Guild Wars 2

I was writing a post in another thread, and this got me thinking a bit about the conditions we get as a necromancer. Or rather… the lack thereof. Now, burning on the Necromancer does sound nice. At first, anyway, But in situations other than 1 vs. 1, it seems like the Necromancer will just become something that is yet again redundant to Guardians and Engineers and Elementalists with their permanent burns. Even as an engineer it feels like half the time I am redundant in a fight since enemies are already permanently on fire anyway. As a necromancer, this sentiment will just be returned to me.

What I would really like to see is more of the conditions we already have. Currently for our DoTs we have bleeding and… on occasion poison and confusion if we do some very particular tricks to get it / run an asura. But lets think about how well we do our other main DoT, poison, and compare it to how other classes do it.

Engineer: Gets permanent AoE uptime with grenades #4, permanent single target uptime with pistol #2 + condition duration or recharge trait, and permanent cone uptime form pistol #2 with coated bullets.

Thief: gets permanent AoE uptime from choking gas but needs to sustain choking gas to retain the effect if there is no condition duration increases. Also gets uptime from the poison field + projectile finishers. Gets permanent single target uptime with Spider Venom + condition duration bonus or venom recharge or extra strike from venoms. Those are all in the same trait line. Also gets permanent single-target duration as long as auto attack is sustained.

Ranger: Gets permanent single target duration from Stalker’s Strike. Gets AoE permanent duration from Poison Volley, but only at point blank range. Gets permanent AoE poison duration with Viper’s Nest + Trap Potency Trait.

Necromancer: Gets permanent single target uptime only as long as scepter auto attack is sustained. Gets temporary AoE duration with Death Nova and Chillblains.

As far as poison goes, the Necromancer is the worst at it. We’re the only class with poison that really struggles to sustain it against an enemy. Our skills can’t get permanent up-time by themselves, even with recharge reductions and 100% condition duration. While using a conditionmancer in WvW, my opponents are never poisoned because the only source I can really use is Chillblains, which gives me a 56% sustain with my current set up. There is never a situation where just auto-attacking with the scepter is productive or even possible. Corrosive poison cloud is horrible because it stops poisoning as soon as my enemies walk out of it, and it punishes me with weakness for using it. Death Nova competes with boon removal and is only useful when my minions die off.

Being the worst at poison would be understandable if there was some kind of hierarchy with how well classes can use poison, but there isn’t one. It is just 3 classes that have permanent poison, and then there’s the Necromancer who doesn’t get it.

For this, I would recommend a rather simple change to the scepter:

Putrid Curse now does 5 second bleed like the rest of the skills instead of poison, and Feast of Corruption now does a 7 second poison.

And the following change to corrosive poison cloud:

Corrosive Poison Cloud now ticks once every 2 seconds, lasts for 8 seconds, and does 5 seconds of poison per tick.

This would give conditionmancers more access to poison that is on-par with other classes access to poison: Permanent with just a few trait points or traits. The damage will certainly help, and the anti-heal factor will be a big contributor now that it is actually around to be used.

EDIT: Fixed name error.

Now, Necromancers currently have two ways to acquire confusion. Ignoring playing an asura, the two ways both involve using Spectral Wall and a combo finisher. One is to use Nectrotic Transversal or Putrid Explosion in the wall to get Chaos Armor, and then hope that on strike the chaos armor gives confusion. The other is to use Grasping Dead along with the Flesh Worm or Bone Fiend through the field in hopes that it’ll trigger confusion as a combo finisher. Both of these are woefully unpredictable and inadequate.

I’m looking at confusion because, unlike burns, confusion isn’t capped out at 25 stacks just by having an engineer or mesmer on the team. It also isn’t available in some capacity to nearly every class like burn is. No, confusion provides a productive outlit in which a condition necromancer can contribute damage to a foe without having to worry about the condition cap. It isn’t overpowered in WvW anymore, so it would be a fairly safe bet that Necromancers getting confusion would contribute meaningfully to the class without making them overpowered. It isn’t like necromancers can avoid enemy attacks anyway. Also, it makes more sense that a class that raises the dead and exchanges life force might cause confusion instead of causing things to burst into flame somehow.

Unlike with poison, I do not have a specific suggestion for confusion. With the devs working on making trait changes, I would like to suggest there be a trait that can apply confusion in the new Necromancer lineup instead of burning. It would be far better for the class if this was done (especially alongside of the poison change). However, I will leave the creativity up to others and the devs on this issue, as I currently have no ideas how to implement such a thing.

I agree with you. In fact, confusion is more in line with the Spiteful Spirit Necromancer of GW1 than the retaliation we currently have so much access to. I see no reason why scepter 3 couldn’t cause confusion instead of doing extra direct damage per condition. It’d have to keep the life force gain. I have no idea how we could get AoE confusion, but it’d be fantastic. I don’t think burning will do much to help us outside sPvP.

Interesting… although the title is kinda misleading, because you could have made your point regardless of whether or not we get burning.

In favor of your agenda, I think dropping poison from the scepter’s auto attack would be counter productive. Reapplying it more freqeuently (even with a short duration) should give you much more single target uptime than a skill that has a 10 second cooldown, because conditions get cleansed.
And another stack of bleeding on the scepter, with the 25 stack limit… I don’t know if this is such a good idea. So maybe keep Putrid Curse as it is and just add poison to Feast?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Our skills can’t get permanent up-time by themselves, even with recharge reductions and 100% condition duration.

With 100% duration, Ligering Curse and Staff Mastery: Chilblains inflicts 12 seconds of poison on a 16 sec CD. On top of that you just need 1 Putrid Curse (4,5 sec poison).
And let’s not forget the transferable selfinflicted poison on Corrupt Boon.
Epidemic on all of that and you perma poison 5 targets… unless they cleanse.

Also, condition transfer (especially with Putrid Mark) is a rather unique feature of the necromancer. There is only the mesmer’s Arcane Thievery, which transfers 3 conditions like Deathly Swarm.
So when people complain that we don’t have access to a certain condition I always have to think: Putrid Mark.
In PvP this mark gives you access to every condition your opponent has. 1 hour of burning and 10 stacks confusion? Right back at you, and take some Epidemic with that, kthxbye.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see some more conditions for us, but the access to everything is already there.

Remember the days when dots were fire and forget type of stuff but gw2 made it fire and maintain :<.

Even if we get fire its most likely gonna be 1sec so we have to get the annoying 100% duration again wouldnt it be nice if we had bleed or in general dot duration similar to other classes so we could get 1 ekstra tick by having 50% duration increase.

Anyway i dont want fire for the simple reason that conditions in the game is still horrible made with how you share with other classes making POWER the only real choice.

I think that they are adding Burning to give Necro higher DoT damage without hitting the Bleed cap even faster.
…or possibly to help Hybrid builds have their own trick while the all-out Condi builds use Fear.
Or perhaps both.
Having higher Poison uptime would be very nice, but Poison is used more for the healing debuff than the damage.

Confusion could be interesting, though.
Possibly applied by Spectral skills?

We shall see.

Back in Beta, Chilling Darkness applied Confusion instead of Chill (had a different name). We did have traited access to it, but it was apparently deemed OP. Then again, this is still before the Confusion nerf, so now might be a good time for the devs to look at that again.

I thought we were supposed to get an entirely new condition…?

I do not think another condition that does damage is what Necromancer needs. I think the profession needs more access to boons, bursts, and damage avoidance or reduction. Arenanet is trying to make each job like every other but Necromancer has been shorted in some key areas in an ironic attempt to make it unique, yet the same.

Adding burn damage, as if we cannot do that with a sigil, would just increase damage output making the profession stronger. If the dev’s want that, then is this a way around the bleed cap? Will some other skill get trimmed to compensate? When will downed health be fixed? When can I get stability without 30 pts in SR or using an elite? How about Vigor? When will Mistfire Wolf not be so useless?

Kilger.5490:

I thought we were supposed to get an entirely new condition…?

We are, for the new Death Shroud skill that is.

Burning will be from some sort of trait.
We don’t know what kind though.

Edit:

I do not think another condition that does damage is what Necromancer needs. I think the profession needs more access to boons, bursts, and damage avoidance or reduction. Arenanet is trying to make each job like every other but Necromancer has been shorted in some key areas in an ironic attempt to make it unique, yet the same.

Adding burn damage, as if we cannot do that with a sigil, would just increase damage output making the profession stronger. If the dev’s want that, then is this a way around the bleed cap? Will some other skill get trimmed to compensate? When will downed health be fixed? When can I get stability without 30 pts in SR or using an elite? How about Vigor? When will Mistfire Wolf not be so useless?

There’s no sigil that inflicts Burning. (There are runes, but it’s totally not worth it.)
There is sigil of Fire, but that is Power based, doesn’t apply Burning.
Also there’s Sigil of Smoldering, but that increases Burning duration, it doesn’t actually apply any.

I think adding Burning to Necro is a great idea.
However I agree with the rest of your post, more or less.

Downed health really needs to be fixed and the lack of Stability is annoying.
I could see Epidemic getting nerfed… but I hope not.

Is burning the only thing we need? No. Burning does, however, have the chance to fix our offensive problems in Condition builds, and depending on how it is implemented has the chance to help out other build types; just based on how high base damage it is (and low scaling).

No one is saying we don’t need more than just burning. Minions, power builds, support, hybrid, every build we have still needs slight work on the defensive front (and some others), but this is a start to fixing our offense. And if you talk to any of the current top PvP Necros, you’ll see why burning is required.

+1 to Bhawb for the response that so well summed up my feelings. There are so many issues remaining. If Necromancer is supposed to be funtionally equivallent to the other classes, will Arenanet give equivallent skills, or will they strenthen Necro’s forte as compensation? And then there are the bugs.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the profession and am fairly pleased with how it stands but I have no idea how the dev’s intend to increase its popularity. I certainly do not want it to be a 111111 job for six-year-olds.

I’d like to see a larger focus on Chill. I could see some interesting Spite or Soul Reaping traits that give our chill an added effect, allow use to do more damage to chilled enemies. Etc.

Draehl.2681:

I’d like to see a larger focus on Chill. I could see some interesting Spite or Soul Reaping traits that give our chill an added effect, allow use to do more damage to chilled enemies. Etc.

This idea has potential, but may I present a counter. Perhaps something similar to the guild bounty Bookworm Bwikki’s ability could be given to the necro in the form of a trait line.

For those who don’t know, Bwikki is immune to any damage dealt by people afflicted with Chill. I’m not saying they should go that far, but perhaps a 50% reduction in damage by chilled foes or something like that to strengthen our defenses and make Chill more prominent.

The problem with anything like that added to chill is it comes dangerously close to making Chill too powerful for Necromancers. Now, obviously it comes down to exactly what the play with Chill is, but Chill is already arguably the strongest control condition in the game; absolutely gimping mobility, and making abilities have significantly longer CDs. This hampers offensive ability (with the movement speed control and less offensive CDs to use besides auto attacking), defensive ability (can’t escape and defensive CDs are further apart) and high chill uptime completely destroys certain build types.

Maybe something along the lines of “Chilled enemies take damage when moving” – could scale off the higher of your condi/power.

-it burns when i pee disease joke-

flow.6043:

Interesting… although the title is kinda misleading, because you could have made your point regardless of whether or not we get burning.

In favor of your agenda, I think dropping poison from the scepter’s auto attack would be counter productive. Reapplying it more freqeuently (even with a short duration) should give you much more single target uptime than a skill that has a 10 second cooldown, because conditions get cleansed.
And another stack of bleeding on the scepter, with the 25 stack limit… I don’t know if this is such a good idea. So maybe keep Putrid Curse as it is and just add poison to Feast?

Blood Red Arachnid.2493:

Our skills can’t get permanent up-time by themselves, even with recharge reductions and 100% condition duration.

With 100% duration, Ligering Curse and Staff Mastery: Chilblains inflicts 12 seconds of poison on a 16 sec CD. On top of that you just need 1 Putrid Curse (4,5 sec poison).
And let’s not forget the transferable selfinflicted poison on Corrupt Boon.
Epidemic on all of that and you perma poison 5 targets… unless they cleanse.

Also, condition transfer (especially with Putrid Mark) is a rather unique feature of the necromancer. There is only the mesmer’s Arcane Thievery, which transfers 3 conditions like Deathly Swarm.
So when people complain that we don’t have access to a certain condition I always have to think: Putrid Mark.
In PvP this mark gives you access to every condition your opponent has. 1 hour of burning and 10 stacks confusion? Right back at you, and take some Epidemic with that, kthxbye.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see some more conditions for us, but the access to everything is already there.

The biggest issue I’ve had with the auto attacking being the primary source of poison is that, being the 3rd hit of a somewhat slow auto attack, it isn’t ever fired off in a PVP scenario. The auto attack chain is almost always interrupted by something else that needs to be used, or interrupted by enemy control. Because of this, even with the auto attack causing poison my opponents are rarely poisoned by it. The extra bleed added to the auto attack is more or less to put it on the same level as other condition auto attacks, which do apply bleeds with every strike instead of 2/3rds of the time. The rate at which necromancers can inflict bleeds is increased, and this also lets them deal with condition cleansing better.

I must also stress that other classes get permanent poison using a single skill with little assistance. They just need to use pistol #2, or just need to use serpent’s touch. Thieves require a bit of assistance with permanent poison in the venom or practical sustainability with the shortbow. Sure, if you layer up multiple of skills while specced for maximum condition duration you can get permanent poison, but no other class has to go through half that effort to sustain poison. Because of this, thy can devote their stats to others places where it is needed.

The problem with condition transferring is that the ball isn’t in the necromancer’s court. In order to get the extra benefit from confusion or burning, you have to hope your enemy applies that condition in a long enough duration for you to take advantage of it. Because if this, it is a less than reliable form of damage.

Bhawb.7408:

Is burning the only thing we need? No. Burning does, however, have the chance to fix our offensive problems in Condition builds, and depending on how it is implemented has the chance to help out other build types; just based on how high base damage it is (and low scaling).

No one is saying we don’t need more than just burning. Minions, power builds, support, hybrid, every build we have still needs slight work on the defensive front (and some others), but this is a start to fixing our offense. And if you talk to any of the current top PvP Necros, you’ll see why burning is required.

The whole point of the argument is that we should get better use of poison and also access to confusion, since access to confusion would be a more reliable form of DPS in a group environment than burn. Nowhere am I suggesting that these changes above are all that we need.