Guild Wars 2

Video Suggestion

I would also like some slight changes to the animation (I’m a fan of counterplay).
During the animation, a small dark/necromancer-looking portal should appear in front of the player and in front of the target that death spiral is being cast on, roleplaying that of a badkitten hell portal.

This makes it the most balanced teleport in the game because it has a 1s cast time, an obvious animation and you are rooted during the wind up phase.

1200 range.

Don’t think I need to explain how bad this skill and the greatsword currently is.
I believe that this change alone will make the greatsword a competitive PvP weapon.
Our 1.5s cast time, killable flesh wurm teleport is cute and all… but how about a real teleport – and on a weapon that desperately needs it.

PLEASE DO THIS.
I know the necromancer (as well as other classes) might need some nerfs, but the greatsword is not a part of the “needs nerfing” list. Greatsword “needs buffing” in the utility department.

Thanks.

A teleport wouldn’t be a bad choice. Also, I don’t think Necromancer needs any nerfs right now. The only class that wants us nerfed is Revenant, and that is because we corrupt their only way to handle conditions.

Nah, Greatsword comes with a gap closer on GS5 and Shroud 2. Sure, the former is less reliable than we’d like, but it’s there.

No, the only change that Death Spiral should get is a cast time reduction from 1 second to 3/4 second. The only other change I would say Greatsword specifically needs is a shorter cast on the third auto hit.

Pulls in general need attention, but I fully recognize that they are not easy to fix.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Nah, Greatsword comes with a gap closer on GS5 and Shroud 2. Sure, the former is less reliable than we’d like, but it’s there.

No, the only change that Death Spiral should get is a cast time reduction from 1 second to 3/4 second. The only other change I would say Greatsword specifically needs is a shorter cast on the third auto hit.

Pulls in general need attention, but I fully recognize that they are not easy to fix.

+1 agree on all points

Looks very good. This would be awesome update, but then it would need several more tweeks:
- damage
- cooldown
- interaction with slows

I would suggest it like this:
1) Reduce damage a little bit
2) Increase cooldown by like 2 sec
3) Cleanse slow/cripple/chill on use, but can’t be used while immobilised

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Nah, Greatsword comes with a gap closer on GS5 and Shroud 2. Sure, the former is less reliable than we’d like, but it’s there.

No, the only change that Death Spiral should get is a cast time reduction from 1 second to 3/4 second. The only other change I would say Greatsword specifically needs is a shorter cast on the third auto hit.

Pulls in general need attention, but I fully recognize that they are not easy to fix.

My thoughts exactly.

OP, the version of Death Spiral you’ve mocked up would be very cool and looks very fun, but I really don’t think that that’s the right way to buff the Greatsword. Death Spiral’s job is to stack Vulnerability and generate some quick Life Force, and it does both of those very well. The Greatsword’s problem is that its autoattack is totally useless against a player, not that we can’t get to them in the first place.

In PvE, anything works so this change doesn’t affect it anyway.

In PvP, greatsword and power necromancer can be made to work (with a lot of effort compared to condition) in low/average tier PvP. In high tier PvP, power necromancers are not viable because to do damage in a power build you sacrifice survivability. That doesn’t work because necromancers are the first to die against good players. You are not going to threaten any good players with your greatsword in its current state. Go watch helseths streams and watch how he simply decimates necromancers. That’s why power isn’t viable – you can’t survive the burst from superior power classes.

Imagine guardian greatsword without leap of faith. Imagine how garbage that build suddenly becomes. People like to claim, “Oh you can’t compare classes and skills!” well, yes you can. Let me put it bluntly… if you’re running a power necromancer in PvP then you WILL be more effective on a power/medi guardian. There’s no ifs ands or butts.

I know it’s cute to play power necromancer and have “fun” playing around with your greatsword once in a while, maybe get a huge gravedigger here and there, maybe tell yourself, “Hmm, this aint too bad. At least I’m doing something”. I, myself, also “enjoy” using power necromancer in PvP because it’s my main. But realistically, it’s garbage. You need to look at it objectively and not with bias because you love necromancer.

What does a power necromancer have over a power/medi guardian? Literally nothing. Nothing. No survivability whatsoever (2 dodges and a blind here and there vs blocks, evades, guardian has blinds as well, invulns, and health regen), less mobility (judges intervention and leap of faith are superior to deaths charge and the sad wurm port), less utility (every guardian build has support). Worst yet, necromancer has no burst. I’m talking burst here – not just doing high damage. A power/medi guardian can judges intervention into a fight, possibly with shield of wrath on, use smite, do some whirling wrath and even decimate opponents with his heal skill also activating smite.

Burst is doing damage before the opponent can even react.

What is the best burst a necromancer has? Well of Suffering is not burst. It’s not even that high of damage on a full berserker build. Gravedigger is not burst and it only does real damage below 50% health anyway. The best burst a necromancer has is with ghastly claws on a full berserker build with sigil of air, sigil of ice, chilling nova, chill of death and close to death. Not bad burst, actually. However, necromancer lacks survivability.

Why is medi guard burst viable? Because of judges intervention and flashing blade. Why is mesmer viable on a burst build? Amongst other reasons, it’s mainly because of blink. Why is thief technically viable? Because of it’s multiple teleports that allow it to burst. How is warrior viable on a burst build without teleports? It has other mobility skills and survivability such as blocks/evades. It’s also naturally bulky. What about power ranger? Same reasons – high burst and active defenses.

Where am I even going with this? A teleport on our greatsword will allow necromancer to burst. Necromancer has terrible survivability on power builds so to make our power builds truly viable we need to be able to kill our opponents quickly since we don’t have any sustain. You can teleport in, go into reaper shroud (possibly activating hydromancy weapon swap sigil for burst damage) and go to town.

That is how power necromancer becomes viable. It doesn’t matter how you buff our auto attack. Unless you quadruple its damage you aren’t going to be surviving to use it anyway. Our greatsword auto attack is for PvE and chip damage in PvP. The only thing that I would argue is perhaps spreading the chill to the first or second hit so we can stick to a target, but other than that…

The biggest issue for power necromancers is in WvW in which these points I just made escalate. In a large fight such as 10 v 10, what are you going to do? Walk/dash up to the frontlines and throw some wells down? lol. You will get focused and die and a thief will burst you down when you retreat to the back to recover. Lich form is completely useless in WvW compared to PvP. You are just there to drop some wells, then? Then play a revenant or elementalist. Unless a necromancer is able to teleport into the middle of a battle and unleash burst, unexpectedly, like a medi guard can, then power necromancer is bad in WvW.

And that’s my novel.

I agree with Zefrost, I’m a fun of power necro and I’ve to admit that it’s playable only in low tier pvp because you can’t actually burst a player with it without mobility.
A teleport on the 3rd skill of greatsword would be great because it can actually gives to necro the mobility that is required to land a burst. (I can think of really nice combos gs/axe-foc something like ghastly claws- teleport (gs 3)- gravedigger-nightfall- soul spiral- deathcharge to go away then repeat the 3 initial steps + deathcharge again to leave)
I also agree with reducing the cast time of the third auto of gs because we can all see that the auto chain is pretty much useless against a good player

increase damage remove vulnerability would be a good opener. or increase damage if foes health is over 50%

Increased range and lower cast time would be my suggestions.

I also suggested a short 300-420 range dash a while back. Still think thats perfectly fine now as its not much distance to be significant. But nice none the less.

I’ve always thought Death Spiral should give us a small leap. As-is it’s just too short ranged, and too slow.

Zefrost.3425:

What does a power necromancer have over a power/medi guardian? Literally nothing.

An on-demand instant shield (DS/RS). Boon Corruption. Lots of Poison and Weakness application. Fear. Life siphoning. I’m not disagreeing with your point that Greatsword and Power Necros need buffs for PvP, but speaking literally, the Necro has a bunch of tools that the Guardian doesn’t.

Zefrost.3425:

Where am I even going with this? A teleport on our greatsword will allow necromancer to burst. Necromancer has terrible survivability on power builds so to make our power builds truly viable we need to be able to kill our opponents quickly since we don’t have any sustain. You can teleport in, go into reaper shroud (possibly activating hydromancy weapon swap sigil for burst damage) and go to town.

Blinks don’t magically make burst appear out of nowhere, nor should we be forced to match other professions’ burst potential in order to be viable.

ANet wants the Necromancer to be an attrition class and I agree with that decision. Some burst is fine, but homogenizing design is only going to hurt the game in the long run. Don’t just give us what Guardians have and call it good. Best-case scenario, we become discount Guardians with green flashy lights instead of blue, and the profession with the better numbers for a given patch becomes the meta choice while the other is left strictly inferior. There are some generic baselines that we all need in order to be viable (stunbreakers, some Stability, some survival options, a mix of sustained and burst damage, a way to get to a target and stick to them, etc), but it is imperative for the longevity of the game that ANet approach meeting those baselines from as many directions as possible.

As I mention in my signature, I don’t consider myself an authority on PvP specifics, but I don’t need to be to want ANet to push each profession in different directions. We each cover a lot of different thematic ground, and that’s not something that should be wasted. If the problem is we can’t survive long enough to beat someone by attrition, the solution isn’t to step away from attrition but to give us better ways to survive — specifically, Necromancers need ways for our defenses to scale better against multiple foes so we aren’t stuck in a no-win dilemma of either being immortal in 1v1s or tissue paper in 5v5s. If our enemies are applying too many boons for our boon removal to do much, then lower boon application across the board (which really should be done anyway to promote smarter boon application) and increase boon removal.

I’m not convinced we’re at the, “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” stage of game balance. Certainly not when we haven’t seen seen a single serious balance patch post-HoT.

As someone who has played necromancer for a long time in 5-10 man WvW combat, I disagree on the WvW aspect of your post, Zefrost. Not to mention that 10v10 is in no way large scale. It’s mid scale at best.
Now, the 2 major problems with base necromancer in these fights are lack of sustain due to subpar recovery and lack of stability, personal or otherwise.
This forces a group to babysit all but the best of necromancers and takes away resources they could otherwise use for pushes. They still work amazingly well if utilized properly but their resource drain is massive.
Reaper fixes this by massively improving recovery, improving self peel capability and giving access to tons of personal stability, making the class far less greedy than before.
It’s also a completely different beast from standard necromancer. Don’t try to play or even build it as one. Mostly because Reapers actually have fairly amazing survivability.
Blocks and invulns are not the only measure of that.
Now for some other statements.

Mediguards of all kinds are bad in this kind of combat. In fact, it hasn’t been a good choice for anything for over 6 months now as mesmers, thieves and elementalists massively outshine it in everything it’s trying to do.
I’m actually appalled that you’d compare any class to medi guard in usefulness. It utterly fails at everything you want from either a guardian or an initiator as it has no support to speak of while also having bad burst and disengage.
I can get more team support on my Reaper by slotting blood magic.

Sandrox.9524:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Nah, Greatsword comes with a gap closer on GS5 and Shroud 2. Sure, the former is less reliable than we’d like, but it’s there.

No, the only change that Death Spiral should get is a cast time reduction from 1 second to 3/4 second. The only other change I would say Greatsword specifically needs is a shorter cast on the third auto hit.

Pulls in general need attention, but I fully recognize that they are not easy to fix.

+1 agree on all points

Agreed. The only buff to GS I really see as being justifiable is reducing the cooldown on Grasping Darkness. We’re not meant to be mobile chasers outside of shroud. I ran Spectral Grasp for a while on my reaper just because the extra pulls were really helpful to locking down particularly cleanse-heavy builds like Eles due to the removal of chill. Putting the skill down to 25s and seeing some GS love outside of Soul Eater (let’s be honest, this trait is awful) could make the GS much more formidable in PvP environments without just buffing the auto. With more reliable pull effect game-wide, we’d end up in a really solid spot for control with the GS