Guild Wars 2

I was personally rather underwhelmed by it, I think terror-based builds work better with the Doom buff and the new Spectral Wall.
I’m aware you can have both of course but then you have to sacrifice something, usually greater marks, and that just doesn’t work for me!

I run 30/20/10/0/10 atm.
Many run 30/30/10/0/0 …maybe I should try it.

Honestly I was surprised by how powerful it is when used together with Terror.
I’ve actually had people yell “omg joke Profession” at me for using it.

Makes me wonder whether the meta will shift or if it’s just plain OP.
Guess we’ll see in time.

I think Anet messed up, had intended it for Hybrids… to whom it’s actually balanced pretty nicely.

It will be fine if u guys don’t combine it with Fear =_=!!!!. Having no control of our action while our body is burning is painful… >-<.

The double source of bursting through Terror and Burn is nice, but even with 1600 Toughness and 18k Hps the Necromancer with this build is tremendously squishy.

The problems are the same as ever. Low mobility, scarce Life Force generation, dependancy from Life Force, impossibilty to open a fight, easy to nuke down, just 18k hps (don’t tell me Death Shroud offers a valuable hp pool because of the LF problems; it’s not reliable as it is now).
I’d rather some pvp trinkets giving Vitality, Precision and Cond Damage more than Toughness.
I’d like to possibly speccing into Blood to have Vitality and some Trait which should synergyze with Contidions….. (Maybe taking away Transfusion and Deathly Invigoration which are imo just thrash). Don’t mention Mark of Evasion because isn’t that useful for the build.

So essentially you just have to sit back, wait for teammates to open the fight, try to survive spikes, make your team babysit you.
The damage is nice, but like this the Necromancer has no survivability. I see Thieves and Mesmers going around in Berserker gear having more survivability…
Noobs die easily, but experienced players gonna give serious problems.

I am having the same issues.
I love the extra burst, it’s fantastic but I have very little lf generation and I am not sure it’s worth giving up all the utility and survivability for the extra burst.

I find it very powerful if you wait for burning to come up and pop torment and terror, it’s a wildly strong burst.

It can still get removed but every one of my burning procs is about 7 seconds, which is close to 5k damage if it runs it’s course, and then it’s up again in a few more seconds.

I think it will shift the meta to more people being concerned about conditions and carrying more condition removal, more stun breaks and more melandru runes and lemongrass soup.

Luke.4562:

So essentially you just have to sit back, wait for teammates to open the fight, try to survive spikes, make your team babysit you.
The damage is nice, but like this the Necromancer has no survivability. I see Thieves and Mesmers going around in Berserker gear having more survivability…
Noobs die easily, but experienced players gonna give serious problems.

This. It’s just like any other class in the game: If I trait for maximum Burn + Terror damage with extended fear duration and Signet of Spite, and I stand up on a ledge and freely nuke and epidemic people, it’s going to be strong. If I get focused, I’m going to die extremely fast due to hardly ANY lifeforce gen and no survivability through traits.

You have to choose between damage and survivability. If you’re too concerned about getting burn + fear chained until you die: Bring extra condition removal. Bring an extra stun break. Call target on the necro because they’re extremely susceptible to focus fire. Etc. I’ve had to modify my builds around whatever the current strong builds are since the day the game came out, same with every other MMO. Why is this any different? I used to have to run a build specifically designed around dealing with BS thieves at launch. Then I had to run one designed to deal with D/D elementalists.

I still run the same build I ran pre-patch at 0/20/10/10/30 or 0/30/10/10/20. If anything my build got nerfed because of Terror getting bumped up a tier and corrupt boon’s nerf is absolutely HUGE (no more Save Yourself! fear combos, it never converts stability anymore). I still enjoy this build more than any of the new fotm builds people are crying about. The problem is, if everyone cries about about a build, everyone is going to then run the build because they want to be OP. So even if a build isn’t OP, the sheer volume of people running the same build is going to make players feel like they’re always fighting the same thing over and over and over again and it leads to redundant, hopeless game play experiences.

Just trying to understand this as a carebear PVEer where I don’t see Dhuumfire as very useful….

With 1000 condition damage (just to pick a number), burning would cause 578/sec * 4 sec = 2312 total…on a single target. But since Dhuumfire requires 30pts in Spite, thats +30% duration, so 5.2 sec, 578 × 5 = 2890 total.

That’s about 3 times the damage BiP would do in the same 5 sec (also @ 1000 cnd dmg).

On the other hand, 2890 isn’t much more than what I typically do instantly with Putrid Mark in PvE in a moderate Power build, and its about half of what Axe2 typically does with some vulns. However, Dhuumfire can’t be dodged.

But then again, Dhuumfire is, in a convoluted sense, a “free” skill with a 10 sec CD, insofar as it doesn’t require taking up a skill slot. However, its truly only a 10 sec CD with 100% crit chance, otherwise it depends on your crit chance, so in practice it might be more like a 15-25 sec effective CD, somewhat similar to Putrid Mark.

In short, Dhuumfire seems to add up to roughly 6-12K or so additional dmg per minute (if one gets 2-4 procs off while off CD per min.), without cleansing, with typical crit%.

But if one could indeed get a proc every 10 sec (i.e., a very high crit chance), then it would be 2890*6=17.3K dmg, with no cleansing.

So I guess I can see where if in PvP one ran a high-crit chance build and could CC a foe for most of a minute, then they could pretty much wipe them out with Dhuumfire damage alone. Combined with other conditions (and Terror, etc.), it’d be less than a minute.

However, this also assumes such an extended CC, and that the foe is entirely ineffective at breaking stuns, cleansing, heals and CCing the necro.

All in all, Dhuumfire damage might vary wildly in effectiveness, from a few K/min to nearly 100% foes health/min.

It seems like this wide range is a big part of the issue. Whether the high end of that range gets knocked down by counter-builds or not isn’t yet known. If not, then maybe Anet would have to do something, like increasing its CD from 10-15 or 17 sec, which would knock them max dmg/min down to 8.7-11.5K (again, assuming 1000 cond dmg). Or conversely, lowering burning duration per proc. The question is whether it would still merit being a Grandmaster trait at that point. Probably yes.

You don’t need a high crit chance to trigger it.
You don’t attack just once a second. I run 19% crit chance and carrion in pvp and I have never had any problems triggering dhuum.
I mean I know I may not trigger it each time it’s off the icd but I don’t need that anyway, I need it to proc when I want to burst which it does. Especially since we get fury when we go into ds.