Guild Wars 2

I’m having a bad case of deja-vu, I had signed onto WoW during launch – for some reason I was drawn to the balance druid class. Although I wanted to play a caster druid- the game would only allow me to play a healer… Balance druids were a mess (probably still are), it made playing the game painful, especially in pvp – druids were freebies.

It’s the same feeling all over again, I wanted to play a minion Necro – turns out I can only play something called a condition Necro if I want any sense of viability (lame). I wish I had the time/patience to level alts, but I have been playing this game since launch and I just reached 80. It’s a beautiful game, I had some fun leveling – but now that I’m 80, I realize how severely gimped this class really is (particularly as a MM). I thought the concept was not to be pigeon-holed into archetypes – I thought all classes would be adaptable to every situation; PvE, PvP, etc (nearly) equally. Why is it taking so long to apply some serious changes to this class? The minions are a joke, the vast majority of skills/abilities are severely limited due to extreme CDs or they are just plain useless.

I don’t want to waste more time on a useless class – one that will remain so for the duration of its existence as I did in WoW… I’m very frustrated, I feel slightly cheated.

Ceraphyn.7916:

Why is it taking so long to apply some serious changes to this class?

Because Anet doesn’t like to big, sweeping changes at once. They’d rather let the meta develop and make incremental changes. There’s 7 other professions that have glaring issues (granted, after playing every other class, Necro is definitely in some of the worst shape), so don’t expect any big changes anytime soon.

Get ready for the long haul. Necro is the red headed step child :P

Don’t compare this game to wow, Anet may be slow with balancing at times but they do get it done. In GW1 there were many long hauls before they got to balancing and fixing some classes, but eventually they got most of it right. There’s always gonna be a thing or two here and there that keeps us scratching our heads, but thats any MMO. Yes necro is in bad shape now and will be for a long time, but it won’t remain that way forever (and I’ve done my fair share of QQing about it too, much to my shame). Comparing this to druids in wow is like apples to oranges. I have played a druid and this is nothing like that disaster. Fixes will be slow, be patient or move on to something else. The best thing we can do as a community is :
1. Stop QQing constantly about how broken it is
2. Start brainstorming fixes and correctly identifying problems to help the devs troubleshoot
3. Start finding workarounds to make some more diverse builds in the meantime (this one is if-y I know but never hurts to try)
4. Be patient and instead of shaking the giant foam Blame Finger at Anet, encourage them to at least communicate to us more about what’s going on, because that’s the main issue here is the lack of communication about our class.

Well let’s hope that Anet do a much better job at class balancing (which does take time to do) than WoW’s roller coaster ride of class balance that renders once viable builds completely worthless on a patch by patch basis, except with mages, they never get nerfed.

Also, Nay of the Ether has valid points to consider.

Totally agree with Ceraphyn. +1

@Nay of the Ether: we have the most complete and precise Bug Report on this Forum, that is free Work not retribuited, a really big utility that Anet isn’t considering at all.
The brainstorm has been done multiple times (free Work that Anet should have done before the launch or during the Beta) and all the things they told us were “emproving movement speed on Signet of the Locust”, “carry on till 14 december for big updates”, “carry on here, carry on there”, no sign of Developers on the Necro Forum.

This is an Awesome game, but for Necro Fans it’s not the right moment to play, Guild Wars 2 hasn’t been released for us, we are still waiting for the release date.

Luke.4562:

Totally agree with Ceraphyn. +1

@Nay of the Ether: we have the most complete and precise Bug Report on this Forum, that is free Work not retribuited, a really big utility that Anet isn’t considering at all.
The brainstorm has been done multiple times (free Work that Anet should have done before the launch or during the Beta) and all the things they told us were “emproving movement speed on Signet of the Locust”, “carry on till 14 december for big updates”, “carry on here, carry on there”, no sign of Developers on the Necro Forum.

This is an Awesome game, but for Necro Fans it’s not the right moment to play, Guild Wars 2 hasn’t been released for us, we are still waiting for the release date.

Yes I know we have those threads, but lately they’re getting worse and worse with more whining and less helping, I was merely saying to keep our focus and continue doing the things I mentioned. If we’re not part of a solution, we’re part of a problem plain and simple.

I’m with Luke on this. I have a few alts so I cruise a lot of class forums and by far I think the necro community has gone above and beyond to suggest viable fixes, test work around and various builds, and locate bugs that should have been fixed in BWE2. In the long run has it had ANY effect? I’m getting so tired of hearing people called whiners and being told stfu its free to play. At this point why shouldn’t they complain. What other route has worked?

I think complaints from necros going up has to due with players getting to level 80 the last few weeks and finding out the builds they got their with and enjoyed are not viable. Minion builds for example just dont work if you want to do ‘end game’ content, alot of people made necros because they like the minion concept its been around for a long time D&D era.

Very confusing why minions are sooooo bad, look at all the utilties and traits dedicated for minions its a large portion of the class thats broken not a little bit but alot. Im not a minion master type player but I can really understand why someone would be mad at how bad MM is.

Heck we have two automatic traits in our toughness line that relate to minions, and multiple master level triats minion related even an 1 of our elites is a minion out of 3 elite choices. This class has nearly as many minion related traits as DS traits.

The necro community imo has tried to be helpful more then any other class forum to Anet, alot of work went into testing and tracking down bugs on the community side. The whole DS main trait line thing for example, necros tested the kitten out of that wasting hours and hours of time trying to help the class and the game.

@Ney of the Ether
How exactly are supposed to help when old known issues aren’t resolved? All your points have been done.

1 “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”. Silence gets translated as “contentment” with things like this. It gets translated to “everything is ok”.
2 as Luke has said, the work has been done (for free too). no amount of brainstorming can help if it doesn’t get implemented.
3 it’s been done. some of the drastic work arounds is to ignore mechanics completely. “minions not working? don’t take minions” just as an example
4 but the blame does lie with anet. they took money for releasing an incomplete game and now their customers are looking for the missing pieces.

Necro here as well (among other classes – Mesmer, Ranger);

What would help from A-net is some communication… you know, to let us know that they are looking into it, or that there are so few Necro players that it’s not worth the effort.

I don’t understand why they can’t apply another classes Minion AI to the Necro.

Even summoned pets from runes engage the mobs you are attacking, but the Necro pits sit around like mannequins in a department store and watch you die.

You cant really blame people me included for getting more annoyed at ANET, just look at some of the changes thats a big slap in the face.

Tooltip change on 2 elite skills to say they now desummons minions
Downstate combofield that we cant use ourself in anyway.
Plaque signet requiring a target & los to remove conditions + stun breaker only work if the los is there.
Reanimator, Reanimator, Reanimator……………………

And after all this time
Minion AI still doesnt work.
You still cant see conditions or skill cooldowns in deathshroud.
Or Deathshroud skill cooldowns out of DS.

How much time do ANET need to relase a fully functional necromancer and whats an acceptabel timeframe for these fixes?

If anet need help testing fixes then i would help em if i got access to testserver, but im not gonna play the game untill i get the impressions necromancer is a fully functional and fun class to play.

Avigrus.2871:

Necro here as well (among other classes – Mesmer, Ranger);

What would help from A-net is some communication… you know, to let us know that they are looking into it, or that there are so few Necro players that it’s not worth the effort.

I don’t understand why they can’t apply another classes Minion AI to the Necro.

Even summoned pets from runes engage the mobs you are attacking, but the Necro pits sit around like mannequins in a department store and watch you die.

Agreed 100%. I accept that they released a game with portions of it unfinished (one of the only industries in which this would be acceptable, btw). I accept that they balance at a snail’s pace (I even encourage it).

I get furious that we have almost zero recognition of any major issues. Many of us are not even sure what is considered a bug anymore. There is no communication.

There is no “Minion AI is a huge issue for us, but we are working on it. We do not have an ETA as of yet, but we are not blind to this issue.”

There is no “The Necro traits are a bit scattered, and we hope to address this sometime in the next X months.”

Or conversely, there is no “We think the Necro traits are fine and here is why…”

Other issues we need to hear about (for good or for bad):

(ignoring general issues such as the state/direction of sPvP or tPvP)
Vampire builds
Axe Damage output
Deathshroud
Condi stack limit
Burst vs sustain and the necro’s role in it
(a cursory glance at the Necro forum will show that there is a host of issues that bug the general forum-going populace).

Don’t compare balance druid to necro.

I distinctly remember at least 4 times that balance druid accidentally got patched into relevance (until the next patch undid the unintended change), which is 400% more times then that’s happened to necro.

station.6421:

Get ready for the long haul. Necro is the red headed step child :P

At least necro has viable builds. Come talk to hunter and engineer sometime…

Ah whatever. Necros can come play in the “desperately needs help” club with the rest of us while our guard/thief/war/ele overlords laugh down at us from on high.

I would take your advice, but I can’t seem to find the “hunter” forum. Did I take a left turn at WoW again?

Also, Static Discharge + TankCat. SD may be bugged to heck, but it works for a few toolbelt skills and fortunately some of those are pretty nice.

At WoW’s release Druids were just a bunch of completely random ideas bundled together with absolutely no consideration as to how that hodgepodge could actually work as a class competing with the much more focused ones. Another example of the very same issue is the Captain in Lord of the Rings Online. Took Turbine two expansions to get the class up to par.

GW2 has a class like that too, but it’s the Engineer rather than the Necromancer. The devs seem to have a pretty good idea what they want the Necro to be, thanks to all the bugs it just doesn’t work out that way in game ( yet ? ).

“Masssster the Death Shroud” is NOT a comprehensive plan.

I would agree with Blurps to be honest.

Engineers really dont have any direction and the class is a mess of crap ideas and poor implimentation.

The problems Necro have, are more down to rubbish traits, badly spread out in random trees, quite a few of which dont work. Combine this with the utility skills that dont work or are vastly underpowered. We do seem to have direction and potential though.