Historically Fear has always been a staple ability of any warlock/necromancer archetype and it feels incredibly lacking in GW2, at least from a necro’s perspective. You think about how having a stun breaker is practically mandatory to survive in PvP against most classes as they can burst you down to either dead or too close to dead to be effective in the duration of a single stun. For the most part, necro’s don’t have any CC that’s terribly threatening enough to warrant the use of a stun breaker. No one’s afraid of that one moment where they fight a necro and if their stun break is on cooldown, they’re pretty sure they’re going to die.
As I’ve said before in my well lock build post, the most effective way I’ve been able to lock someone down and burst them has been chaining Dark Pact > Golem Charge > Wail of Doom while well bombing. That’s a 25 sec DP, 30 sec WoD, 45 sec Elite, 45-60 sec Wells x2 or 3 depending on build. In order to POTENTIALLY burst down one player. If they have a teleport stun breaker and they use it when wells are dropped you’ve just lost your primary burst for nothing.
I feel like Fear should be closer to 4 sec BASELINE for necro’s to be more on par with the stolen Fear ability thieves gain. While it’s OP for thieves as it sends us away from them, gives them our back and adds to their already high amount of damage-taking-downtime from stealth, I don’t see it as being OP for necros. It would send them out of wells and push them out of reach of dagger or axe abilities. The strongest uses of this would most likely result from MoTerror, Terror and 6/6 Necro rune fear lock builds and condition heavy 30/30/10 esque builds as it would give conditions a much larger uptime as the Feared player wouldn’t have access to remove them as quickly. However, this would force people to have to run with a stunbreaker against a necro instead of a straight damaging ability which would also increase our survivability to a small degree.
It would need to be a pretty strictly considered change to make sure it doesn’t make us overpowered and ruin the game for everyone else, but IMO it would go a long way to making us feel like the necro class we should be.