Guild Wars 2

I have over 600 hours as a necro main and as discouraged as I have been of late I’m going to say it…necro isnt THAT bad. I run strict condition build and have excelled in pve and wvw. S/T PvP is hit or miss. I’ve had matches where I die a bit, but others I have dropped people 3v1 IF circumstances are right. All that being said there are issues and I honestly feel 5 rather easy fixes of existing skills could completely turn this class around.

1. Pet AI- Without much detail as its been said to death. Add an attack and passive option. Sometimes minion ai is fine and sometimes downright kitten. Just take the ai out of the equation.

2. Siphon needs to scale a bit off healing-nuff said and I don’t think anyone can disagree

3. Dagger #1 and Axe #1 maybe #2 as well should cleave- we have no cleave, these are melee weapons its a no brainer.

4. Change warhorn #4 to a cone confuse or even a stun. We are the only class I believe that has no stun but personally I would give that up for confuse. Right now warhorn is at best a pvp weapon at worst total junk.

5. This is the big change, but I feel the most impacting. Lower the cooldown on signets significantly. Signets are great but nobody uses them because the cooldown on the active element is just too big of a trade off for the passive. Plague signet is the best example. If I use this I am always going to be taking on someone elses conditions but I can only send then at an enemy every 60 seconds… And even then they can just use a condition removal and lose them all anyway. Certain classes have passive condition removal every 10 seconds, ours needs to be far shorter. Same thing with spite, its a nice signet for power builds but as 90seconds cooldown I almost ever see it used and again this massive cooldown can be negated easily by condition removal. Lastly is locust, the lifesteal is meh at best at 60 second intervals and we are begging for the blood magic type feeling of siphoning the life of our enemy. Make it 30 seconds and do #2 and we will use it.

Personally I don’t feel any of this would create imbalance or being asked with my head in the clouds expecting sweeping change. Just work with the base skills and I think a lot of the issues can be easily solved.

I think Necro utilities need to be lowered across the board, personally.

I wished they’d rework minions entirely, I liked GW1 minions where you actually built up an army as opposed to just sacrificing utility slots for kittenty excuses for ranger pets, I’d rather they have no/little cooldown and cost life force to cast, if they needed it give them a skill that they use on their own, they would of course have to be limited, then give necro a utility that applies direct healing to allies and heals undead allies for double or something so that you can maintain the minions in combat and give necro a support option that isn’t stacking Regen or a well with a 30 second cooldown.

Reason I say this is I’ve been working on support builds for all the classes cause I feel every class has a way (or should) to dump 30 trait points into helping their allies stay up and if most of a dungeon group is contributing to keeping everyone standing then the run goes pretty easy, but Thieves, Rangers, and Necro’s have little way of helping in this regard, they have some decent CC options, Thieves have especially good blinds, but to spec those three as a healer is really difficult if anyone else on the team is already stacking regen.

I agree on most of your points though, Necro’s need a cleave, and I think if they got a haste then it’d be fine, Necro’s are one of 3 classes in the game without a haste the other two being Ele and Guardian, Ele’s rarely ever auto attack and have fast casting combo’s, and Guardians are well… guardians they’ve actually been ballanced to not need the haste, but a Haste skill on necro would allow you to open up a fight with a large flurry of condition application to get off some initial damage, and it breaks very little because Necro’s have almost entirely ground targeted skills for condition builds and their power ration’s are pretty laughable as well…

no.1 Could easily be fixed if they just gave the minions the ai from the summoned rock dog from runes of the ogre…. If you use those runes you know what I mean those dogs go right for what ever you’re attacking with minimal delay….

For the axe/dagger cleave I think only the dagger should have cleave… The axe even though it’s still semi short range 600 range isn’t that bad but it lacks in the feeling of power from rending claws no.1…. I’ve got 800ish hours as a power/crit axe/focus necro and the only issue I’ve had with the weapon is the no.1 is just a lazy animation and there’s no chain to the attack like most weapons… Honestly I keep saying it that they should keep the no.1 as it is but add a 2nd hit that does the same damage as the first hit but in a single hit followed by a 3rd hit that has 10% higher base damage and a secondary effect… My suggestion for this has been ignored multiple times and honestly as a axe player it depresses me because that’s all it really needs for pve/wvw…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Suggestions-for-the-axe/first#post911572 That’s the suggestion I made for the axe no.1 and as you can see it didn’t even get a single reply from anyone… I have a feeling because it didn’t have a TL;DR version…

“Siphon needs to scale a bit off healing-nuff said and I don’t think anyone can disagree”
I agree with that totally.
It`s really funny that the thief`s signet of malice is a much much more better “life stealing” skill (for free) than necros vampiric traits which needs your whole build very very focused on that one thing and it worths nothing at the end.
Signet of Malice has 100 heal on every hit (not lousy criticals only) at level 80 and gains 5% bonus form healing power too + thief with sword can attack a whole bunch of enemies so it stucks up with the number of hits.
I think Vampiric and Vampiric Precision should gain min 40-50% (maybe 100%:) from healing and should have 100 and 100 base heal at level 80.
Necro should be a lilfe stealer kitten not the thief.

Dakiaris, I agree with your tweaks to axe. The only issue I see with it is that anet seems to like only a few specific ranges. Ie. 600, 900, 1200. I’m guessing this is due to adjustment of players estimating range when trying to outrange attacks. However I did recently notice dagger now shows 130 and I think it was 120 before.

“4. Change warhorn #4 to a cone confuse or even a stun. We are the only class I believe that has no stun but personally I would give that up for confuse. Right now warhorn is at best a pvp weapon at worst total junk.”

What? #4 WH is awesome, especially when you use the warhorn trait. Please don’t change it for a confuse, as most people use with Dagger MH, which is a power weapon. Daze = ownage. And it’s AoE!

This thread is freakin awesome…. seriously freakin awesome

Yeh pretty much agree with all of those

I personally would add DS UI (though they have already suggested they are looking into this)

“What? #4 WH is awesome, especially when you use the warhorn trait. Please don’t change it for a confuse, as most people use with Dagger MH, which is a power weapon. Daze = ownage. And it’s AoE”

The reason I would rather have a confusion condition is that it does damage to an enemy each time the try to use a skill and lets face it damage is an issue for us. With traits and sigils of the mesmer you can max it out at a 4 second daze which is impressive but what are you losing to get that and do we have the ability to do damage in that 4 seconds equal to or greater than that we would gain from confusion? I have never run with the 4 second daze so I honestly do not know the answer.

Also the secondary WH skill the speed boon/cripple is nice for perma swiftness in pvp, but is somewhat diminished by recent changes to swiftness for necromancers, elementalists, and thieves.