Guild Wars 2

While answering a different topic I found a term that pretty much describes the problem I see with the concept of necro attrition at the moment:
Necros damage mitigation is largely focused around
a) conditions like snares and weakness to reduce incoming damage
b) soaking damage with the lifeforce hp bar
c) limited teleports
and that’s about it. The scaling with player numbers in a fight is HEAVILY stacked against the necro:

a) Application of damage-reducing conditions is linked to cooldowns. In small scale skirmishes the cooldowns and counters are (arguably) balanced. Once a critical mass is reached condition removal outpaces condition reapplication, at which point the necro is bound to facetank the incoming damage.
b) Again, (arguably) balanced in small scale skirmishes. Once more than a few enemies decide to train the necro, that second hp diminishes in split-seconds and refilling it is harder than ever. Necro has no (?) damage mitigation that scales with group size. Most noticibly necros only have access to dodge every 10 seconds, no blocks, no immunities. Necros are ridiculously limited at outplaying incoming damage once they get targeted by a group and their first two dodges are down.
c) Teleports, for the sake of completeness. You can disengage for a bit, you can troll tards, you will get chased down. I r underwhelmed. Still, spectral walk is one of the better life-savers for me.

I don’t have a solution for this that fits the necro theme (and so does anet if im concerned). Would you agree with my assessment of the situation?

Solution is to have groupmates that heal and peel for you.

And, be sure to complain a lot about being CC’d and trained, that way they will do it just to get you to shut up.

Oozo.7856:

Solution is to have groupmates that heal and peel for you.

Basically we need other classes to plays our effectively!

Oh come on, just because blocks, evasions, and invulns block infinity people while our survival abilities can be cracked instantly by a train doesn’t mean that mass pvp is stacked against Necros…

Necro has great access to AoE weakness, so we got that going for us.
The only other dmg mitigation that scales with enemies is locust swarms LF proccs since they put a 1sec cd to spectral armor and walk LF-on-hit proccs.
Some random ideas for making attrition and dmg mitigation more group fight friendly would be
i) stronger base life steal but non linear scaling;
If life steal would be strong enough to sustain in 1v1’s and it would scale linear with the amount of enemies you hit, that would mean in a skirmish, where you hit around 5 enemies with life stealing attacks, you need to receive the combined dmg from 5 sources to be taken down.
In other words: if life stealing would work 1v1 and scale linear with combatants, you would be unkillable if you hit 5 people but only 3 are attacking you (exaggerated for emphasis).
Solution: make it scale or accumulate stolen life(=hp) nonlinear. Like 100% in a 1v1, 150% in a 2v1…

ii) Another option would be to make Death Shroud more like a time limited shield.
First option: Death shroud grants immunity to damage but loses about 25% life force(rnd #) per second. This would guarantee that Full Life force translates to 4 seconds of mitigation no matter the amount of targets you get hit by.
Second option: This is how i think the current implementation could be altered to get closer to the first option.
By increasing the Death shroud hp substantially, like setting it to 1 million hp and increasing the scale in which life force is measured (rnd #s: 100% -> 1000per mil, decay from 4% to 100pm) you would get a mitigation tool, that is less affected by hits you receive (every hit between 1 and 1k dmg would decrease your life force by 1pm) and more by the amount of time you stay in it.
As an Example: Lets say you get attacked by 5 people each dealing 1k dmg per second. This would mean a loss of around (16k DS hp / 100 = 160 hp per , 1k/160=6,25) 7 per enemy per second in addition to base 4%. Totals: 2,5 sec lasting DS vs 5 oponents, 9 sec lasting DS vs one oponent. That is around 30% of mitigation uptime.
With the 1mill hp Shroud you would see (1pm loss per sec + 100 pm decay = 101pm lost per sec; 5pm loss per sec +100 pm decay=105pm lost per sec) 9,9 sec DS vs one and 9,5 sec vs 5 enemies and thus a steady mitigation tool.

The increase to per mill lessens the effectiveness of multi hit attacks further.
Obviously those numbers are completely out of whack and shall simply illustrate some modifications to allow necros to get mitigation “frames” that are comparable to what other classes can achieve via dodge and invulnerability.

Sororita.3465:

Oozo.7856:

Solution is to have groupmates that heal and peel for you.

Basically we need other classes to plays our effectively!

Basically, yes. Condition necro is probably the most group-reliant class in WvW when fighting a decent organized group. Your groupmates have to help you when you get focused and CC trained. Pretty much any decent group will try to pressure the necro at some point in the fight to see how much the group actually supports the necro. You also need groupmates to help build and cover your conditions for good epidemic spreads. Most, but not all, decent groups have significant cleansing. A single necro is not going to be able to apply enough condition pressure if their group is not built to support conditions as offense.

I have to deal with that a lot since the vast majority of people I play with prefer playing power and they are too selfish to change their builds to revolve completely around me (although, they would if they knew what was good for them).

So, in a group versus group fight you will need help to execute both your offense and defense. With that said, when a necro gets that support they are extremely powerful. So, how do you give a necro better escape options without breaking the game? Are you willing to sacrifice some of your offense and face-tanking defense?

I agree with pretty much all of the above, and setups like this are what makes pvp interesting imo (I played resto shaman in wow for the longest time. It’s pretty similar in that you need your mates to peel for you 24/7. Once you find the right mates you can pull off ridiculous plays though).
Still it is extremely frustrating to know what’s coming, thinking ‘now would be the time for an immunity/block/…’ and the only thing you’re left with is hoping death shroud holds up.
I dunno, maybe I just don’t know the right people ingame to make condi necro work in mid sized groups.

Drawing Guy.3701:

Oh come on, just because blocks, evasions, and invulns block infinity people while our survival abilities can be cracked instantly by a train doesn’t mean that mass pvp is stacked against Necros…

I know, right? :P

When I started gw2 a few months ago and saw epidemic I was like ‘This is going to be SO MUCH FUN’. Looks like it’s a bad time to roll condi necro and expect ginormous epidemics on the regular.

Solution is to roll a Norn, go cheetah mode.

Raven.9603:

Solution is to roll a Norn, go cheetah mode.

Pretty much the most powerful racial elite in the game, if not more powerful than all non-racial elites.

Asura get useless golems, Charr get useless racials, Human racials are ok – hounds are good for some added DPS.

It’s a pitty i can’t stand the Norn race.

The main issue is a lack of vigor and access to blocks/immune. While I think the ideas for solving the issues listed above are cool and creative, overall I can see too many places where changing mechanics like deathshroud would be too powerful or too weak.

I think the solution is/always has been to simply give us access to vigor via traits, give us access to a short block (maybe 2-3 sec when you first enter DS) and finally just fix the blood line to have some legitimate scaling with healing power/ power.

Over all 2 new traits and a slight buff to siphoning mechanics will allow us all the survivability we need. Until then don’t go trying to fight zergs lol

i would have the base hp of an ele if all theyd give me is some mobility, thats all i ask for. i simply hate trying to kite foes in pvp/wvw when they have so many more teleports and leaps to get at you/away from you, when all i have is 2 dodges and the slowest teleport known to gw2 (deathshroud’s dark path #2 skill), which is useless to condi builds if you’re main goal is to kill from a distance

adding fear to ur build doesnt help much either when they have a lot more stability and many a stunbreaker. only noobs get caught in fear chains anyway.

The problem is, last 2 times they said Attrition in patch, they made us squishier with more damage.
The dev’s have said, they don’t want to balance us vs other class’s in the same ways. Or we would be guardians. That, vs say a Eng. We should be able to throw more conditions, but not be mobile & be more squishy.

As for the DS, we had it working as a block. That got removed.
As for siphons, I’ve seen dev’s laugh and say ‘oh yeh, that’s totally useless’. (Not dissin on the dev, I totally love this guy for just saying the truth). The siphons fix in last patch, actually lowered heals we can get from siphons overall. But, did increase the damage they do with power. (Including on minions that don’t scale with gear in any other way).

As for the idea of scaling DS (And been suggested on minions many times) to only take X damage per Y time. (What your basically saying with vs more people).
They did add that as a ‘nurf’ to spectral skills, so you can only gain X life force per second. So basically the same thing, but in reverse, so necro’s do worse with building life force vs burst/group burst.

condition necro is reliant to others in wvw? not so much………..
i am roaming in wvw with condition necro and can pretty much fight and kill anything head on.
as for atrition ds is a valuable tool but if you get caught in a x vs 1 condition ds runs out very fast which is pretty lame becuase most of our kill skills is only available in ds

the problem in necro is:
- condition damage is not dealing enough damage. dps wise we are kinda sucks
- we dont have much mobility spell. so if people want to run they can outrun us, well most of the time guardian and warrior just flee like crazy and we cant pursue them, that is annoying (for the other usually if they flee from me they ended up dead. thief are made for cowards that like to flee spit)
- the ds takes a long time to recharge compared to its usefulness in battle

so i think we should focus on the outplaying damage part
the solution:
- switch our bleed to torment, that should fix a lot of problem with people fleeing
- buff the scepter 3 skill, because seriously that skill sucks. at 8 condition damage it only deal maximum 2 k damage for me and reaping 1 boon is not enough, need at least able to reap 3 boon
- increase base scepter damage, in beta scepter damage is much higher that scepter damage now. or at least make power scaling favorable to scepter

there is a lot of things that can be done to improve necro, but we are the red head kid in the dev eyes so they keep nerfing us while buffing other class (seriously stop buffing mesmer and thieves they are an eyesore to me) plus we are kinda screwed by the universal healing skill introduced in next patch, as if there is not enough condition removal for one class.

Personally I’d be happier if they took off the spectral skill cooldown – at least then it’d scale… kinda like a longer duration block, except on a longer cooldown, can be bursted through still, CCed still (unless you Grandmaster trait for the 3s DS stability), and condition stacks built up still… you know, screwed still, but slightly less so. But I’m sure people would say it’s unbalanced when the necro doesn’t die instantly when the zerg glances at them, as they go Shield Stance as it’s a 70% chance they’re a Warrior.

Bawi.9541:

While answering a different topic I found a term that pretty much describes the problem I see with the concept of necro attrition at the moment:
Necros damage mitigation is largely focused around
a) conditions like snares and weakness to reduce incoming damage
b) soaking damage with the lifeforce hp bar
c) limited teleports
and that’s about it. The scaling with player numbers in a fight is HEAVILY stacked against the necro:
<snip>
I don’t have a solution for this that fits the necro theme (and so does anet if im concerned). Would you agree with my assessment of the situation?

I agree 100% with this assessment. It’s the correct conclusion to draw.

For a condition necromancer, it definitely appears to be a problem. However, as others, including the developers have mentioned (indirectly), it’s an intentional design limitation for the profession.
Necromancer survivability simply does not scale as well as the survivability of most other professions, but the developers believe it is in a good spot for sPvP. This may be the case for condition necromancers, but I question if power necromancer survivability is in a good place in sPvP.

Necro survivability definitely is not in a good spot for WvWvW or PVE.

Drawing Guy.3701:

Personally I’d be happier if they took off the spectral skill cooldown – at least then it’d scale… kinda like a longer duration block, except on a longer cooldown, can be bursted through still, CCed still (unless you Grandmaster trait for the 3s DS stability), and condition stacks built up still… you know, screwed still, but slightly less so. But I’m sure people would say it’s unbalanced when the necro doesn’t die instantly when the zerg glances at them, as they go Shield Stance as it’s a 70% chance they’re a Warrior.

Spect used to not have ICD, and did scale. They put in the extra effort to nurf it.
The 3sec Stability used to be perm stability in DS.

My biggest gripe with necro survivability is in dungeons. We have no vigor and no aegis, we have no invulns. Our larger health pool helps, but not a lot. This is bad news considering we are supposed to be tanky as a means for defense.

In PvP, I find it extremely easy to survive on my necro. Toughness + DS and at least one stunbreaker makes us very durable. You are not supposed to be surviving whole trains of players for very long so Im not sure I understand what you are saying.

If you mean we need something like mist form or blocks then I disagree. Those classes have those, we have other stuff. Like epidemic… how many classes would kill for a skill like that?

I run 3k armor in wvw with a spec based around refilling my LF bar… It takes a lot to take me down.