Guild Wars 2

For a condition class, and thematically, Necros access to Poison seems pretty limited and on the outskirts of a lot builds.

One way for an attrition class to function well is to prevent the opponents heals from being as effective, this could work for the Necro if he could keep poison up almost all the time. But he really can’t because he doesn’t get enough or long skills that have it.

It could also be a nice little damage boost since Poison scales better than Bleed with condition damage.

Let’s look at the typical condition build, which is Staff + Scepter/Dagger.

Weapons

On Staff: Chillblains, base poison is only 6 seconds for a 20 second cooldown skill. Even with duration increases you are unlikely to have this up more than half the time.

On Scepter: Putrid Curse (3rd in chain). This skill is ok but being the third on the chain many fights you will never get to it, and certainly not use it as a way to sustain poison unless you are simply spamming auto-attack the entire fight, which is not ideal.

Axe: No Poison
Dagger: No Poison
Warhorn: No Poison
Focus: No Poison

Utilities

Corrosive Poison Cloud: For a poison cloud, its pretty underwhelming, and is rarely used in Necro builds. Potentially 10 seconds of Poison, but no one sits in a field that long. And 40 second cooldown again offers little in the way of sustaining.

Corrupt Boon: This puts poison on you. Can be transferred, but wasting a transfer for a 5s poison usually isn’t optimal at the time as the skills primary function determines when you want to use it. And again, a 40 second cooldown.

Signet of Spite: 5 second Poison on a 90 second cooldown. Hardly worth mentioning as a consistent means to poison.

[Suggestion: Make Epidemic put Poison on your target. Right now it does not harm your main target at all. This would give you one free condition to spread, and give it some use in 1v1 situations.]

Traits

Toxic Landing: Poison on fall? Ok this is not going to be used in any normal rotation.

Death Nova: 3 Seconds of Poison when a minion dies, but for a Grandmaster slot. Only minion master will consider this, which is ok if you happen to be one, but considering how buggy pets are, not many consider these extremely viable builds.

The lack of Poison themed traits and improvement, I find embarrassing.

Pets

Necrotic Traversal (Flesh Worm), a 5 second, very situational, poison, on a 40 second cooldown.

Elite

Plague: Auto-poison, but lasts just 1 second. More of a survival or escape elite, or perhaps to chain blind a group, then means of damage, since you have no access to your normal abilities.

Downed/Drowning/Underwater

We have one means to poison in each of these states, but I’m primarily focused on our normal land-based alive combat with this.

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So as we can see, though the list looks peppered with quite a few delivery means, the duration times and long cooldowns pretty much kill keeping poison sustained. As well as most are highly situational and outside the normal purview of a condition build. Poison should be a symbiotic condition to bleed, with the two helping each other to boost Necro condition damage, as well as providing redundancy in case one of the two gets removed. Right now if your big bleed stack is removed, you just lost probably 70% of your DPS. If Poison was more readily reapplicable, and longer lasting, this could reduce the power of removals, in keeping Necro DPS a bit more reliable, as well as stunting heals – which works in harmony with attrition.

Unfortunately, consistent poison upkeep looks like an afterthought on this profession.

epidemic puts vulnerability on you. ‘copoclo’ is the one that puts poison, and weakness, on you. (edit: oops copoclo only puts weakness lol!)

Btw, death nova deceptively puts a lot more poison than the description says, when i run my minion build I can pretty much keep poison on the enemy forever.

^ Right, thx. Will update.

In my opinion, improving poison length or accessibility would make it “too easy” to counter heals. As it is now you are encouraged to save your poisons for the right moment, and I like being smart about my skill use rather than spamming staff 2-3-4-5 one right after the other whenever I swap to it.

Could we use more/longer poisons? Maybe. Do we need more/longer poisons? No. Given the strength of the condition I don’t think it should be able to be kept up all the time.

lettucemode.3789:

In my opinion, improving poison length or accessibility would make it “too easy” to counter heals. As it is now you are encouraged to save your poisons for the right moment, and I like being smart about my skill use rather than spamming staff 2-3-4-5 one right after the other whenever I swap to it.

Could we use more/longer poisons? Maybe. Do we need more/longer poisons? No. Given the strength of the condition I don’t think it should be able to be kept up all the time.

The problem is that “timing” any necro poisons is limited to dropping Chillblains at their feet as they heal. By the time you can Corrosive Poison Cloud, they’ve finished healing and have gotten a couple of hits in on you. Scepter auto-attack has the same issue.

So to have good “timing” with poison, you need to keep it on them almost all the time as otherwise you will miss the heal.

Corrosive Poison Cloud last 12 seconds and has 5 ticks of 3 seconds, so its actually 15 seconds total poison, 19.5 if 30 points are in Spite.

I do agree poisons should be slightly increased in duration to weapon skills, personally id like to see an effect added to the 2nd attack in the (1) dagger chain and have it added the same way to axe and make axe (1) into an attack chain

would also like to see a poison effect added to the (5) attacks for all 3 offhand weapons but that might be asking too much

Most of the Heals in game that also remove conditions remove the conditions first then heal so the poison passive dosnt work.

LastDarkness.7390:

Most of the Heals in game that also remove conditions remove the conditions first then heal so the poison passive dosnt work.

And that pretty much sums up everything about the necro: Most of their things don’t work as intended.

1 sec longer atleast for the scepter
and 2 for the staff will be fine
utility skills are with long cd so i won’t count them

CHIPS.6018:

LastDarkness.7390:

Most of the Heals in game that also remove conditions remove the conditions first then heal so the poison passive dosnt work.

And that pretty much sums up everything about the necro: Most of their things don’t work as intended.

Poison is far from exclusive to the Necromancer. The fact that healing skills that are specifically condition removals actually remove poison before applying their heal strikes me as far better than consume conditions being limited by a condition it’s feeding off of.

This is one thing I hope they fix with Necromancer. We have “multiple” weapons that apply poison, but there’s actually only three. And one is underwater that doesn’t directly apply poison unless they pass through it.

Thief has just as much poison on their weapons as us I think, which is pretty sad. And they can apply bleeds and poison much more faster than we can.

Love the part on epidemic should cast poison on target and spread to all. Hate when I epidemic and they cure their conditions a second before it casts.

Melpomene.2367:

This is one thing I hope they fix with Necromancer. We have “multiple” weapons that apply poison, but there’s actually only three. And one is underwater that doesn’t directly apply poison unless they pass through it.

Thief has just as much poison on their weapons as us I think, which is pretty sad. And they can apply bleeds and poison much more faster than we can.

Love the part on epidemic should cast poison on target and spread to all. Hate when I epidemic and they cure their conditions a second before it casts.

Actualy a Ranger applies Bleeds the fastest, then sword Warrior, then Thief.
My brothers Ranger can apply 25 bleeds in a couple seconds.

Poison is good if it worked, it really needs its passive to have better effect since its cleansed so much or automaticaly before heals.

Epidemic, I actualy have the problem of a target dieing often before it casts. I would either like Epidemic to be instant or to apply the effects of a target when the button is pressed not when the skill animations are all done. (Targets get what was on current target at time of key press)

Of course I would also like DoTs to be able to crit and also have magnitude stacking so the strongest ones stack on a single target. It would be great also if you could by some means maybe a trait get a chance for your conditions to resist being removed. Seems fitting and thematic for a Necromancer afterall.

Especialy Considering I could do more Damage as a Condition build with my same gear (All exotic Rabid) on a Warrior, Ranger, Thief, and especialy Mesmer. Along with better group support and utility for some. Just what as a Necromancer am I supposed to be bringing to the party again?

Massssster the Death Shroud.