First off, great video. I love seeing people put time, thought and consideration into a class balance discussion, instead of the yelling and ‘noob’ calling which typically dominates these kinds of discussion.
I agree with most everything that you said in the video. I don’t think the examples always did a great job of illustrating what you where trying to say, but you where spot on with your points. However, I don’t fully agree with your fear conclusion. THis is why:
Necros lack serious ability to lock down opponents and/or disengage from opponents. While I wouldn’t expect both, and arguably some classes do have both, if I can’t disengage from a class bursting me, then at the very least I should be able to lock them down if I survive. Or roll it the other way, make it easy to disengage, but hard to lock down targets.
That being said, the variable duration change for the fear, or the variable setup for fear doesn’t resolve this issue for both power builds and condition builds. Namely, power builds do not build enough conditions to affect fear. In fact, one of the major factors missing from the video is a power build has almost no ability to lock down an opponent. This is required for all close range power builds and is illustrated with the numerous methods other classes utilize. Please note that mobility is a very strong method of lockdown, not just cc. As for condition based builds, fear may add an additional few seconds to subject a target to our debuffs, but in the end, the proposed second or two will translate into roughly 1.2k dmg for bleeds, maybe a full 2k dmg, before they disengage. That doesn’t remove the ability to cleanse/disengage after that time and for a none burst build, that won’t change much.
I have a few ideas to add to the mix which may or may not be good ideas, but they are some ideas :P
- Provide a debuff that prevents stealth and/or needs to be cleansed before other debuffs. Call it Will O’ Wisp. It might be something that is attached to our fear, a lock if you will on the debuffs. The reason for this is that we ‘build’ our dmg over time and the ability to remove ALL of it is a major issue. Other MMOs used multiple DoTs to manage this concept and thus removing all was not easy. Building just one stack, be it Poison or Bleed, makes it incredibly easy to at any point in the fight ‘reset’ the condition building by removing just one debuff. In fact, another easy solution is make cleanse only remove one application of Bleed or one time interval of Poison.
- Provide ability or skill drains, similar to what was present in GW1. This allows Necros to shut down skills that easily allow other classes to disengage or burst. Two variants could be implemented (not at the same time, just two separate options). The first is a heal skill that drains an opponents heal skills if they are available. For each heal skill ‘drained’, set on cooldown, the necro heals a set amount. Another is draining the ability gauges of most classes, basically as a more powerful version of weakness.
- As the OP said, expanding or doing something with our poor fear would be nice in general. I’ve never been a big fan of the fear mechanic but the fact that we have the weakest fear in the game is embarrassing. It’s like giving Mesmers better stealth abilities than a thief, or giving thieves heavier armor than a warrior. I would actually prefer it have a longer duration an reduces dmg output from the opponent, but thats just me.
Anyway, my thoughts for the day. I appreciate the post and video Nemesis. There are a ton of other bugs Necro suffers from too, but I think those are well documented and at this point, ANet has a linear path to solving those, developer time.
