Guild Wars 2

For the Necro to truly fulfil the role of an attrition profession and compete against the invul/stealth/evade mechanics available to other professions I would like to see LF generation to be accessible to the Necro whilst in DS, allowing the Necro to stay in DS for longer periods of time as a true 3rd weapon-set. Two changes I believe would help achieve this:

1. Utilities to be visible and usable in DS. The hard work is done now that DS has moved from the custom UI.

2. Healing/regen affect LF when in DS (regen would offset decay somewhat).

Good, bad, silly?

I’d be for number 1, but I don’t think they want that (especially considering the spectral stuff doesn’t work with DS for some goofy kitten reason).

2 should have already been this way. DS actually HURTs the use of the Blood minion, Regen and Leeching. Terrible terrible design.

Necros will need a combinition of mechanics to become the “attrition” class Anet wants us to be.

The Devs don’t want to give Necros damage prevention like Vigor, Stealth, Invulnerability and to a lesser extent mobility, but would instead rather give us more stun breaks, but not Stability. Currently if you put hard CC on a Necro we melt, DS or no DS. Stun breaks won’t prevent damage, just let us get out of the damage chain. Unfortunately, Vigor, Stealth and Invulnerability and mobility scale really well with the number of opponents. This won’t solve the Necros issue with 1v2 or greater.

The only other damage mitigation is Protection, Weakness and Blindness. This only solves one of the three problems with the Necro. Weakness is supposed to get a buff soon and it may be that Necros become the master of Weakness. Protection is the only one that scales with the number of opponents.

To be an attrition class without damage prevention you have to heal better than everyone else. That means our direct healing, Life Siphon and Regeneration need to be better. Again, to make these better for 1v2 or greater, there would have to be an AoE component to them. Similar to healing better is Poison, which lessens enemy healing.

The last thing an attrition class needs is a way to prevent the enemy from leaving combat. That means we need more Stun, Daze, Immobilize and Chill. None of these scale with the number of opponents. If only our fears were AoE stuns…

So what do we get??? Burning

Staying in DS for extended periods is dangerous. Not saying it is inherently OP, but that is one of the ridiculously OP builds that we used to have during Beta.

I never saw this build. How did it work?

I believe Andele knows it better than I do (since he actually played it), but it was a DS tank, with 100% DS uptime.

Seems pretty powerful. If it were still around, that’s something I’d really wanna try.

Bhawb.7408:

Staying in DS for extended periods is dangerous. Not saying it is inherently OP, but that is one of the ridiculously OP builds that we used to have during Beta.

How is what happened 10 months ago relevant to the current state? Things were most likely drastically different that time. The excuse of “avoiding whack-a-mole approach” is an excuse after all and nothing more at this point.

Could you please specify what you mean when saying “Staying in DS for extended periods is dangerous.”?

I would imagine it being dangerous to your team, if you were playing with one, considering all the things you don’t have access to when you’re “staying in DS for extended periods of time.” Maybe he means something else though.

Iceflame.5024:

Could you please specify what you mean when saying “Staying in DS for extended periods is dangerous.”?

Dangerous for balance. They had DS tanks that could stay permanently in DS (you know, where you don’t take any damage to your real HP bar, but can still do damage) and stand on point with impunity through things that even a bunker guardian would not do. That build at the time was OP. That isn’t to say extended DS is OP now (Shade, a main problem with that build, is gone), but that it is potentially dangerous. I think they should look at it, I completely agree, I was merely mentioning that it is a potentially dangerous thing.

If they can find a way work back in Shade… Man…
That’d just be wonderful.

Unfortunately the Necro really suffers from limitations that were in place to stop things like Shade (cc immunity while in DS), Soul Stealer (faster LF gen) from being OP. When the powerful traits were removed, the limitations on DS were left in place leaving us more than a little broken with DS.

DS itself was never really the problem, just those traits that used to exist.

edit: just those ‘awesome’ traits that used to exist

Bhawb.7408:

Iceflame.5024:

Could you please specify what you mean when saying “Staying in DS for extended periods is dangerous.”?

Dangerous for balance. They had DS tanks that could stay permanently in DS (you know, where you don’t take any damage to your real HP bar, but can still do damage) and stand on point with impunity through things that even a bunker guardian would not do. That build at the time was OP. That isn’t to say extended DS is OP now (Shade, a main problem with that build, is gone), but that it is potentially dangerous. I think they should look at it, I completely agree, I was merely mentioning that it is a potentially dangerous thing.

Thats the very problem…they nerfed the baseline ability (usual approach for them) rather than address the peculiar circumstances. Result: all necro’s suffer for the outlier results of a few. This is NOT the way to balance.

If they want to make us the master of attrition as they say they want to then they have to make us stronger as the fight progresses. If they won’t give us mobility, stability or any disengage mech. then they must give us weakness, poison and/or blind etc. in an easily (read: much shorter cooldown) aoe form.

Honestly I won’t be happy with the class until the time comes that other professions look at us as they do a bunker guard and just don’t bother due to the time it would take to kill us one on one.

Additional options for improving our attrition would be the inclusion of more skill and trait effects which become stronger when a certain condition is met.

There is already precedent for this:

Close to Death – Increases damage by 20% to enemies below 50% health.

Taking a page from thieves:

Heartseeker – Leap and strike your foe. The less health your target has, the more damage you cause.

There’s several criteria that could be used to scale our damage, conditions, and other effects:

1) Our health. This can be in the form of absolute thresholds (e.g. when health reaches 50%, deal 10% more damage) or comparative thresholds (e.g. if your health is greater than your target’s, deal 10% more damage).

2) Our opponent’s health. As they become progressively weaker, we become progressively stronger by dealing more damage (a la “Close to Death”), taking less damage, increasing condition damage or duration, improving crit chance, etc.

3) Number of boons. The more boons an opponent has, the more damage we do, the longer our conditions last, etc.

4) Number of conditions. The more conditions an opponent has, the more damage we do, the more health we steal via life siphoning, the less damage we take, etc.

5) Remaining endurance. The less endurance an opponent has, the longer our conditions last, the less damage we take due to their fatigue (perhaps this could even be a new condition; it saps endurance over time or outright steals a set amount instantly), etc.

6) Skill cooldowns. The more skills an opponent has on cooldown, the less damage they do to us or the more damage we do to them.

These are just brainstorming examples; the details of the mechanics would have to be worked out later. The point is – as attrition fighters – we need to become stronger as the fight progresses (however you wish to define “stronger”) and/or our opponents have to become weaker (beyond simply the loss of health points).

This puts pressure on an opponent to either conclude a fight with a Necromancer quickly or get the hell out of there. Allowing the Necromancer to drag out the fight should make it more and more likely that the Necromancer will win that fight. These are just a few suggestions – in addition to the other excellent examples offered above – on how to accomplish the attrition goals for this profession.

In order to perform an attrition role, you need to deny an opponent these things for an EXTENDED period of time:

• 1: Damage (Obviously so that you can last long enough to see them through to the end)

• 2: Mobility (So that they cannot escape your attrition)

• 3: Healing/Cleansing (So that they cannot survive your attrition)

All whilst providing a steady stream of death at them, which is not an easy thing to manage, but at the current state of the Necromancer, impossible. We have no way to keep people from teleporting/running away. We have no way to keep them from healing/cleansing or even a way to punish it. Lastly our ability to shut down their damage to us is incredibly limited, since our best shut down options last for incredibly short times, have incredibly long cooldowns, cause us to lose our other 2 attrition requirements, or are simply bad (well of darkness, weakness, plague form, minions, fear, deathshroud, etc.)

TheMightyAltroll.3485:

In order to perform an attrition role, you need to deny an opponent these things for an EXTENDED period of time:

• 1: Damage (Obviously so that you can last long enough to see them through to the end)

• 2: Mobility (So that they cannot escape your attrition)

• 3: Healing/Cleansing (So that they cannot survive your attrition)

All whilst providing a steady stream of death at them, which is not an easy thing to manage, but at the current state of the Necromancer, impossible. We have no way to keep people from teleporting/running away. We have no way to keep them from healing/cleansing or even a way to punish it. Lastly our ability to shut down their damage to us is incredibly limited, since our best shut down options last for incredibly short times, have incredibly long cooldowns, cause us to lose our other 2 attrition requirements, or are simply bad (well of darkness, weakness, plague form, minions, fear, deathshroud, etc.)

If attrition is CORE to the Necro, then we should have multiple ways (weapons, traits, utilities) to do something from each group, not just weapon fix or a utility fix or a cd fix…

DS in its current state would have been good, if we had better life force generation, but it takes a long time to build life force and it can be depleted in matter of seconds.