Guild Wars 2

Might add – with the guardian symbol changes, it specifically mentioned that the trait to make them larger, makes them 240 (I do believe that doesn’t make them 240 now, correct me if I’m wrong), where as nothing similar is mentioned for necros, so I understand that as the size of the traited mark shall remain the same. Who knows, maybe I’m wrong.

Also jesus christ, just have to say it again, why did they completely WRECK the spectral buffs? I would rather lose my spectral buffs in DS again then have an ICD on them.

Also what the kittenENS, they said we take extra damage in DS? It can’t be something that always happens, as this used to be a theory, but I tested it in pvp with steady weapons to show that we took the same amount of damage in DS as out of it, so either it’s a new bug, or happens under certain conditions. How did they ever make DS so bug ridden?

Don’t worry all, they just want guardians to have even more buffs as people tend to think they are needed for everything already, and we all know necromancer is taken in PvE all the time and is very popular already so nerfing DS was a really really good idea…

This is really the crappiest change to DS i have seen since launch, and buffing an already strong profession to crazy powers, yeah that makes sense, warrior, mesmer and guardians need nerfs not buffs. (haven’t read mesmer and warrior patches so don’t know if they got either).

War Mourner.5168:

Also jesus christ, just have to say it again, why did they completely WRECK the spectral buffs? I would rather lose my spectral buffs in DS again then have an ICD on them.

Because they did it to mesmer armor buffs, and they will do it to any and all on-hit or on-when-you-get-hit skills. This is part of their balance effort to prevent things from being grossly overpowered when you factor in lots of little hits from lots of sources.

Whey they are balancing that? I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe they are adding a PVE boss that hits for 100 damage 10 times per second.

I cannot believe the stupidity of this patch. They actually killed the class. And we were finally a viable choice too.

Guess it’s time to either reroll or quit.

please stop talking about the spectral walk jumping ability as that will surely get it nerfed.

So why are necro’s buffed more for offense but our defensive capabilities get nerfed… weren’t necros meant to be a defensive attrition based class or necros are being changed to be more of an offensive caster type class?

Quite interesting if you think about it.

Necro patch notes tl:dr version:

• Necromancers were actually being played and seen outside of Lion’s Arch. This has been fixed.

Lol “Spectral walk now has a 1/4 cast time because we hate you!” XD would laugh

Those new spectral skill cool downs is a huge nerf!!! This is just terrible.

Rennoko.5731:

Because they did it to mesmer armor buffs, and they will do it to any and all on-hit or on-when-you-get-hit skills. This is part of their balance effort to prevent things from being grossly overpowered when you factor in lots of little hits from lots of sources.

Whey they are balancing that? I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe they are adding a PVE boss that hits for 100 damage 10 times per second.

The problem of going down the path of nerfing these aura type effects because they proc so often, (outside of the obvious fact that spectrals provided some much needed defense against focused fire) is that you can (by the same logic) say that the guardian wall, or necro wall should have an ICD on effecting people, after all, you can effect whole zergs worth of people with them.

bravoart.5308:

Necro patch notes tl:dr version:

• Necromancers were actually being played and seen outside of Lion’s Arch. This has been fixed.

Meanwhile more buffs to mesmers and guardians because we all know nobody plays those!

Spectral’s cooldowns are in line with Elementalist’s auras and Mesmer’s chaos armor. Overall, spectral skills were probably buffed, not nerfed.

Just like any OP class … the ones playing it think they are just "great " at pvp and the rest of us stink …. lol get a grip necros they over buffed you and now all these fine tunes were needed.

None of these nerfs are killing. Everything’s alright you guiseee

So, what I don’t get is… (And I didnt even use spectral skills) But spectral skills made taking damage keep you alive through it while in DS if hit by a lot of people… So me row had some Zerg defense…? What about almost every thief move that has a passive evade on it that completely negates all damage? I’m not seeing the logic.

“Spectral Armor: Incoming hits now grant 8% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Spectral Walk: Incoming hits now grant 2% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown. This spectral skill now grants life force while Spectral Armor is active."

This better give me like 50% life force 4fs

What about those of us doing PvE then?, we’re suffering because some of you can’t handle a necromancer, i play PvP on a warrior and beat necros most of the time with not much hassle really, Necros aren’t OP at all as i have ahd no trouble with them at all, not even on my rarely played pvp professsions.

This is the biggest nerf to Death shroud because a few whiney PvP’ers have no skill, then the PvE community has to suffer, that’s not at all good especially not when guardians gets buffed at the same time.

War Mourner.5168:

Rennoko.5731:

Because they did it to mesmer armor buffs, and they will do it to any and all on-hit or on-when-you-get-hit skills. This is part of their balance effort to prevent things from being grossly overpowered when you factor in lots of little hits from lots of sources.

Whey they are balancing that? I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe they are adding a PVE boss that hits for 100 damage 10 times per second.

The problem of going down the path of nerfing these aura type effects because they proc so often, (outside of the obvious fact that spectrals provided some much needed defense against focused fire) is that you can (by the same logic) say that the guardian wall, or necro wall should have an ICD on effecting people, after all, you can effect whole zergs worth of people with them.

I fully expect that to happen as soon as they can figure out how to code it.

The thing is the build that people cry about is ultimately an amazing pub stomping build where you’re much less likely to get focused fired, much less likely to see co-ordinated cleanses and stability, chain CC etc, leaving you free do to huge amounts of AOE hilarity. In TPvP, and serious team will be able to extremely easily punish your lack of mobility/stability/damage mit/stun breaks. Not to say it’s completely useless, but the competitive meta is a tad different from spvp.

Which brings me to the point of why are they making us worse at taking that focused fire. Everything else in this patch is reasonable enough, but this changes hits us rather hard in every format of the game.

Rok.5260:

“Spectral Armor: Incoming hits now grant 8% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown.

Spectral Walk: Incoming hits now grant 2% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown. This spectral skill now grants life force while Spectral Armor is active."

This better give me like 50% life force 4fs

It’s a pity then, that in most situations you’ll be burst down in a few second with 20+ hits on you, but hey.

ronpierce.2760:

So, what I don’t get is… (And I didnt even use spectral skills) But spectral skills made taking damage keep you alive through it while in DS if hit by a lot of people… So me row had some Zerg defense…? What about almost every thief move that has a passive evade on it that completely negates all damage? I’m not seeing the logic.

That’s because there is no logic at work here. The whole thing reads as a knee-jerk reaction to the community’s inability to adapt to a new meta. We’re simply not allowed to be a good or competitive class. And in the way of gunning for our top spec they also managed to gun down several less popular specs. If Dumbfire was such a huge issue then Dumbfire should have been removed. There was absolutely no reason to mutilate shroud like this when we’re already struggling with survivability.

See, the GM shift to Major is what’s annoying me.

Terror builds are gonna suffer. The OP hybrid burning/terror build is unaffected (buffed if anything by the larger radius) but the pure terror builds with 20pts in DM for fear on stun are borked.

I dunno, I sometimes think ANet don’t have a clue.

DS got hit on this one, very uncool as it is our unique ability and a life saver since we don’t have invulnerability, evade, or other such skills. No more jumping off mountains either (c’mon that wasn’t hurting anybody, it was good clean fun)

Nerf on terror? It is Dhuumfire that f’ed it up so why not nerf it (or change it completely). Terror is unique and fun, Dhuumfire is just part of the same ’ol stuff (and exactly what Engies have). A fail for me.

Spectral skills were hit again and are no longer the reliable source of LF. What a shame!

Buff on axe is a good thought, but Axe #2 was fine. It is Axe # 1 that needs attention.

Marks got a slight buff in radius, but the move of Greater Marks to Master Trait line sucks! That said, in all fairness I haven’t looked at the new mark radius in action so I can’t say how big of an effect this may have.

All in all, necros got nerfed and frankly I think in mostly the wrong ways. Very unhappy.

no offense but all i have seen recently in wvw are necros, the aoe red circles indicator on the floor are infinite lol, people jumped the necro bandwagon and this was already expected. I have a low level necro so i am no expert in the class but if all of a sudden people started using necros in wvw is for a reason, because they were OP.

Those changes make no sense at all.

Last patch everyone complained that necros turned into squishy dps machines.
The fix: sustain nerfed! -_-

This patch suxs monkey balls

I’ll be interested to see how the Spectral Armor change works out. It’s a buff if you’re getting hit less than 3 times a second. That changes the use case slightly, but it still has one. I’m also curious about the ‘taking more damage than intended while in Death Shroud’ bug: was that the % rounding people were insisting on? I never really noticed it myself.

Edit: Terror nerf was acceptable, considering how fear application has been buffed, burning technically is available to a necromancer now and DS’ torment. Would have rather they changed Dhuumfire, but there’s a case to be made that terror needed that change anyways.

Edit2: Oh yeah! Shadow Fiend’s active is now an ersatz heal / tanking maneuver! That’s pretty cool.

Oh, and now Warriors have access to Torment. Was kinda hoping for another options for necros, might have made the nerfs easier to swallow. Was hoping Dhuumfire would do Torment which would have avoided the need for nerfing our unique and fun terror options.

Buffs:

Mark of Blood: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Chillblains: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Putrid Mark: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Reaper’s Mark: The base radius of this skill has been increased from 120 to 180.
Greater Marks: This trait has been moved to the Master tier.

This is actually a good change for most Necromancers. Our marks will be pretty decent without this trait, but taking the trait will still be useful. This also stops us from having to dedicated 10 points to Death no matter how useless those points are.

The one build this nerfs is Terrormancers, who typically put 20 into Death for Reaper’s Protection. This change locks them out of getting Greater Marks, which actually does hurt them since they rely on Staff #5 so much. I guess they’ll be able to get the cooldown trait instead for more 5s, but I’m still gonna call this a nerf to them.

Fixed a bug that caused the necromancer to take increased damage from direct attacks while in death shroud.

Obviously a buff, though I’d like to hear more about this bug (where it was active, how much of a difference it made, etc). I have sometimes felt that our DS gets torn through weirdly fast.

Shadow Fiend—Haunt: When this attack hits an enemy, it will grant the necromancer 10% of their life force.
Ghastly Claws: The total life force granted from this skill has been increased from 10% to 12%.
Spectral Grasp: This skill now grants 15% life force (up from 10%).

Ok buffs. Gives MMs a bit more LF. The other two are kinda pointless. Axe #2 was already basically fine. Turning the weapon set even more into something to do while out of Life Force isn’t what it needed. Spectral Grasp is mostly useful for Dagger builds IMO which already have way more than enough LF generation.

Spiteful Vigor: This trait has been moved to the Adept tier.

Technically a buff, but in practice, would anyone seriously take this? Retaliation is so neutered these days. Particularly since the 5-point Death trait sucks, I don’t see anyone going into the tree for this. If you’re in Death on purpose and you’re not a Terrormancer, it’s almost certainly for Minion traits which means you don’t have a trait slot to spare for this.

Nerfs:

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.

Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaame. So very laaaaaaaame.

Necromancer—Dark Path: Fixed an issue that caused this skill to strike enemies further than 1200 distance away.

It basically never hits targets more than Axe range away anyway, so this is technically a nerf, but really it’s just making it consistently awful.

Spectral Armor: Incoming hits now grant 8% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown.
Spectral Walk: Incoming hits now grant 2% life force; has a 1-second internal cooldown. This spectral skill now grants life force while Spectral Armor is active.

A slight buff to our 1v1 potential, a pretty big nerf to our 1vX, exactly the opposite of what we needed. If they’d just made these change but fixed the ICD to be per target, this probably would’ve been an overall buff but as it stands, this was nonsense.

Terror: Reduced the damage by 17%. Fixed a bug so this trait now checks for the torment condition as well.

We all knew something like this was coming and 17% isn’t as bad as it could’ve been. Still, I really wish Anet hadn’t taken the path of least resistance on this fix. Terrormancers get hit again and receive nothing in compensation.

Did I see someone whining about warriors getting a buff? The worst class in the game getting a buff deserves a whine? LOOOOOOOOOOOOL…

These changes were needed in a severe way, the Necro wasn’t in the least bit in control, I play one, I should know. It’s not like they still won’t be running up into the battle lawlz kitten the entire field with condition spam, so chill.

StugLyfe.2134:

Just like any OP class … the ones playing it think they are just "great " at pvp and the rest of us stink …. lol get a grip necros they over buffed you and now all these fine tunes were needed.

I would take the time to explain high end PvP to you, but i don’t think it is worth it… you would not understand it.

galandor.1059:

Did I see someone whining about warriors getting a buff? The worst class in the game getting a buff deserves a whine? LOOOOOOOOOOOOL…

These changes were needed in a severe way, the Necro wasn’t in the least bit in control, I play one, I should know. It’s not like they still won’t be running up into the battle lawlz kitten the entire field with condition spam, so chill.

The point isn’t that the Necro didn’t need adjustments. It’s that a lot of these changes took the adjustments in the wrong direction.

Adapt and make them cry again.
Let’s show that it is us the players that makes the necro class “OP”

More nerfs please, I enjoy a challenge.

Greater Marks being moved to Master level kind of disrupts my build, that said with the standard radius of marks moving to 180, the question goes to the radius of the marks when under the trait, if it remains at 240 I might decide to go for Staff Mastery as a replacement.

Smaller marks set more often might be better than getting a 40 toughness for minions I’ll never have just to get the bigger radius on marks and losing 10 points in one of my other lines.

I guess there were too many of us using marks, probably due to the synergy we could get with the rest of the build.

I wonder if this move was done to push people to use other builds or to bring additional possibilities synergy wise because the first reason would be a bad one to perform the switch.

I wouldn’t say that most of these are nerfs. It depends on the situation and build. In some cases these are buffs, in some they are not.

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
If you take a look at Wiki there’s a note that says
“Taking falling damage while in Death Shroud will drain life force. Any excess falling damage is negated, allowing any necromancer to fall from heights normally deadly”.

This might still be untouched after the patch.
The change might only be affected by damage from enemies.

And as usual anet messes up.
We’re getting nerfed hard in areas where we don’t even kittening need them.
“Necro is the attrition class. We’re buffing their survivability.”
Yeah, real good plan putting an internal cd on lf gain, making dmg in ds flow over to hp.
We don’t have escapes, invul, teleports, decent access to stability nor are we mobile. Yet our only way to “tank” something is getting nerfed.
And who’s daft idea was it to put Greater Marks on Master tier now, that wasn’t even an issue. Stop pulling random kitten outa your kitten .
And fear wasn’t the problem either, Dhuumfire was, a trait no one ever asked for in the first place. But go ahead, buff warriors/thieves/guardians more, cause most ppl just wanna play a braindead class.

Maroah.8607:

I wouldn’t say that most of these are nerfs. It depends on the situation and build. In some cases these are buffs, in some they are not.

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
If you take a look at Wiki there’s a note that says
“Taking falling damage while in Death Shroud will drain life force. Any excess falling damage is negated, allowing any necromancer to fall from heights normally deadly”.

This might still be untouched after the patch.
The change might only be affected by damage from enemies.

That is extremely wishful thinking and very unlikely. Wiki is not driven by devs, but by players so that is not an official statement anyway. Besides, damage is damage unless otherwise specified. Although I’d love to believe you are right here, I just can’t stretch my thought process far enough to do so.

wiki is community written more or less, it will be touched. And touched inappropriately.

Why does every profession i play get nerfed… -_- i’m sick of this Anet.
DS nerf was unnecessary. I hope you are happy… -_-

Maroah.8607:

I wouldn’t say that most of these are nerfs. It depends on the situation and build. In some cases these are buffs, in some they are not.

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
If you take a look at Wiki there’s a note that says
“Taking falling damage while in Death Shroud will drain life force. Any excess falling damage is negated, allowing any necromancer to fall from heights normally deadly”.

This might still be untouched after the patch.
The change might only be affected by damage from enemies.

I’d love this to be true, but i agree with the others that anets reason to nerf it was accessing unfinished/whatever areas. i never had any profit from jumping to an unreachable place and had to port my way back, so i don’t see any problem.

using 11% DS as a shield might seem OP if we could jump in and out of DS at any time, but with a 10s CD (7s traited) doesn’t seem stronger than blocks or vigor (don’t know their uptime on other professions though). plus with addiotional dodges from vigor you’re blocking EVERYTHING for the time of the dodge and not just a single hit ..

I guess you have to be a masochist irl too if you want to play necro now

Couldn’t they at least have made dark path an instant teleport before mucking with its range? It’s useless enough as is with how easy it is to dodge. With some kind of compensation to our mobility and overall survivability these changes wouldn’t have been nearly as difficult to swallow but right now all I see here is pure, unadulterated doom.

Are we really going to have to spend months as a broken class again before getting the attention we need?

Fungalfoot.7213:

Are we really going to have to spend months as a broken class again before getting the attention we need?

Simply put, yes.

Fungalfoot.7213:

Couldn’t they at least have made dark path an instant teleport before mucking with its range? It’s useless enough as is with how easy it is to dodge. With some kind of compensation to our mobility and overall survivability these changes wouldn’t have been nearly as difficult to swallow but right now all I see here is pure, unadulterated doom.

How often were people actually hitting Dark Path from over 1200 range? It’s a nerf to an extremely rare case, imo.

Softspoken.2410:

Fungalfoot.7213:

Couldn’t they at least have made dark path an instant teleport before mucking with its range? It’s useless enough as is with how easy it is to dodge. With some kind of compensation to our mobility and overall survivability these changes wouldn’t have been nearly as difficult to swallow but right now all I see here is pure, unadulterated doom.

Are we really going to have to spend months as a broken class again before getting the attention we need?

How often were people actually hitting Dark Path from over 1200 range?

I have had it do that a number of times since the patch. It locks on much much more reliably at long ranges now, but will still do the strange, port me 3/4 of the way to the target thing.

Du Bist Schuld.8097:

Maroah.8607:

I wouldn’t say that most of these are nerfs. It depends on the situation and build. In some cases these are buffs, in some they are not.

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
If you take a look at Wiki there’s a note that says
“Taking falling damage while in Death Shroud will drain life force. Any excess falling damage is negated, allowing any necromancer to fall from heights normally deadly”.

This might still be untouched after the patch.
The change might only be affected by damage from enemies.

I’d love this to be true, but i agree with the others that anets reason to nerf it was accessing unfinished/whatever areas. i never had any profit from jumping to an unreachable place and had to port my way back, so i don’t see any problem.

using 11% DS as a shield might seem OP if we could jump in and out of DS at any time, but with a 10s CD (7s traited) doesn’t seem stronger than blocks or vigor (don’t know their uptime on other professions though). plus with addiotional dodges from vigor you’re blocking EVERYTHING for the time of the dodge and not just a single hit ..

Because Mesmers teleporting a whole team isn’t OP yay. Simply smart.

Biggest piece of crap patch ive ever seen!!!!!!
Screw you Anet!

Invictus.1503:

Maroah.8607:

I wouldn’t say that most of these are nerfs. It depends on the situation and build. In some cases these are buffs, in some they are not.

Damage taken while in death shroud will now overflow to the necromancer’s health pool if the damage taken is greater than the remaining life force.
If you take a look at Wiki there’s a note that says
“Taking falling damage while in Death Shroud will drain life force. Any excess falling damage is negated, allowing any necromancer to fall from heights normally deadly”.

This might still be untouched after the patch.
The change might only be affected by damage from enemies.

That is extremely wishful thinking and very unlikely. Wiki is not driven by devs, but by players so that is not an official statement anyway. Besides, damage is damage unless otherwise specified. Although I’d love to believe you are right here, I just can’t stretch my thought process far enough to do so.

It’s conceivable that falling damage may be coded differently with respect to Death Shroud (it pierces through Invulnerability, for example, so it isn’t merely treated like regular damage). Still, I’m not gonna get my hopes up.

this is ridiculos kittening

they just nerfed LF gain which is exactly the thing they would have given more to necros.

there goes any reasonable SUSTAIN to core class skill called deathshroud.

i don’t give a kitten about anything else but not being able to use DS effectively ridiculously gimps any necromancer

(and no i don’t call myself necro i have 8 characters different classes, oh kitten)

Mixed bag, but not too bad imo.

Granted, some things makes downright no sense or will need some testing.

1 sec ICD to Spectral Walk/Armor sounds meh, but is guess this has been done to bring them in line with Mes/Ele auras. Also, being buffed the LF regen it might even be a buff in some istances. Anyway, CDs on this 2 skills could surely use a cut, due to this change.

Staff: larger base marks? Great! Moving away one of the 2 traits, i can deal with it (with staff build you go to 20 or even 30 anyway – wvw pov). But tbh, merge already GM and Staff mastery, come on.

DS changes…eeeh. Makes some sense because, as some said, 1% of LF was worth like a dodge, wasting a whole attack regardless of dmg. On the other hand, DS is the class defensive mechanic, if you can’t use it to defend yourself reliably what’s its purpose? I guess some play time to test is needed to see how much this affects Nec gameplay.
Oh and no more jumping off cliffs, sad.

Terror nerf: come on, everybody knew this was coming. And 17% is much less than most foreseen.
Pair it with

Rune of Melandru: Fear duration is now only reduced once by this rune set. The negative stun duration bonus no longer reduces incoming fear duration. This is also true for food consumables that offer a negative stun duration bonus.

And things get balanced out.

In short: some nerfs, few buffs, overall it went much smoother than expected imo.

OMGWTFBBQ
Thanks for Deathshroud nerf…. -.-