Heyo,
In light of the recent balance patch, the time has finally come; Necromancers have no helpful elite skills that bear an impact on how they play. When it comes to Necromancer we have the options of:
Racial Elites, which are intentionally bad or highly highly highly (worth repeating) situational.
Lich Form: Transforms, gives stability, gives Shroud, and swaps your skill bar. There is, obviously, the point of the recent nerf to this alternate skill bar’s 4: the limitation on the minions that it summons, and how this severely impacts Condition Necromancer. There is a counter point that this was NEVER the intended use of this skill (activate, use 4, deactivate) as it gives an entire skillbar, but the point of this usage has to also be mentioned: It is the ONLY skill on the ELITE skill-bar worth using over your regular weapon skills, as it is the ONLY skill on the ELITE skill-bar that has MORE impact than auto-attacking with a non-elite weapon. There is obviously a problem there, especially when paired with a 180 second cooldown.
Flesh Golem: summons a fairly beefy minion that does ~700 damage on its first AA hit, followed by ~50% more on the second hit in its sequence, with a very slow attack speed and a frequent bug that makes the golem not actually attack at all. But the AA Damage is not why this skill is taken anyway: It replaces the summon with an activate-able ability “Charge” which deals ~1500 damage and – more importantly – performs both a knock-back and a 2-second knock-down (the tooltip is wrong). This is a significant amount of CC and is a potent source of damage against break bars. This entire skill functions primarily as a 40-second cooldown anti-breakbar ability that can die and go on a longer double-cooldown, like Warrior’s Headbutt if it didn’t give you any self-bonus and would randomly double its own CD.
Plague Cloud: Is bad. It’s just objectively terrible. It has a 180 second cooldown, gives you a pulsing condi effect with duration times so low as to be ignorable, the condis it pulses themselves are weak, and using this skill is in all situations and circumstances an abject loss compared to using your NORMAL skills and utilities from your weapon and bar. This might not be THE worst elite skill in the game, but it is a serious contender.
Reaper: Chilled to the Bone: A 90-second cooldown AoE Shout with a 1.25 second casting time that can be blocked/evaded/blinded, but does do a 2 second stun (although it actually applies its own effect; https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reaper's_Frost I am unsure how this interacts with sigils/runes) on each target hit as well as provide stability to the necromancer, as well as dealing very minor damage. It is functionally an AoE stun that also applies chill, and while its effects are decent, it has a 90-second cooldown. A minute and a half. While in PvP this skill can catch someone off guard and be used as an opportunity to burst them down, most often the target simply has a form of stun-break on a much shorter CD and pops right out of it. This skill has almost no application in PvE at any level.
So I ask; Please. Can Necromancer just have an elite skill? Just a single elite skill that is actually worth activating in most situations, or at all? Failing that, can we just slot an extra utility skill in that elite slot if we don’t want it? Something needs to be done with elites – not just with necromancers either, though it’s the example used here – as they do not feel very ‘elite’, especially when the act of actually using them hampers a class rather than enhances it.
