Guild Wars 2

I guess ill start it.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-December-14-2012

Necromancer

-Vampiric: This trait no longer triggers when projectiles hit allies.
-Feast: This trait’s recharge has been reduced from 12 seconds to 10. Damage has increased by 15%.
-Frozen Abyss: This skill is now a blast finisher.
-Foul Current: This skill is now a leap finisher, a poison field, and has its recharge reduced from 15 seconds to 12.
-Dark Spear: This skill is now a projectile finisher.
-Deadly Feast: Skill recharge has been decreased from 18 to 15.
-Wicked Spiral: This skill is now a whirl finisher. Recharge has been decreased from ten seconds to eight.
-Signet of the Locust: Passive movement speed has increased from 10% to 25%.
-Quickening Thirst: Movement speed increased from 10%/5% to 15%/10%.
-Reanimator: Decreased the degeneration rate of Jagged Horrors.
-Terror: Damage is increased by 50% if the target has any conditions on them.
-Spiteful Removal: This trait now removes three conditions when an enemy is killed, -but can only trigger once every 10 seconds.
-Crimson Tide: This skill is no longer able to fire at enemies behind the player.
-Plague Blast: Updated projectile to fire from a more logical area of the necromancer.
-Gluttony: Life Force gain has been increased from 5% extra to 10% extra.
-Updated Corrosive Poison Cloud’s skill fact to display the proper duration of the applied conditions.

Overall i think they focused and buffed things that were meant to be left on the side. The only positive that i can see is Signet of the locust passive speed increase and gluttony.
I must say i’m very disappointed.

EDIT – After reading every other profession notes, I can say that this class will now be locked away or to extreme cases /deleted. To those, such as myself, who fought to get improvements for the staff particularly with its ridiculous speed, you will be very disappointed.

Warrior
-Increased the velocity of arrows fired from Longbow skills by 30%.

Thief
- Ink Shot: Projectile speed for this skill has been increased by 22%

Ranger
- Increased the velocity of arrows fired from Short Bow and Longbow skills by 30%.

Guardian
- Spear of Light: Velocity has been increased by 50%

Disappointed.

Full agreement here.

Maybe a little too much emphasis on water combat for this one. Unfortunately that won’t make me fight more underwater.

I’ll go test Gluttony to see if 10% now works as intended.

I was not impressed with these changes at all… I am shocked…. SHOCKED that they wasted so much time on our water combat, which really was not even an issue for me at all…. Noted the following as worth while:

-Terror: Damage is increased by 50% if the target has any conditions on them.
-Gluttony: Life Force gain has been increased from 5% extra to 10% extra

So if gluttony works properly now, this is nice. Not amazing, but nice.

For all you people who have been following the posts I made on long fear duration build, get ready to be amazed….. I hope….. having no tested the terror buff I cannot be sure, but this could mean a top end terror tick of 1500 damage. (with BIP)

As soon as I get a chance to test today I will update. But logically this would mean reapers protection proccing would deal 6000 damage…. certainly not amazing by normal burst class standards, but a HUGE buff to a fear based build. The normal 1 second fears with 100% duration are doing upwards of 1700-2000 for the duration.

wow.. lame. .

oh cool, our kittenty useless jagged horrors are still kittenty and useless.

apparently they have no interest in making the necro class useful. so glad they spent all this time on underwater skills, because we do so much water combat outside of when we’re forced to do it in fractals or HoTW

I am itching to test LF generation with the Gluttony fix/buff.

There was a massive stealth nerf to Necros, though. Fear no longer bypasses Defiant.

We may have the worst fears in the game (but we do have significantly more than anyone else), but this was something that let necros be awesome allies vs. Champs and Legendaries, especially those with channeled healing skills.

Sigh. Part of me thought this patch might give some decent changes in the area of build diversity, but no. Absolutely nothing was changed to make the necro any more versatile or enjoyable to play, it’s really quite disheartening.

Another patch, still the same 1 trick pony that is the necro.

Rennoko.5731:

I was not impressed with these changes at all… I am shocked…. SHOCKED that they wasted so much time on our water combat, which really was not even an issue for me at all….

Agreed. How can they possibly focus on underwater nonsense. 90% of my fighting is on land.

We were stressing to fix our bugs, make the staff more efficient, make the DS traitline including DS itself useful, Minions AI, life siphoning and this is ANET response.

Ranger
-Increased the velocity of arrows fired from Short Bow and Longbow skills by 30%

Whoo, we got the kittening Ranger treatment from last patch!

kitten you Arenanet. Seriously.

Disappointing, per usual. Though, I already felt Terror was nice — should be very interesting how that buff works.

Gluttony buff was laughable. 10% just is too small an amount.

ugh — more pewpew less qq?

Is this a joke?

Lots of underwater changes, but a lot of the changes for most classes were about underwater combat, so I’m not too broken up about it.

Really it’s about what I expected: a wide variety of small changes, but no major overhauls. I think we’ll have to wait a while for those. ANet isn’t at that stage of the game, and I’d assert they shouldn’t be trying to make sweeping changes to a profession just yet, like the ones this forum whines pines for.

As for specifics: The change to Gluttony is welcome, though it still looks a little small to me. Time will tell there though. Spiteful Removal is a clever change that makes the trait a lot more powerful in my eyes, especially for PvP play. Reanimator also looks like a good compromise for now, but I’ll have to test how it plays now to see if I actually get more stacks of bleeding out of it.

The change to Terror looks incredible though, I’m really surprised by it.

Edit:

There was a massive stealth nerf to Necros, though. Fear no longer bypasses Defiant.

Yep, noticed that. I honestly thought there would be way more crying about it here. I’ll miss our free pass on boss interrupts, but really I think more players need to learn that peeling stacks of Defiant is a good thing to do for your team.

In summary: I’m pretty okay with this patch. I would have liked more changes for all the classes, but I think that saying Necromancers were ignored is flat out incorrect. Saying they got less than other classes seems pretty wrong too, so don’t even start forums.

april is still months away!

Really Anet, what is this garbage ?
Do you guys actually listen to your customers?
I really like the game, but i`m starting to get fed up with this.

alanis.6094:

Disappointing, per usual. Though, I already felt Terror was nice — should be very interesting how that buff works.

Gluttony buff was laughable. 10% just is too small an amount.

Hooray! We get 1% bonus life force from Spectral Grasp and nothing else!

Unless, of course, they really did fix the “rounding error”. Would be better if they made it so Life Force wasn’t measured in pure percentages.

So, shelving nec until next patch (save for when a tpvp team needs a nec).

If you need me, i’ll be in the welcoming committee on the ele forums. Just look at ele daggers in comparison to nec… just sayin.

edit: shelved until traits see a major overhaul. there is still no disclosure about Weakening Shroud having a cooldown.

My thoughts will be below following each one.

Necromancer

-Vampiric: I do not believe this was made it a weak trait, they should have buffed its heal by a bloody lot
-Feast: besides them buffing this under powered underwater skill which is a nice change but really, no one really fights underwater.
-Frozen Abyss: This skill is now a blast finisher, thats good and all but again its underwater.
-Foul Current: o joy another underwater skill buff.
-Dark Spear: still underwater skill what the heck
-Deadly Feast: still underwater, dont really care
-Wicked Spiral: happy about all the buffs to underwater skills but come on, enough.
-Signet of the Locust: great we have another decent passive signet speed boost, i dont see it being that useful since of its long cooldown on it still, we sacrifice a utility slot for just a passive speed increase that does not stack with other speed increases.
-Quickening Thirst: happy about the update but still worthless because it does not stack with other speed increases so whats the good of it.
-Reanimator: why does this exist still, i really hate that little thing being forced on me. They need a AI fix, not to mention we need to have more then one up for it to even matter.
-Terror: I can support this because with good condition damage builds it is a very nice bit of fear damage on a fear. Side note, they nerfed fear on boss like mobs so sad day for that.
-Spiteful Removal: i never liked this trait but now it might be useful that it clears more then just one condition
-Crimson Tide: again underwater combat…
-Plague Blast: already a good skill for underwater combat DS form, have to test it to really have an idea if they made it better or worse.. sad its still only underwater skill
-Gluttony: happy they updated the increase and all but, still have to test to see if it works better because before it barely added any lifeforce at all, not sure if making it 10 will be enough.
-Updated Corrosive Poison Cloud’s- Great a tooltip update, not really helpful to the skill but hey atleast we know the correct times.

I am extremely disappointed. Half the stuff buffed didn’t need it to begin with, and the stuff that REALLY needed fixing (AI bugs, signet that draws conditions, ect) still aren’t fixed.

Effectively no change to performance in PvP/WvW (gluttony is still pretty weak but I wasn’t expecting much), but the fear nerf REALLY hurts us in PvE, mainly dungeons.

Edit: upon further reading…
Anet listed their design philosophy on the classes (aka: how they would like the classes to work, even though they don’t necessarily do that)

The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

We have possibly the least CC among all the classes (2 of our 3 non fear cc’s are based on our elite), we have almost no escape ability besides smart use of spectral walk, or very situational use of the wurm, and what damage mitigation do we have? well of darkness, blinding plague, and 2 fairly short protections.
We only can apply poison with 2 weapons, every class combined damage and condition damage, so I’m not sure what they’re saying here, and we most certainly not the king of attrition they think we are. Death shroud is good in the short term, but we don’t generate enough LF fast enough to make it that good for attrition, hell, a p/d thief is an attrition build, one that is extremely impossible to kill, I struggle to say the same about necro builds.

I am somewhat unhappy here.

Edit 2: we do not have “multiple movement disabling abilities”, we have one. Dark pact.

could have scratched all these notes and put:

-Spectral armor now grants STABILITY, along with protection and DS gain.

guess ima have to rely on a 30 point trait, for god knows how long… for any form of stability…

With all these water combat things, they could of thrown in allowing flesh golem to swim. .-.

anyone else popping some popcorn?

Softspoken.2410:

Lots of underwater changes, but a lot of the changes for most classes were about underwater combat, so I’m not too broken up about it.

Really it’s about what I expected: a wide variety of small changes, but no major overhauls. I think we’ll have to wait a while for those. ANet isn’t at that stage of the game, and I’d assert they shouldn’t be trying to make sweeping changes to a profession just yet, like the ones this forum whines pines for.

As for specifics: The change to Gluttony is welcome, though it still looks a little small to me. Time will tell there though. Spiteful Removal is a clever change that makes the trait a lot more powerful in my eyes, especially for PvP play. Reanimator also looks like a good compromise for now, but I’ll have to test how it plays now to see if I actually get more stacks of bleeding out of it.

The change to Terror looks incredible though, I’m really surprised by it.

Edit:

There was a massive stealth nerf to Necros, though. Fear no longer bypasses Defiant.

Yep, noticed that. I honestly thought there would be way more crying about it here. I’ll miss our free pass on boss interrupts, but really I think more players need to learn that peeling stacks of Defiant is a good thing to do for your team.

In summary: I’m pretty okay with this patch. I would have liked more changes for all the classes, but I think that saying Necromancers were ignored is flat out incorrect. Saying they got less than other classes seems pretty wrong too, so don’t even start forums.

I have to disagree here. Warriors had a major bug fix, in addition to their underwater buffs, and several other nice mid-range importance buffs. Mesmers (the class I apparently must start playing more), got the phants buffed back up, and several other speed related/power related buffs to minor traits.

The terror buff if it works the way I am supposing it does is a very nice BUFF, but it was already a good ability, and a niche build most would say. The jagged horror fix is fine for me, I like that thing well enough in wvw, even though its mostly useless.

The BIG problems, (like the warriors fast hands bug – which got fixed), for us being minion ai problems, the entire leaching tree, etc…. left to the wind.

so i guess we can all officially agree they have no idea what they want to do with the necro class, i mean its not like theres any legit reason for the lack of proper changes to the things the class actually needs still 4 months after release

All classes had alot of underwater buffs/tweaks. So I guess there will be more underwater battle in the future patches. That sounds good.

But, does Anet realy think, that the classes are already good enough for just some small tweaks. For Necro, we need major overhauls in DS and Traits, while the skills are quite fine for me (bugs and so, but generally they are nice). I would like to know where Anet is going with this class and other classes, as i dont want to spend more time on a class where I can’t take the tough. line if not minion specced and the class mechanic makes the character worse then without…

What is your Vision for this class Anet? Cause I dont see any without working Minions, not being able to efficiently group with other condition based players at the same time nor having a class mechanic that defines gameplay or enhances it in a special way.

I’m just laughin since i started reading the necro “buffs”..

“Reanimator: Decreased the degeneration rate of Jagged Horrors.”
Why giving precedence to this useless fix? I’d like they spent more effort for something more useful.. On which bases do they decide what’s better fixing or not? If something is useless like this Trait, don’t even waste time trying to balance it… Why caring about the most useless Jagged Horror’s Survivability? Why? It deals ridicle damage, it has no utility in combination with other traits (want 20 more toughness for 10 seconds? Want a free portable Death*Coff*Useless Nova? Maybe it would work like Mesmer’s Phantasms to create more confusion between the opponet targets…)

I just can say Spiteful Removal it’s decent now…
But what about Staff’s emprovements? Underwater the necro was yet strong, why empowering the water weapons when we have still big problems on the dry land?
Meh..

I still can’t understand why there are people putting so much EFFORT in gathering Necro’s Bug and still getting no consideration by ANet.

tehdirtyfivethirty.3507:

april is still months away!

HE WON

Oh and as far as fear no longer bypassing the boss mobs, doesn’t bother me much. PVE in this game isn’t a difficult thing to do with any class, and having the interrupt was nice, but not game breaking. It was fun for pushing around the mini-bosses like a ping pong ball and kitten off your 5 man team. Most of the big bosses were immune anyhow, no big loss. Calling it a HUGE nerf is just silly.

-Terror: Damage is increased by 50% if the target has any conditions on them.

That’s interesting.

Isn’t the Terror buff worded so that the damage Fear inflicts will now be increased by 50% if the Feared target has any (Additional) conditions on them?

And not ‘You do 50% more damage to the target while they have conditions’?

I was hoping to be able to continue play with my Necro. Doesn’t look like Minions are fixed. Looks like it’s shelved for even longer now. Guess I’ll start on a Ranger.

Arianna.7642:

Isn’t the Terror buff worded so that the damage Fear inflicts will now be increased by 50% if the Feared target has any (Additional) conditions on them?

And not ‘You do 50% more damage to the target while they have conditions’?

I believe that is the case…. can’t get on to test yet though.

Rennoko.5731:

I believe that is the case…. can’t get on to test yet though.

I won’t be bothering to update for a while, so confirmation would be good, I guess.

Just to kind of throw some laughs into the thread, here’s Arenanet’s obliviously incompetent outlook on the Profession, apparently;

Necro
The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

very small changes… Huge nerf on pve…. Nice alteration for conditionmancers with Terror..
Come on anet… there is like tons of traits that still don’t work properly that need to be looked at… Dunno why all the other classes get some love but we don’t =/

I will be honest in that I never expected much. I just hoped they didn’t tweak anymore skills that weren’t broken like they have done in the past.

My only gripe is all these speed buffs that have been introduced to each of the classes. I feel its a game full of Sonic the Hedgehogs, it was bad enough trying to catch folk. Now I feel im being pigeon holed into taking Signet of the Locust in WvW/PVP just to keep up with the Joneses.

Sometimes a fashionably late entrance with a well positioned fear mark in the right order is just what your smashed team needs.

I enjoy fighting underwater and these changes are a nice welcome.

There I said something positive today.

I think this update’s great for necros. There’s more mobility options. With the new Signet of the Locust you don’t really need warhorn or spectral walk anymore (except wail of doom and the recall feature of spectral walk are still pretty useful).

Before I felt pigeon-holed into using both spectral walk and warhorn for best mobility. Now we have more options.

Arianna.7642:

I won’t be bothering to update for a while, so confirmation would be good, I guess.

Just to kind of throw some laughs into the thread, here’s Arenanet’s obliviously incompetent outlook on the Profession, apparently;

Necro
The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

I’ve been curious for a while about how ArenaNet sees their Necromancers. I find it weird that they are encouraging combining raw and condition damage, but I can see where they’re coming from when they talk about restriction of movement.

I’m surprised they’re praising/focusing access to poison, of all things. I honestly would have given that identity to Thieves.

For now, I’m just going to play with a few of the changes.

I don’t think anything is wrong with my necro, I mean I do loads of damage and outlast most heavy armored professions but every time there are skill balances, I just go “meh” nothing I wanted or cared about was updated >.>

So ANet, can you like, change that worthless Reanimator trait into a trait that lets fear bypass Defiant again? That way other classes are still restricted but Necro still gets their arguably most attractive PvE feature…

For some reason I doubt this change was due to necro to begin with

Absolutely pathetic… i’m really shocked that there were no decent changes again.

I thought this was supposed to be a decent patch balance wise?

Necro patch feedback huh?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Then tears for my engie being still unable to have turrets useful, then a small smile for the mesmer because no nerfs and phantasms are better. One of these days I will just play warrior like I am supposed to.

…and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher.

The secret of DS finally revealed to us!

And here I thought using DS as a second health bar was doing it wrong…

Arianna.7642:

Rennoko.5731:

I believe that is the case…. can’t get on to test yet though.

I won’t be bothering to update for a while, so confirmation would be good, I guess.

Just to kind of throw some laughs into the thread, here’s Arenanet’s obliviously incompetent outlook on the Profession, apparently;

Necro
The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

Chasing down enemies with low health. And posion. I see.
So may I assume that the necromancer is therefore good in PvP while PvE is neglectible.
I see where they are going in PvP, but for PvE it’s still not good enough, to fill in a space, that somebody could fill a lot better. Poison is not realy helpful, as most bosses don’t heal or regen. Chasing low health mobs… well yeah…

So I reroll an ele now, good support/damage in PvE, while being able to chase and kill! people in PvP as well with daggers, chill and stun. Maybe not as much raw hp, but after I kill, I most likely regen anyway. Necro is shelved.

I am actually fairly disappointed, with the amount of feedback we’ve had I assumed they were making some more changes. I knew that the DS GUI wouldn’t be changed in this patch, so that’s no issue for me.

When I saw that 60% of our patch notes were for underwater I just sighed. I hate underwater combat as a Necro. Who knows though, maybe it won’t be so bad at least now?

The good things were the Signet speed buff and increase in Reanimator duration. It’s not quite the fix we were hoping for with that particular trait, but at least it’s something until the major Feb patch comes along.

All in all I’d like to say good work anet, you guys did a lot of work. Not a ton for Necros but thats okay

After this “big balance patch” it is clear that not only do the devs not play necro to know what is wrong, they honestly don’t give a kitten about this class. How about some changes to make more than the LOL condition spam viable. How hard is it to take any of the forum posts over the last month into consideration. What about your broke kitten lifesteal mechanic? Blood magic is so useless atm how does this not even come onto the radar?

On the whole very poor patch. Despite the recognition of the issues regarding ds and minions there is very little change to the class. Minions remain untouched. The jagged horrors i fail to see how an additional few seconds life will help what has to be one of the worst minor traits on the game. And 10% extra life force on skills…. i guess that remains to be seen.

However, one interesting thing is the fear 50% buff. Could be interesting. I can see a few fear based builds in the upcoming weeks, particularly in WvW where it is one of the best cc a necro has. Just a shame that the projectile speed of the staff was untouched else the staff/fear/ds build could have been very interesting with the 10% skill life force regeneration