Guild Wars 2

What if spectral wurms teleport was 5000 range, and spectral walk lasted 15 or more seconds? Do you think this would be OP? Would necros be in more team comps?

Flesh Wurm getting a teleport range increase would be immensely helpful to allow them to be homepoint bunkers, because it actually allows for a Necromancer to rotate to another point meaningfully, with the speed of say a Mesmer with portal (but without all the extra team power). Would also help out MM a lot (though not enough to do anything meaningful).

SWalk duration increase would allow you more time to jump into a fight and do some work as a glass cannon build while still being able to jump back. I wonder what it would cause in WvW where you can jump down and destroy something before jumping, but who cares about WvW balance.

Flesh wurm’s problem isnt the range, its the buggy naturr of teleport mechanic due to height and line of sight. It fails me like 20% of the time do the buff would not at all make it OP.

As for spectral walk, there is already a trait that makes it last longer so that could be OP. What they need to do is buff unused utilities like Corrosive poison cloud, not ones we actuallly use. This is from a balancing perspective

akaCryptic.2389:

Flesh wurm’s problem isnt the range, its the buggy naturr of teleport mechanic due to height and line of sight. It fails me like 20% of the time do the buff would not at all make it OP.

As for spectral walk, there is already a trait that makes it last longer so that could be OP. What they need to do is buff unused utilities like Corrosive poison cloud, not ones we actuallly use. This is from a balancing perspective

I disagree, flesh wurm having that range would give necros a way to rotate home or mid. Spectral walk having a longer duration would allow necros to engage then disengage for a short period of time, or combine with flesh wurm to teleport back home after going mid or vica versa.

I know the trait exists, and had considered that and compared to other classes I still don’t think it would be too strong. Necros are a glassy profession in pvp, the other glassy professions can rotate much better then necros making necros suboptimal in most team comps. That is why a buff like this could be smart. Normally, I like to see buffs to unused skills, but the best necro skills aren’t on par with other classes best skills. That needs to change first to bring necros further into the meta.

I long for the day when I can look at a necro utility bar, and compare skill for skill with ele cantrips, warrior stances, guardian shouts and meditations, thief shadowstep, Infiltrators, Sr, or mesmer portal blink decoy. Those are skills good enough to make any build work because they give a lot of the survivability, whether that be in the form of disengages, invulns or healing. Arguably, Spectral Armor, Spectral Walk, and wurm are the skills that can fill that have been filling that roll for us, as most builds take 2 of those 3. The problem is they are still outclasses by other classes utilities. Compare blink, lightning flash, or shadowstep to wurm. Compare Spectral armor to endure pain, or armor of earth. The skills are simply outclassed.

The fact of the matter is necros are carried by condition transfers, soft cc, boon corruption, and a huge HP pool. To get those few things we give up dodges, invulns, resistance to cc, being able to rotate quickly, having good healing through traits and weapons, high boon application, support, damaging conditions (little torment, no confusion, hard to get burning) and big hitting burst skills.

Sorry for the rant, I could go for a while about how weak mesmers and necros are relative to the skill required to play them. The point is, necros very best weapons, traits, and utilities fall behind other classes, and still need buffs.

akaCryptic.2389:

Flesh wurm’s problem isnt the range, its the buggy naturr of teleport mechanic due to height and line of sight. It fails me like 20% of the time do the buff would not at all make it OP.

(tl;dr: it’s not 1,200 in a straight line, it’s 1,200 going around obstactles, so increasing the teleport range will make it bug out less)

I’m not entirely sure about this, but over hundreds of hours of using the stupid thing I suspect that the reason it bugs out so often IS the teleport range. Unlike other teleports it has to trace a walkable line between you and the wurm that goes around obstacles. If there’s too many of them, it can eat up a 1,200 range very quickly, and when that happens it glitches and instead teleports you directly towards the wurm until it hits the first tiny little obstacle (which is usually about 2 paces left of where you were standing, so whatever burst you were trying to avoid you eat in the face anyway).
Like I said, I can’t actually look at how the skill is scripted and even if I could I wouldn’t understand it, but, from my usage, I think this is the reason it happens. The only way to test is if the devs increased it for a trial period and let us play around with it, see whether it still glitches as frequently or not, etc. So I’m wholeheartedly in favour

The fact that it would also allow for faster rotations is an incidental, but very welcome, side effect.

Flesh Wurm acts the exact same way as every other blink move, only it has 1200 range (instead of the usual 900) and doesn’t require LoS. The only exception to the rules is Portal.

Definitely in support of a flesh wurm teleport range increase.

Flesh wurm should have the teleport range of a portal. Even then it would have counter play that portal does not…just kill the wurm.

In addition however, the wurm should work like the new illusionary leap on mesmer. You should just be teleported to the wurms position.

I have died 1000s of times because the wurm doesnt teleport me, either i get caught on a rock, I do it in mid air or some other BS. It really is stupid.

I think the far range on wurm could be super strong. It would be an instant disengage that would put you out of combat. You could teleport to points behind you, travel the map quickly…. I dunno. I’d like it for sure, but when you start thinking about WvW too, you’d be literally uncatchable. If you combine that wurm range with Spectral Walk (activating spectral walk, teleporting 5000 units away with wurm…. then teleporting back with Spectral Recall)… it makes for… interesting scenarios, to say the least.

That being said, I think increasing the duration of Spectral Walk passively would be a bit too much. It would require them to change Spectral Attunement trait, which would be completely OP if spectral walk base duration was 15 seconds (With spectral attunement it would be 22.5 seconds). If they reduce the power of Spectral Attunement to make up for that, the trait would make traited Spectral Armor and Wall weaker… so they’d probably have to increase the un-traited power of those as well, which would make the trait overall weaker and kind of useless because the skills would already be powerful without the trait, so they’d have to change the trait completely…. I dunno if anyone is still following this ramble but long story short, it would introduce a whole bunch of problems and personally, I think Spectral Walk is more or less fine right now. The best spot it was ever at though was when it had no 1-second cooldown on life force regen.

As for wurm glitching for people… I’ve been using the skill for at least 2 years now and wurm glitches about 1% of the times for me. At first it won’t be the most reliable thing to use, but you need practice where to place it. You probably left it too far from your character. I try to always destroy the wurm before moving on to a new location so you can re-summon it at a proper spot later on. I’m still not 100% good with it in sPvP, but in WvW it works like a charm. There would be no better way to show where/how it works other than a video, imo.

Kinda funny how some months ago people were like “NO! You CANNOT use wurm and Spectral Walk together.” Now it’s meta.

It would make wvw hilarious. I don’t like this fight, I’m gone. Can you imagine the response?

Gryph.8237:

It would make wvw hilarious. I don’t like this fight, I’m gone. Can you imagine the response?

Yeah. It’d be exactly like fighting Warrior, Thief, Mesmer, or Elementalist.

I know. I love it but I would prefer another stability or a block skill that activates upon entry into ds. Just to mitigate some of the damage we take when focus fired. That and a ground targeted fast moving projectile for ds2. But I know I’m dreaming. Still I think necros could use some things where people go they are so op… Yet in reality it’s not op.

When it comes down to wurm I do aggree that it could use a range increase. This would make it more viable to get back on another point to defend it. It wouldnt be too strong since the enemy knows you can port here at any time and kill the wurm asap.
Looking at SW I disaggree totally. As some1 already said its duration can already be traited. Next to that the purpose of the skill is positioning in a fight. It already seems to do its work just fine and feels perferctly balanced.

Spectral walk is already too good in terms of Juke-tude factor.

However, Flesh Wurm should get a range increase.

One alternative to flat out increasing Summon Flesh Wurm’s range would be to simply increase the Destroy Wurm teleport. That is, when destroyed, you are taken back to the Flesh Wurm’s location (up to 5000 m).

Bhawb.7408:

Gryph.8237:

It would make wvw hilarious. I don’t like this fight, I’m gone. Can you imagine the response?

Yeah. It’d be exactly like fighting Warrior, Thief, Mesmer, or Elementalist.

Bhawb.7408:

Flesh Wurm acts the exact same way as every other blink move, only it has 1200 range (instead of the usual 900) and doesn’t require LoS. The only exception to the rules is Portal.

Blink (and lightning flash), don’t have a 900 teleport range: they have an infinite teleport range. You can put the target template down within 900, but that could be a spot that, to walk to, you would have to walk a range of 9,000 round a lake and up a mountain to get to it.
Flesh Wurm is different. You can put the target (the wurm) down anywhere, in advance, and walk halfway across the map before activating, but it will only ever teleport you a walkable distance of up to 1200.
So there’s no basis in comparison between the two, and making it sound as if Flesh Wurm is a longer-ranged teleport than other teleports is absurd. A thief can teleport from the ground floor up to the walkway outside Clocktower on Kyhlo. If I walked that distance (down the roof, round clocktower, up to the point, and onto the walkway) it would be a stupidly long way, much longer than Wurm can teleport you.
It’s the only teleport that works this way, and it’s severely limiting. I know it has added utility by the ability to prepare its positioning, but that utility is very niche. The pathfinding in this game is very basic, as anyone who’s watched their minions trying to catch an enemy who simply jumped on a crate knows: it only works along 2 axes, whereas players move in 3. Making a teleport skill limited by the same dumb, broken pathfinding Flesh Golem uses cripples it.

If I were making this game I would have wondered: you already scripted Spectral Walk to teleport players an unlimited distance. Why write completely different code for a similar skill in the same profession? Was whoever scripted necro skills hourly or something? Or was there a massive management failure and absolutely no kittening oversight of the skill designers?

Even if it were made “1,200 as the crow flies”, as opposed to “1,200 as the flesh golem waddles, manoeuvring its way around every little pebble ‘blocking’ its path with the elegance of a 3-wheeled supermarket cart”, it would be a massive buff and would instantly fix all its glitching. There’s precedent for that in the way Portal and Spectral Walk work. Both are unlimited by pathfinding, but have an as-the-crow-flies range of 5,000. So the code exists in-game, and it would be easy to apply it to Necrotic Traversal, replacing its current functionality.

Flesh Wurm does not have a limit of 1200 walking distance, if I get a chance I’ll make a video showing it.

I would really love a Portal-range Flesh Wurm.

You can use wurm to teleport from the ground to the walkway in clock tower just like theif.

It would be nice that instead of destroying wurm you would swap places with it. And if the worm would not get killed you could swap again on 50% shorter cd than if it gets destroyed.

I don’… think wurm does the walking distance bug thing. It can teleport you to roofs and ledges easily… I think it would be fun to test out though. I’ll try it with a Mesmer buddy. He’ll trait for a larger blink (1200 units) and we’ll compare. Personally I haven’t noticed wurm misbehaving in such a way (it’s an obedient little thing… kinda cuddly) but we’ll see

Annndd… swapping places with it is a no-no. It would be counterproductive. I’m kinda excited for the expansion… I envision leaps and teleports

The way blinks and wurm work is as follows. When casting the blink. It checks if there is any possible pathing route to teleport there regardless of range. If there is then it checks the direct straight line distance between you and that spot. If it is within range then it works. If it is out of range then it will bug or teleport you part way. If there is no direct pathing route found it will also bug. Removing the teleport range will just allow you to blink greater distances. But it wont fix the issue if the blink was going to bug on terrain anyway.

I do think the teleport range should be removed. But the only way to solve the bugged terrain issue is to make it work like shadowtrap or portal. Place it under your feet and teleport regardless of terrain.

But Blink isn’t limited by pathing range, only by direct-line range. Wurm is limited by both, that’s why it bugs out. In other words, when it’s working out the (walkable, not direct line) path between you and the wurm, if that path is longer than 1200, the teleport won’t work. It will instead teleport you directtly towards the wurm until it hits the first obstacle, instead of taking the walkable route.

manveruppd.7601:

But Blink isn’t limited by pathing range, only by direct-line range. Wurm is limited by both, that’s why it bugs out. In other words, when it’s working out the (walkable, not direct line) path between you and the wurm, if that path is longer than 1200, the teleport won’t work. It will instead teleport you directtly towards the wurm until it hits the first obstacle, instead of taking the walkable route.

That is not true. You can place wurm on the hill between side and mid on Foefire and teleport from the edge of the mid point up to the top of the hill, despite it being much further than 1200 walking range.

Would be really amazing, except wurm would almost have to be placed at your current location for that to happen, instead of being a ranged placement.

Also notable that – allegedly – teleport spots have been changed for HoT, according to a hearsay post in the PvP section.

Its possible that they “fixed” places where you could, for example, shadowstep through large portions of a building (like mid on Khylo).

I would not be surprised if teleports worked differently in the new PvE zones. Simply because of gliding. Which suggests the maps are designed to be much harder to do map break outs. So blink abuse probably wont be an issue in those zones. But everywhere else we will probably still see the same problems.