Guild Wars 2

Necro is an atttrition class…ok. I’m cool with that. Survivability is decent. But can anyone really say that the balance between survivability and damage is in line the way it is currently. Take for example a 1v1 pvp fight may last what? 30 seconds? To me using the model of attrition if i stack my conditions efficiently and use the correct abilities to survive the 30 seconds by the ideal of attrition I should win the fight over a glass cannon. But in reality if you do the above due to the bleed cap you usually only end up with everything on cooldown and a glass cannon at 50-75% hp who is now going to burst you down is about 5 seconds.

I feel that this is all directly related to three things.

1.bleed cap-Needs do explanation. Its breaking our damge in pvp and even more-so in pve. Its was implemented only to drag out fights and give the illusion of more challenging content when in fact it so no different that just stacking an insane amount of hp on a mob and calling it epic battle.

2. Way to much passive condition removal and condition removal in general at no cost- classes should have to make some sacrifice or do some planning to be able to remove conditions. Right now other than warriors nearly every class can passively or actively remove conditions more efficiently than conditions can be stacked at little to no cost to them in other areas.

3. Poison needs to be a bigger element for necros- right now we have 1 viable condition to stack…bleeds. Poison or even a new condition needs to be bumped to add a viable second option.

I think you’re barking up the wrong tree here – I’ve never seen a player walking around with 25 stacks of bleed in WvW or sPvP. I don’t agree with a bleed a cap, but neither do I think it has anything to do with our shortcomings in PvP. Your second point definitely has something to do with it, though.

I agree. I don’t feel that the cap really applies to pvp. I was trying to encompass as a whole both pvp and pve in those three ideas. I do believe removal and condition variety are more the issue in pvp. Stack limit is more pve and variety to a lesser extent is pve as it limits viability of multiple conditions builds in a group.

One thing that has been driving me nuts is the trait where thieves lose a condition everytime they enter stealth. This pretty much neuters condition necros who fight them.

I think a lot of the passive condition removal behavior needs to be changed in both spvp and wvw.

kidbs.8920:

I think a lot of the passive condition removal behavior needs to be changed in both spvp and wvw.

I agree with this. Condition removal should be an active choice (both to include it on the skillbar and when to most effectively use it).

I think ALL passive removal should be a grandmaster trait in a defensive line. As it stands right now most professions can spec for great passive condition removal and still do insane damage. If ppl want to bunker and spec conditions thats fine, there should be a counter for everything and they will be ours. Everyone else should have to make a conscious decision to time removals. Either that or make conditions tick for about 4x what they do.

I don’t think the problem is as simple as condition caps.

GW1 conditions are so much better than GW2 conditions. Look at GW1’s blind, and then look at GW2’s blind. Look at GW1’s weakness, and then look at GW2’s weakness. The list goes on and on.

And in GW1 necros used to have this thing call hexes. You know, a spell “condition” that are hard to remove.

GW1 pvp was at 8v8. GW2 pvp can be 40vs40 zerg wars.

So they nerfed conditions. And then they removed hexes. And then they throw necros into a wvw zerg vs zerg situation, and limit AoE skills like Epidemic to 5 targets. Other than having more hp and DS, everything about the necro has been nerfed. As necros have to face more and more foes, their skills are actually much weaker than before. The rest is history.

All in all, I think a bleed cap of 25 per player would be a nice thing. After all, I had read something from ArenaNet awhile back where they were consciously trying to eliminate the sense of irritation you might get at seeing another player (e.g. kill-stealing, stealing resource nodes, etc.). Unfortunately, I think the global bleed cap is something that goes against that philosophy and I often find myself frowning more than expressing camaraderie when finding a group with another condition necromancer in it.

I agree with the problem that occurs when conditions are too easy to remove. Without being too emotional, most games have developers with favorite profs. And there is usually an ugly stick beating to one prof. Necs have to work hard to get their effects working, while other profs (like defender, rangers etc) get several passive condition applications. And effects that proc off those conditions. Necs do get a lot of conditions, especially in staff, but while most classes have decent spammable slot one weapon skills, necs are always waiting for cooldowns. For other profs, the cooldown skill is a flourish, a dmg boost, a def boost, a condition or positional advantage. To necs they do nothing significant if their weapon skills are cooling. Arena, you need to address the weakness of this prof, and no, it’s not just player skill. There are mechanics that are counter to the success of this prof that can not be described as flavor (easy condition removal, long cooldowns, little to no passive condition procs). Defenders with very little trait investment can blind a group of foes 5 times in 30 seconds. Necs can fear them for 1.25 secs every 40. Give us some hope! I really want to play this stupid prof T_T

I agree with the OP and the others posting here. Necros are an attrition class, as per ANet. An attrition class that is tossed in with every other class that can finish fights extremely quickly, as per poor pvp design.

I often wonder what the purpose was behind a 100 tick dmg vs. your enemy with 15-30k HP. Really? Let’s assume the odds are in your favor and for some bazaar reason all of the planets are aligned and hell has frozen over, that they have no way to cleanse or stealth away the condition you put on them. 100 tick damage (around there) will take forever to drop someone, even AFK.

Sure there are other means of damage, but I am specifically talking about the tick damage.

Zatria, our bleeds can actually kill people quite quickly, granted that they are not removed. With 14 stacks of bleeds on a target that are ticking for 130 each, then you are doing about 1820 damage per second to the target. Don’t forget you have direct damage from you weapons as well as DS. So a glass cannon with 16k health or so should go down in less than 15 seconds theoretically if you interrupt heals (maybe a bit more to get your stacks up)

I don’t see the real problem being the damage of our bleeds, but moreso how they are a conditionmancer’s only real source of dmg. Poison doesn’t do much, but its effect of decreasing healing power compensates for that. Again the issue of how often bleeds can be passively cleansed hurts us badly and I agree that it should be something that you need to sacrifice a bit to get.

Another issue that has already been stated is how other classes can stack bleeds much more quickly than we can. Rangers, warriors, eles stack bleeds better and also have some good direct damage. Meanwhile rangers also have the passive cleanse which puts them in a strong position. I’m not saying Anet should limit how these classes stack bleeds, but it should make it easier for us to do so.

People argue that we can manipulate conditions well and that is true. Sending conditions back to enemies and spreading them is fantastic, albeit has a long cooldown or a limit on how many people can be affected by the AOE.

I don’t think ANET should give us a major boost to our bleeds, but I’d like the scepter to maybe apply 2 bleeds with rending curse

No, what ruins the attrition concept is the ease at which conditions can be removed and the high level of burst other classes can put out.

What I find most frustrating is that a stack of 25 bleeds can be removed just as easily as one. Perhaps condition removal should remove a set number of individual conditions? That way passive removals could be configured to remove fewer than active ones making big condition stacks and active condition removal more relevant.

The problem of condi-removals is an extremely simple fix, pretty much every game with dispels has it (I don’t know why GW2 doesn’t). Simply have a trait that pushes a % of the damage that would have occurred up front when the condition is cleared. That way the condi dmg is still mitigated for the dispeller, but we don’t lose 100% of our damage output.

For example if the trait made it so 10% of bleed damage was applied when cleared and you had bleeds that if left to tick would do 10 000 dmg, they would apply 1000 of that damage when cleared.

I do think that we need at least one more damaging condition (burning or confusion) and a more reliable way to apply poison (buffing the base value of the sceptre auto attack to 4s would probably do it).

Palmski.6419:

What I find most frustrating is that a stack of 25 bleeds can be removed just as easily as one. Perhaps condition removal should remove a set number of individual conditions? That way passive removals could be configured to remove fewer than active ones making big condition stacks and active condition removal more relevant.

No kidding. In the past you can stack Empathy+Backfire+other hexes and they are hard to remove. Now all these can be removed by someone passively, like entering stealth.

My preferred solution is for there to be no “infinite” removal AT ALL.

You can’t remove an infinite stack of burn or poison, you may only remove a set number of ticks.

You can’t remove all bleeds, you may only remove a set number of stacks.

You most certainly may not ever ever ever remove all conditions everywhere.

Various condition removal abilities will have more or less units of conditions they can remove, and the current “remove all” will be adjusted to shave some ticks off of all existing conditions.

That fixes the removal problem.

As for the stacking problem against massive mobs, I prefer bursting.

When you exceed the maximum stacks or a balance-determined maximum duration time on a condition, then half the existing stacks/duration get applied immediately in a burst, but at 50% the damage they would have applied had they continued.