Guild Wars 2

It seems like Anet doesn’t want to add the type of utility people ask for such as party buffs or reflection in order to keep the necro unique. That’s fine but what they did with blood magic doesn’t really cut it.

I think blood magic is a great specialization for personal usage and made the necro a lot stronger, but the team utility it has isn’t appealing to teams interested in fast and clean runs. Nobody is supposed to go down in the first place and if they do, there should be enough DPS to rally off an enemy kill.

Who isn’t interested in a fast and clean clear? People who don’t care about optimizing, so the same people who were taking necros in their group in the first place. We got nowhere with the new rezzing stuff.

Honestly I think the best team utility we currently have is the protection boon we can apply with wells, which is something we already had before the changes. I think it’s a much better grandmaster than transfusion because the protection prevents people from going down in the first place which helps you keep things running smoothly.

I usually feel useful with my necro but there are situations where I don’t feel useful at all. For example, when running SE path 1 you can clear triple golems without reflect or projectile destruction but it’s difficult and the necro can’t bring very much to the table for this fight.

A huge problem is that Unshakable renders blind completely useless. If not for that, Well of Darkness would be one of the most useful tools for PvE. It makes no sense that bosses are immune to blind but they can be blocked by aegis or have their damage reflected back at them.

tldr; Rezzing support is a defeatist strategy. Effective support keeps people from going down in the first place.

PS: There is a great place to use things like transfusion… like tequatl where tons of people going down is a given. If you can prevent 5 people from dying that is a huge impact on the fight for one player to have. But for small organized groups we need different options.

I think the problem with necro in PvE is not the necro but the PvE… If enemies used boons to make them more powerful, a necro would be a strong and unique addition to the party as a debuffer. If they used conditions against you, sending them back would be better than cleansing (the same way reflect beats deflect). Necro has unique utilities, but they are irrelevant to PvE for no reasons. As Brazil said recently: “necro is really good at being good at things that just don’t matter”.

But there is hope. In HoT, Reaper seems to really add DPS and “challenging group content” may be happy to have a razzing/healing necro.

Silverkey.2078:

I think the problem with necro in PvE is not the necro but the PvE… If enemies used boons to make them more powerful, a necro would be a strong and unique addition to the party as a debuffer. If they used conditions against you, sending them back would be better than cleansing (the same way reflect beats deflect). Necro has unique utilities, but they are irrelevant to PvE for no reasons. As Brazil said recently: “necro is really good at being good at things that just don’t matter”.

But there is hope. In HoT, Reaper seems to really add DPS and “challenging group content” may be happy to have a razzing/healing necro.

The other problem is that enemies that do apply boons apply them faster than a whole horde of necros could ever strip them off or corrupt them. What good is corrupting kitten row of boons when the enemy will just reapply it 5s later while our skill is on CD for 50s?

Also sword autoattack on other classes rips boons. That’s much better than anything necromancers can hope for.

There used to be a guild bounty that required boon ripping. Guilds banned necromancers from doing that boss because of scaling and Necomancer boon ripping not being good enough.

nekretaal.6485:

Also sword autoattack on other classes rips boons. That’s much better than anything necromancers can hope for.

There used to be a guild bounty that required boon ripping. Guilds banned necromancers from doing that boss because of scaling and Necomancer boon ripping not being good enough.

What you mention is only the mesmer as far as I know. The mesmer does have good boon ripping abilities, but as I said, corruption is better than ripping (although many conditions are intensity-stacking while most boon are duration stacking and you get at most 3 stacks of the conditions from corruption).

So yes, the boss should have skills that apply many boons and have a reasonable cooldown to them so that peak corruption is better than corruption-over-time.

There are plenty of times in PvE when the enemies have boons. Dredge give themselves a few boons including protection, there’s that golem in CoE, the mid-boss in grawl fractal… All of those guys use protection + other boons.

When I bring my necro to those fights it doesn’t seem to matter enough. If I forget to bring Well of Corruption to those fights it doesn’t matter. We could kill things a little faster with it but honestly it’s not high enough impact. There are no boons that you absolutely need to remove.

Also there is a weapon sigil that removes boons on crit. I have an alternate rifle on my warrior with it that I could pull out for bosses that use boons.

Silverkey.2078:

I think the problem with necro in PvE is not the necro but the PvE… If enemies used boons to make them more powerful, a necro would be a strong and unique addition to the party as a debuffer. If they used conditions against you, sending them back would be better than cleansing (the same way reflect beats deflect). Necro has unique utilities, but they are irrelevant to PvE for no reasons. As Brazil said recently: “necro is really good at being good at things that just don’t matter”.

But there is hope. In HoT, Reaper seems to really add DPS and “challenging group content” may be happy to have a razzing/healing necro.

I highly doubt that the rezzing stuff will be important once people figure out the best strategies. The best strategies will minimize the possibility of people going down.

Pretty much what Silver Key already pointed out, PvE is too easy and foes don’t use enough conditions and boons, tho it’s more with conditions that Necromancer can shine, by inflicting and sending them back, while turning boons on foes into conditions instead of removing them.

And some foes have ridiculously low cooldowns, like what Mordrem Hounds did, but ANet chose to remove Retaliation from them, a bad idea, instead of adding longer cooldowns or “No effect if ally is under effect of Retaliation” limiters. The duration of Retaliation could have been something of 5-8 seconds.

The problem with ANet trying to make the enemy more dangerous is that they have no self-control. When they give hard CC to an enemy (even mobs!) they don’t give one, no, they put it on each skill. Same with your retaliation example. So instead of making enemies harder, they just make them frustrating! I really hope HoT will be better.