Here we are 9 months later and they STILL can own a necro despite the nerfs.

Exactly how “insane” was axe damage? Were Necros globaling people? How OP was DS teleport that made whack-a-mole necessary to bring them in line, but not Thieves at release???

I really don’t think you understand what we mean by OP. This isn’t the “oh man thief backstabbed me for 8k thats OP!” I’m literally saying that Lich Form’s auto attack had the same DPS as 100b, except you had far more survivability than a warrior has ever dreamed of, could do it while moving, and had no recharge time on it. You would 2 shot everything that wasn’t invulnerable.

Or lets say you didn’t like that kind of playstyle, and wanted to be a bunker? Sure, use DS and you can permanently facetank 4 players on your own.

If that wasn’t bad enough, every Necromancer had more mobility than what Eles currently have.

We were OP, that is a fact with absolutely no room for logical debate. We did everything better than anyone else, at once. So they completely gutted us and had to put it back together.

Iceflame.5024:

I would like to point out that Necro’s way of damage mitigation is facetanking and it’s kind of a really difficult tanking mechanic to balance since it is “relative” as in its effectiveness is relative to the number of damage sources that are attacking you:

Some examples of what I mean:
If the facetanking capability is enough for 1v1 then it begins to drastically suffer the more sources are attacking you so it becomes unreliable and ineffective in these situations. If the facetanking capability is effective enough to be reliable in a situation against multiple attackers(let’s say for example 4), then it becomes OP in the situation with less attackers. So as a result the facetanking capability(LF pool, LF generation as well as DS CD) ideally needs to be a dynamic variable that changes depending on the number of attackers if you want it to be equally effective in all situations. We are in a situation where our facetanking capability is not OP in 1v1 and so it’s in the state where its efficiency drastically drops with 2 or more sources attacking you. Facetanking does not prevent you form being CCed in our case either.

As another example I would like to put attention to the soul marks trait. I suggested making it baseline along with greater marks and a person disagreed bringing up an example of it being OP in WWW zergs where 1 or 2 marks give you a full life force bar. Actually this might be the mechanic that takes care of the relativeness of the LF generation but at the same time it’s not quite enough. We still are limited by the LF pool and a 10 second CD(5 second CD if traited which is actually freaking awesome and I personally see it being better than the stability trait), these things ideally need to be dynamic too. I still think the soul marks trait should be made baseline for staff in addition to greater marks.

So you can see that facetanking efficiency is a relative thing. If we talk about blocks, invulnerabilities, evades and other stuff, they are absolute. They ignore all the damage and effects that are flying towards you in a short time and they do not care about the number of damage sources. And we have a game where a lot of classes have these mechanics that are absolute at mitigating damage.

All in all I think that if you want Necro to be in a somewhat ideal spot, the only way to achieve it would be a huge freaking redesign.

P.S. It would be nice to make the stability trait go back into being immune to CC while in DS since we have limited abilities that we can use and our utilities aren’t available to us while inside DS.

^^^
Quoted for great justice, I agree with every point you explained Iceflame, I hope devs agree as well with this explanation

On the other hand, I just checked out Soul Marks trait in-game and it’s a FLAT amount LF (3%), no matter how many enemies you hit with the marks. If there is someone who doubts this, he can check it out on the official wiki: Soul Marks Wiki

You can talent minions for poison damage, but they have to die which is unreliable.

Not really unreliable when you can blow them up to make a poison field, but minions are very rare at higher levels of PvP.