Guild Wars 2

I’ve been testing a few different condi builds for PvE to see how well they might work in comparison to other professions. If I said I was disappointed that would be an understatement. A few issues I’m having no matter what build I use is the ramp time and duration. Once we hit the max damage out put on the ramp up we do in fact deal greater damage than we used to. Barely. But the damage to get to that point is lower and its much more difficult to get to that point. I compared it with other professions and they seemed to have a much shorter ramp time with close to twice our damage output. I did find a way to get close to their damage output but its fickle, the traits that are supposed to combo together don’t, and we end up doing far more damage to ourselves than the extra damage to our opponents.

For example one of the places that where synergy is supposed to work but doesn’t work very well is Plague Sending + Master of corruption. So epidemic and Corrosive poison cloud both cause weakness when you use them with master of corruption. Corrosive poison cloud causes weakness on its own and epidemic has it added. Well, weakness makes it so you can’t crit 50% of the time. And Plague sending requires you to critically hit. This means that you’ll probably have to use one of your condi transfer skills which are more valuable than a trait. BUT WAIT! There’s more, when you do beware using deathly swarm or Putrid Mark because they might just crit and waste two transfers at once.

I can’t seem to win for losing with this. Its so frustrating to use a condition build in PvE now its almost hilarious. Something needs to be done about these traits because its not rewarding to play this way and its high risk.

What can we change?:

1. Buff barbed precision back to 66%. We don’t rely on a bunch of little hits like other professions do we rely on big single hits. We can’t strike nearly as often as they can and this is especially true for condi builds. So having this back would be a nice start.
2. Put 50% of the condi duration from Lingering curse into the base duration of the scepter and make Lingering curse give 50% condition duration to all conditions while wielding a scepter. Perhaps some bonus duration while in shroud as well seeing as neither death shroud or reaper’s shroud have very many damaging conditions.
3. Move Terror up to grandmaster and combine it with master of terror. as well is revert it back to its original damage. I agree, terror should be its own defining build. But it can’t be fighting with itself to do so. And there are allot of traits that seem to fight itself to prevent this build from working too well.
4. Reduce the recharge of skills on Master of corruption to 25%, keep the bonus condition application and have it grant us resistance for 3 seconds after casting a corruption skill.
5. Move Prasitic Contagion to Blood magic and change its function to heal allies around foes who are suffering conditions you applied to them. This could give condi some well needed support. Its numbers might need to be adjusted or change to only be effected by one condition but either of those changes would be decent as it would help allies in high risk situations. its radius could be rather low like 180.
6. Drop weakening Shroud down to Master and adjust its stats accordingly. Its a nice trait to have and I don’t think it should be taken from people. My personal opinion of this trait is that it really shouldn’t be a grandmaster.
7. Move Unholy Martyr to Curses and add new function. Add to its description that critical hits while in death shroud copy a condition you are currently suffering. This would be a random condition and it wouldn’t get rid of the condition. It could provide some really interesting play with the corruption skills and you could jump into DS right after gaining some resistance to critical to avoid the weakness from blind or weakness. If its too strong as is a chance to trigger could be added to it as to prevent unbalance. At the moment there isn’t a reason to want to take this trait. But a move and added trigger could make it really interesting.
8. Lastly, this leaves an Open spot in soul reaping. I’m not sure what should go there. But the idea I had would be to give yourself and all minions you control quickness for 3 seconds on entering death shroud. Maybe that’s too much and that doesn’t directly impact condition builds but it would be nice to have a little bit of this.

These are my ideas. What are your guys’s thoughts? too much? not enough?

Lopez.7369:

I think you’re severely underestimating the damage boost we got. In Death Shroud with full might and vulnerability and proper condition duration gear and consumables, we can get upwards of 12,000 DPS. That’s higher than power’s average DPS — and it’s also pretty impressive when considering condition necromancer can now keep passive weakness on bosses since Corrosive Poison Cloud is worth using, while providing decent support and DPS to the group through Blood Magic.

Can I please see a video, some math, and/or a build for that 12000 number your getting?

Back to OP:
Could you give other examples where we have this anti-synergy you suggest? Two examples isn’t enough in my opinion to convince me all of our traits lack synergy. I could give two examples where curses does have synergy just as easily. Also, the patch has been out 2 days, so unless your doing some serious data analysis I can’t take your claims of double damage and half the ramp up time seriously. I think you’d be hard pressed to even know what build is best at this point.

Having said that, I like some of your changes, not all, but most of them are good. The necro devs number 1 priority should be the incredibly weak weapon skills, heals, and utilities on some of the necro weapons. Scepter 3 doesn’t make sense, focus is slow, dagger 2/3 are slow with long cds, axe 1 and 2 are just bad, life blast still isn’t a projectile finisher, and dark path can be outran. Well of darkness, CPC, Flesh wurm, spectral walk, minions, well of power, signet of undeath, spectral grasp, and blood is power are all either buggy, redundant, or outclassed by what other classes can bring.

Lopez.7369:

I think you’re severely underestimating the damage boost we got. In Death Shroud with full might and vulnerability and proper condition duration gear and consumables, we can get upwards of 12,000 DPS. That’s higher than power’s average DPS — and it’s also pretty impressive when considering condition necromancer can now keep passive weakness on bosses since Corrosive Poison Cloud is now worth using, while providing decent support and DPS to the group through Blood Magic.

Could you make a video of this? I’d like to see its damage with both with and without food. Because This is really important. I feel that if a build can’t stand up on its own without cons than it probably isn’t worth running.

Lopez.7369:

zapv.8051:

Can I please see a video, some math, and/or a build for that 12000 number your getting?

I use scepter/dagger and scepter/focus, full sinister, Runes of Balthazar, Sigil of Earth, Sigil of Malice, Rare Veggie Pizza, and Toxic Focusing Crystal with Curses / Soul Reaping / Blood Magic.

The ideal rotation on a boss is Corrosive Poison Cloud to Blood is Power to Deathly Swarm to Enfeebling Blood to Grasping Dead to Reaper’s Touch to Death Shroud to Tainted Shackles to Dark Path to Life Blast spam to Dark Path to Reaper’s Touch to Corrosive Poison Cloud to Blood is Power to Deathly Swarm to Enfeebling Blood to Grasping Dead to Feast of Corruption to Death Shroud to Dark Path to Life Blast spam to Dark Path and you rinse and repeat from there. You can throw in Well of Suffering on bosses if you don’t need Epidemic.

To be clear, the build doesn’t get an average of 12,000 DPS overall. It’s probably more around 10,000 DPS. But in Death Shroud, it can get up to 12,000 DPS. Again, that’s pretty good considering the passive weakness, Blood Magic support, and high AOE damage potential of Epidemic provided by the build. (The weakness and Epidemic are only really good in fractals, though, since dungeon and world mobs and bosses die way too quickly at the moment.)

Nevermind. Tested it myself. I’m getting about 7k with curse, spite and soul reaping. With your build, I’m getting closer to 5-6k… and still I’m killing myself while doing it and the ramp up time is insanely high. So i’m going to have to see a video. Because you could get 12k… If you have allies also granting bonus conditions while you attack like a venom share thief or burn guard. Otherwise, I’m not seeing the numbers you’re seeing.

i very much so agree with you about the terror build nerf, especially since it was my main in pvp pre-patch, lol

is this PvE? what gear and stats are you using? sinister like OP?

The current Weakening Shroud is excellent and I’d argue that it’s better than the scepter trait since it amounts to almost 6 stacks of bleeding if you trait for 7 second shroud. That’s a LOT of damage and it’s done in an AoE and it applies weakness.

Lopez.7369:

Here is some math for the Death Shroud numbers. My assumptions are sinister, full consumables, full might, full vulnerability, 5.5 stacks of burning, 10 stacks of bleeding, and four stacks of poison. I left out torment to be conservative.

12,105.125 DPS = 4000 + 1.25 * 1.4 * (5.5 * (7.5 + 1.55 * 80 + 0.155 * 2100) + 10 * (2 + 0.25 * 80 + 0.06 * 2100) + 4 * (3.5 + 0.375 * 80 + 0.06 * 2100))

It’s entirely possible I’m getting something wrong here, but this seems like a reasonable peak for condition necromancers in Death Shroud.

see, I tested it and if I stay in DS longer than 3 second I start losing allot of damage. Which is one of the complaints I’ve always had with Condition builds. You don’t want to stay in DS. Even with the dhuumfire changes you’re still losing damage. And I’d drop blood for spite if you’re running hybrid. The extra might and valn you get from spite is more valuable than life stealing imo.

Lopez.7369:

Here is some math for the Death Shroud numbers. My assumptions are sinister, full consumables, full might, full vulnerability, 5.5 stacks of burning, 10 stacks of bleeding, and four stacks of poison. I left out torment to be conservative.

12,105.125 DPS = 4000 + 1.25 * 1.4 * (5.5 * (7.5 + 1.55 * 80 + 0.155 * 2100) + 10 * (2 + 0.25 * 80 + 0.06 * 2100) + 4 * (3.5 + 0.375 * 80 + 0.06 * 2100))

It’s entirely possible I’m getting something wrong here, but this seems like a reasonable peak for condition necromancers in Death Shroud.

Those numbers don’t represent a rotation and are thus pretty meaningless.

The biggest problem for pve is master of corruption. It is the pve condi trait and to be quite honest the previous corruption set was better, the 13% extra cooldown reduction is in most cases not worth the extra conditions and is being balanced around ( which is bad design). Also your transfer skills couldn’t keep up with the corruptions unles you transferred 2 cooruptions at a time but that comes at the cost of you suffereing of a condition and not a foe and you artificially limited the cooldown of your own skills. So the cooldown reduction was a curse in disguise.

So I suggest this:
- consume conditions cooldown back to 25s since it was oviously nerfed for MoC.
-master of corruption: corruption skills recharge 20% faster, every time you use a corruption skill gain a stack of corruption (15~30) applied before condition application.
corruption : gain 30% condition duration. (max 1 stack)

This way pve condimancers can regain the lost condition duration from spite. Also the trait is still double-edged not only does it enhance your own condi duration it also extends the duration of your self applied conditions. Just less crippling.

@ lopez how do you get 5.5 stacks of burning? dhuumfire applies 6 seconds of burning at most and in 6 seconds you you can only fire 4 life blasts.

Tim.6450:

@ lopez how do you get 5.5 stacks of burning? dhuumfire applies 6 seconds of burning at most and in 6 seconds you you can only fire 4 life blasts.

In the testing I was doing I could only maintain 4. The cast time plus the after cast delay makes it impossible to stack 6 burns. Its why I wanted a video of it. So same question you have. Unless a guardian is granting virtues to allies there isn’t a way for you to stack burns that high without being a reaper.

Me Gusta these changes! I’m not too big on the three seconds of quickness in Deathshroud, but you’ll have to make something truly amazing to justify it over vital persistence on a Terror build.

Lopez.7369:

Even if we say four stacks of burning (I might have overestimated), that’s still 11,000 DPS. That’s still pretty good, especially since I’m not counting torment to be a bit conservative.

For reference, average berserker necromancer DPS is around 10,000. But thieves and elementalists are around 15,000 to 17,000, so necromancers are just flat-out worse across the board.

Nothing new there, then. The funny thing is I cannot even be (too) mad because of how awesome signets of suffering and plague sending are (but that is most likely only cause I have always just played necromancer so I’m not used to actually having good traits. )

EDIT : Forgot the awesomeness that is new bloodmagic (boss magic).

Lopez.7369:

Blood Magic is pretty nice. But I think people might be overlooking condition necromancer’s constant weakness application. It’s really useful in high-end fractals.

With power and condition necromancer right now, the choice essentially comes down to more weakness (conditions) or more vulnerability (power). Considering the proliferation of vulnerability, I find the weakness more compelling.

Our weakness application is just as strong as it was before. If it didn’t get us into groups before why should we expect it too now?

Lopez.7369:

I explained the build, gear, and rotation in an earlier post.

You’re misunderstanding. What you’re posting is burst damage over one second. DPS is a representation of the total damage you do during a set rotation or over a set period of time (usually a few minutes of combat if you run a priority system that doesn’t loop).

As for Spite vs Blood Magic, it depends on if your group provides you with 25 Might stacks or not. If you run with a set group that always has 25 Might, then Blood Magic most likely wins out, especially in AoE situations. If you don’t have perma 25 Might, then Spite’s self Might stacks will most likely provide more overall damage to your party than having the aura from Blood.

In any case, you’d probably get more DPS from having Geomancy runes (or Frailty in your staff if you’re going Spite and using Rending Shroud) and swapping to a staff and doing staff 2-3-4 before going into DS. If your group already provides 25 Vuln, going Weakening Shroud and Speed of Shadows might also be a DPS increase through stronger Epidemics and just more AoE damage in general, as well as more Weakness stacking.

Lopez.7369:

Even if we say four stacks of burning (I might have overestimated), that’s still 11,000 DPS. That’s still pretty good, especially since I’m not counting torment to be a bit conservative.

For reference, average berserker necromancer DPS is around 10,000. But thieves and elementalists are around 15,000 to 17,000, so necromancers are just flat-out worse across the board.

I don’t know where you’re getting the numbers for Necro because even with your rotation you can’t get higher than 7k. At the moment I’ve dropped Soul reaping entirely. Though if I was to take it up again I’d take food in the grave over Dhuumfire. Every test I’ve done shows that spamming Dhuumfire drops your DPS after 3 seconds. Doesn’t matter which combination you’re using. You lose damage by entering DS and charging Dhuumfire because that’s a time you’re building up your burning but all the while your poison stacks are dropping like a rock and your bleed stacks are dropping off as well thanks to the barbed precision nerf. After that you just barely match your DPS lost at the 3rd hit and staying in any longer means you’re losing damage in the thousands.

So I need a video. Thats all their is to it.

Lopez.7369:

I think my numbers are self-explanatory. I posted the full math and the conditions required. I think the problem might be that you’re ignoring the bleeds and poison that are applied before Death Shroud, since 7,000 DPS is how much you get from Life Blast and burning alone.

As for weakness, Necromancer has more of it because Corrosive Poison Cloud now has a shorter cooldown and is a more viable option since it does decent damage.

Zaroua.2714:

You’re misunderstanding. What you’re posting is burst damage over one second. DPS is a representation of the total damage you do during a set rotation or over a set period of time (usually a few minutes of combat if you run a priority system that doesn’t loop).

Of course. I explicitly said this is peak DPS in Death Shroud, and that the average is more around 9,000 to 10,000.

7k? try 3k. IF that, closer to 1.5k

Lopez.7369:

Life Blast alone does more than 3,000 DPS.

Anyway, the math is up there. I am warming up to a non-Death Shroud, though, which does about 12,000 DPS on average.

How are you getting max berserker damage and max condi damage at the same time? Your math is either horribly flawed or you’re lying. Show me a video. Show me the actual numbers in practice.

Lopez.7369:

I think you’re severely underestimating DPS in general. Berserker Life Blast, assuming full might and vulnerability, does way more than 3,000 DPS — it can easily hit 8,000 DPS.

with food and full might and valn its 8-11k. Without food and max valn+might its closer to 4-7k. Reason its such a high range is because of how big the difference is above 50% health. I’m not underestimating the damage. You’re over estimating. You’re talking about optimal situation. I’m looking at it from a more realistic. The hit of Life blast is around 1.5k not crit. Full sinisters adds no ferocity to that so you’re doing only getting the 150% of normal damage. That doesn’t double the damage. Critical it can go up to about 4k-5k with full sinister but will average about 3k on crit.

Look at it from a practical stand point. What you’re claiming is optimal, the absolute perfect situation. Which Is why I want to see a video. I know the damage of both in their optimal situation. I’ve rune those builds for years. The build up is really slow with a tone of self harm. The weakness is especially harmful. I know how much I can do now as well as then.

Lopez.7369:

Okay, that’s fine. We’ll just agree to disagree.

No, show me a video. You’ve made a unsubstantial claim I’m willing to be wrong but you have to actually show it. You claimed you can average 12k, show it. Its not a disagree thing. You have the chance to prove you’re right. SHOW ME!

Remember the dev stream? The proof is that we can beat an engi that doesn’t dodge by transfering all of his conditions onto him…
Srsly tho, show us video evidence. I don’t think you can kitten this like the devs did.