Guild Wars 2

WARNING: This is a long read. As a result I have listed a table of contents below to make it easier to digest.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
0. Purpose of Address
1. What are the Flaws with Necromancer?
2. Necessary Functionality Changes

• Utility skills in shroud
• Healing in shroud

3. Utility Skill Changes
4. Weapon Skill Changes
5. Deathshroud Skill Changes
6. Incentivizing Build Diversity
7. The Reaper [TBA]
8. Specialization 2 [TBA]
9. Specialization 3 [TBA]

0. Purpose of Address:

The purpose of this address is to improve the viability of necromancers across all game modes. This shall be achieved by first analyzing the profession‘s design flaws and then proposing simple, straightforward fixes to the current iteration of the necromancer. At this point in time the reaper specialization will not be addressed, however, after the beta weekend I will post my feedback here.

1. What are the Flaws with Necromancer?

Clunky, abysmally long cast times:

In video games, we have opportunity cost. The cost (time) of casting a skill needs to be worth the skill’s effect after you finish casting. This is often not the case with the majority of necromancer’s skills. They have long cast times and weak effects (some are even self-detrimental, Corruptions I’m looking at you!). The best skills In the game are often instant cast because the opportunity cost of having cast times is not balanced with the effects you gain. This is a large issue for necromancer and I will address them on a skill-by-skill basis.

Unclear shroud identity:

The journey from a downstate, to a pseudo-transform, to a second health bar with skills attached to it has been a long and arduous one. Assuming that the third conceptual direction of shroud is approaching its final refinements, there are a few mechanical changes that need to be implemented if we are to be on equal footing with other professions who have instant cast, scaling defenses. We must fully integrate shroud into the necromancer profession so that it synergizes with our utilities, traits, and healing.

Skills, traits, and profession mechanic work against one another:

• Shroud blocks healing (some leeching works but its very inconsistent in this iteration) from your own skills, blast finishers, allies, runes, regen and food buffs.

• Shroud blocks all utilities; signet passives, minion actives, stun breaks (ignoring foot in the grave on pace every 7-10 seconds), heal skills, elite skills.

• Elite transform skills flat out destroy our semblances of active defense. It destroys our spectral effects, it destroys our meat shield minions and puts them all on cooldown if you were unfortunate enough to use them beforehand. It’s not a learn to play issue, it’s a badly designed mechanical limitation. Sure you can work around it, but that’s doesn’t make it good game design (Moa morph…).

Oversights:

Necromancer has :

• a lack of active defense
• a lack of scaling defense
• a lack of mobility
• a lack of CC defense
• a lack of team support

Without ruining the theme of the necromancer, I will attempt to address all of these problems flavorfully and effectively.

2. Necessary Functionality Changes:

Justifying Utility Skills in Shroud

• There are soon to be 9 professions in GW2 and only 8 of them have virtually 100% access to their utility bar. The only exception is necromancer. His signets passives only work about 50% of the time. You actually get punished for skillfully using your profession mechanic if you take signets.

• A full bar of minions requires you to avoid using your active defense (shroud) for 7.5 seconds just to re summon all of them. That doesn’t include auto attacking, that doesn’t include using healing skills, that doesn’t include dodge rolling or being stunned. We need to be able to summon these in shroud in between life blasts or tainted shackles.

• As for stunbreaks, we can’t use them while in shroud. Once you enter it, you are susceptible to cc. Even if you trait “Foot in the Grave” you have a stunbreak and 1 stack of stability, but after that you’re forced to either remain cc’d in order to tank some burst, or leave shroud and burn one of your other stunbreaks to avoid the burst. But now you are locked out of shroud for about 9 more seconds, so you’re basically even more vulnerable. Having utilities in shroud would somewhat alleviate the issue of chain cc and burst that our immobile necromancer profession is vulnerable to.

• Another issue with shroud is condi removal but that’s not my biggest concern since there are already some recent passive counters to this through Plague Sending, Shrouded Renewal, and in WvW, food and runes.

• Let’s move to the skill ceiling of this profession. It’s been said that necro is the “hardest profession to master” due to shroud. And I agree . It’s the hardest class to master because it is the only class that punishes you for good play, it is the only class where you actively prevent yourself from healing, from getting trait benefits, from having active, scaling defenses and mobility. SAB: Tribulation mode is nothing compared to being a necromancer main. We don’t need the mobility of a thief. We don’t need cantrips or endure pain. We don’t need stealth. What we truly need is for the necromancer to have internal synergy. We need utilities in shroud, and we need healing in shroud as well.

Healing in Shroud

For just a minute, let’s forget allies trying to heal us with water attunement swap into a dodge roll. All of our self applied healing needs to go through Shroud! If allies can’t heal us, at least allow us to heal ourselves with skillful play. Mark of Blood gives us regen. Don’t punish us for turtling in Shroud, our defenses should work together with regen. We should get healed by Well of Blood’s tick healing. Currently, we don’t. Blood Fiend, probably our weakest heal, and Signet of Vampirism’s leeching effects do not heal us while in Shroud. This needs to be fixed.

We can’t benefit from Runes of the Dolyak more than about 50% of the time. We can’t benefit from Mango Fruit Pies like a stance warrior or mist form else can. Our defenses don’t stack in multiple layers of small healing like a cleric signet regen ranger can achieve either. We counter ourselves.

Please address this.

3. Utility Skill Changes:

Now I would like to overview the effectiveness of our utility skills and recommend changes that are in my opinion, reasonable, flavorful, and beneficial in addressing the class’s lack of group support, and other design oversights.

Necromancer utility skills are quite niche, and as a result, one utility might not be perfect for all situations. Therefore, I will rate them based on how well they fill their respective niche. Only skills that are less than 5/5 will receive fixes. This is to improve diversity— do not interpret it as a necromancer power creep.

Spectrals

• Spectral Walk: 5/5
• Spectral Armor: 5/5
• Spectral Grab: 4/5 Increase the projectile speed by 33% to increase reliability.
• Spectral Wall: 5/5

Corruptions

• Epidemic : 4/5 Cast time reduced to ¾ seconds.
• Corrupt Boon 5/5
• Blood is Power 3/5 : Range of AoE might increased to 300. 8 might for 8 seconds changed to 10 might for 10 seconds.
• Corrosive Poison Cloud: 3/5: This ability now destroys projectiles.

Signets

• Signet of Spite: 4/5*
• Plague Signet: 4/5*
• Signet of the Locust:4/5*
• Signet of Undeath: 2/5: Cooldown reduced to 120 seconds. Cast time reduced to 2 seconds. Passive generates 2% life force every 3 seconds (regardless of combat status).
  
  *The reason these signets are not 5/5 is because currently, their passives do not work while in shroud. My proposal for this is seen in section 2. Allowing the use of utilities while in shroud would allow signet passives to function properly, making them synergize with our class mechanic.

Wells

• Well of Suffering: 5/5
• Well of Corruption: 5/5
• Well of Power: 5/5
• Well of Darkness: 3/5 Cooldown reduced to 40 seconds. Duration increased to 8 seconds.

Minions

• Bone minion: 4/5 Cast time reduced to 1 second.
• Bone fiend: 4/5 Cast time reduced to 1 second.
• Shadow Fiend: 3/5 Cast time reduced to 1 second. Remove active ability’s minion precast. Shadow Fiend blind and teleport should be instantaneous to reflect its active ability.
• Flesh Wurm: 4/5 Cast time reduced to 1 second.

Heals

• Consume Conditions: 5/5 It is still a very good heal.
• Signet of Vampirism: 3/5 There is now passive leeching damage added on hits taken. Passive healing now works while in shroud (this can be fixed by allowing utility skill access in Shroud.)
• Well of Blood: 3/5 Cast time reduced to 1/2 second. Healing over time needs to heal through Shroud.
• Blood Fiend: 3/5 Cast time reduced to 1 second. Active cast time reduced to 1/2 second. This minion’s leeching attacks now heal you in Shroud.

Elites

• Plague: 3/5 No longer removes spectral effects or destroys minions. Additionally, the general necromancer consensus is that they would love it if Plague got some sort of condition duration reduction.
• Lich Form: 3/5 No longer removes spectral effects or destroys minions.

Before I discuss Flesh Golem I will assert why Spectrals and Minions need to persist through these elite skills. Death Nova summons a Jagged Horror while in both of these forms. Lich Form 4 summons Minions. Last Gasp activates while in these forms. Lich Form itself is now a Spectral, and so it stacking with other spectral skills shouldn’t even be a question.

It is counterintuitive to have elite skills invalidate your entire bar of utilities. It lowers the skill ceiling of the profession, it makes you more predictable, and punishes strategic play. If you place a Flesh Wurm in advance, you waste it by activating your elites. If you use Spectral Armor, but heavy burst makes you go into Plague while your shroud is on cooldown, you have wasted the elite’s valuable life force gain. Sure, you have protection for a few seconds, but that invalidates 50% of your utility skill’s effectiveness. The effect is even more prominent with minion masters, who as a result of this design oversight are basically forced into picking flesh golem as their elite.

Destroying Spectrals and Minions on the activation of these two elites is bad game design; it reduces diversity and needs to be fixed. I don’t think classes can be compared in a vacuum but take this example: warriors can pop all of their Stances and go into Rampage without losing the Stances. It doesn’t make sense for necromancers to be so adversely affected for using the same resources in a similar fashion. In the case of the warrior, we have skill synergy and good game design. And yet, for the necro, we still have asynergy.

• Flesh Golem: 3/5 Ignoring the bad AI that plagues basically all minions (;D) the main fixes here are to reduce Flesh Golems cast time to 1 second and reduce its active to ½ second. The active needs to give Flesh Golem 5-10 stacks of stability for the charge’s full duration. Otherwise it’s useless In large scale WvW. In 1v1s and PvP its dodge able so there’s definite counterplay to this change.

4. Weapon Skill Changes

• Staff: 5/5 This is our most flexible weapon set. I don’t think it needs any changes.

Based on feedback, a good suggestion would be to add 1 stack of torment on staff auto to marginally help justify going into staff on a condition build.

• Dagger MH: 4/5 This is our best dps weapon. Dagger two channel time reduced to 2 seconds. Dagger 3 cast time reduced to 3/4 second.

• Axe: 3/5 Axe auto attack damage and its animations are terrible. My solution to this is to have its second hit of the attack chain remove 1 boon. This will synergize well with the Spite line in section 5, and it will also increase axe’s overall dps (through the spite trait, spiteful talisman). Axe 2 is useable. Axe three is amazing, but it needs a blast finisher. This will make axe see more use as a boonhate weapon.

• Scepter: 4/5 Scepter auto is our best condition auto. 2 is also ok. 3 should also 3 stacks of torment for 5 seconds. That would synergize with the cripple on scepter 2 for kiting, while also giving us a bit more access to torment.

• Dagger OH: 5/5 It brings good utility although it may become more valuable with changes to pve. Currently, warhorn is used more often although that doesn’t make this offhand inferior.

• Focus: 3/5 Focus 4 now applies 2 stacks of might for 5 seconds instead of regen per bounce. Spinal Shivers’ cast time is reduced to ¾ second.

• Warhorn: 5/5 Magnificent game design. Wonderful synergy. Very sustain. Wow.

5. Deathshroud Ability Changes

DS1: This skill does about 29% less damage at range. It is a 1 second cast time, but it has a .5 second after cast. Change DS1 to fire at the same rate as Plague Blast. (Piercing and 100% projectile finisher should probably be baseline but I’ll discuss that more after the beta weekend)

DS2: This skill is fine. Speeding up the projectile 33% like spectral grasp wouldn’t hurt though.

DS3: Probably the most balanced necro skill in the game.

DS4: At a 40 second cooldown, I honestly think this should pulse scaling stability(2s/pulse) per second based on how many people it hits.

Against five people you would have 1 second of 5 stability followed by 3 seconds of 10 stacks, followed by 1 second of 5 stacks. That gives you 2 seconds of stability to cover a heal after finishing the channel, which of course is very important for clutch heals in outnumbered fights. Against 1 player, you would have 1 stability for 1 second, 2 stab for 3 seconds, and another second of 1 stab. This is balanced in 1v1s because 2 cc abilities are not that hard to come by, and it allows counterplay. They can wait it out, burn through it with cc, or rip or corrupt the stability.

DS5: Also fine.

6. Incentivizing Build Diversity

In order to promote build diversity it is necessary to make each major trait useful in a particular build or niche. Thus, we must bring underpowered traits up to the level of stronger traits. Choices are supposed to be build defining and are not supposed to be easy decisions. Below are what I recommend to make every trait viable in some build.

Spite:

• Spiteful Talisman: This trait additionally does 500 damage to enemies when you rip or corrupt boons on an enemy. (And now both axe and focus are viable in multiple game modes ! )
• Rending Shroud: vulnerability pulsing every 3 seconds increased from 3 to 5 stacks (for ten seconds).
• Unholy Fervor: Damage multiplier changed to “10% damage increase against vulnerable foes.”. Axe reduced recharge remains at 20%.
• Unholy Feast: Internal cooldown removed. Shroud already has a 10 second cooldown, there’s no need to asynchronize this trait from Shroud. (With the change to axe three, necros now have a blast finisher every 10 seconds).

Curses:

• Chilling Darkness: Renamed Brainfreeze “applying chill to an enemy also applies 1 stack of confusion for 3 seconds.”
• Master of Corruption: Aditionally, all self inflicted conditions caused by corruptions are also applied to enemies within 300 range (maximum of 5 enemies).
• Parasitic Contagion: This now heals through shroud.

Death Magic:

All of these major traits are decently useable.

• There is one minor trait, “Soul Comprehension” that definitely needs to be changed. In addition to 20% more lifeforce from nearby deaths, the minor should “ gain lifeforce from nearby deaths even while in Shroud.”

PvPer ‘s might not agree with this suggestion, however, I think that it is a strong change in all three game modes. This way you get something unique to Shroud sustain that makes Death Magic preferable. With Minions you can go in shroud and still gain lifeforce when they die. In team fights turtling in Shroud gets a bit more sustain from stomps than it does now. Shroud builds in PvE will be able to stay in Shroud longer without even speccing for reaper shroud.

Blood Magic:

The only thing that needs to be fixed here is an extension of the Signet of Vampirism problem: the active on Blood Bond needs to heal through deathshroud.

Also if you dodgeroll and lay down a Mark of Evasion, and an enemy behind you triggers Blood Bond, BB gets put on cooldown without applying any effects, because the enemy was behind you. Signet of Vampirism needs to work on people you are running from and it will fix this portion of the Blood Bond trait.

Soul Reaping:

Overall this is one of the strongest specializations, however there are clear best traits that are almost necessary choices. Those traits are “Vital Persistence” and “Death Perception”.

Accordingly, we need to buff the other four competing traits.

• Spectral Mastery: “Additionally, spectral skills have added effects. Spectral Walk clears chill, cripple, and immobilization both on activation, and on recall. Spectral Grasp is now unblockable. Spectral armor now grants 5 stacks of stability. Spectral wall now reflects projectiles.”

This versatility is what is necessary to compete with the sustain of vital persistence. In spectral builds this will be superior. In most other builds, it’ll be a tougher choice.

• Fear of Death: fear durations are increased by 50%. When you are downed fear 5 enemies around (240 range) you for 1 second. (No cooldown.) When you down an enemy player or kill an npc, 5 enemies around it (240 range) are feared for 1 second. 15 second cool down.

This change should be fine and fun in all game modes. Because no one would use fear as a means of top dps in pve right ? It doesn’t work on bosses anyway.

• Foot in the Grave: This currently stunbreaks and grants 1 stack of stability on Shroud entry. Additionally, it should pulse stability (not stunbreak) like juggernaut. You are giving up a large dps increase by taking this instead of 50% crit chance while in deathshroud, so this skill needs to be less lackluster.

• Dhuumfire: Shroud 1 now applies one stack of burning and 1 stack of torment. I think this is a more flavorful way to buff the trait instead of increasing the burning stacks.

7. Reaper

To be discussed.

8. this is reserved

9. this is reserved

Congratulations for reading this far !! Feel free to discuss, question my logic, or just +1 this until it gets a sticky.

~Born of Shadow

The flaws are nothing that hasnt been said before countless times. Still very nice to have it all well formatted in one spot.

Dont really agree with a lot of the weapon and trait changes tho.

Staff should get its bleed stack and partial AoE cleanse (3 from self, 1 from allies) back.

Dagger #3 is kind of bland. Compareit to Magnetic grasp of elementalist for example. I would maybe even combine dagger#2 and dagger#3 into one skill and give it a gap closer as a new #3.

DS1 and DS2 must be projectile finishers, for obvious reasons.

DS1 needs a condition by default.

I also dont see why Focus needs to have its regen replaced by a few seconds might.

Dhuumfire: both torment and burning is weird. either buff the burning or turn it all into torment.

Spectral mastery: this doesnt need a buff in my opinion. the increased LF gain, duration and reduced CD are enough.

But those changes still dont address the issue that many enemies can just walk away when things go badly for them.

I really agree with pretty much all of this, except that your new Fear of Death idea is pretty op. And we don’t need to both make Life Blast fire super fast and buff Dhuumfire, one or the other would be balanced.

And Axe Training should really give some entirely different bonus than just bonus damage. It should be something that actually synergizes with the axe skills, not just “take this for extra damage”. Your Spiteful Talisman idea would actually be a perfect axe trait if it had a boon strip on its auto attack.

RashanDale.3609:

Still very nice to have it all well formatted in one spot.

Yepperonies.

RashanDale.3609:

Staff should get its bleed stack and partial AoE cleanse (3 from self, 1 from allies) back.

I primarily play power necro in wvw and cele necro in pvp but I haven’t noticed a big problem with missing that one bleed stack. Bleed damage in general is pretty pitiful right now, better to just putrid mark 5 stacks of burning or 10 stacks of confusion.

As for the putrid mark team support I completely agree with you, however I don’t know if we will ever get old putrid mark back

RashanDale.3609:

Dagger #3 is kind of bland. Compareit to Magnetic grasp of elementalist for example. I would maybe even combine dagger#2 and dagger#3 into one skill and give it a gap closer

This seems more complicated of a change than I would advocate.

RashanDale.3609:

I also dont see why Focus needs to have its regen replaced by a few seconds might.

Both axe and focus are bad, because they don’t have clear identities. With this change it would make focus more of a bursty offhand than we currently have. The might stacking is more useful than regen, which we already have 100% AoE uptime through staff 2. I don’t know anyone who uses focus anymore at all, especially not for the regen xD

RashanDale.3609:

Dhuumfire: both torment and burning is weird. either buff the burning or turn it all into torment.

Weird doesn’t seem like a valid reason to not try something like this. People have called for more torment, people have called for a buff to Dhuumfire. This is a middle ground ^^

RashanDale.3609:

Spectral mastery: this doesnt need a buff in my opinion. the increased LF gain, duration and reduced CD are enough.

But those changes still dont address the issue that many enemies can just walk away when things go badly for them.

Even with 3 spectrals I don’t think Spectral Mastery is currently better choice than the sustain you get from vital persistance. I’ll do some more testing, but I still think it could use a buff to compete.

And the baseline projectile speed buff on spectral grasp should help.

Captain Unusual.9163:

I really agree with pretty much all of this, except that your new Fear of Death idea is pretty op. And we don’t need to both make Life Blast fire super fast and buff Dhuumfire, one or the other would be balanced.

I’m pretty sure that these two changes even together would not be crazy overpowered. Someone calculated the damage you get from running condireaper, and even with dhuumfire and the faster aoe attack speed of RS1, it was a condi damage dps loss. 1 stack of torment isn’t really that much extra damage. With 1975 condi damage, it does 193 damage every 2 seconds or 387 if moving.
1 stack of burning for two seconds with the same condi damage would be a total 819 damage.

So regular condimancer with this trait wouldn’t lose too much pressure by turtling in shroud. And it makes it so they have to choose between more damage of Dhuumfire and the stability of Foot in the Grave.

And Axe Training should really give some entirely different bonus than just bonus damage. It should be something that actually synergizes with the axe skills, not just “take this for extra damage”. Your Spiteful Talisman idea would actually be a perfect axe trait if it had a boon strip on its auto attack.

Thanks haha, I’ll think about maybe a mixing and matching the two.

Malchior.1928:

Both axe and focus are bad, because they don’t have clear identities. With this change it would make focus more of a bursty offhand than we currently have. The might stacking is more useful than regen, which we already have 100% AoE uptime through staff 2. I don’t know anyone who uses focus anymore at all, especially not for the regen xD

Fair enough.

Weird doesn’t seem like a valid reason to not try something like this. People have called for more torment, people have called for a buff to Dhuumfire. This is a middle ground ^^

Well, i cant really give you more of a reason than that. It just doesnt really fit together in my opinion.

Even with 3 spectrals I don’t think Spectral Mastery is currently better choice than the sustain you get from vital persistance. I’ll do some more testing, but I still think it could use a buff to compete.

But think about what it already does (or should do). Cooldown reduction and increased duration alone is already enough for banshee’s wail to be a good trait. spectral mastery then also has some life force generation on top of that.
Maybe it’s vital persistence that needs to be toned down a bit.

I like most of your suggestions, though I’d be worried about dumping all of them into the Necro at once. That seems like it would result in an unpredictable spike in power which could necessitate a serious nerf in other respects.

Here are the changes in particular which I don’t agree with:

Malchior.1928:

Signet of Undeath: 2/5: Cooldown reduced to 90 seconds. Cast time reduced to 2 seconds. Passive generates 2% life force every 3 seconds (regardless of combat status).

Bad idea. Now optimal Necro play would involve micromanaging your Utility bar so that it’s switched to Signet of Undeath between every fight to top off. That sort of micro is unfun and I’d really prefer not to have to engage in it.

Also, the current cooldown is too long (Necros should be especially good at this sort of thing IMO), but 90 seconds for a ranged, AoE instant res is way too strong. 2.5 second cast time with a 120 second cooldown seems about right to me.

Malchior.1928:

Dagger MH: 4/5 This is our best dps weapon. Dagger two channel time reduced to 2 seconds. Dagger 3 cooldown reduced to 20 seconds.

I’d prefer for Dagger 3 to have a 3/4 cast time rather than a lower cooldown. 1 second is an awfully long time to have to spend keeping line of sight on someone.

Malchior.1928:

Axe: 3/5 Axe auto attack damage and its animations are terrible. My solution to this is to have its second hit of the attack chain remove 1 boon. This will synergize well with the Spite line in section 5, and it will also increase axe’s overall dps. Axe 2 is useable. Axe three is amazing, but it needs a blast finisher. This will make axe see more use as a boonhate weapon.

Way too much boon hate. The autoattack should cleave to up to 3 total targets, and perhaps each hit could also extend the duration of existing Vulnerability by .5 seconds in addition to applying a style.

Malchior.1928:

Scepter: 4/5 Scepter auto is our best condition auto. 2 is also ok. 3 should also 3 stacks of torment for 5 seconds. That would synergize with the cripple on scepter 2 for kiting, while also giving us a bit more access to torment.

I dunno, it takes an awfully long time to apply conditions with the Scepter auto. I’d kinda like to see 1 Bleed / 2 Bleeds / 1 Bleed + 1 Poison. Torment on 3 would be cool, but it would be even cooler if the Torment stacks or duration scaled off the number of conditions already on the target (to keep the skill’s current play pattern).

Other than that, I agree with most of what you said. Ooo, one more change: Necros should start each sPvP match with 50% Death Shroud.

Thank you so much for the time you dedicated to put this together in a clean and organized format. This would be very useful for developers as well to peruse and pick up a few ideas for necromancer.

RashanDale.3609:

Well, i cant really give you more of a reason than that. It just doesnt really fit together in my opinion.

Fair enough haha! However, my thoughts for adding a stack of torment as opposed to another stack of burn were due to :

1. Not wanting another Dhuumfire Fiasco
2. Dhuumfire is a compound of dhuum and fire. Fire obviously goes with burning, but Dhuum was the god of death and ruler of the underworld. Consequently, it would only make sense that you would feel tormented after being hit by someone with the power of dhuumfire.

RashanDale.3609:

But think about what it already does (or should do). Cooldown reduction and increased duration alone is already enough for banshee’s wail to be a good trait. spectral mastery then also has some life force generation on top of that.
Maybe it’s vital persistence that needs to be toned down a bit.

I have two things to say to this.

• Vital Persistence is like the Fast Hands (warr trait) of Necros. It is basically required. For warriors, they get it as a minor trait. But we basically have to choose it as our major.
• I don’t think nerfing VP is a good idea because that would be a flat out nerf to all necromancer sustain, which is unmerited. So logically, if there were incentives to lose out on the sustain for advantages elsewhere, such as a buffed spectral mastery, then it is a worthy opportunity cost.

Nynuwe.5893:

Thank you so much for the time you dedicated to put this together in a clean and organized format. This would be very useful for developers as well to peruse and pick up a few ideas for necromancer.

Your praise is much appreciated <3. I am doing this for the good of the necromancer community!

They should reduce total LF by like I dunno, 15% and just make the vital persistence degeneration baseline. That trait doesn’t allow for flexibility in the slightest, its so potent. This would be a good middle ground. Then add some new effect to Vital persistence that isn’t quite as potent as the current trait. We’d get some choice at least, at that point.

Then tack on 20% LF when out of combat. I’d be in support of that.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I like most of your suggestions, though I’d be worried about dumping all of them into the Necro at once. That seems like it would result in an unpredictable spike in power which could necessitate a serious nerf in other respects.

In an ideal completed world, these are all the changes necro would have. I compiled them here in the hopes that devs will take these ideas and slowly but surely incorporate them into your profession. I also would be wary of changing too much too quickly.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Here are the changes in particular which I don’t agree with:

Malchior.1928:

Signet of Undeath: 2/5: Cooldown reduced to 90 seconds. Cast time reduced to 2 seconds. Passive generates 2% life force every 3 seconds (regardless of combat status).

Bad idea. Now optimal Necro play would involve micromanaging your Utility bar so that it’s switched to Signet of Undeath between every fight to top off. That sort of micro is unfun and I’d really prefer not to have to engage in it.

In which game mode? In PvE you have critters that you can use staff to get to full LF in 5 seconds. In WvW, I doubt this would even be superior to the lifeforce gain of just Spectral Grasp, which means if you’re taking it, it’s because you need a group res and you don’t have a warrior banner. In PvP, there are crates, crates everywhere! Dagger auto attack. And also you can’t switch utilities in PvP so this last scenario is a moot point.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Also, the current cooldown is too long (Necros should be especially good at this sort of thing IMO), but 90 seconds for a ranged, AoE instant res is way too strong. 2.5 second cast time with a 120 second cooldown seems about right to me.

Agreed. I came up with a lot of changes but this one was just a rough estimate. Your feedback is helping me fine tune it. However, it’s not instant res. It has a 2 second cast time, like warrior banner. And it can be interrupted quite easily due to our low access to stability.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I’d prefer for Dagger 3 to have a 3/4 cast time rather than a lower cooldown. 1 second is an awfully long time to have to spend keeping line of sight on someone.

You make a very good point. I will think about this.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Way too much boon hate. The autoattack [axe] should cleave to up to 3 total targets, and perhaps each hit could also extend the duration of existing Vulnerability by .5 seconds in addition to applying a style.

At one time I would have agreed with you ! But since we are getting AoE cleave with the greatsword I think this conceptual identity to the axe would overlap too much. As such my take is that we should make axe the ranged boonhate weapon. It allows us to kite, it gives retal, it stacks vuln, it can do decent damage in combination with changes to spiteful talisman and axe training, and it gives us a stronger power range option.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I dunno, it takes an awfully long time to apply conditions with the Scepter auto. I’d kinda like to see 1 Bleed / 2 Bleeds / 1 Bleed + 1 Poison. Torment on 3 would be cool, but it would be even cooler if the Torment stacks or duration scaled off the number of conditions already on the target (to keep the skill’s current play pattern).

.

I think the main selling points of the scepter are that with lingering curse (additionally with condi duration foods in wvw), you have 12 second bleeds on auto attack that average about 2k dmg per swing in addition to having 100% poison uptime. These long duration bleeds and poison make good cover conditions for your fears, dhuumfires (if you’re using them) perplexity stacks (if using runes), torment, and all the conditions that you just transfered using plague signet. Its attrition and you apply more condis than they can handle.

As for stacking torment with conditions, I thought about that. But one signet of spite is like 8 stacks of torment. And if it’s torment for 5 seconds, with lingering curse that would be 10 seconds. Thats why I picked a nice round number of 3 torment stacks

Blaine Tog.8304:

Other than that, I agree with most of what you said. Ooo, one more change: Necros should start each sPvP match with 50% Death Shroud.

xD I personally like the challenge of building up lifeforce from zero in pvp, but that change would make us stronger for sure. I don’t think having no lifeforce is a flaw though. More like a counterweight to keep us in check.

ronpierce.2760:

They should reduce total LF by like I dunno, 15% and just make the vital persistence degeneration baseline. That trait doesn’t allow for flexibility in the slightest, its so potent. This would be a good middle ground. Then add some new effect to Vital persistence that isn’t quite as potent as the current trait. We’d get some choice at least, at that point.

Then tack on 20% LF when out of combat. I’d be in support of that.

Heyyyy !

I also think this would be a good idea. But I REALLY don’t like all this talk of nerfing total lifeforce. First zapv and now you here haha.

But something must be done about Soulreaping to allow for more diversity. I’ll think about this.

@Malchior: I agree with RashanDale about DS1 e Dhuumfire. Torment should be baseline on DS1 and not on the trait. I would add it even on Staff1 so condimacers have a cover condition and they not kitten their dps too much while waiting for weapon swap CD or using DS. Torment on DS1 and Staff1 is great “utility” for all the other necromancer specs too.

Charblaze.6958:

@Malchior: I agree with RashanDale about DS1 e Dhuumfire. Torment should be baseline on DS1 and not on the trait. I would add it even on Staff1 so condimacers have a cover condition and they not kitten their dps too much while waiting for weapon swap CD or using DS. Torment on DS1 and Staff1 is great “utility” for all the other necromancer specs too.

Valid point. I was thinking about this. Although I still feel like Dhuumfire doesn’t compete with the other two grandmasters. What would you propose? (Besides 2 stacks of burning; that would be too much haha.)

Edit:

I found this perusing the forums, go figure!

OlliX.1705:

I’d rather they did a baseline increase of attack speed for Life Blast and increased the duration of the burn to 4-5 seconds.

Charblaze.6958:

@Malchior: I agree with RashanDale about DS1 e Dhuumfire. Torment should be baseline on DS1 and not on the trait. I would add it even on Staff1 so condimacers have a cover condition and they not kitten their dps too much while waiting for weapon swap CD or using DS. Torment on DS1 and Staff1 is great “utility” for all the other necromancer specs too.

I’d love for a longer duration torment (only one stack, to keep that “attrition/buildup” feel for Necromancer) on DS 1 (/RS 1??? Maybe only on the first two hits as the final hit is a “burst” hit) baseline for Shroud 1 skills to allow for more condition covering and generally making the core mechanic work for condition builds a little better.

The staff though, I see it as a utility weapon mostly. I really think Staff 1 would be met best with a 2 second cripple on enemies above 600 away (600-1200), which is both utility and really pushes that “you can’t run from the necromancer” sort of niche, without allowing Staff too much melee KITING pressure close quarters, obviously baseline. I sincerely believe Staff 1 needs this little perk to drive home that feeling of being hard to escape the necromancer.

And, it helps with closing gaps a bit which Necromancer (and reaper) also direly need since they have a lack of realistic mobility. So this sort of staff tweak really helps in all areas without giving it something it doesn’t necessarily need, a close range kiting tool.

Malchior.1928:

[Re: Signet of Undeath passive]
In which game mode? In PvE you have critters that you can use staff to get to full LF in 5 seconds. In WvW, I doubt this would even be superior to the lifeforce gain of just Spectral Grasp, which means if you’re taking it, it’s because you need a group res and you don’t have a warrior banner. In PvP, there are crates, crates everywhere! Dagger auto attack. And also you can’t switch utilities in PvP so this last scenario is a moot point.

The only reason to want Death Shroud generation between fights is because you think this is needed, but now you’re saying it isn’t needed because we can already fill up to full with trivial effort. Seems like an unnecessary change, if that’s true.

Malchior.1928:

[Re: Signet of Undeath cooldown]
Agreed. I came up with a lot of changes but this one was just a rough estimate. Your feedback is helping me fine tune it. However, it’s not instant res. It has a 2 second cast time, like warrior banner. And it can be interrupted quite easily due to our low access to stability.

I mean, it can be interrupted, but its range appears to be much greater than the Warrior’s Battle Standard (the wiki isn’t giving me a straight answer about this). Battle Standard also has a 240 second cooldown and takes up the Elite slot, so I’m perfectly fine with it having a shorter cast time. I don’t usually find the cast time of Signet of Undeath to be unreasonable, so dropping it to 2.5 seconds should be enough.

Malchior.1928:

[Re: Axe]

At one time I would have agreed with you ! But since we are getting AoE cleave with the greatsword I think this conceptual identity to the axe would overlap too much. As such my take is that we should make axe the ranged boonhate weapon. It allows us to kite, it gives retal, it stacks vuln, it can do decent damage in combination with changes to spiteful talisman and axe training, and it gives us a stronger power range option.

A fair point, but stripping basically one boon a second is much too strong (and also devalues the Necro’s other boon stripping options).

Hmm. Maybe each axe autoattack could reduce the target’s boon durations by .5 seconds instead of outright removing one? This would still be really nasty but it wouldn’t be quite so difficult to deal with and it wouldn’t remove the need for other boon stripping skills. It’s also, to my knowledge, a completely unique effect; at least, I can’t think of another player skill that directly reduces the durations of an opponent’s boons.

Malchior.1928:

[Scepter]

I think the main selling points of the scepter are that with lingering curse (additionally with condi duration foods in wvw), you have 12 second bleeds on auto attack that average about 2k dmg per swing in addition to having 100% poison uptime. These long duration bleeds and poison make good cover conditions for your fears, dhuumfires (if you’re using them) perplexity stacks (if using runes), torment, and all the conditions that you just transfered using plague signet. Its attrition and you apply more condis than they can handle.

True, but Bleeds are just so ignorable right now. Other professions with strong condition builds succeed because they can stack up conditions very quickly and while it’s ok for the Necro to have a bit more ramp-up time, right now the Scepter just seems a bit too slow to me.

Malchior.1928:

As for stacking torment with conditions, I thought about that. But one signet of spite is like 8 stacks of torment. And if it’s torment for 5 seconds, with lingering curse that would be 10 seconds. Thats why I picked a nice round number of 3 torment stacks

How about scale the duration rather than the number of stacks, then? Start out pitably low, like 1 second of 3 stacks of Torment with 0 conditions and then add one second per condition (or per two conditions) already on them? This could result in some extremely long Torment stacks, but only if you’ve managed to stack a bunch of conditions on your foe first.

I just don’t like the idea of spamming Feast of Corruption on cooldown regardless of whatever else your opponent is doing. Its current incentive to wait for the optimal number of conditions on your foe is really interesting.

Malchior.1928:

[Starter Life Force in sPvP]

xD I personally like the challenge of building up lifeforce from zero in pvp, but that change would make us stronger for sure. I don’t think having no lifeforce is a flaw though. More like a counterweight to keep us in check.

True, and I don’t play much sPvP so maybe I’m overestimating how rough this is, but it seems unnecessarily harsh to completely lock the Necro out of her profession mechanic for the start of every match. Elementalists don’t have to wait until halfway through a fight to switch to Water or Earth attunements, after all.

ronpierce.2760:

The staff though, I see it as a utility weapon mostly. I really think Staff 1 would be met best with a 2 second cripple on enemies above 600 away (600-1200), which is both utility and really pushes that “you can’t run from the necromancer” sort of niche, without allowing Staff too much melee KITING pressure close quarters, obviously baseline. I sincerely believe Staff 1 needs this little perk to drive home that feeling of being hard to escape the necromancer.

Better improve the staff auto tracking first because no one will get hit from 600+ range away haha

Malchior.1928:

ronpierce.2760:

The staff though, I see it as a utility weapon mostly. I really think Staff 1 would be met best with a 2 second cripple on enemies above 600 away (600-1200), which is both utility and really pushes that “you can’t run from the necromancer” sort of niche, without allowing Staff too much melee KITING pressure close quarters, obviously baseline. I sincerely believe Staff 1 needs this little perk to drive home that feeling of being hard to escape the necromancer.

Better improve the staff auto tracking first because no one will get hit from 600+ range away haha

Yeaaaahhhh… -sigh-

I only feel right for asking for so much at once… :/

Blaine Tog.8304:

The only reason to want Death Shroud generation between fights is because you think this is needed, but now you’re saying it isn’t needed because we can already fill up to full with trivial effort. Seems like an unnecessary change, if that’s true.

I didn’t change the passive, just the active ^^. The passive is just frosting on the cake. And it would add a bit more sustain while in deathshroud once signet passives work with our profession mechanic. Although the opportunity cost of losing this sustain is worth saving up to three allies in a teamfight.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I mean, it can be interrupted, but its range appears to be much greater than the Warrior’s Battle Standard (the wiki isn’t giving me a straight answer about this). Battle Standard also has a 240 second cooldown and takes up the Elite slot, so I’m perfectly fine with it having a shorter cast time. I don’t usually find the cast time of Signet of Undeath to be unreasonable, so dropping it to 2.5 seconds should be enough.

Hmm, I don’t know how much you pvp, but the reason nobody uses this signet isn’t just the cooldown. 2.5 seconds is basically the casting time of a stomp. You have 0.5 seconds to position and start casting which is a marginal period of time to react. It’s almost not worth it to slot this if an uninterrupted active is going to be so unreliable. Thats why 2 should be the cast time. Warrior banner, the primary res skill that sees use has a 2 second cast time. And it can res up to 2 more allies than our signet can, in addition to granting aoe fury, might and swiftness.

Blaine Tog.8304:

A fair point, but stripping basically one boon a second is much too strong (and also devalues the Necro’s other boon stripping options).

Hmm. Maybe each axe autoattack could reduce the target’s boon durations by .5 seconds instead of outright removing one? This would still be really nasty but it wouldn’t be quite so difficult to deal with and it wouldn’t remove the need for other boon stripping skills. It’s also, to my knowledge, a completely unique effect; at least, I can’t think of another player skill that directly reduces the durations of an opponent’s boons.

I think this would be mechanically more difficult to program than my suggestion, and also, it doesn’t synergize with my changes to spiteful talisman and the concept I hold for axe. Right now Axe’s damage is abysmal, so if it got boon stripping I think that would be alright. Currently, even mesmers boonstrip better than necros with their auto attacks on sword clones as well as on shatter. I don’t think 1 boon per ~second of boon strip is that powerful once we put it into context.

Blaine Tog.8304:

True, but Bleeds are just so ignorable right now. Other professions with strong condition builds succeed because they can stack up conditions very quickly and while it’s ok for the Necro to have a bit more ramp-up time, right now the Scepter just seems a bit too slow to me.

Precisely. Bleed damage is terrible, but as a cover condition it is amazing. Since we aren’t condition damage kings, but rather the best class at manipulating condis with transfers and boon corruptions, It would be rather strong if we had stronger scepter condi damage.

How about scale the duration rather than the number of stacks, then? Start out pitably low, like 1 second of 3 stacks of Torment with 0 conditions and then add one second per condition (or per two conditions) already on them? This could result in some extremely long Torment stacks, but only if you’ve managed to stack a bunch of conditions on your foe first.

I like this idea. I will think more about it. The only problem i could see would be with is in implementation, but actually it shouldn’t be too hard. It would reward skillful play more than just spamming 3 on cooldown, so perhaps this is a better alternative.

Blaine Tog.8304:

True, and I don’t play much sPvP so maybe I’m overestimating how rough this is, but it seems unnecessarily harsh to completely lock the Necro out of her profession mechanic for the start of every match. Elementalists don’t have to wait until halfway through a fight to switch to Water or Earth attunements, after all.

Oh it’s rough. But thats why we play necro isn’kitten Masochism? hahaa Although if you think about it, once you switch out of an atunement you’re locked out of it for about 10 seconds. And you can only use one at a time. :P So you could consider that being locked out of three attunements at a time.

Malchior.1928:

Valid point. I was thinking about this. Although I still feel like Dhuumfire doesn’t compete with the other two grandmasters. What would you propose? (Besides 2 stacks of burning; that would be too much haha.)

Edit:

I found this perusing the forums, go figure!

OlliX.1705:

I’d rather they did a baseline increase of attack speed for Life Blast and increased the duration of the burn to 4-5 seconds.

Another proposal was to keep the same attack speed and make life blast a 2-3 hits skill so you have more chances to proc stuff that works only on hit. With one LB you would get 1 stack of torment, 1 stack of bleeding on average between barbed precision and earth sigil, and 1 stack of burning every second. Dhuumfire burn duration should just be slightly increased. If it seems OP keep in mind that you are applying shorter duration bleeds at half the rate of the mace and condi builds have a hard time at generating life force so you can’t keep spamming LB forever.

Just a few things…

Malchior.1928:

Healing in Shroud

All of our self applied healing needs to go through Shroud!

If allies can’t heal us, at least allow us to heal ourselves with skillful play.

Any kind of healing should work through Shroud, period.
There’s no reason why necros should be the only class that can’t receive ally healing half the time. And bargaining for “skillful” self-heals as a trade-off entails the same discrimination against necros as having no heals work in shroud at all.

Malchior.1928:

Blood Magic:

I see no need to change anything here.

Blood Bond’s Lesser Signet of Vampirism doesn’t heal through Shroud.
Also, like the original signet it requires facing your target, so in case you apply enough bleeding stacks to targets behind you (which happens all the time with aoe) Blood Bond will trigger but miss and go on cooldown.

Speaking from a pvp perspective only. These changes I would like to see them implement now as I think everyone would at least agree this would be good fix.

- Minions need to persist through transformations as you mentioned( moa, lich form, plague form, ect. )

- Display utilities in Ds

Long term fixes

STAFF- love it, the only problem with it is the auto attack is way too slow a 33% increase would be good.

AXE- needs a rework, it falls in the category of not better then staff or dagger. It does less damage then dagger and has less range then staff and it has less utility then both.

FOCUS/DAGGER- they both fall behind in comparison to the amazing warhorn, they need some buffs.

SOUL REAPING- the problem I have with soul reaping is it feels pretty much mandatory, Soul marks is pretty much essential for both the unblockable factor and the lf generation.

It might possibly too overpowered to have that as standard, but I don’t think I have made a build without it because it’s needed.

If you don’t take soul reaping you gain little benefit out of ds, which is contradictory because its meant to be our defense mechanic.

Long term I would like to see ds deteriorate/increase out of combat to a certain level 30-40-50%, because as you are aware a necro without any is extremely hard to kill yet when full its the opposite.

Malchior, thank you for putting all this together!

I don’t agree with many of the weapon and utility changes though. Most of the necro’s utilities are not as niche as you think – matter of fact other classes have better alternatives. That said, I wish a new set of utilities would be added in the future, something that actually matters in group play.

The GS pull is one weapon skill that has utility value and I wanna see more of that.

Malchior.1928:

• Dagger OH: 5/5 It brings good utility although it may become more valuable with changes to pve. Currently, warhorn is used more often although that doesn’t make this offhand inferior.

Dagger OH is not a 5/5. As a primary condimancer, its fairly weak but our only option. The skill 5 is rather slow to cast and slow to hit compared with other skills and it doesn’t have a way to generate life force which forces heavy focus on the scepter making the scepter seem like a really bad weapon for life force. When it really isn’t. Allot of the misconception about a condimancer comes from their prefered Offhand weapon. Dagger. I’d say its a 4/5 maybe 3/5. It needs some love to it for sure.

Malchior.1928:

• Axe: 3/5 Axe auto attack damage and its animations are terrible. My solution to this is to have its second hit of the attack chain remove 1 boon. This will synergize well with the Spite line in section 5, and it will also increase axe’s overall dps (through the spite trait, spiteful talisman). Axe 2 is useable. Axe three is amazing, but it needs a blast finisher. This will make axe see more use as a boonhate weapon.

I actually disagree with giving axe a blast finisher. I think it would help its usability, but I don’t feel that that is the way to help it. A whirl finisher on skill two might not be as attractive, but fits a bit better. As for boon corruption on the auto, well that was my idea so of course i’m in favor of that. Though I still am of the opinion that Axe should be a skill chain with its 3rd strike corrupting a boon.

Malchior.1928:

• Warhorn: 5/5 Magnificent game design. Wonderful synergy. Very sustain. Wow.

Again, as a OH I feel warhorn isn’t as good as you think it is. If any weapon should have a blast finisher its this one. Warhorn always disappointed me as its wail of doom was supposed to fear and confuse foes. Which it does neither. Which also means its potential synergy with traits outside of Banshee’s Wail is fairly limited. Still, a 4/5. Its good but not great.

flow.6043:

Just a few things…

Any kind of healing should work through Shroud, period.

Don’t worry, I agree with you. But at the very least we need to start somewhere, and that is fixing all our skills first. We can add ally healing afterwards. Anet has said they don’t want to rush adding full healing. But I pray to the 6 that it happens within the next 3 years haha.

flow.6043:

Blood Bond’s Lesser Signet of Vampirism doesn’t heal through Shroud.
Also, like the original signet it requires facing your target, so in case you apply enough bleeding stacks to targets behind you (which happens all the time with aoe) Blood Bond will trigger but miss and go on cooldown.

Ok, thanks, I didn’t catch that one.

bile.7560:

Speaking from a pvp perspective only. These changes I would like to see them implement now as I think everyone would at least agree this would be good fix.

STAFF- love it, the only problem with it is the auto attack is way too slow a 33% increase would be good.

If you hit 5 enemies clumped up you can get 20% lifeforce gain per auto attack. I think that the true issue is that it needs better pathing It’s already a lot faster than it was at launch haha.

bile.7560:

AXE- needs a rework, it falls in the category of not better then staff or dagger. It does less damage then dagger and has less range then staff and it has less utility then both.

I actually think that giving the Axe auto a boon rip on its second hit, and would make it a go to ranged power weapon. Changing spiteful talisman to do a flat damage amount whenever a skill rips or corrupts a boon would in turn increase the dps of the axe— both the auto and the three would rip a boon (this would also make focus better). And if you’re traited for Unholy Feast, every time you pop shroud you’re doing more damage. I got the idea from Eles where when they disable someone that person takes damage. I think it could be the dps increase that axe needs while also giving it a solid identity, “I want to take this because i need boon rip/vuln/ decent ranged dps.”

bile.7560:

FOCUS/DAGGER- they both fall behind in comparison to the amazing warhorn, they need some buffs.

I agree with focus being weaker, hence the might stacking on focus 4, the shorter cast time on focus 5, the change to Spiteful Talisman, and Axe training (which gives 10% dmg increase on vuln which the focus can also stack).

The dagger, from a WvW and PvP standpoint brings a decent transfer (if you bait dodges) and AoE weakness. That is niche but I think it is just as useful as warhorn, but in different situations. From a PvE perspective (fractals namely) the blind and weakness are powerful the harder the content gets.

bile.7560:

SOUL REAPING- the problem I have with soul reaping is it feels pretty much mandatory, Soul marks is pretty much essential for both the unblockable factor and the lf generation.

It might possibly too overpowered to have that as standard, but I don’t think I have made a build without it because it’s needed.

If you don’t take soul reaping you gain little benefit out of ds, which is contradictory because its meant to be our defense mechanic.

These are very valid points and I agree, SR is powerful ! But I think the solution is to give us equally powerful options in other specializations, and therefore let us have powerful options, such that by not choosing SR we get something of relatively equal value in some other aspect of our gameplay.

Panopheles.9308:

Malchior, thank you for putting all this together!

^^

I don’t agree with many of the weapon and utility changes though.

What don’t you agree with? I’m listening

Panopheles.9308:

The GS pull is one weapon skill that has utility value and I wanna see more of that.

I agree ! I am happy with how the Greatsword looks, but I want to see more damage on auto, and I wish the blinding AoE skill pulsed per second but I think they changed it to once every two seconds :\

As always with Necro Changes suggestion threads, I paste my work:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3aghyy/graphics_necromancer_changes/

Now, couple things:

1. Signet of Undeath passive could improve all LF generation by 20%. That would make it decently powerful.

82. I am not against Necromancer’s slow condition application.* Not at all.
But I’m all for some way to make our conditions stick without overloading target with 5 bonus cover conditions.

- One way I have suggested that was toying around with Terror (as described in linked thread) and removing it’s damage, making Cleansing not effective on target you have applied Terror on.

- Second way could’ve been toying around with Scepter, as this prime condition weapon needs help.
What if Feast of Corruption applied some effect which would punish for cleansing? Or make it uneffective for couple following seconds after the skill lands? We could give it slightly better tell.

What I’m saying is that Necromancer should’ve actually be that Damage over Time condition spec, unlike others. To get to that point, we don’t need 10 conditions overload on target, but we need to have strong punishment for constant and AoE cleansing.
We need something like… Unstable Affliction

3. Damage reduction.
Armor doesn’t seem to cut it. It makes us unkillable for non-zerk/marau Power setups, but at the same time it’s horribly uneffective against mentioned stats.

% based Damage reduction, like Putrid Defense, seems like a good alternative, but we need to make sure we can get the effect more easily while under pressure, not while we are already dominating our opponent.

4. And that brings us to Parasitic Contagion. A trait that suffers from exactly the same reason like Epidemic and many, many other things in Necromanced.

Under perfect circumstances it has potential to be great

But perfect circumstances don’t occur. And if they occur, it means that you’re already dominating.

What’s wrong with this skill? It can heal you for 5000 per second…or 50. It will heal you a ton when you don’t need healing and barely heal you when you’re dying.

For start, I’d make it heal for 100 HP/S when Bleeding is applied to any foe and then 10% of condition damage. Make it work through the Shroud. And give it a limit of 1500 HP/S.

Malchior.1928:

bile.7560:

Speaking from a pvp perspective only. These changes I would like to see them implement now as I think everyone would at least agree this would be good fix.

STAFF- love it, the only problem with it is the auto attack is way too slow a 33% increase would be good.

If you hit 5 enemies clumped up you can get 20% lifeforce gain per auto attack. I think that the true issue is that it needs better pathing It’s already a lot faster than it was at launch haha.

bile.7560:

AXE- needs a rework, it falls in the category of not better then staff or dagger. It does less damage then dagger and has less range then staff and it has less utility then both.

I actually think that giving the Axe auto a boon rip on its second hit, and would make it a go to ranged power weapon. Changing spiteful talisman to do a flat damage amount whenever a skill rips or corrupts a boon would in turn increase the dps of the axe— both the auto and the three would rip a boon (this would also make focus better). And if you’re traited for Unholy Feast, every time you pop shroud you’re doing more damage. I got the idea from Eles where when they disable someone that person takes damage. I think it could be the dps increase that axe needs while also giving it a solid identity, “I want to take this because i need boon rip/vuln/ decent ranged dps.”

bile.7560:

FOCUS/DAGGER- they both fall behind in comparison to the amazing warhorn, they need some buffs.

I agree with focus being weaker, hence the might stacking on focus 4, the shorter cast time on focus 5, the change to Spiteful Talisman, and Axe training (which gives 10% dmg increase on vuln which the focus can also stack).

The dagger, from a WvW and PvP standpoint brings a decent transfer (if you bait dodges) and AoE weakness. That is niche but I think it is just as useful as warhorn, but in different situations. From a PvE perspective (fractals namely) the blind and weakness are powerful the harder the content gets.

bile.7560:

SOUL REAPING- the problem I have with soul reaping is it feels pretty much mandatory, Soul marks is pretty much essential for both the unblockable factor and the lf generation.

It might possibly too overpowered to have that as standard, but I don’t think I have made a build without it because it’s needed.

If you don’t take soul reaping you gain little benefit out of ds, which is contradictory because its meant to be our defense mechanic.

These are very valid points and I agree, SR is powerful ! But I think the solution is to give us equally powerful options in other specializations, and therefore let us have powerful options, such that by not choosing SR we get something of relatively equal value in some other aspect of our gameplay.

It’s nice having a discussion about it, I’ll address some of your points.

I guess I’m not often in the position where I am able to hit multiple opponents with staff 1, I’m either at some distance or right up close with dagger/warhorn. Being forced to use staff 1 at any sort of range and trying to hit someone is impossible unless the opponent is immobilized or not moving.

Yeah axe change would be nice, I think it needs a range or speed increase as well. Axe 2 being possibly the easiest to dodge ability in game with the “oh look the axe is spinning I’ll just dodge” rinse repeat- It needs something.

Might stacking on focus 4 is not needed for me personally as I can might stack by myself, as well as the popular cele signet build.

I think Spite and Soul Reaping Tress are the strongest trees.

Spite has good options at grandmaster with close to death and the signet gm, as well as some excellent passives- for might stacking.

All the other trees have some good things in them but I dont feel any of them are must haves.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Malchior.1928:

I didn’t change the passive, just the active ^^.

But you changed the passive to function out of combat. The way I see it is, if Necros need access to out-of-combat LF, they should get it baseline, regenning LF as soon as they finish regenning their normal health bar. If they don’t need that, then they shouldn’t be able to get it through a method that encourages micromanaging your skill bar (or your traits, for that matter).

Malchior.1928:

Hmm, I don’t know how much you pvp, but the reason nobody uses this signet isn’t just the cooldown. 2.5 seconds is basically the casting time of a stomp.

I hardly play sPvP at all (I hate that kind of capture-and-hold gameplay). This makes sense, though. 2 seconds might be ok then, but then 90 seconds of cooldown is really much too short.

Malchior.1928:

Precisely. Bleed damage is terrible, but as a cover condition it is amazing. Since we aren’t condition damage kings, but rather the best class at manipulating condis with transfers and boon corruptions, It would be rather strong if we had stronger scepter condi damage.

But what are we trying to cover? Not Fear, because Fear access is limited when using a Scepter and anyway it locks the target out of most active condi removal. Not Burning, because our only reliable Burning application is DS1, which means we’re probably better off staying in DS to continually apply burning stacks than dropping out just to cover the few stacks we’ve already added. Not Confusion because we can really only get those with Perplexity runes. Maybe Torment, except our Torment application is also pretty bad.

I see what you’re saying about boon corruption, but I still think our base condi application needs to be a little better. Necro condi builds are too dependent on external sources of conditions. We need to be a little bit more self-sufficient; otherwise, we’ll be too unreliable to compete with other profession’s condition builds.

Malchior.1928:

Oh it’s rough. But thats why we play necro isn’kitten Masochism? hahaa Although if you think about it, once you switch out of an atunement you’re locked out of it for about 10 seconds. And you can only use one at a time. :P So you could consider that being locked out of three attunements at a time.

I main Ele (Necro is my second main), and I really don’t see attunement cooldowns as anything comparable to Necros starting a match without LF. The Ele gets to choose when and why to jump into a defensive attunement (Earth if you’re anticipating trouble, Water if you’re recovering from trouble). There are consequences to that choice, but the choice is always his. The Necro, on the other hand, doesn’t get to choose to go defensive until halfway through the battle, making them heavily vulnerable to early focused fire. As I understand it, this is the biggest problem with trying to run a Necro is sPvP: smart opponents will just focus you down immediately because there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop them from murdering you.

Rym.1469:

1. Signet of Undeath passive could improve all LF generation by 20%. That would make it decently powerful.

Interesting idea ! It would reward more aggressive play. Hmm but if you can’t damage anything with auto attacks you’re losing sustain.

Rym.1469:

- Second way could’ve been toying around with Scepter, as this prime condition weapon needs help.
What if Feast of Corruption applied some effect which would punish for cleansing? Or make it uneffective for couple following seconds after the skill lands? We could give it slightly better tell.

I will say that pure condi necro is not my strongsuit so I may not be assessing it as well as I do power or hybrid necros. Wouldn’t you say that the bleed and poison stacked from the auto punishes cleansing? Maybe not in a direct fashion, but every time they use a cleanse and those two conditions are cleansed, thats 2 less condis being cleansed. If you are covering perplexity and high torment or burning or immobilize or chill, then I think really it’s not an issue, especially because necro is extremely good at burst condi spam through transfers and signet of spite.

Rym.1469:

What I’m saying is that Necromancer should’ve actually be that Damage over Time condition spec, unlike others. To get to that point, we don’t need 10 conditions overload on target, but we need to have strong punishment for constant and AoE cleansing.
We need something like… Unstable Affliction

I wouldn’t know how this could be easily implemented in the current game. It probably couldn’t be a condition, so that would make it a specific class effect, the ones like warrior stances, or spectrals, but in reverse, as in you put it on the enemy. But then it couldn’t be cleansed due to its implementation, so where would the counterplay be?

Rym.1469:

3. Damage reduction.
Armor doesn’t seem to cut it. It makes us unkillable for non-zerk/marau Power setups, but at the same time it’s horribly uneffective against mentioned stats.

% based Damage reduction, like Putrid Defense, seems like a good alternative, but we need to make sure we can get the effect more easily while under pressure, not while we are already dominating our opponent.

Sure you can’t tower dive past a zerg in wvw due to our lack of scaling shroud, but I think this isn’t that big of an issue. Necromancer defenses are very good with positional awareness. I think that currently, the only time an necro will get focused and die is if you had bad positioning or overextended. Sure there are times when two thieves will instadown you, but that happens due to slow reaction times or bad awareness.

Until reaper comes out I don’t want to quite address how toughness and damage mitigation should change.

Rym.1469:

4. And that brings us to Parasitic Contagion. A trait that suffers from exactly the same reason like Epidemic and many, many other things in Necromanced.

Under perfect circumstances it has potential to be great

What’s wrong with this skill? It can heal you for 5000 per second…or 50. It will heal you a ton when you don’t need healing and barely heal you when you’re dying.

For start, I’d make it heal for 100 HP/S when Bleeding is applied to any foe and then 10% of condition damage. Make it work through the Shroud. And give it a limit of 1500 HP/S.

Sure I don’t mind. I personally haven’t used this trait because I don’t go blood + conditions, but I’ll take your word for it.

bile.7560:

It’s nice having a discussion about it, I’ll address some of your points.

I guess I’m not often in the position where I am able to hit multiple opponents with staff 1, I’m either at some distance or right up close with dagger/warhorn. Being forced to use staff 1 at any sort of range and trying to hit someone is impossible unless the opponent is immobilized or not moving.

I usually just use staff auto when everything is on cooldown and I’m waiting for something else to do. If it hits it does give some decent sustain until mark of blood or wep swap or ds comes back up. Idk when you would be “forced” to use staff one. Although I do think it is a bit lackluster. I was entertaining the idea of adding a stack of torment, but I still think the main problem is that it needs better tracking..

bile.7560:

Yeah axe change would be nice, I think it needs a range or speed increase as well. Axe 2 being possibly the easiest to dodge ability in game with the “oh look the axe is spinning I’ll just dodge” rinse repeat- It needs something.

Might stacking on focus 4 is not needed for me personally as I can might stack by myself, as well as the popular cele signet build.

900 range baseline would be perfect IMO. The best part about axe 2 being dodgeable in pvp is that its good for baiting dodges “oh? spinning axe? let me mlg dodge it…” and necro says “haha now eat my immob into fear into immob into dagger auto… dead”

bile.7560:

Spite has good options at grandmaster with close to death and the signet gm, as well as some excellent passives- for might stacking.

All the other trees have some good things in them but I dont feel any of them are must haves.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Yes. Spite needs a buff for unholy feast though, right now I wouldn’t take it over the other two grandmasters, like it’s been said a 100 times, axe 3 needs a blast finisher. That would improve both axe and this trait quite a bit in particular game modes.

Thank you for the great discussion

Blaine Tog.8304:

you changed the passive to function out of combat. The way I see it is, if Necros need access to out-of-combat LF, they should get it baseline, regenning LF as soon as they finish regenning their normal health bar. If they don’t need that, then they shouldn’t be able to get it through a method that encourages micromanaging your skill bar (or your traits, for that matter).

Oh right, haha, but my justification for this was: all other signets on all other classes have 100% uptime on their passives while not used. Necro only has the uptime ~50% if they are using deathshroud properly. Additionally, if Signet of Undeath’s effect only works in combat, then its basically terrible because that’s maybe 25% uptime. It’s more of a QoL change in my opinion to bring it up to the level of other signets.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Malchior.1928:

Hmm, I don’t know how much you pvp, but the reason nobody uses this signet isn’t just the cooldown. 2.5 seconds is basically the casting time of a stomp.

I hardly play sPvP at all (I hate that kind of capture-and-hold gameplay). This makes sense, though. 2 seconds might be ok then, but then 90 seconds of cooldown is really much too short.

Yeah I took your advice and changed the recommended cd to 120 seconds ^^.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I see what you’re saying about boon corruption, but I still think our base condi application needs to be a little better. Necro condi builds are too dependent on external sources of conditions. We need to be a little bit more self-sufficient; otherwise, we’ll be too unreliable to compete with other profession’s condition builds.

In which game mode ? As a solo class in pve, our condi application isn’t bad. In a 5 person team, the residual conditions applied by allies is turned into massive condi application through Epidemic. This obviously is when there are more than 1 enemy, which could be considered our niche, sure we don’t bleedstack like a ranger or warrior on 1 enemy, but we can make their strengths our own.

Blaine Tog.8304:

I main Ele (Necro is my second main), and I really don’t see attunement cooldowns as anything comparable to Necros starting a match without LF. The Ele gets to choose when and why to jump into a defensive attunement (Earth if you’re anticipating trouble, Water if you’re recovering from trouble). There are consequences to that choice, but the choice is always his. The Necro, on the other hand, doesn’t get to choose to go defensive until halfway through the battle, making them heavily vulnerable to early focused fire. As I understand it, this is the biggest problem with trying to run a Necro is sPvP: smart opponents will just focus you down immediately because there’s not a whole lot you can do to stop them from murdering you.

Thats funny, I main necro and play ele as an off-main ! Honestly, in pvp, I just run into the fray and pop my spectrals at the start of the match. That plus dagger auto spam while having warhorn 5 up is more than enough to get a burst of lifeforce. If you are taking too much damage, pop plague. You still get lifeforce from warhorn 5, at 50% health you get last gasp for more lifeforce.

From there, skillful play just gets the momentum rolling. If you’re in a fight where you know you’ll die, its better to not let them burst all of your lifeforce. So it’s kind of fun strategically !

I just had a quick look with berserker am and no Soul Reaping Tree, You have a max of 13,245 life force.

With Soul reaping this increases to 15,245 just from passive traits.

My minion mancer has 25,045 life force. With soul reaping. without 21778.

I’m not sure what my point is really, perhaps something along the lines of there is not much you can do with 13k life force that disappears in seconds especially without vital persistence.

Yet the amount I have as minion master is op.

Malchior.1928:

Oh right, haha, but my justification for this was: all other signets on all other classes have 100% uptime on their passives while not used. Necro only has the uptime ~50% if they are using deathshroud properly. Additionally, if Signet of Undeath’s effect only works in combat, then its basically terrible because that’s maybe 25% uptime. It’s more of a QoL change in my opinion to bring it up to the level of other signets.

Other than movespeed signets (which the Necro has), signet passives are almost never actually useful out of combat, though. Who cares if you have +250 Power if you’re not hitting anyone? I think it’s fine for this particular passive to disengage outside of combat, particularly since I maintain that it would be a nerf to our Quality of Life by making optimal play more fiddly.

Malchior.1928:

In which game mode ? As a solo class in pve, our condi application isn’t bad. In a 5 person team, the residual conditions applied by allies is turned into massive condi application through Epidemic. This obviously is when there are more than 1 enemy, which could be considered our niche, sure we don’t bleedstack like a ranger or warrior on 1 enemy, but we can make their strengths our own.

Compared to most other condition builds, our condition application is pretty bad. Engineers in particular are much better at it than us, and condition Mesmers can straight-up burst people (or mobs) with heavy Confusion application. Elementalists can pretty much only apply Burning, but they can apply so much of it so quickly and so consistently that it doesn’t matter; I’m talking 10k ticks of burning here for long durations, crazy numbers. Burning’s probably gonna get nerfed soon, but still. Outside of the Signet of Spite active, it is quite difficult for Necros to get conditions to stack up quickly enough to really melt face with a Scepter.

I’m not asking for 10k condition damage ticks in the first 2 seconds of combat, but the Scepter’s autoattack just feels so futile. Even with heavy condition damage and condition duration, those bleeds never seem to amount to much.

Malchior.1928:

Thats funny, I main necro and play ele as an off-main ! Honestly, in pvp, I just run into the fray and pop my spectrals at the start of the match. That plus dagger auto spam while having warhorn 5 up is more than enough to get a burst of lifeforce. If you are taking too much damage, pop plague. You still get lifeforce from warhorn 5, at 50% health you get last gasp for more lifeforce.

From there, skillful play just gets the momentum rolling. If you’re in a fight where you know you’ll die, its better to not let them burst all of your lifeforce. So it’s kind of fun strategically !

This really constrains build options, though. Putting aside that dagger power builds are probably one of our strongest specs right now, most other Necro builds don’t have anywhere near that level of LF generation, which means most are going to struggle really hard to get stay alive. Starting with some base LF would bring a bit of parity and leave the Necro as less of a sitting duck in general.

I think that the reaper feedback section needs to be constructed ASAP. I fear that by the time we get the solid numbers, it’ll be too late. I already have a few comments.

#1: Augury of Death is a badly designed trait. While most traits give a 20% recharge bonus + additional effects with no strings attached, this trait only becomes effective when scaled up. In PVE this isn’t so bad (except that wells are better, period), but in PVP it means you have to be surrounded and thus about to die to make use of this trait. You have to hit all 5 targets for this recharge trait to be on the same strength as every other recharge trait.

When necromancers asked for things that scaled up, we didn’t mean “horrible unless scaled up”. Change this trait to something like 20% recharge reduction + additional effect, like 2% life force per enemy hit.

#2: Chilling Nova: if this triggers once per enemy I would understand, but as it stands this trait does less damage than spinal shivers, even if it hits 3 targets. Also has less chill, too, and doesn’t remove boons, and is dependent on crits… This trait was nerfed 400% from its previous versions. Reduce the cooldown to 10 seconds.

#3: Deathly Chill: This trait is fine for now, but give it a proportional condition damage scale of about 0.2, keeping in mind that chill stacks in duration and not intensity.

#4: Reaper’s Onslaught: The first portion is fine. The second portion is useless. Death’s Charge has a cooldown of 6 seconds, and recharging early because of a killed enemy isn’t going to produce anything meaningful. I’d change this to 5% per enemy killed for Soul Spiral, or something like that.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#3: Deathly Chill: This trait is fine for now, but give it a proportional condition damage scale of about 0.2, keeping in mind that chill stacks in duration and not intensity.

how exactly does this thing work atm?

does it deal the damage whenever chill is applied, like halting strike? or per second?

the wiki suggest it scales with power

RashanDale.3609:

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#3: Deathly Chill: This trait is fine for now, but give it a proportional condition damage scale of about 0.2, keeping in mind that chill stacks in duration and not intensity.

how exactly does this thing work atm?

does it deal the damage whenever chill is applied, like halting strike? or per second?

the wiki suggest it scales with power

Its every second of chill I believe, just like the fear trait. I think this is why the chill stacks were reduced to 5.

As for the healing in DS, the point is that you can still keep and offensive while having a defense up. To be healed normally during it is incredibly OP. You’re supposed to be punished for turtling. Most classes who can turtle cannot even attack during it or have a very, very long CD.

To those who’s DS lasts only seconds from a full one, you put yourself in a bad spot to begin with.

Really good job.
Even if I don’t agree with all your ideas they all make sens.
I think you sums up pretty much everything that was said in the necro section.
Thank you for doing it in a critical way and not another QQ thread.

My post isn’t important but I think +1 isn’t enough.
And I love what you said about DS design.

PS: now that we have Gee talkin, this kind of thread and feedback from beta might give us a real chance in this game.