Guild Wars 2

Then I realized that to get just 2 ticks of the damage, you need to not only have 6 runes of the Necromancer, and the +50% fear duration trait, but also 30 points in Spite. Which leaves only 20 points for Curses, to utilize a mechanic that’s damage is based on your Condition Damage.

Well played, ANet. Well played.

they hate us necromancers

Terror is a tough trade off of more survivability or other strengths, but probably worth it – if – the fears land and stay for their duration. In that case you make up for the lost damage while the enemy is running. But if the fears miss or are removed, then you are definitely at a loss.

I like the 2s Terrors but am having a difficult time making the leap to get Reaper’s Protection, as 90s seems an awfully long time in between oh crap situations. And will also mean I have to sacrifice virtually all of my life force generating in combat.

Which case it kind of feels like you are a complete package only for a one shot engagement, but severely exposed while waiting for that trait to come up again, due to how much you’ve given to get it.

Glace.9285:

Then I realized that to get just 2 ticks of the damage, you need to not only have 6 runes of the Necromancer, and the +50% fear duration trait, but also 30 points in Spite. Which leaves only 20 points for Curses, to utilize a mechanic that’s damage is based on your Condition Damage.

Well played, ANet. Well played.

For a second there i thought they were implementing my suggestion, the one everyone agreed with… The one i spend so much time in developing into a final version.
Eh… oh well, maybe next time.
Here is the link to the forum topic in which all of this was discussed… maybe it is time to revive this topic.

Someone with 100% fear duration able to do 1.5k damge pre trick for 4s from Reaper’s Protection, that is 6k damage aoe ignore armor. Also you only need 20 on spite to round off 2s/4s on fear

EDITED: there also a new weapon that give Vit/Percision/10% condition duration (go search for “Giver” lv80 exotic weapon) so you can just need to spend 10 on spite.

In PvP to get 100% fear duration you need 20 points in soul reaping for master of terror, 30 points in spite for 30% condition duration, and 10 points in curses for terror (although not strictly for longer fears, it is the point of getting to 100%), in addition to a full set of necro runes, or two lyssa runes + 4 lich runes. This mean’s you can’t even get reaper’s protection because you only have 10 trait points to play with, meaning your only 2s fears are underwater and your downed state. This is on top of the fact that your build options are now severely limited, and fear can be instantly removed by stun breaks (which everyone in PvP has atleast one of, many can and do have more such as many d/d ele and mesmers), as well as by passive or allied condition removal, and simply ignored by stability.

In PvE you have access to those new weapons, as well as food, but the weapons are fairly poor overall, and there are a lot of seriously OP food items anyway.

Edit: If I missed out any other fear duration boosts, please point it out, I’m happy to admit I’m wrong.

^ Well in PVE/WVW you can equip Nigthmare runes for the 20% Fear (what I use) or Mad King, and this allows you to ignore Spite, which isn’t all that great for condition.

But in tPVP it kind of all breaks down trying to get a complete package.

You will just be instantly destroyed in tournaments trying to run a Terror build. The damage done by fear is negated entirely by a sweeping damage nerf and cooldown reductions that only serve to make Necro an even more frantic paced play experience with zero reward top end for the EXTREME level of difficulty presented.

I wondered why the Lead balance Dev laughed at the poor Necro player every time he said something about Necro. Its because he knows there is no one at Anet that gives a flying kitten on a rolling doughnut about Necro Balance. None of them even play Necro. That is painfully obvious at this point.

It takes way to much trait commitment to even spec properly in fear and even then….it makes it subpar at best. The damage increase is nice but the trait alignment doesn’t go all to well with a conditionmancer either….

Plus the aformentioned issue of….we dont even have that many fears to begin with…..we have more fears through utility effects than actual skills. Reapers Mark, Reapers Protection, Fear of Death, etc….even then…thats a HARD spec in certain area’s to even maximize the fear potential; which is dependent on situational effects to occur. The issue with that is…the point of the damage increase is to aid in DPS as a additional condition effect modifier…but when the fear effects thru traits are all situational…you can’t “plan” burst damage around being downed or stunned,etc….so ur left with staff and DS…which…just doesnt cut it..

So I’m not sure this addition will do much tbh…not worth the investment….nor time to even make it remotely viable…

Sera.9750:

Plus the aformentioned issue of….we dont even have that many fears to begin with…..we have more fears through utility effects than actual skills. Reapers Mark, Reapers Protection, Fear of Death, etc….even then…thats a HARD spec in certain area’s to even maximize the fear potential; which is dependent on situational effects to occur. The issue with that is…the point of the damage increase is to aid in DPS as a additional condition effect modifier…but when the fear effects thru traits are all situational…you can’t “plan” burst damage around being downed or stunned,etc….so ur left with staff and DS…which…just doesnt cut it..

So I’m not sure this addition will do much tbh…not worth the investment….nor time to even make it remotely viable…

Yep, to build properly for fear damage you would need to get the cooldown shorteners for staff and death shroud, and you don’t have enough trait slots to get them AND setup the longer fears that damage. Totally at odds with each other.

Then our best fears are totally beside the point, one when we are already downed, and one underwater.

From my own testing, I’ve found that it doesn’t take as much trait commitment as some people are stating here. This is what I’ve been using:

10 Points in Spite (10% Condition Duration)
20 Points in Soul Reaping (50% Fear Duration)
Full Necro Rune Set (+20% Fear Duration)

With just those three, I am getting 2 ticks of terror in sPvP. I have noticed something that’s strange, though. If I attempt a fear with no conditions on the target, terror only ticks once. However, if I’ve got at least one condition on the target, I’ll successfully get 2 ticks of terror. Not sure why this is the case, but that’s what I’ve seen after testing with Golems for awhile.

It should be noted that without the 10 points in Spite, I was unable to get more than one tick of terror damage, conditions or not.

should also be mentioned that the +condition duration values add multiplicatively. doesn’t need to be a flat, summed 50%. it adds contribution from spite, then fear trait, then runes. should put you over the 2 sec mark with just 10% from Nightmare runes and give you an additional fear from 6pc proc.

the design of the trait seems odd to me though. % dmg modifiers have never effected conditions on any class. Suddenly though we have one class able to bump a condition based dmg by a large % value. Why not just buff the base dmg to something respectable? There’s far too much build work going into making an interrupt do some dmg. Conditions ticking for 1k is a bit excessive as well and way out of line with the rest of condition dmg. I have a feeling this “exception to the rule” could be the top of a slippery balance slope.

hackks.3687:

should also be mentioned that the +condition duration values add multiplicatively. doesn’t need to be a flat, summed 50%. it adds contribution from spite, then fear trait, then runes. should put you over the 2 sec mark with just 10% from Nightmare runes and give you an additional fear from 6pc proc.

the design of the trait seems odd to me though. % dmg modifiers have never effected conditions on any class. Suddenly though we have one class able to bump a condition based dmg by a large % value. Why not just buff the base dmg to something respectable? There’s far too much build work going into making an interrupt do some dmg. Conditions ticking for 1k is a bit excessive as well and way out of line with the rest of condition dmg. I have a feeling this “exception to the rule” could be the top of a slippery balance slope.

A better question is why the hell don’t Necro have a Trait that boosts all Conditions with Damage Modifiers instead of the useless nonsense we get for End Line conditions… If any class should have intuitively had something… necro should have had a major damage mod for condition damage…

Although we didn’t get much this patch, there is alot of misinformation in this thread.

Terror is awesome, and yes you do need a specific set up to get it. 20 Soul Reaping, 20% rune cond duration and 20 spite. That’s it. Also I don’t think it works with the 20% fear duration runes, or you’ll need 30 spite instead to get 2 seconds. Lyssa/Nightmare is better.

Each 2 second fear would deal 1500~ dmg before this buff, so 2250 dmg per 2 sec fear now, which is actually good.

And IMO this is the only condition build worth anything in both pve/pvp.

That said, we’ll probably going to be nerfed hard next patch anyway, was nice knowing you Epidemic.