Guild Wars 2

http://s8.postimg.org/jaq4vb89h/stop_throwing_me_out_of_the_window_o_1069678.png

this is how I feel when talking about the necromancer.

I might not agree with it, but it was a good laugh.

I think its more along the lines of “how can we stop Necromancers from complaining for awhile” then actually trying to improve them out of the fairness of balance.

Taking bets the new trait will inflict burning on critical for 0.45 seconds.

Well having not play gw1 and hence not really caring about it from that perspective I think the guy should be saying that they should look at the class from the core and fix all the bugs and then think what they need to change. With the mechanics we got now I do not think it’s gonna work unless some huge core changes are made, kind of like a huge redesign.

Screw burning wtf

Odds are Burning isn’t going to be noticeable or will be hard to apply and we’ll be pigeon holed into some bunker build if we want to survive/facetank the way Anet wants.

Chesire.9043:

Odds are Burning isn’t going to be noticeable or will be hard to apply and we’ll be pigeon holed into some bunker build if we want to survive/facetank the way Anet wants.

Yes, but us WvW necros will enjoy burning, assuming it doesn’t also break accessing terror (I would even drop master of terror for it if I had to).

Not everyone lives in sPVP, and I am on the edge of my seat waiting for burning.

Now a signet that gives 180 condition damage would be nice to go with it…

I wish I had the option to play like my curse/blood necro from gw1… As it is now it plays nothing like necros from gw1 besides inflicting bleeding at a fast rate… The poisoning is a bit lower then gw1 though….

On a side note they said they didn’t wanna bring back hexes but why did they drop plague I wonder… I loved infecting 1 person in alliance battles and watching every singe person friend and foe get it…. Best condition ever.

Chesire.9043:

Odds are Burning isn’t going to be noticeable or will be hard to apply and we’ll be pigeon holed into some bunker build if we want to survive/facetank the way Anet wants.

I dunno about that so much, the average Conditionmancer has around 1400 condition damage which is 678 burning per second making it 6 times more effective then bleeding.

Most burning in the game has very short duration which makes it alot harder to purify.

I don’t think burning is going to give that much of a impact to necros… Would have rather seen marks with shorter cooldowns except no.2 that one is fine and slightly more damage damage on trigger… 100% condition specs don’t work well in this game with the sheer amount of condition removal so the only way to counter that is just give a little more direct damage and lower cooldowns to make it so you can apply conditions slightly faster then you currently can.

The other thing would be to fix the staff no.1 to track targets since it moves so slow that way you actually have a semi reliable auto attack… It’s good as is for pve but wvw and pvp it’s not going to hit past 600 range due to how slow it travels you can just take a step to the side and avoid it.

Is everyone also forgetting Target the Weak? access to burning would make roaming Necromancers that much more bursty.

Burning doesn’t fix any of the problems the necromancer has without kittening all over the lore of the necromancer. The fact that magic was divided up by the human gods to prevent the complete domination of magic over everything, those who specialize in necromancer have no access to spells that would allow for something like burning. They don’t have the raw destructive force of the Elementalist, they can’t make someone think they are on fire like the mesmer, nor do they have access to the life giving fire of the Guardian.

Fire is both the element of life and destruction. The necromancer is death and cold. Everything that fire is goes against what the necromancer is about. The necromancer is more about snuffing the flame then creating it.

The fix for the necromancer should be thematic to the necromancer and shouldn’t harm the flavor of the profession. For those who play magic the gathering, Imagine if the developers suddenly decided that the color black or red needed Naturalize.

To add to this, rather then give the necromancer burning, it would be much better for us if many of our skills had a reduce in cast time as well as the addition of a completely new condition to help protect our bleeds rather then just destroy what the necromancer is.

Here is a condition that I push for heavily for the necromancer. Disease. Disease was comparable to burning in the first game even with less degen because it was the hardest condition to remove. The advantage of it was that you needed mass removal in order to cleans it. Without mass removal it would easily spread to party members and foes alike. Although the change for GW2 would have to make it so it only spreads to foes and not your own team and to remove the part where it cares about creature type. Other then that, makes its damage 4x bleed and we have an extremely powerful condition that is hard to remove and lasts longer then burning. Its also lore friendly.

Another condition I’ve suggested is giving us a condition that does the same thing that the skill barbs did in GW1. This one is less likely to be implemented in GW2 then disease is, however its effect is extremely attractive. Having a condition that’s damage only triggers on successful hits on your opponent is like a reverse retaliation. Rather then them taking damage for them hitting you, they take damage for you hitting them.

I have plenty of other ideas for the necromancer that would help fix it, however disease is the most attractive.

Also.. Don’t be like the guys in the comic. Burning isn’t thematic to the necromancer and doesn’t solve our problem.

Personally I would’ve gone with more confusion instead of burning. Confusion has defensive play, fits thematically more than burning, and lets the necromancer contribute more condition damage in a group environment. Burning is just yet another thing that will be overwritten by the nearest Guardian or Engineer or Elementalist or Memser or Ranger or Warrior, in that order.

Burning works better for us than confusion. Lore or w/e aside giving us burning is just a small fix to a very specific problem in specific builds; a way to damage with conditions that actually sticks. There is so much condition removal in PvP (and there always will be, because of how destructive conditions are) that burst conditions do much better than trying to slowly stack up 25 bleeds; no one decent will ever let that happen.

The problem is that offensive condition damage builds just aren’t working well on their own in PvP. That is why almost every Necro you will see will be paired with an Engineer (or someone else to “feed” them conditions to work with). That is not good balance, this game is built around classes being at least somewhat self sufficient, and yet our condition builds not only aren’t self sufficient; but they aren’t self sufficient in any way, offensive or defensive.

How do they make offensive condition damage builds more self sufficient? They need to give us a way to burst condition damage. Burning is already just that, low duration high damage. Their other options are giving us abilities like Churning Earth (that stack high bleeds at once), which would require them completely changing around our skills, or making the new condition similar damage to Burning (which, due to it having a secondary effect, makes no sense).

Giving us burning on a trait, which can be controlled, is the easiest way to give one specific group of builds offensive independence. That is all it is. This isn’t the be all end all of our balance, this is nothing to do with defense, this is fixing one problem with one fix; stop making it out to be more than that.

Bhawb.7408:

Burning works better for us than confusion. Lore or w/e aside giving us burning is just a small fix to a very specific problem in specific builds; a way to damage with conditions that actually sticks. There is so much condition removal in PvP (and there always will be, because of how destructive conditions are) that burst conditions do much better than trying to slowly stack up 25 bleeds; no one decent will ever let that happen.

The problem is that offensive condition damage builds just aren’t working well on their own in PvP. That is why almost every Necro you will see will be paired with an Engineer (or someone else to “feed” them conditions to work with). That is not good balance, this game is built around classes being at least somewhat self sufficient, and yet our condition builds not only aren’t self sufficient; but they aren’t self sufficient in any way, offensive or defensive.

How do they make offensive condition damage builds more self sufficient? They need to give us a way to burst condition damage. Burning is already just that, low duration high damage. Their other options are giving us abilities like Churning Earth (that stack high bleeds at once), which would require them completely changing around our skills, or making the new condition similar damage to Burning (which, due to it having a secondary effect, makes no sense).

Giving us burning on a trait, which can be controlled, is the easiest way to give one specific group of builds offensive independence. That is all it is. This isn’t the be all end all of our balance, this is nothing to do with defense, this is fixing one problem with one fix; stop making it out to be more than that.

I’m sorry, but no. It doesn’t fix the problems. Giving us shorter cool downs and quicker cast times on the condition skills will work far better then breaking lore. And No, Confusion is far more lore friendly to the necromancer then burning ever will be. If we can apply 10 stacks of bleeding within a second and easily get up to 20 stacks then apply 10 stacks again as soon as they pop their condition removal, the pressure on them will be far more then adding one or 2 skills/traits that give us burning.

You are wrong, You are very wrong, don’t try and suggest butchering the necromancer’s lore for your make believe fantasy that burning solves everything. Because it solves nothing. Unless anet comes out with something like, the blood stones are starting to crack, and magic is becoming more chaotic, there is absolutely no lore friendly way to make burning not kitten all over the lore. But if they did that the guardian should be able to apply poison and confusion. Even though both those go strictly against the school of preservation.

Lily.1935:

Another condition I’ve suggested is giving us a condition that does the same thing that the skill barbs did in GW1. This one is less likely to be implemented in GW2 then disease is, however its effect is extremely attractive. Having a condition that’s damage only triggers on successful hits on your opponent is like a reverse retaliation. Rather then them taking damage for them hitting you, they take damage for you hitting them.

I have plenty of other ideas for the necromancer that would help fix it, however disease is the most attractive.

Also.. Don’t be like the guys in the comic. Burning isn’t thematic to the necromancer and doesn’t solve our problem.

Totally agree that Burning doesn’t fit us. But I don’t think Condition Necros need love.

The thing you mentioned is nice because it would fit the lore and help many builds. I would love to see a Boon do reverse Retaliation and it could scale with Power like Retaliation giving more damage to power Necros in need of love. We could call it Death Touch or something.

Okay, let me put it this way. I don’t give a crap about lore. I’m not reading a book or watching a move. This isn’t an incredibly interesting story-driven gaming experience. This game would have completely failed already if the best reason to play it was for the storytelling, because the storytelling is bland, generic, and forgettable. I’ve seen the exact same themes and ideas used in story after story; and they aren’t even done well. Who hasn’t seen a world with human gods, ancient evils making enemies unite and fight together, and the ton of other boring elements involved in the story. The universe itself is somewhat interesting, but outside the Sylvari I could find better lore on an amateur submission to a free website (and I have, its all over the place).

This is a game and as such is driven by gameplay. If the gameplay is boring, this game dies, end of story. I realize you have a great love for the lore, and that is cool, I’ve been there with other fantasy universes. But I am not using lore as a basis for my debate; I am coming purely from a gaming standpoint. And when it comes down to it, no one wants to play a game that isn’t working (regardless of its story); otherwise I will just read a book.

If you want to argue that burning doesn’t fix us based on a gameplay standpoint then go ahead. But I’m not going to argue lore when lore means nothing here.

A true fix would be to give us spectral agony from gw1… It was a mursaat skill but lorewise it fits necromancers… It was nothing but a uber version of burning…. I could see that working for power or condition if they actually brought it in…

I think the closest thing we’ve seen to it in gw2 is agony in fractals…

Lily.1935:

Unless anet comes out with something like, the blood stones are starting to crack, and magic is becoming more chaotic, there is absolutely no lore friendly way to make burning not kitten all over the lore.

Well, most people just don’t care about the lore that much.
We are more interested in balance and the overall flavor.

So long as it’s called something like “Underworld Fire” or “Will-o-the-Wisp” as opposed to “Holy fire of holy holiness and pink unicorns” it doesn’t really bother most of us.
(Actually I’d kind of like to have the latter to go with my guild banner! )

We don’t actually know what happened to all of the Blood Stones, but given that each Legendary weapon needs a Bloodstone Shard they definitely aren’t in one piece.
Spoiler for a dungeonArah has the Bloodstone path where you actually find a rather big one, although it could be from the time when the shards were first split. I doubt Miyani has been in Arah, though. Perhaps a stone in Elona was split?

In addition dual Professions of GW1 break the lore anyway, afaik.
Unless being the “chosen” allows you to bend the rules?
I’m not too great at lore, although I do like reading it sometimes.
I think that the stones still allow one to dabble into elements of the other ones, just not master them.

Also Necromancer’s school of magic falls under “Aggression”.
That’s a pretty broad concept to slap skills on.
Who knows how many different never-made Professions could fall under it?

For example Assassin and Mesmer in GW1 fell under the same Bloodstone category, called “Denial”.
Both have ways to teleport (Yet Necro has some too!) but whereas one focuses on interrupts and annoying hexes the other is a close-range glass-cannon that hits people with sharp bits of metal a lot and with style.

And in GW2 Mesmer skills have butterflies whereas Thief skills are all black or smoky.
Granted both have stealth (and Mesmer has Burning, btw) and some similar themes but they are still quite different.

LastDay.3524:

Well, most people just don’t care about the lore that much.
We are more interested in balance and the overall flavor.

However, this is a very strong part of the Guild Wars community that cares a great deal about the lore. And it is extremely important to us. If Arena Net breaks our trust with keeping the game’s lore cohesive, then who is to say they can be trusted to keep the balance of the game.

I use magic the gathering as an example allot because the game’s mechanics are based on strict rules on what each of the colors can and can’t do. The professions are the same way. They aren’t just stats and numbers, the professions have an identity and need to preform and work in their own way. This game was designed with asymmetrical balance in mind. An idea that each profession is equal to one another however they are very different. It is also allowing for a small level of imbalance in the game so players have something to chase in terms of what is the best. If the game is done right, you won’t be able to tell which profession is the best at first glance.

Arena net could just make everyone the same with no difference between anyone. Give everyone the same weapons, same moves, same health. This would make the game far more balanced, but it wouldn’t be fun. Giving the necromancer burning actually starts to blur the line between the necro and Engineer. It isn’t just a lore reason why this is a bad idea, its a bad idea from a game play perspective. A necromancer might be a better condition profession then the engineer in a later update. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever want to take an engineer. The Engineer should be able to do something the necromancer has trouble with or can’t do. And vise versa.

The necromancer has tones of problems, not just with a condition build. Giving them burning doesn’t fix their problem. Burning wont reduce the high recharge on wells, doesn’t fix the long cast time and animation time of their spells, doesn’t solve the problems in death shroud, doesn’t make them any less of a pinball, doesn’t help the necromancer escape from combat, and doesn’t give them the ability to keep someone in the fight if they need to.

The necromancer is getting a new condition and many of these problems are being addressed and fixed. When the Ritualist in GW1 was terrible in PvE arena net didn’t just make it so the rit had a bunch of aoe damage spells or gave them the ability to remove hexes. They stuck to their guns and fixed the profession’s problem with its theme, the spirits.

The necromancer needs to be an individual and needs to function in her own way. Rather then jumping on this ridiculous idea that changing something that is both charming and fundamental about the profession you need to be aware of what the profession represents. What the philosophy of that profession is and use the tools that exist or have existed to really help fix what is wrong.

When I say use history as a teacher, its because its a good learning tool. You don’t need to just use the history of Guild Wars 1 either. You can, again, use magic the gathering. There was a block in magic called Time Spiral that skewed the lines between the colors into what each of them might be able to do. Suddenly Blue could discard, black had wraths, Green had fliers, white could counter spell. From a tournament player perspective this was extremely cool, however this confused the new players and caused massive problems with the game that Wizards is still feeling to this day. People still ask them about the set trying to get them to make cards like that without a real understand of how horrible it was for the balance of the game and for the new players.

You need to understand that balance is a ballet between the flavor as well as the mechanic restrictions of the game. You don’t give a ballerina a chainsaw just because your think it might make it more interesting. No, it doesn’t fit. If you are having trouble with a dance move, don’t completely change the choreography, come at it at a different angle, learn what you did wrong and work to make the theme and style work.

Engineer’s defining features are skills that have unpredictable effects, immobile minions and borrowing things from other Professions.
(That and the Toolbelt)

They use an Elixir to turn Conditions into Boons (much like Guardians), an Elixir to turn into an Elite form from an another Profession and one to gain the Quickness effects from an another Profession.

Just Because the Necromancer has Flesh Wurm (an immobile minion) does not mean they suddenly step on an another Profession’s territory horribly.

Nor does Elementalists having Elemental summons mean they are now reskinned Necros.

Every single Profession except Thief and Necro have Burning.
Giving Necro 1 trait with a few seconds of Burning hardly makes them into Engineer rip-offs.
Removing Death Shroud and replacing it with a renamed Toolbelt would.

As for Well cooldowns and the lack of Stability that’s an entirely different issue and should be addressed separately.
Also the lack of Stability could perhaps even be addressed in some other way, such as simply making the DS take more of a beating, but then you run the risk of making Necro invincible like they used to be.

What this particular change is doing is it’s raising Necro’s Condition damage without impacting the Bleed cap.

All those times you ran a pure-condi build to a boss who had 25 stacks of bleed on him?
At least you have some Burning on them now.
Likewise it will likely add build variety. (Unless it’s so good that everyone runs it…)

…and if it really is that good it’ll probably make Necros more wanted in sPvP.
Majority of the damage will still come from Bleeds, no doubt.
Burning is same as 6 or so stacks of Bleed if memory serves me correct.

On that note I think every profession has Bleed.
Edit: Oh, Guardian doesn’t.

LastDay.3524:

Engineer’s defining features are skills that have unpredictable effects, immobile minions and borrowing things from other Professions.
(That and the Toolbelt)

They use an Elixir to turn Conditions into Boons (much like Guardians), an Elixir to turn into an Elite form from an another Profession and one to gain the Quickness effects from an another Profession.

Just Because the Necromancer has Flesh Wurm (an immobile minion) does not mean they suddenly step on an another Profession’s territory horribly.

Nor does Elementalists having Elemental summons mean they are now reskinned Necros.

Every single Profession except Thief and Necro have Burning.
Giving Necro 1 trait with a few seconds of Burning hardly makes them into Engineer rip-offs.
Removing Death Shroud and replacing it with a renamed Toolbelt would.

As for Well cooldowns and the lack of Stability that’s an entirely different issue and should be addressed separately.
Also the lack of Stability could perhaps even be addressed in some other way, such as simply making the DS take more of a beating, but then you run the risk of making Necro invincible like they used to be.

What this particular change is doing is it’s raising Necro’s Condition damage without impacting the Bleed cap.

All those times you ran a pure-condi build to a boss who had 25 stacks of bleed on him?
At least you have some Burning on them now.
Likewise it will likely add build variety. (Unless it’s so good that everyone runs it…)

…and if it really is that good it’ll probably make Necros more wanted in sPvP.
Majority of the damage will still come from Bleeds, no doubt.
Burning is same as 6 or so stacks of Bleed if memory serves me correct.

On that note I think every profession has Bleed.
Edit: Oh, Guardian doesn’t.

You didn’t listen to a thing I said.

Dakiaris.2798:

I wish I had the option to play like my curse/blood necro from gw1… As it is now it plays nothing like necros from gw1 besides inflicting bleeding at a fast rate… The poisoning is a bit lower then gw1 though….

On a side note they said they didn’t wanna bring back hexes but why did they drop plague I wonder… I loved infecting 1 person in alliance battles and watching every singe person friend and foe get it…. Best condition ever.

The condition was disease. Not plague. But yes, I’ve been pushing for disease to return for a long time. And People seem way too hung up on burning to even consider the fact.

Lily.1935:

You didn’t listen to a thing I said.

I’m sorry if I missed anything.

You said:

They aren’t just stats and numbers, the professions have an identity and need to preform and work in their own way. This game was designed with asymmetrical balance in mind. An idea that each profession is equal to one another however they are very different. It is also allowing for a small level of imbalance in the game so players have something to chase in terms of what is the best. If the game is done right, you won’t be able to tell which profession is the best at first glance.

My reply:

Engineer’s defining features are skills that have unpredictable effects, immobile minions and borrowing things from other Professions.
(That and the Toolbelt)

They use an Elixir to turn Conditions into Boons (much like Guardians), an Elixir to turn into an Elite form from an another Profession and one to gain the Quickness effects from an another Profession.

Just Because the Necromancer has Flesh Wurm (an immobile minion) does not mean they suddenly step on an another Profession’s territory horribly.

Nor does Elementalists having Elemental summons mean they are now reskinned Necros.

Every single Profession except Thief and Necro have Burning.
Giving Necro 1 trait with a few seconds of Burning hardly makes them into Engineer rip-offs.
Removing Death Shroud and replacing it with a renamed Toolbelt would.

What I didn’t address here was your claim that a Profession should be the best at something.
I don’t agree with it if you put it in a term like “Condition Damage, period.”.
If you put it as “most mobile” or “standing still while getting hit” or “takes the most damage before dying” then I have no problem with that.

You also said:

The necromancer has tones of problems, not just with a condition build. Giving them burning doesn’t fix their problem. Burning wont reduce the high recharge on wells, doesn’t fix the long cast time and animation time of their spells, doesn’t solve the problems in death shroud, doesn’t make them any less of a pinball, doesn’t help the necromancer escape from combat, and doesn’t give them the ability to keep someone in the fight if they need to.

The necromancer is getting a new condition and many of these problems are being addressed and fixed. When the Ritualist in GW1 was terrible in PvE arena net didn’t just make it so the rit had a bunch of aoe damage spells or gave them the ability to remove hexes. They stuck to their guns and fixed the profession’s problem with its theme, the spirits.

To that I replied:

As for Well cooldowns and the lack of Stability that’s an entirely different issue and should be addressed separately.
Also the lack of Stability could perhaps even be addressed in some other way, such as simply making the DS take more of a beating, but then you run the risk of making Necro invincible like they used to be.

What this particular change is doing is it’s raising Necro’s Condition damage without impacting the Bleed cap.

All those times you ran a pure-condi build to a boss who had 25 stacks of bleed on him?
At least you have some Burning on them now.
Likewise it will likely add build variety. (Unless it’s so good that everyone runs it…)

…and if it really is that good it’ll probably make Necros more wanted in sPvP.
Majority of the damage will still come from Bleeds, no doubt.
Burning is same as 6 or so stacks of Bleed if memory serves me correct.

In case I need to clarify the part about “while fitting the Profession” I already told you I think Fire fits Necro just fine so long as it’s given an appropriate name.

If there’s something else you wanted me to address do let me know and I will do so.

Bhawb.7408:

Okay, let me put it this way. I don’t give a crap about lore. I’m not reading a book or watching a move. This isn’t an incredibly interesting story-driven gaming experience. This game would have completely failed already if the best reason to play it was for the storytelling, because the storytelling is bland, generic, and forgettable. I’ve seen the exact same themes and ideas used in story after story; and they aren’t even done well. Who hasn’t seen a world with human gods, ancient evils making enemies unite and fight together, and the ton of other boring elements involved in the story. The universe itself is somewhat interesting, but outside the Sylvari I could find better lore on an amateur submission to a free website (and I have, its all over the place).

This is a game and as such is driven by gameplay. If the gameplay is boring, this game dies, end of story. I realize you have a great love for the lore, and that is cool, I’ve been there with other fantasy universes. But I am not using lore as a basis for my debate; I am coming purely from a gaming standpoint. And when it comes down to it, no one wants to play a game that isn’t working (regardless of its story); otherwise I will just read a book.

If you want to argue that burning doesn’t fix us based on a gameplay standpoint then go ahead. But I’m not going to argue lore when lore means nothing here.

Then why are you playing the profession? Without context for what the profession is or their theme of how they do things, I don’t see a reason to even touch any of the professions. If your goal is to optimize and be as powerful as possible, lore be kitten ed, I would suggest playing another attrition profession like the engineer or ranger. You basically have just told me, You have no reason to play a necromancer.

And from a “Pure” gameplay stand point, it still doesn’t work considering the necromancer is supposed to be an attrition profession and keep the fights long. In which case they should be able to apply bleeds far easier and keep the pressure much longer and build death shroud much faster to out last. Burning will make the fights shorter and it cuts a core strategy that they where built around. Which is keeping a player(or players if you are good) occupied for a longer stretch of time litterally wasting their time with you, locking them in an unnecessary combat for them that allows your team to take control of a situation.

How about we give them Disease? A condition from GW1 that would spread to other creatures only change it in GW2 so its 4x bleed damage and only spreads to foes. It wouldn’t be as strong as burning, but it would be flavorful. You would be happy because you have one more powerful damage condition on top of your bleeds and poison. I would be happy because its a return of an old favorite of mine, the devs would be happy because they don’t have to listen to us argue. Everybody wins!

Even if you don’t agree with everything else I say. Can we at least agree that disease in GW2 would be freaking awesome?

LastDay.3524:

In case I need to clarify the part about “while fitting the Profession” I already told you I think Fire fits Necro just fine so long as it’s given an appropriate name.

If there’s something else you wanted me to address do let me know and I will do so.

It doesn’t. The idea of “Spirit flames” although spirit fits the meaning of necromancy in the real world, necromancy has a different meaning in the Guild Wars universe. Necromancy, in Guild wars refers exclusively to the dead and dying. Not the after life. The after life is the ritualist’s domain. The necromancer deals in the here and now, where as the ritualist deals in other worldly beings.

If you look at 3 of the GW1 profession you see a pattern that I personally would rather not break. We have the mesmer which is mind. We have the necromancer which is body. And we have ritualist which is soul. Although the lines are blurred sometimes, they aren’t blurred so much that a ritualist ability, such as spirit flames, would ever be usable by a necromancer.

I can justify giving the necromancer confusion. The idea that the necromancer decays a part of their foe’s brain causing them to become more irrational, violent or even passive is well within the realms of the necromancer.

How these lines are blurred, sometimes the necromancer does have the ability to dabble in spirits. However these are spirits that linger in the physical world who don’t pass over to the mists.

Also. Disease. I’m going to repeat myself again. Giving them disease is far more lore friendly then giving them burning. The necromancer doesn’t want to watch you burn, that is the elementalist. They want to watch you rot.

If you have ever listen to Eve in GW1, necromancers are very sadistic. She wanted to drag corpses into the shiverpeaks just so she could watch them rot in a new environment. Necromancer don’t like destruction. It isn’t their cup of tea. They like to watch things slowly die. A short scream might be satisfying for a moment, but looking at the quiet dread in their foes eyes as they slowly drift away, as their body withers before them brings them oh so much more pleasure. They get to watch the show. see the agony on their face as their magic slowly works into their system. The absolute pain of necrosis spreading through the body. The glee they feel while watching the parasites work their way into their skin. The fool who decided to cross them begging them to just end it, only to suffer for what seems to be hours.

Burning them alive is too quick. It destroys the body way too fast and they get no pleasure from seeing them just wither. They never get a chance to root around in the body, or use them as their undead slaves because the fire makes their bodies useless. Its just so messy and impractical for the necromancer on the go.

Necromancer is just a Profession.

Eve would no doubt watch people die slowly in lovely agony!
Trahearne wouldn’t.
He’s a boring character but well known and thus a good example for this.
Master of Whispers from GW1 was quite different as well.
Seemed like the quiet, planning thinker type.

As for the Body thing, well…
If you look at the Underworld Portals at Godlost Swamp the Necromancer’s theme colors are very similar if not exactly the same as those of the portals and the minions coming from them.
You might think I’m grasping straws just looking at colors.
Well it gets stranger.

Shadow Fiend shares it’s skin with the Shades coming from the Underworld Portals.
Shadow Fiend also used the be a Death Shroud skill.
Maybe Deathshroud and Netherworld are linked together somehow?
Bargaining with Lifeforce somehow?
It even makes edges of your screen green and your character black, like the portal and it’s center.

In addition “Spectral” is a synonym for “Ghostly, Spiritual”.
Thus for every Spectral skill you could replace the word with “Ghostly” or “Spiritual.”
Ghostly Grasp, Ghostly Armor, Ghostly Walk.

It just doesn’t sound as cool.
If you use “Spiritual” then you end up with a rather silly sounding Grasp and a movement skill from WC3/WoW!
Edit: Actually Spirit, not Spiritual for the Warcraft thing. :p

I dunno about the part of your post about the Mists…
Not sure how it relates to the Underworld (or not!) when it comes to a Necro using spirits.

Aside from Curses Necros in GW1 were rather physical though, at least compared to Spiritualists.

I agree with Lily. Maybe add a new condition that has the same effect as Burning but labeled differently. Decay perhaps?

Azraeel.1238:

I agree with Lily. Maybe add a new condition that has the same effect as Burning but labeled differently. Decay perhaps?

That probably won’t happen for technical/gameplay reasons.
Adding multiple graphical effects/icons for Conditions doing the same thing would just add more Conditions for people to memorize.
Plus stacking that copy of Burning+Regular Burning = Same as 12 stacks of Bleeding.

Something like Disease (as stated by Lily) could happen simply because it’d be a Condition that’s different from the others.
Heck, it could even be on the new DS5 skill for all we know!

Necromancers as a whole would be better off if ability activation times and cool-downs we given an in depth balance pass rather than trying to shoehorn burning in (even though I’d love torch as a weapon option).

Make it so that we can reliably keep condition pressure going on an enemy even if they cleanse would do a lot for condition builds on the offensive front.

Another thing would be quality of life adjustments like allowing us to see Death-shroud ability cool-down timers in normal mode and regular ability cool-down timers while in Death-shroud would also help immensely while not overtly increasing the top end power potential of the class as well.

Edit: or hell, they could do a two for one improvement and make the Life blast abilities automatically corrupt one boon per hit. That alone would be a great help for condition builds in using Death shroud as anything other than a HP sponge to ablate hits.

LastDay.3524:

Aside from Curses Necros in GW1 were rather physical though, at least compared to Spiritualists.

Ritualist.. And truth be told most the necromancer’s skills had to do with physical. Mark of pain builds where a thing, Order builds where a thing for a while. Minions where physical. Promoting physical interaction was something the necromancer promoted allot. I personally believe that this should be explored a bit more in GW2. Especially seeing as Orders kinda fell out of favor in GW1 and could really bring something new to the table that was long forgotten. Giving the necromancer a vampiric aura that they could grant to allies allowing them to steal life on top of their attack sounds extremely cool and flavorful to me.

The necromancer tends to get hit allot. They don’t have ways to become invulnerable, block or gain vigor. And I personally don’t believe just giving them this is the way to go either. I would like to see arena net promote more of a physical contact strategy along with party buff and foe debuffs that incentivise your party to attack like blood thirsty dogs. I personally don’t feel that vulnerability and might is enough for the necromancer in this strategy. That a Barbs like effect and a Order of Vampirism effect on the necromancer would promote more of a support direction without being identical to lets say a Engineer or Guardian support.

Also.. Screw Trahearne. Really dull character. And if you read some of the Master of Whisper’s battle quotes… He is pretty sadistic. The sylvari have more of a childish wonder about necromancy then the other races. Necromancers are usually looked down on in the other races because of their practices in death. As stated by arena net.

Although I am disappointed that your profession didn’t have anything to do with your story and didn’t effect how people reacted to you. But that is a completely different topic for a completely different time.

So necros dealing with fire are forbidden, but shooting unicorns and rainbows is cool?

Lily.1935:

The necromancer has tones of problems, not just with a condition build. Giving them burning doesn’t fix their problem. Burning wont reduce the high recharge on wells, doesn’t fix the long cast time and animation time of their spells, doesn’t solve the problems in death shroud, doesn’t make them any less of a pinball, doesn’t help the necromancer escape from combat, and doesn’t give them the ability to keep someone in the fight if they need to.

Again, don’t make out Burning to be more than it is. It is to address a singular issue with a type of builds; we need better “bursty” conditions.

Lily.1935:

Then why are you playing the profession? Without context for what the profession is or their theme of how they do things, I don’t see a reason to even touch any of the professions. If your goal is to optimize and be as powerful as possible, lore be kitten ed, I would suggest playing another attrition profession like the engineer or ranger. You basically have just told me, You have no reason to play a necromancer.

And from a “Pure” gameplay stand point, it still doesn’t work considering the necromancer is supposed to be an attrition profession and keep the fights long. In which case they should be able to apply bleeds far easier and keep the pressure much longer and build death shroud much faster to out last. Burning will make the fights shorter and it cuts a core strategy that they where built around. Which is keeping a player(or players if you are good) occupied for a longer stretch of time litterally wasting their time with you, locking them in an unnecessary combat for them that allows your team to take control of a situation.

How about we give them Disease? A condition from GW1 that would spread to other creatures only change it in GW2 so its 4x bleed damage and only spreads to foes. It wouldn’t be as strong as burning, but it would be flavorful. You would be happy because you have one more powerful damage condition on top of your bleeds and poison. I would be happy because its a return of an old favorite of mine, the devs would be happy because they don’t have to listen to us argue. Everybody wins!

Even if you don’t agree with everything else I say. Can we at least agree that disease in GW2 would be freaking awesome?

Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the idea of Necromancers, I have played the class since GW1 because I tend to love “summon” classes; I spent an entire summer playing MM in FA/AB. And I do completely agree that they need to keep the Necromancer theme going, it is why I am all for them not giving us boons and things of that nature to balance us, but balancing us with our own unique mechanics. And really, Rangers and Engineers play very differently than we do. Yes they have a few similar mechanics, but it just isn’t the same.

What I mean about lore is specifically that I don’t think lore should be the limiting factor here, I think gameplay should. Necromancer’s have a unique gameplay that needs to be addressed, and Burning is an easy (please note that it isn’t the only way, which I’ll address shortly) to do that. Would I like Disease? Hell yeah, but it doesn’t fit with their design philosophy to keep the condition/boon system smaller. I actually hope Disease is being looked at for DS 5.

Burning is just the easiest and most accessible answer for the problem. It doesn’t have to be implemented in a way to make fights faster, it is just a way to make a condition that is guaranteed to do decent damage (like Terror), and without changing a lot. Give us very short burnings of 1-2 seconds on some proc (not Rabid dependent please), and it just lets us have our condition damage actually be effective. If they keep the access to it not super easy (to where we can just spam burning after burning) then it fixes us but keeps up with the idea of long fights.

I’m curious how our burning is going to match up with Guardian and Elementalist burning on targets when they have quite a bit of access to it as it is..

Will it not end up the same way Bleeding is now with other professions being able to apply it better than us? Of course this is just speculation since we don’t know yet how much access we’ll have or how long the duration will be on it. On that note, how does the Burning condition compare to the Bleeding condition in account to who the damage/duration goes too? Since Bleeding has a stack limit and burning just stacks in duration, I’m assuming that only one person can apply it at a time; has this been tested?

shizo.5698:

So necros dealing with fire are forbidden, but shooting unicorns and rainbows is cool?

Yes. Because that is a weapon’s ability to do that and not the user. I wouldn’t be opposed to runes or sigils that cause burning. Because that doesn’t break lore.

Bhawb.7408:

Burning is just the easiest and most accessible answer for the problem.

Its actually the laziest answer to a problem and doesn’t fix the problem. It isn’t a god send, answer. Its a hollow shell that doesn’t address the problem. If you want to see examples of similar situations look at the long history of magic the gather. The game is a superb teaching tool for what to and what not to do. They have screwed up so many times and done things right so many times, you can find a situation in there history that applies to other games. They even have an example for this exact situation with necros and burning. Its a block called time spiral.

Necromancer has problems with maintaining bleeds and a single second of burning will help the damage a little bit, but wont fix the bleed stack problem. Shorter cast times and cool down will go a long way in fixing the problems. And upping the number of bleeds for existing skills will put their damage at far higher then just adding burning.

There is one way that is flavorfully friendly to the necromancer that they could get burning. And that is through sigils and runes. If you have a 1-2 second burn on weapon swap, and/or a 1 second burn on critical, this starts to give them this condition without actually changing the nature of their magic. Or maybe a rune that burns foes once you drop below 80-50% health. Giving us alternative ways to burn that doesn’t use our traits or skills is a far better way of doing things. Sure it gives other professions more access to burning. However, who that helps would be condition profession that have a bit of trouble already.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Insidious_Parasite
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Parasitic_Bond
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Spiteful_Spirit
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Verata%27s_Gaze.jpg
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Well_of_Silence
These are necro skills..

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_necromancer_skills

These arn’t.

Iow,
The ability to play with your healthpool is gone, utterly gone.
The ability to play with applied curses hexes is gone..utterly gone..
The ability to control your minions and play with both of the abilities above on your minions has not excisted in gw2. in fact minion control in gw2 is utterly #@$%

So yeah, there you have it. necro reduced to a hp tank with some aoe not supporting its own health/minion/pool/condition trough skills.

Minion control Is far, far better in GW2 than GW1. In GW1, you had to hope that your minions didn’t see a random mob and decide to go beat that down, leaving you with half your army when you want them. If you had a boss with mobs around it, you could guarantee your army would not attack the boss.

In GW2, we can determine what the minions attack with ease as well as command them to do specific things. That and there is the fortunate side effect of a dead necro’s minions not turning on his allies.

The tradeoff, of course, is in the firepower department. But anyone who says that controlling your minions was better in GW1 has clearly never played one of the two games.

I remember being able to trade off minions for eachother, apply a specific condition on a minion, blow it up, create a new one trough the one dying, consuming a minion, telepoting to a minion, rallying a minion from corpses teleporting to corpses creating minions, directing conditions to a minion, feasting of the conditions on a minion, having a minionpool, selecting specific minions,minions not despawning, stealing minions, uncontrolling minions so they go rampant, have minions stalk someone across the map, a high minion cap and the ability to actually keep producing minions

In GW2 minins are noting more then hollow skins that go pop the second they hit.
yes in GW2 you can specificly target a player and send a minion up to him to apply a condition.. but thats about it.

Dude, you must be thinking about multiple games.

You were never able to do the following:
Teleport to a minion
Feast on conditions of a minion (Foul Feast didn’t quite work like that)

Things you can still do in GW2:
blow up a minion
consuming a minion
create minions
have a minion pool
transfer conditions to minions
minions not despawning
select specific minions

The removal of the corpse limitation was a very good change as minion masters no longer have to wait for someone else to kill something before they can start doing anything. The removal of all corpse-affecting stuff was likewise a good change.

Uncontrolled minions was also a good thing to remove, as it would have made the necro even more of a liability to groups than it is now (especially in WvW).

I am not saying that minions are better now than in GW1. I preferred the snowballing army, personally, but they are waaaay easier to actually control in GW2.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Dude, you must be thinking about multiple games.

You were never able to do the following:
Teleport to a minion
Feast on conditions of a minion (Foul Feast didn’t quite work like that)

Things you can still do in GW2:
blow up a minion
consuming a minion
create minions
have a minion pool
transfer conditions to minions
minions not despawning
select specific minions

The removal of the corpse limitation was a very good change as minion masters no longer have to wait for someone else to kill something before they can start doing anything. The removal of all corpse-affecting stuff was likewise a good change.

Uncontrolled minions was also a good thing to remove, as it would have made the necro even more of a liability to groups than it is now (especially in WvW).

I am not saying that minions are better now than in GW1. I preferred the snowballing army, personally, but they are waaaay easier to actually control in GW2.

There are major advantages and disadvantages to the changes they made to the minions for GW2. I’m on the side of more disadvantages, but I’m coming from a PvE perspective. I do understand that from a WvW perspective the old style of minion master could easily create a very dominant strategy. Especially if they keep the individual resource concept with minions. Could you imagine a group of 10 Necros all waiting for a single moa to die to double there numbers? That wouldn’t be okay in WvW. It would be a absolute nightmare both for the server and for balance reasons.

That said, what the Minion master has lost is long term sustainable minions. Which this could be fixed if the minion skills where changed a bit. I don’t personally agree that minion’s stats should be completely independent from the user. Although this helps with low level necromancer who want to level. Because they will basically have minions just as strong as if a level 80 was using them, minus the traits sometimes. Beyond that it hurts the minions more then helps.

So that said, some things i would personally change about the minions would be this. Minion skills recharge after they are cast. Minion skills right now don’t start their recharge until after they have died. This often means that you will have a large amount of down time when your damage is cut in half, probably more then half seeing as you are spect defensively. Not only that you lose your utility. So if You are wandering and all you minions suddenly get killed, with this change you might only have a short down time to recast them. Granted if they get killed just as quickly again, you are still out minions.

The second change i would make to them is change how there stats work. I personally feel their stats should be dependent on your stat choices, much like a mesmer’s clones(although to be honest I don’t know if the mesmer clones precision is the only thing that changes). This will allow the developers to open up new traits to minions that can take advantage of varying stat differences. Such as a group of high precision minions or rather tanky minions.

The third change I would make is more of a skill change then a large minion change. Taste of death in GW2 is kinda a terrible skill. Because you require that Blood fiend is still alive, you can lose your heal rather easily. I personally would remove blood fiend all together and just have the skill be taste of death which would heal you and heal you for extra if you sacrificed a minion.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself though. Truth be told, you can do more with minions in GW1 then GW2. Just because the individual minion has more skills doesn’t mean you can do as much.

But this is my opinion.

I agree totally with having the recharge start when the minion is summoned. However, I also feel like this should be a split between PvP and WvW/PvE. Minions are surprisingly decent in PvP anyway, so giving them pracitcally 100% uptime in fights there would be overbearing and probably too powerful. In WvW, however, they die so quickly due to the mass amount of AoE that they would need the recharge to start on-summon just for them to have any decent uptime. In PvE, the minion uptime is kind of a non-issue as they don’t die that quickly (save Fleshie when you wander near water)

I do not agree with minion stats being connected to yours, but I do believe that there should be more trait options to boost the minion stats. I would love to see a Precision boosting trait for minons (perhaps adding an “on-crit” effect for them), as well as a toughness boosting trait. You wouldn’t be able to get all of the minion traits, but customization could be fun.

Taste of Death should be changed to just automatically activate on blood fiend death. There would still be times to manually pop it (you’re about to die, but your blood fiend is still doing all right), but it also wouldn’t leave you with nothing at all for a heal if they kill your fiend first.

How about

Frost burn
Soul burn
Flesh eating disease “feels like burning”

Fire isn’t the only thing that burns

Swamurabi.7890:

How about

Frost burn
Soul burn
Flesh eating disease “feels like burning”

Fire isn’t the only thing that burns

you missed the obvious – Acid!
Like, festering, putrid bile organic acid of nastiness.

Swamurabi.7890:

How about

Frost burn
Soul burn
Flesh eating disease “feels like burning”

Fire isn’t the only thing that burns

Soul burn is a ritualist thing. Frost it doesn’t really work with that. You would want to just have a trait that makes chilled cause damage. Which would make more sense. just call the trait frost bite. Flesh eating disease, have you seen my disease post? Also flesh eating diseases often cause large amounts of bleeding. So it doesn’t work there either. They are also very slow while burning tends to be quick. Burning can also be used as Cauterization which stops blood loss.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I agree totally with having the recharge start when the minion is summoned. However, I also feel like this should be a split between PvP and WvW/PvE. Minions are surprisingly decent in PvP anyway, so giving them pracitcally 100% uptime in fights there would be overbearing and probably too powerful. In WvW, however, they die so quickly due to the mass amount of AoE that they would need the recharge to start on-summon just for them to have any decent uptime. In PvE, the minion uptime is kind of a non-issue as they don’t die that quickly (save Fleshie when you wander near water)

I do not agree with minion stats being connected to yours, but I do believe that there should be more trait options to boost the minion stats. I would love to see a Precision boosting trait for minons (perhaps adding an “on-crit” effect for them), as well as a toughness boosting trait. You wouldn’t be able to get all of the minion traits, but customization could be fun.

Taste of Death should be changed to just automatically activate on blood fiend death. There would still be times to manually pop it (you’re about to die, but your blood fiend is still doing all right), but it also wouldn’t leave you with nothing at all for a heal if they kill your fiend first.

I agree with you on most parts. The only thing is the taste of death part. The heals is still bad if that happens. I would like to see more skills that sacrifice minions and increase the number of minions that can be summoned so we can have more effects on killing them. But I really just want to spam minions and be the zerg.

But yes, I do understand for balance reasons for PvP. However, if the minions are effected by your stats that would change the fact that the masters usually bring the tankiest gear possible. So I would say that it needs to be experimented with before we can determine for sure.

..make the weapons have more powerful attacks with lifeforce. How is this so hard?
Now lifeforce is useful and the weapon skills won’t be as lackluster.

Sebyos.4089:

Screw burning wtf

I agree. Enough with the burning. I want Zombify! Raise dead players and make them charge their allies and spam #1 until they are dead, again. They could be powered by LF.

I’m really not sure how I’d feel about burning. I almost feel like it’d be OP if combined with the Terror trait. My fear ticks for about ~1k, and my bleeds for just under 100. I have to imagine burning ticks, 6 stacks of bleeds (a reasonable amount to have on a target), and the super damage/cc that comes with fear might be too much to bring into an SPvP match.