Guild Wars 2

bile.7560:

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.

Hmm I think going full zerk without SR basically forces you into taking at least Spectral Armor or Spectral Walk for the lifeforce regain and survivability increase. And then the rest is probably a damage well or something because at that point, its kill or be killed haha.

And I’m actually impressed with bunker necros at the moment. 2v1’d a soldier necro the other day who decapped one of our points and when his hp got low, he had full shroud. When he came out of shroud he LoS’ed and healed back up to full for a good minute xD. Last Gasp triggered at least 2 times, which shows just how powerful SR is for necro sustain.

Blaine Tog.8304:

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.

Very valid points! I guess that +180 power doesn’t matter outside of combat while you flaunt Sunrise or something in Lion’s Arch. Perhaps I slightly tunnel-visioned on the principle of having signets that aren’t rendered useless by Shroud 50% of the time and I maybe took it a bit too far in comparison with the persisting effects of movement signets

At the very least, they need to make this work through shroud. After that happens, we can decide if the passive effect is adequate enough or if it needs to be altered to make the skill more valuable.

Blaine Tog.8304:

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.

Fear thee not! I read somewhere that our savior Mr. Gee is reworking scepter as we speak It might be getting more sustain on auto, changes to 2 and maybe even a reflect on three. We will just have to wait and see.

Blaine Tog.8304:

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 agree. You are basically forced to take Warhorn, at least one Spectral, and Soul Reaping for Last Gasp and Vital Persistence, regardless of whether you are a power or condi necro. Condi necros are a little bit less suceptible to burst due to the tanky nature of non-sinister condi sets, and their ability to apply pressure at range. This slightly offsets their lower lifeforce generation, however, as shroud is our profession mechanic, I think there need to be some changes that allow condi necros to benefit more from it even as just a defensive mechanism. Hopefully the scepter rework allows for more lifeforce generation.

Would 3% lifeforce generation on the second skill in the Scepter auto chain be overpowered? haha

Lily.1935:

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.

Thanks for sharing this viewpoint with me. For a power necro, dagger is awesome! But I see what you’re saying. The transfer on 4 is powerful and even though it’s easy to dodge, you can still land it by baiting dodges first. I think a good way to alleviate some of the problems you mentioned would be to add life force generation on the 5 skill. Being an untraited 25 second cooldown, Enfeebling Blood should be decent lifeforce gain. How about adding something like:

“Gain 5% life force for every enemy hit. If a foe has bleeds above the threshhold (4 bleeds), the life force gain is doubled to 10%. "

This would help condimancers that want to use a dagger offhand still have a viable amount of lifeforce regen.

Lily.1935:

I actually disagree with giving axe a blast finisher.

Not a problem, however I do still think it is necessary to improve both Axe, and the Spiteful Spirit trait. ^^

Lily.1935:

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.

I’m glad we both came to the same conclusion ! Axe as a boonhate weapon would give it a solid identity. As long as changing the auto to a chain gets rid of that horrid axe animation, I will be happy.

Lily.1935:

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.

Spiteful Spirit blast finisher synergy, Spiteful Spirit blast finisher synergy !! :P I feel that Warhorn 4 already does a lot. It’s an AoE unblockable 2 second daze untraited. I’m sorry it doesn’t fear, but if you have perplexity runes, it does confuse foes

Also, sorry for taking so long to reply, I had a lot of people posting and I wanted to think about your points for a while before answering and then I forgot xD

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

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.

By golly, I think you’re absolutely right ! I will try to start working on it this evening

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

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.

“Reduces shouts by 15%. For every enemy hit, reduce the cooldown by an additional 3%.”
Worst case scenario it’s 18% cooldown reduction. Best case scenario, 30% reduction. But if you are in a situation where you hit 5 people, you probably should be rewarded as such with that additional 10% reduction. Also, shout cast times are horrible still, their cooldowns are very long for the meager effects that they provide, and I still don’t agree with You Are All Weaklings being a stunbreak… :\ I’ll comment more on this in the evening.

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#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.

If the ICD was completely removed, do you think 2 seconds of chill baseline would be too much? Should it be reduced to 1 second of chill AoE on crit?

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.

What do you mean a condi damage scaling of 0.2? As in, it does not currently scale (with power or condi damage)?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

#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.

I would change it to "Reduce the recharge of Death’s Charge by 1 second every time you hit someone below 75% (or 50%) health.

Malchior, you are just scratching the surface.

Every build has runes and sigils. The necromancer themed Runes (Superior Rune of the lich) are some of the worst in the game.

Tons of Rune and sigil effects are negated for the necromancer because they boost conditions or boons that the necromancer has at best poor acesss to. And, Death shroud prevents a lot of rune effects from even working.

As for sigils, the most powerful sigils are on crit sigils and on swap sigils. But the necromancer has poor access to fury, and bad access to critical chance outside of select traits. If you aren’t taking those traits the on crit sigils dont work well. Swapping is disabled in death shroud, so those sigils don’t help you as much as they should either.

The more time that you spend in death shoud, the worse the swap sigils are. And while you can’t swap in death shroud, entering death shroud doesn’t count as a swap either.

Then there’s fear which is among the weakest hard CC effects in the game because the effect of fear also causes the enemy to kit from you. It’s so bad that anet had to add chills to fear for the reaper.

Only daze is a weaker effect.

But fear counting as a condition and being removable with weapon swaps or condition removal skills is terrible. Basically you might get an interrupt with your fears but that’s it.

Then there are the existing stat combinations that don’t exist in Pvp. A lot of people think that dire runes would help the necromancer.

I’m not sure.

But why not add those runes anyways. If something is OP with dire runes, it’s OP. period.

I know the Pvp community complained about, for example, perplexity runes. Why not just add them and nerf them I’d they are too strong. I think the non existing runes and stat combinations are helping kneecap Necomancer and are allowing broken stuff in other classes to proliferate.