Guild Wars 2

I’ve been bored and “fast” leveling characters to 80 lately so I just wanted to throw out my initial impressions of the necro. I was going to do a general overview of my personal feelings and personal rankings of all professions based off of “fun” factor, some qol type stuff like mobility, condition management, what game mode I felt each profession was more enjoyable to play in… but I feel compelled to get some necro thoughts off my chest…

I’m at a point where I could care less about number “stuffz”, but I do pay attention some. I also care less about “this and that” super ultra meta builds. So now that you all know where I basically stand, I want to say this…

Necro feels so absolutely boring and absolutely sluggish to play. Thank goodness I unlocked the reaper today, because at least reaper shroud abilities feel fun, fast and responsive… Everything outside of reaper shroud felt like getting teeth pulled very very ssslllooowwwlllyyy… Sure, there are some normal feeling attacks and abilities, but as a whole for me, necro ranked up there next to warrior in the “boring as all get out to play” category. Like I said, I do not care about numbers too much or meta stuff, but this profession just “feels” meh.

I will not understand how (in such a fast paced and movement heavy oriented game where some professions have access to multiple movement skills) the devs would think it’s fun to design such a sluggish feeling and mobility deficient profession…

I was thoroughly bored out of my mind today while running around VB grabbing hero points… I sincerely hope the next elite has some on demand movement skills put in to the weapon and skills.

Right now I have one level 80 of each profession except engineer (didn’t even make one yet), but based off of “fun” factor for me, necro will be “extra storage space” until I have to do a HP run for the next elite. I know some of you love necro and that’s great, I’m happy if you find it and the play style fun. For me, I’d rather watch paint dry as opposed to feeling like I’m playing in slow motion.

I kind of understand where you are coming from Swagger. My first Necromancer was a Norn and I was using a staff, so it felt like I was running through mud. I remade the necro as a human and started using a Axe/Dagger as my main weapons and it feels faster and there is a 25% Signet that helps the run speed. Now just a observation the Necromancer compared to my Mesmer and Tempest feels slow. I do not know why it feels so dramatic but sometimes it feels like you are running up hill, in a storm on ice with no shoes in the dark. I think the devs should take a look across all the professions, but to be honest, I do not think they have it high on the list. So when I need a speed boost/fix I grab my Tempest. Lets hope they notice and tweak the speed .

Low mobility is one of the primary weaknesses for the class, along with poor active defenses, to compensate for shroud giving us great sustain and being able to bring loads of CC and condition/debuff pressure to the table.

I mean I also really love necromancer for what it can do in pvp, where its one of the stronger classes, but your mileage may vary. If you want something faster, go play daredevil or shiro revenant.

Nearlight,
I saw for the first time a shiro revenant up close and personal, they are fast, I think they drink rocket fuel for meals . The daredevil is like a mini tornado saw a Daredevil just goofing around with a veteran mob nothing super uber I admit, but I swear I do not think that thing touched him once. I would love to see one really fight a high level boss , I heard there is a video of one doing just that , I need to find and watch the video as I keep hearing about it.

Cheers

Zulth.4708:

I kind of understand where you are coming from Swagger. My first Necromancer was a Norn and I was using a staff, so it felt like I was running through mud. I remade the necro as a human and started using a Axe/Dagger as my main weapons and it feels faster and there is a 25% Signet that helps the run speed. Now just a observation the Necromancer compared to my Mesmer and Tempest feels slow. I do not know why it feels so dramatic but sometimes it feels like you are running up hill, in a storm on ice with no shoes in the dark. I think the devs should take a look across all the professions, but to be honest, I do not think they have it high on the list. So when I need a speed boost/fix I grab my Tempest. Lets hope they notice and tweak the speed .

I pretty much feel the same way and think some minor tweaks could make it “feel” better. I’ll mess with it more and try to narrow down some specific suggestions, but as of right now the necro plays like your description. There was nothing about it that made me feel any excitement except for the reaper shroud abilities. And the reaper shroud skills only seem to highlight the sluggishness with the rest of necro even more.

In general, I like the speed of Necro abilities. They can be slow, but they feel so good when they hit.

Zulth.4708:

I kind of understand where you are coming from Swagger. My first Necromancer was a Norn and I was using a staff, so it felt like I was running through mud. I remade the necro as a human and started using a Axe/Dagger as my main weapons and it feels faster and there is a 25% Signet that helps the run speed. Now just a observation the Necromancer compared to my Mesmer and Tempest feels slow. I do not know why it feels so dramatic but sometimes it feels like you are running up hill, in a storm on ice with no shoes in the dark. I think the devs should take a look across all the professions, but to be honest, I do not think they have it high on the list. So when I need a speed boost/fix I grab my Tempest. Lets hope they notice and tweak the speed .

I have two observations.

First, Norn characters intrinsically feel slower than Sylvari, Human, and especially Asura characters due to their size. Because they’re bigger, they create the illusion of ponderousness even if they’re actually moving at the same speed as everyone else. Conversely, Asura always tend to feel like they’re moving faster than they actually are because of how much ground they’re covering relative to their height. If you didn’t have Signet of the Locust equipped, this would only exacerbate the issue. I created my first Norn recently, and boy was making her a Revenant a huge mistake. Running around the world was positivelly painful on her before I unlocked Dragonhunter and got access to permaswiftness, and she still feels so much slower to play even though I know I’m actually moving slightly faster than my characters with just +25% movespeed traits/signets. There’s really no solution to this problem other than to give Norn a buff to their base speed, which isn’t a good idea under the paradigm ANet has right now where race doesn’t have much impact on mechanics.

Second, you picked our two lowest-damage weapon sets. Scepter/Dagger beats the pants off Staff for condition damage, and Dagger/Warhorn or Dagger/Focus are substantially more damage than Axe/Dagger. While Staff and Axe/Dagger have their uses, using them as your main weapon set is going to cause most fights to take way longer than they should.

My Necro often used dagger and blood magic for speed boost while running about to level.

Dagger also had some serious damage, especially when I ran Wells traits to drain and harm. If I couldn’t handle a fight with blood magic and dagger, then I could go full MM and sustain my way through things.

When HoT came out, I strapped runes of the Traveler onto my zerker gear. I have enough damage and survivability that I honestly don’t care if it’s the most mathematically superior gearing setup. I have my own perma swift with two HP bars, a 50% damage reduction button, chills out the yin-yang, fast accumulation of life force, and an easy 20-25 stacks of might.

Doesn’t really feel slow to me, but ymmv

My Norn Necromancer feels alright from the movement speed aspect. My biggest “complaint” was/is that Dagger DPS felt tedious – even though I’m quite aware its the best weapon dps choice – when I wandered downleveled in some zones while leveling up or to get to the next personal story point.

There are a lot of things we can look at, and a lot of neat aspects to necro, but from a certain standpoint it feels very blah to me.

From a total package standpoint for example, the ele and necro feel worlds apart in the “fun” category for me and I didn’t even like one weapon design of ele before tempest… The tempest is great for me because I’ve been dying to play a “truer” healing and support role in this game, but pound for pound the ele “feels” far far far more fun to play for me…

Once again necro has its merits and honorable mentions for sure, but my gosh, it feels so awfully slow and is so uninspiring to play…

I personally feel that the following (partial) list of things are some of the worst tortures the devs could do to me in this game…

Force me to play necro and warrior 90% of the time.

Force me to heal on my druid.

Force me to only pve on my thief.

Force me to listen to the pony bow sound.

Force me to listen to ele warhorn farty sounds.

I would rather be forced to quadruple click to open every bag in a bag in a bag than to be made to do the above…

Swagger.1459:

There are a lot of things we can look at, and a lot of neat aspects to necro, but from a certain standpoint it feels very blah to me.

…

I would rather be forced to quadruple click to open every bag in a bag in a bag than to be made to do the above…

So, don’t. I’m honestly confused about your motives here. What’s the point of this thread? Literally no one is forcing you to play the Necromancer. You’ll be no worse off for playing another profession if you don’t like the way the Necro plays. Heck, you could even switch to another game entirely (or read a bunch of books, or take up competitive bike riding) and still have a perfectly nice life. If you don’t enjoy playing the Necro, there’s no reason for you to play the Necro, yet you’re whinging about it like a kid being yelled at to eat his spinach.

Why would you go to the trouble to spill so many words aggressively expressing your personal preferences against something that you needn’t touch for even a moment more? You don’t like the Necromancer. I like the Necromancer. Why shouldn’t that be the end of the conversation as we then proceed to play the professions we each actually like?

I haven’t leveled a bunch of professions back-to-back, but I didn’t feel that Necro was particularly slow — except maybe a lack of leap/teleport/perms-swiftness. It’s fairly easy to tag lots-o-mobs in open world events, you’re pretty tough, you can go Power or Condition fairly straightforwardly. Reaper definitely takes Reaper to another level, though.

My Necro’ better-equipped than my other 80’s, so take it with a grain of salt, but my Reaper feels like it has larger margins for error in (in PvE, anyhow) and is more indestructible.

I’m just providing some feedback. There are some neat aspects to necro and I am interested to have one of each profession, so I’m sharing some thoughts.

I like this game, but have grown kind of bored with certain things and decided it was time to level up and play some other professions to liven things up. When I got to necro (and warrior) however, it seemed all the profession “fun” I was having had stopped.

I think it’s important to share how things “feel” when playing. All too often I think the devs and players get wrapped up in numbers and forget about “fun”. Colin likes to ask himself “is it fun?”, so I’ve been following that lead by asking myself “is it fun?” with regard to many aspects of the game.

As a necro 3years running..my advice to you is dump the class, seriously dont do it. I still play it because all m y progress is on it and the thought of starting again gives me nightmares.

The class is sluggish yes but that was the design choice so its OK. Where the stoopidity starts is that you are not compensated for how sluggish the class is. You will quickly realize that the class is not only sluggish but has no flexibility when it comes to attacking or defending.

A dev said on livestream that reaper is not so much you going to your opponents(like thief, or revenant) but pulling your opponents to you. Ok? so why is one pull a utility (taking up a slot you need for something else) and the other on an extremely slow weapon both of which also have 30 second cooldowns. They are both only single target and affected by block, blind and stability while mobility skills arent and can defend you from multiple people. Somehow the designers convinced themselves you can swap mobility for a couple single target long cd pulls and that compensates for the problems of dealing with faster, mobile classes that also have blocks, blinds and stability, o and can continuously chain negates.

So seriously unless you just want to use something different from the other classes sure run necro, but different in the case of this class means bad.

I, for once, love basic Necromancer way more than Reaper, which just totally missed my expectations apart from really niche stuff (basically, I like Rise! and unblockable shout).

I always loved the sheer amount of customization avalible to Necromancer which was matched by no other profession, DoTs with Condition Necromancer as shining example of good condition playstyle design, ripping boons, some crazy fun skills like Epidemic. It also used to have some crazy PvP builds like Shroud dancing Power ones which were absolute blast and very fast-paced.

As far as mobility goes, power-based necros are quite alright if you spec into it :

- pack runes
- warhorn
- spectral walk
- wurm
- shround #2

Those are your mobility options. You can pretty much shadow step on a 30sec CD with the wurm, use #2 for a dash every 10sec and warhorn + pack runes give you high swiftness uptime (and over 100% with spectral walk).

Yes, it’s more effort than a shortbow thief or a s/wh gs warrior – but those classes are only good for running anyway.

I’m new to GW2, and casual, 1/2 hour a day.

I created one of every class and leveled each to 20. Then, every time I sat down, I just let my instinct of the moment decide which I’d play. At first I hopped around a lot, no clear winners, but now they stand something like this:

• Necromancer: 52
• Guardian: 47
• Warrior: 22
• Engineer: 22
• Ranger: 21
• Thief: 20
• Elementalist: 20
• Mesmer: 20

(No HoT yet.)

Clearly I’m a newb, but I don’t understand this thing about Necromancers not feeling mobile. All my characters are female charr, so there’s no variation in mobility from race. Banshee’s Wail alone gives near-permanent Swiftness uptime. If you don’t like that, Quickening Thirst gives permanent 25%. If not that, Signet of the Locust gives permanent 25%.

All of those require zero effort. Isn’t that part of feeling mobile? Effortlessness? For me, anyway. I’d much rather be running around a zone with a Necromancer than with most classes because I don’t have to be casting and running through walls, or flipping my character and jumping backwards and flipping again, or constantly aiming teleport circles. I can think about the game. Of course, that’s from the perspective of a newb.

Otherwise. I’m not sure why, I’m just riding my instincts, but I think I play Necro most because of its huge variety. Condi MM or Power Wells…they have almost nothing in common. And if you don’t like Wells there are Signets! And if you don’t like minions there are Corruptions! Most other classes seem more dependent on a few key abilities.

bravehoptoad.5246:

I’m new to GW2, and casual, 1/2 hour a day.

I created one of every class and leveled each to 20. Then, every time I sat down, I just let my instinct of the moment decide which I’d play. At first I hopped around a lot, no clear winners, but now they stand something like this:

• Necromancer: 52
• Guardian: 47
• Warrior: 22
• Engineer: 22
• Ranger: 21
• Thief: 20
• Elementalist: 20
• Mesmer: 20

(No HoT yet.)

Clearly I’m a newb, but I don’t understand this thing about Necromancers not feeling mobile. All my characters are female charr, so there’s no variation in mobility from race. Banshee’s Wail alone gives near-permanent Swiftness uptime. If you don’t like that, Quickening Thirst gives permanent 25%. If not that, Signet of the Locust gives permanent 25%.

All of those require zero effort. Isn’t that part of feeling mobile? Effortlessness? For me, anyway. I’d much rather be running around a zone with a Necromancer than with most classes because I don’t have to be casting and running through walls, or flipping my character and jumping backwards and flipping again, or constantly aiming teleport circles. I can think about the game. Of course, that’s from the perspective of a newb.

Otherwise. I’m not sure why, I’m just riding my instincts, but I think I play Necro most because of its huge variety. Condi MM or Power Wells…they have almost nothing in common. And if you don’t like Wells there are Signets! And if you don’t like minions there are Corruptions! Most other classes seem more dependent on a few key abilities.

When most people think mobility, they think teleports, leaps, and dashes, which is something necro lacks a lot of, reaper has one dash and we have two teleports, flesh wurm which has a long cast time and can be destroyed, and spectral walk which requires us having to move.

@Ragion: Your overall point is well-taken, but you do have one thing wrong: the pull on the GS is not single-target. It’s not AoE, but it will pull multiple targets.