Guild Wars 2

I play this game for WvW mostly, the PvE is really fun and I enjoy it, and I really havent done any PvP at all although I may play around with it some, but here are some basic problems I see with the class playing in WvW, and these problems/solutions can carry over into PvE and PvP too.

1) Pets: They are fairly useless in anything outside of a small skirmish. They get aoe’d down extremely fast, especially during any kind of keep siege. Also, with no control over the pets they just kind of spread around to attack whoever, which doesn’t really do much… being able to tell them to attack a specific target, attack your target, or just auto attack would be great… also all the bugs that exist with them make it even worse.

Resolution: Increase overall pet health (or have their health/armor scale with ours), improve their AI to notice, and move out of incoming aoe attacks. Give them AI to dodge on their own. Add in commands to make pets attack selected enemies, the enemy your attacking, play defensive and only attack who attacks you, auto attack (they attack as they do now) and stand down (they will not attack period). Also, they need to regenerate life outside of battle.

2) Conditions: This has been called out many times, but I will again, with a cap on things like bleed, and playing in a larger battle with a lot of different players, can really hurt a condition built necro greatly, as every other person stacking a bleed is directly taking away from the damage you can do. Also, since it’s easy to remove conditions, if you completely spec for it, you can have all of your damage negated by any decent player.

Resolution: Allow stacks of conditions to go beyond 25, but start adding diminishing returns at that point. If people want to stack that much bleed, they should be able to do so (no different than bursting damage and that isn’t capped) and if the person taking it in doesn’t remove it, then thats his fault. Also, I would cap how many stacks of bleed condition removal / transfer can actually remove… could be 15, 25, or a percentage of existing stacks… I don’t know the answer, but, some sort of cap on atleast bleeding would be a great idea.

3)Gap Closing: One thing I find extremely annoying in comparison to playing my elementalist, is it’s very hard to catch someone as a necro. Specifically I play mostly in D/D, and swap into S/F when the situation warrants. With ranges on most spells being so short, it can be really hard to deal damage vs good players. We have only a couple of CC related abilities, that are short duration, and short range. So, first I have to close the gap, then I have to use my ability, then they shed the condition, then I have no way of catching them again.

Resolution: Dagger line needs a gap closer of some sort (not cc related, maybe more like a charging or teleporting attack) scepter, or focus needs something that increases movement speed by 15%+

4)Ranged damage: Outside of doing bleed damage, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to do decent ranged damage, be it single target, or aoe, outside of 900 units away. Most if not all other classes have a way to do some decent form of direct damage in a weapon line atleast at 1200 range, if not 1500. In any decent sized WvW fight, that means you have to get within range of the entire other side to be able to do any damage… so I typically end up trying to fight around the edges and hope I don’t get singled out, or just sitting back and watching

Resolution: Either increase the damage in the staff line, or increase the range to 1200 for scepter skills and/or warhorn/focus skills (dagger and axe should be short range, so they are fine)

Not trying to troll, I read a lot of posts like this and tend to think your really not supposed to play like the traditional dot casting necro. As an example, I use staff and dagger/ horn. I am still not full exotics and hit for 900-2k staff auto attack 1-2k mark are Welsh just kitten and with daggers I’m getting 900-1500×3 and 3-4k bite finishes auto attack.

Yeah I think dagger auto attack damage is fine, although keeping someone in range can be rather hard if they really want to get out of range, and getting someone into range initially is rather tough (gap closer would be great)

The staff auto attack skill is extremely easy to move out of the way of, I was fighting a necro just last night that used staff, and I was easily able to strafe all his attacks. Mark’s doing 1-2k damage isn’t going to do much, as players have minimum 20k hp, so having them as a whole increased in damage by 25% or more would be great, or having the #2 mark doing significantly more damage… although honestly I think scepter having an increased range to 1200 would be better, and it’s direct damage improved a bit as well.

I’ve always been a necromancer fan, and have never liked doing conditions, I typically enjoy pets, and any form of direct damage I can find… I wouldn’t expect direct damage to be better than an ele (which they arent great right now either) but it should still be pretty solid.

I agree with most of your points however I have to disagree on #4, we are much better off in the range department than guardians who’s only skills that reach out to 1,200 range are slower moving than our staff auto attack. Engineers and thieves also have very limited long range options, with the former being pigeon holed into one kit and the latter only having one weapon attack that can reach long range.

Maybe, but those classes also have numerous other advantages over us that makes up for that. But if we had some good closing/escape abilities it would lessen the need for more/stronger ranged abilities.