Guild Wars 2

Anyone else agree with me that necros downed skills are just trash… I mean a long cast single target fear as number 2… Don’t even get me started on number 3 LOL just plain terrible… I mean in pve these might be good but in pvp it’s just a disaster… Number 1 is meh. I know you can spec to make downed better but still trash in pvp

Compare these to the other classes
Ranger – aoe daze fast cast.. And pet Rez (which is bugged)
Warrior – hammer faster cast then the fear… And vengeance which I personally think is better then ranger pet Rez
Mesmer – teleport away with stealth and a phantasm which can hit hard
Guardian – aoe knock back bubble plus the heal thing
Ele – mist form and don’t know what number 3 is
Engi – maybe just as bad as necro :P still better tho
Thief – teleport stealth

The downed 3 skill actually does a load of damage, and is aoe, and a dark field as well.

Our downed auto is a channel so it will keep hitting thieves even if they cloak, which has netted me more then a few kills, but it also make it hard to change target as it will keep trying to hit the first person you used one on unless you use another ability.

While it would be nice if our fear was AOE, we’re overall not that terrible.

War Mourner.5168:

The downed 3 skill actually does a load of damage, and is aoe, and a dark field as well.

Our downed auto is a channel so it will keep hitting thieves even if they cloak, which has netted me more then a few kills, but it also make it hard to change target as it will keep trying to hit the first person you used one on unless you use another ability.

While it would be nice if our fear was AOE, we’re overall not that terrible.

I’m sorry but the number 3 is terrible it doesn’t save you at all. Dark field? Why is that good when your downed? Compared to the other classes this is pretty terrible. Not considering when you use it any person would just walk around it and finish you and jeez the fears cast time is so long if you are quickness finished you are done. They are the worst downed skills in the game and need to be better.

He’s probably thinking 1v1 where fights sometimes come down to who has the better downed damage output.

Do you know how many people I’ve downed and promptly killed because the field kills them before the can finish stomping me? It does a lot of damage. The dark field isn’t some amazing thing, but it’s decent in tpvp when you’re down on a point and you teams mates can aoe blind off it.

The only time our downed abilities are useful is against another downed player…and that’s only because our 1 spam is a lifesteal. Only once have I managed to fear someone off a cliff so I could rally off them.

fakeblood is right, sadly in pvp/wvw our downed skills are by far on the low end.

Necro down state is the worst down state in the game. We love death so much that we couldn’t die fast enough.

Look:

Skills:
Life Leech-Gains no benefit from healing power. Not even strong enough to heal yourself when no one is hitting you (your hp still goes down).
Fear – takes forever to cast. Single target.
Fetid Ground – 5 second charge when you are downed. You are often dead before the recharge finish.

Traits:
Fear of Death – Bug: Fear is not applied to foes when downed. (LOL!)
Death’s Embrace – Only benefits Life Leech, 1 skill out of 3. Takes up 1 important trait slot. I repeat. This trait, taking a trait slot, only benefits 1 skill out of 3 that can only be used when you are downed. This got to be the single biggest running joke for the necro.

Lifesteal is alright.

The fear would be good if its cast time was dramatically reduced. As it stands, the long cast and hugely telegraphed animation/graphic doesn’t help anyone. It’s on the low end of the spectrum by far.

The third skill is OK, but would be better if it actually hit half the time. Sometimes it casts on my cursor as it should, sometimes it instead casts at the feet of my targeted enemy, sometimes on my corpse, sometimes somewhere unrelated entirely.

No, the downed skills suck in PvE too. I’ve been playing mostly necromancer and Mesmer. if you go downed as a necromancer, you are done. Your chances of getting up are almost none existent. Where as with my mesmer I can just distract them with a clone. Not only that the clone also uses the first ability, which confuses, and I can just stack around 8 confuses and even foes at full health just melt. With the necromancer. The second skills doesn’t help me at all because its cast is too slow to do anything, doesn’t help me because if I’m downed there is never just one guy and the first skill’s healing doesn’t offset the degen you have naturally. The 3rd skill? I’ve only ever managed to use it twice. And its damage wasn’t high enough to save me.

The engineer’s is also pretty bad.

You don’t know bad until you’ve tried the Engineer’s. Necro’s isn’t that much better, but theirs is hands down the worst.

CHIPS.6018:

Traits:
Fear of Death – Bug: Fear is not applied to foes when downed. (LOL!)
Death’s Embrace – Only benefits Life Leech, 1 skill out of 3. Takes up 1 important trait slot. I repeat. This trait, taking a trait slot, only benefits 1 skill out of 3 that can only be used when you are downed. This got to be the single biggest running joke for the necro.

Wrong. Twice!

Fear of Death is functional, it just has a short range. It procs in both the Heart of the Mists and open world PvE.

Even if Death’s Embrace only benefited life leech, that would probably be good enough because it’s the skill you use 90% of the time you’re in downed state.

The problem is, fetid ground is a beast of a skill. The wiki doesn’t note it, but it pulses damage like well of suffering / corruption, and has damage (before the trait) somewhere between the two, but I think closer to well of suffering. Unless you get the trait, at which point it does more damage than well of suffering, while also stacking poison.

In a skill that takes about 1/4 of a second to cast, and always casts at the location of your opponent. It’s well of suffering with ritual mastery, poison instead of vulnerability, and it can be traited for 50% increased damage.

Fetid ground is absolutely crap-your-pants amazing. If your opponent is relatively low, you have a good chance to getting them downed via Fetid Ground, not including the HUGE benefits the field gives your team. Remember that downed state isn’t meant to give equivalent damage to being up, it is to add a little extra strategy to team fights, and make death a bit less meaningful. It is annoying at first, but with a good team dynamic, it actually becomes a really cool mechanic to team fights.

The problem of this downed state is the craptastic fear. The third skill is deadly good, but since you can always never use it unless you have some support the downed state feels weak.

Other downed states don’t have “stronger” options, really. Again, downed state in PvP (in PvE you can pretty much solo mobs in downed state) is a team mechanic. The fear is to prevent any fast stomps by 1 person, and the drain makes you very hard to kill without focus.

Other classes just have different ways to delay stomps, not necessarily much better or worse, and some classes can’t really do anything to stop stomps.

The 1 and 3 skills are both actually pretty strong. Being able to sustain your HP while downed is a bigger help than you think. The fear itself is perfectly fine too considering that most other classes have single target interrupts.

We don’t go down that much so our downed skills aren’t supposed to be the best, still they are not bad.

Skill 1: If it stopped your degen that’d be OP. The idea that you can slow down this process is cool.
Skill 2: Getting stuffed in WvW/PvP..Fear!..by the time they get back chances are you have your 3 skill ready to go. Maybe not as useful in PvE but that is why you don’t do dungeons alone.
Skill 3: It really does do a nice chunk of damage if you can get it off in the right spot. Especially if you fire it off as soon as your team finishes getting you up.

I agree it could use some small adjustments but nothing major.

Help the Engy first…..I mean don’t they have a skill that pulls enemies TOWARD them?

Downed State outside of PvE is kitten +1 to any dev working on a way to remove it in WvW.

Necromancer downed states are not the best compared to specific others, but there also not the worst.

Life Leech is actually very strong, in wvw ive been in situations were I’ve gone down in a guild vs guild fight and kept alive from spamming this skill long enough for a ally to rally me. Add in 50% downed damage trait and 10% food, you can pretty much guarantee being rallied.

Fear is not what it use to be before the Fear nurf (instant boss CC long enough to be rezzed) but its still quite useful in PvP. If the enemy is not smart enough to try to finish you right away it buys enough time for Fetid Ground. Change would be to make it an AoE around you.

Fetid Ground if your able to use it before you die does very heavy AoE damage and poison. This has rallied me in fights untold amount of times. Change would be a shorter cooldown.

The number 3 downed skill is scaled with power. If your a conditionmancer, tough luck I suppose. Number one is decent in regards with the life steal, as it really helps push you up to full life while your teammate is reviving you when normally you would of been stomped playing another class. Number 2 really needs to be aoe OR have a shorter casting time. It is too unreliable for a 1-2 second single target fear.

• #1 skill works off of life siphon traits and if you run those traits you CAN rally yourself if no one is hitting you, not to mention it does more damage, trait into the +50% while downed trait and you hit like a truck with #1 skill.

• #2 skill is affected by terror, you can get a pretty nasty spike out of it which has rallied me more than once or at least downed them and I can finish them off after that easily.

• #3 also works off of life siphons, so the more people you hit, the more it heals you, it is kinda weak for conditionmancers, because you don’t have time to build up the condition steamroller like you would if you weren’t downed.

So all in all, other than being stuck in #1 unless you change targets, even if your target goes out of range, our downed skills are pretty nice, assuming you’re not getting stability/stealth/invuln stomped. In which case you’re SoL no matter what you do.

Only problem i ever had as necro downed is that you cant retarget channeled pulse skills (Life siphon, life leech and Life transfer when there are 6+ enemies around) during cast.

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

lettucemode.3789:

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

building around downed abilities… sounds like an SOR player

I kid, I kid.

Talentless.5708:

lettucemode.3789:

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

building around downed abilities… sounds like an SOR player

I kid, I kid.

Haha, nice one! I just spit up some of my water all over my keyboard

One could probably work the traits into a bunker, point-holding build with wells. I want to try this now.

AoE #2 would be really nice. Stealth finishers really kitten me off.

lettucemode.3789:

Haha, nice one! I just spit up some of my water all over my keyboard

One could probably work the traits into a bunker, point-holding build with wells. I want to try this now.

I was actually thinking of this, though I would do it more as a damage build since you are going down more often, but if you run a dagger bunker build, you could pick up every trait and not hurt yourself.

lettucemode.3789:

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

That takes away 3 of your trait slots. That means you are not as effective in normal wvw fighting. That’s unless your build happens to use channelling skills of course.

CHIPS.6018:

lettucemode.3789:

Necromancers can actually trait to get the best downed state. You have the +50% damage (which everyone does), but you also have Bloodthirst which will improve your siphoning and Dark Armor which will give you an extra 400 toughness. You are as hard to damage down as a guardian who used his #3 skill if not more. Of course if someone stomps you they bypass all that but that is true of any class. If you are down on a point and the other team is unable to stomp because of team support, you will last a long time.

And to my knowledge you can cancel the cast of #1 by pressing Escape, just like with other spells.

That takes away 3 of your trait slots. That means you are not as effective in normal wvw fighting. That’s unless your build happens to use channelling skills of course.

His point was to do it to see how effective it was, not to make an actual build around it. Would you lose some abilities sure, but the 50 percent downed ability is in a spot that pretty much is interchangeable same with Blood thirst. The only one that poses a negative is the 400 channel you would lose the spot normally used for Greater marks. But you could go 20 in Death (not preferred) and pick it up anyways.

Bas.7406:

The only one that poses a negative is the 400 channel you would lose the spot normally used for Greater marks. But you could go 20 in Death (not preferred) and pick it up anyways.

Or commit the ultimate crime and not use a staff at all.

(You’ll never take me alive!)

Ubi.4136:

The only time our downed abilities are useful is against another downed player…and that’s only because our 1 spam is a lifesteal. Only once have I managed to fear someone off a cliff so I could rally off them.

Honestly, fear is borked as a mechanic. Fear a mob and it will turn right round and continue attacking, fear a character and you get the same result unless they happen to fall off a ledge. Never mind that our down state fear is single target, meaning it will not buy you one second of breathing space if there happens to be more than one mob gnawing on you.

Softspoken.2410:

(You’ll never take me alive!)

*Kills you and then forces you to pay for your crimes with 1000 reincarnations as a JH.

So for anyone who cares, I tried out a 10/0/30/30/0 point-holding build with wells, taking the three downed-state-enhancing traits. It worked out good, but in the end I felt like the downed traits were kind of a waste. I really didn’t spend that much time downed and the times I was downed I didn’t notice them helping too much.

So my verdict is to only use those traits as filler or if they benefit some other aspect of your build, too.

AOE fear on downed might be kind of cool, been meaning to try it out. Is it 1 second fear the same as other necro fears?

lettucemode.3789:

So for anyone who cares, I tried out a 10/0/30/30/0 point-holding build with wells, taking the three downed-state-enhancing traits. It worked out good, but in the end I felt like the downed traits were kind of a waste. I really didn’t spend that much time downed and the times I was downed I didn’t notice them helping too much.

So my verdict is to only use those traits as filler or if they benefit some other aspect of your build, too.

I ran a condition build last night and took all of the downed traits. I went with rampager stats and the fear damage heals. In small fights, where I got trapped and went down it was hilariously powerful. I actually downed three guys in one fight, after I went down, killed one guy, went down again, and downed the other two. Was rezzed while taking the other guys down significantly.

Outside of the occassional downed play it was kind of not necessary since I didn’t go down that often. It’s is really worthless against coordinated kills, but in 16/16 sPvP battles of pug zergs it’s hilariously funny to play.

Kilger.5490:

AOE fear on downed might be kind of cool, been meaning to try it out. Is it 1 second fear the same as other necro fears?

Fear of Death is 1 second. That said, our downed fear and Reaper’s Protection are a base of 2 seconds (which with Master of Terror is a LONG hard CC).

I agree; #2 Fear is terrible

Update: I’ve come to realize the number 1 is quite good but being a condi manner it’s not great. The channeling is lame tho cuz u can’t undo target then use fear.

Still 2nd worst in my eyes.. Engi for sure has the worst in game lol

agreed, necro downed state is terribad. i prefer the instant aoe interrupts, mist form, and stealth other classes have vs the single target fear with cast time. It’s so predictable a good player will always bait and dodge it, then stomp you. And if 2 people stomp you at the same time your screwed. but since i mostly play hotjoins it doesnt make or break me.

the fear is good but it should fear everyone in a certain radius around us.

Maybe somebody posted it before, but you don’t have to use an other skill to interrupt the 1 channel and be able to change the target. In my opinion just hitting the escape key (, waiting for the short cooldown) and pressing 1 again when your desired target is selected is much easier.

Also since the patch fear works even less than it did before. I hit the pvp heavy today and it would be a stretch to say that my #2 fear worked half the time. Initially I figured it was stability but after close attention that was not the case. Hard to test though given most of time time I was getting stealth stomped by one of the bazillion thieves pvping now.

The reason our downed state is bad is not because of our abilities. It’s because we have less health when we’re downed to begin with.