Guild Wars 2

In GW1 necromancer was the high risk, high reward mage class of the game. Their life sacrifice gives their spell more power than other mages. Their risky game play style was second only to assassins.

My necromancer in GW2 died A LOT more than my elementalists and mesmer. But never did I ever think she was UPed. I run a Dark Aura bomber build for the longest time in GW1 hard mode. I also play other high risk builds in GvG and randon arena. BiP in GW1 was my favourite elite.

I know what I was getting into, and I accepted all the risks. The thrill of sacrificing everything, even my necro’s life, for power cannot be matched. That is exactly what sets necromancers apart from all other “scaredy cat” mages. “I AM DEATH!!!”

In GW2 their risk are (on theory at least) greatly decreased due to their high hp and 2 hp bars. There are also no longer life sacrifice skills. Since there are “very” low risk, there must be “very” low reward. So everything in the necro is UPed.

I felt that Anet is balancing GW2 necros around their high hp and 2 hp bars. I want to get rid of this entirely. I didn’t fall in love with my GW1 necro because she was indestructible. I love her because she was SO insane.

So here is what I am suggesting. Lower the necro’s hp. Increase the risk of necro’s skills. And then buff everything.

I agree with your view of what the necromancer was in GW1 and what it should still be in GW2 – at least if you choose to play the necro that way (because the GW1 MM was probably the safest build to use as a necro). I’d gladly decide to take on lots of bleeding stacks for example in order to gain massive damage capabilities.

BiP is nice, but why not increase Might to 15 stacks and increase the bleeding received to anything between 5 to 10 stacks? That along with fixed Vampiric would provide the player with the ability to compensate for the damage wrought by self-bleeds, which shouldn’t be removable, by stealing the opponents health. Or have wells that force the player to sacrifice 1/3 of their health in order to AoE steal health from their foes – sacrifice first, then reward – with the sacrifice being the most dangerous part of the fight for the necro due to the large drop in health.

Skills such as these would be powerful, yes, but using them together (drop 1/3 of health + lots of unremovable self-bleeds) provides a big risk with a potentially high reward.

tl;dr
Provide us with traits/skills that force us to take risks and strike the perfect balance between HP sacrifice and vampiric skills in order to be very powerful.

I still think the high risk, high reward can still be applied to us.

One of the reasons i still love and play my Necromancer despite all the terra-bad patches is when i kill people on my Necro i feel i earned that kill and im proud of it.

Anyone (like the new meta seems to be) can just roll a Shatter Mesmer, or Backstab Thief and win but its just boring.

Dungeons are challenging because I’m a Necromancer. All those times I get aggro and I run around the room with the boss on my tail, all those times I’m downed because of that, all those times I have to run

[whine]
Holy f! I’ve just discovered that one trait line that was originally planned was called Blood Rituals and it dealt partly with sacrificing health (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_historical_traits), which means that there could have been skills “powered” by sacrificing health. Why oh why was this not implemented?
[/whine]

frogshake.2419:

[whine]
Holy f! I’ve just discovered that one trait line that was originally planned was called Blood Rituals and it dealt partly with sacrificing health (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_historical_traits), which means that there could have been skills “powered” by sacrificing health. Why oh why was this not implemented?
[/whine]

It seems that it morphed into corruption skills. Instead of sacrificing HP you give yourself conditions for other benefits.
Best example is Blood is Power, which was a GW1 skill that had the user sacrifice HP to give an ally energy regeneration. (from blood magic)
Not a far cry.
The other huge part of Blood was life stealing; still implemented.

While i can see where you’re coming from, i don’t think i would enjoy that playstyle so much. Necro’s downed skills are poor and i anticipate being downed much more if i had to use my hp to power skills.

Also loved Dark Aura, even ran it in Random Arenas for awhile, just for fun It did really well cause life steals went through protective spirit, but the downside was a single Vampiric Gaze could kill you!

Then of course they changed Aura of the Lich and it just wasn’t viable anymore. Except for rangers – with high expertise they can spam vampiric touch/bite ad infinitum.

On topic: I would also love to see a return to life saccing spells or other high risk strategies. Corruptions are pretty tame by comparison tbh. It’s not fun if you’re not constantly balancing on the line between ultimate power and accidentally killing yourself!

@Vioxis
I agree that it’s not a far cry. However, some vulnerability or 2 stacks of bleeding is very, very tame as manveruppd has already pointed out. It doesn’t feel risky at all, in fact it isn’t, because I can simply use these conditions to heal myself or throw them at a foe via various skills. This is fun, no doubt, but the stacks are so small that it’s almost not worth the effort. Also, life stealing in GW2 is laughably ineffective when compared to life stealing in GW1.
So, while I totally agree that variations of what I’d like the necro to be are there, I don’t think they are very well designed. In short, I want blood magic to be way more bloody.

manveruppd.7601:

It’s not fun if you’re not constantly balancing on the line between ultimate power and accidentally killing yourself!

Exactly

Someone please tell me why in other books, worlds, films, games a Necromancer raises and army but here he raises a few weak minions? I am fine with the way we are….underpowered, except for one, tiny little thing: we should make whoever we kill join our merry band of minions. Sounds crazy but we are not vampires. Necromancers generally aren’t supposed to be fast or powerful in combat, instead they raise minions. For a combat freak the game should have Vampires but Necromancers are more casters and spellweavers, which is fine by me but then A.Net don’t make them that good in combat. Yet where we are meant to excell we fail miserably. The staff is average mostly, with the marks recharging too slowly and leaving us at the mercy of the #1 power which is simply bad. Again, our minions aren’t an army which really annoys me, 20 minions should be the norm, weak ones to be sure but a whole horde of them.

Aren.9478:

Someone please tell me why in other books, worlds, films, games a Necromancer raises and army but here he raises a few weak minions? I am fine with the way we are….underpowered, except for one, tiny little thing: we should make whoever we kill join our merry band of minions. Sounds crazy but we are not vampires. Necromancers generally aren’t supposed to be fast or powerful in combat, instead they raise minions. For a combat freak the game should have Vampires but Necromancers are more casters and spellweavers, which is fine by me but then A.Net don’t make them that good in combat. Yet where we are meant to excell we fail miserably. The staff is average mostly, with the marks recharging too slowly and leaving us at the mercy of the #1 power which is simply bad. Again, our minions aren’t an army which really annoys me, 20 minions should be the norm, weak ones to be sure but a whole horde of them.

This is off topic, but yes I do agree. Mesmer can produce more “bodies” on the battlefield than necromancers. This should never happen.

The thing that keeps me going is that I believe ANet will totally rebuild the profession some time in the next 12 to 18 months. The profession lacks synergy; both internally (abilities, weapons, traits, equipment) and with other professions, and generally just lacks a role/focus. Life Force needs to be something we use to power up abilities either by draining it over time, or using it one big hit, to do more damage or increase personal/group survivability. It could also do with traits giving more benefits to AoE damage. Also, for the purposes of tagging mobs in an AoE situation, the game should see our 500 damage over 5 seconds as 500 damage when applied. That way we can compete in mass AE farming situations.

Yeah it would be nice if ‘Lifeforce’ was more than just an enhanced downed state you can use while still having hit points.

If I was a game designer, I would have given it 3 uses along the lines of-
Burn life force for:
F1: Extra DPS
F2: Extra Health
F3: Extra Boon/Condition Duration

That way it would fall into the playstyle synergy instead of being a a component of your career, rather than being an additional playstyle completely different to what you normally do as a necro.

But, its another idea Im sure Anet dont care about.

Thresher.3049:

Yeah it would be nice if ‘Lifeforce’ was more than just an enhanced downed state you can use while still having hit points.

If I was a game designer, I would have given it 3 uses along the lines of-
Burn life force for:
F1: Extra DPS
F2: Extra Health
F3: Extra Boon/Condition Duration

A number of people (including me) have been shouting for something like that for ages. I wish they’d listen to us. I’m not saying DS as it is is underpowered, on the contrary it makes us very tanky, but it’s more useful for some builds than others and replacing your entire skillbar with just the same 4 skills no matter what you’re specced as is just dull. Also, having SO MUCH HEALTH just doesn’t feel very “necromancey” to me. Wish they’d listen to us!