Guild Wars 2

Why don’t Necro’s get this sort of attention?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/ranger/Ranger-update/first

We have pages and pages of bugs, issues & suggestions and there is no communication with the Necro community whatsoever.

Customer Support tells us to post our issues here, but what’s the point in that if they’re just being ignored.

Now having 3 level 80s, i can confidently say that the Necromancer is not even in the same ball park (especially compared with my Mesmer).

Not asking for immediate buffs, just some communication to let us know where we stand.

Avi.

They just want the meta-game to settle before making any huge changes, they are aware of the bugs and are actively working on them as you have seen many have been fixed, like DS trait line actually works now, also Many devs and I are worried about how strong necros will be once players have mastered Death Shroud.

Tons and tons of bugs in that bug list have been fixed…it’s woefully out of date. I’ve been thinking about starting another bug thread, actually. Not sure where hashes has gone to.

We don’t get a lot of red posts but they do read the forums and they are fixing stuff.

I really have to continue to laugh at the stupid “once players master death shroud” line. Seriously, death shroud in its current form has been “mastered” inside and out. Thousands of players have spent hundreds of hours in WvW & PvP, attained R50+, tried every build under the sun, spent dozens of hours testing numbers and damage equations on dummies and against friends. Anyone who thinks there is anything left to “master” has obviously not done any of these things, but still claims to be “worried” for some unspecified reason.

The bread and butter of the necro is they are a semi-effective class with low burst damage, low mobility, extremely limited build options, little synergy in their traits, and still have a LOT of bugs that haven’t been addressed since BWE’s.

Does all that make necros a bad class? Not at all! I still enjoy mine in many situations, but unfortunately, they have a fundamental flaw that has been programmed on purpose. They are an “attrition” based class in a game that is not at all friendly to attrition. Killing things faster and having more mobility is pretty much always the better way to go. My glass cannon mesmer is significantly more durable in WvW than my bunker necro. Why? Mobility and Control. My mesmer hits harder, kills faster, is harder to hit, impossible to keep up with if I want to run, and brings a LOT more group utility with portal, time warp, & mirrored feedback.

Necros are the MMO equivalent of a “jack of all trades, master of none”. Guardians & Eles are better bunkers & healers, warriors & thieves are better dps, mesmers are better control & support. You can do any of those things in a pinch, but I can’t think of anything really unique that a necro brings to the table. ANet could possibly make us more effective at controlling group/enemy conditions, but conditions are so easy to remove and re-apply that it degenerates into a frustrating exercise in herding cats after a while. I’ve found it’s usually just better to focus on DPS and crippling/chilling runners.

The real truth of the matter is there is nothing essentially broken about the implementation of necro abilities, it’s the essential core design that is flawed. That is why we receive so little attention… I seriously don’t think they even know what to do to fix the issue.

Mesmers are most definetly better support my mesmer is specced as a mantra healer and I get 2.7k heals every time i cast mantra of pain, no small amount and I’m not in exoctic healing power gear yet.

I think if the 50 pct leaching trait made your life steals heal your allies as well necro’s could start getting some decent support going too.

but yeah necro’s would need close to 4k toughness to match the survivability of classes that can just run away from fights.

we dont get anything like that because they have no idea what to do with the class. that or you just need to learn how to master DS

^ This (at Zakar’s post)!

Another big part of the problem – in my opinion – is the Necro is an attrition class in a game in which attrition is no longer effective. Zakar explained it perfectly from the standpoint of how the Necro compares to other classes. I will explain it from the standpoint of how the elimination of curses and hexes (a GW1 mechanic) have undermined the attrition capabilities that are core to the Necromancer class.

In GW1, the Necromancer had access to a large number of curses/hexes which applied various effects; virtually all of them focused on dealing low but sustained damage over time. Furthermore, many of these curses/hexes had a duel effect of benefiting the Necromancer through life siphoning, health regeneration, or damage mitigation.

Beyond the mere mechanics involved, there was the deeper psychological game of wearing your opponent down through a protracted battle. I specialized in Blood Magic. One of the self-heals of that line was a spell called “Blood Renewal” in which a Necromancer would sacrifice 15% of their health now to be healed for ~ 200 health (in a game where max health averaged ~500 health) 7 seconds from now. The effect from an enemy’s standpoint was to watch the Necromancer get closer and closer to death only to be demoralized at witnessing them instantly jump back up to 50% or more of their full health. Coupled with additional life siphoning hexes and direct life stealing spells, it made for a very difficult-to-kill class. The Blood Necro danced on the edge of death, able to return from the brink and jump back to nearly full health if played skillfully.

GW2 eliminated curses/hexes. I’m not even suggesting this is a bad thing; the curse/hex mechanic wasn’t without its problems. However, it removed the primary mechanic by which the Necromancer survived and applied attrition. Without curses/hexes, the GW2 Necromancer is a slow, cumbersome class at the mercy of enemy crowd control skills against which they have few counters. In the face of a single, long-recharge self-heal (and, yes, compared to GW1 healing, GW2’s healing is slow) and pitiful life siphoning (assuming a Necro who has chosen to specialize in Blood Magic), the Necro’s larger health pool is no compensation; it simply delays their defeat by an extra one or two hits.

Conditions are not an equivalent replacement for curses/hexes. Curses/hexes in GW1 were not easy to remove given how many could be stacked against an opponent and how few curse/hex removal skills existed in the game. Furthermore, conditions lack the second aspect of Necro curses/hexes; the direct benefit to the caster. To illustrate, let’s compare GW1’s Insidious Parasite to GW2’s Confusion. Insidious Parasite causes the Necromancer to siphon health from an enemy with each successful melee attack that the opponent lands. The enemy is harmed while the Necromancer is healed. With GW2’s Confusion, an enemy is harmed each time they use a skill; similar to Insidious Parasite. However, there is no equivalent benefit to the caster. I realize Confusion is a Mesmer-specific condition. However, since the mechanics of the two skills are similar, the comparison is valid for the sake of this conversation.

In GW2, there is no mechanic permitting the Necromancer to directly harm an opponent while simultaneously benefiting/healing themselves save for the dagger main-hand skill Life Siphon and the pitiful amount of life siphoning (which does not scale with healing power, by the way) that comes from the Blood Magic trait line. In short, one of the primary mechanics which provided for the Necomancer’s survivability in GW1 has been eliminated in GW2 with no replacement to compensate.

This isn’t an argument in favor of reinstating the curse/hex mechanic of GW1. However, there is room for using existing GW2 mechanics to provide the same benefit of the curses/hexes as existed in GW1. For example, if specializing in Blood Magic a minor trait would grant life siphoning on every hit the Necromancer takes. In Death Magic, the Necromancer could have a trait that heals them every time a minion dies or every time a minion deals damage to a foe. The Curses line may cause opponents to suffer the weakness condition every time they damage the Necromancer (subject to a cool down between applications, perhaps). A signet could have a passive effect of low but constant life siphoning from the Necromancer’s current target. All spectral skills could heal the Necromancer for some amount when they expire or life siphon from an enemy while in spectral form. Aura skills could be added which achieve similar effects (e.g. Aura of the Reaper, Aura of the Vampire, Aura of the Horde, Aura of the Corrupter, etc.).

The Death Shroud mechanic could be completely redone so that the DS skills replace the weapon skills. As there are only four DS skills, the 5th skill slot could be replaced with a DS-specific skill tied to the weapon the Necromancer was wielding immediately prior to entering DS (a suggestion which has been made by others in previous posts). This 5th skill would be based on the simultaneous harm-an-opponent/heal-or-otherwise-benefit-the-Necro principle.

I realize some of my suggestions above may not work as a result of balance issues or unintended consequences. So before trying to pick them apart one-by-one through a too-literal reading of my suggestions, realize they are simply offered as a means of getting the devs to think about how the “attrition” can be added back into this “attrition class”.

Before anyone counters with, “The Necromancer IS an attrition class; just use conditions!”, my argument is I don’t want to be pigeon-holed into being a Conditionmancer. I don’t like conditions; their durations are too short and they are too easily removed or otherwise mitigated. I also don’t find them an enjoyable way to play. In a game that was marketed as eliminating the Trinity, allowing players choices, and lauding their MMO Manifesto, then I should have the freedom to choose to be a Blood Necro with equally effective attrition capabilities (albeit on a single target, perhaps) as a Conditionmancer.

Lastly, this isn’t a QQ-I-want-my-GW1-necro-back post. I realize they are two different games. However, even keeping the discussion focused squarely on GW2, Necromancers aren’t really living up to being the attrition class the devs claimed them to be. Nor is it a learn-to-play issue. I do quite well despite stubbornly clinging to my Blood Magic Necro; I solo most PvE content, tank quite nicely in the dungeons, and am almost always in the top 1 or 2 spot in my sPvP rounds while claiming many of the top rewards for most captures, most kills, assaulter, defender, etc. So I’m doing well with the tools at my disposal; but that comes from 7 years of practice with GW1. But the class is most certainly not the hard-to-kill attrition class we were told it would be and not nearly as fun or possessing the deeper psychological game as its predecessor (in my opinion).