Guild Wars 2

Anet asks for constructive feedback, so here we go!

It is going to be a long post.

1) Intro.
2) Necro weapon sets.
3) Necro utilities & elites.
4) Necro class mechanic.
5) Suggestions.

Ad. 1.
I’ve sticked to the necro since the second BWE. I’ve played it through everything in PvE and played hundreds of tPvP games with it. Necro used to be the king of terrible. After the nerfs from BWE2 it suffered from numerous bugs, very bad traits and overall felt like a dump-class with things thrown into it without any greater thought.
It was said by Jon Peters to be the hardest profession. Starting to learn the game as a necro was definitely very difficult, but I sticked to it. After some time, I learned the tricks necro has as well as enjoyed fixes and buffs from Anet.

I really loved the challenge playing the necro offered and I loved the playstyle. All until I tried other professions extensively. I’ve played a warrior, an ele, a ranger, tried some engineer and guardian. Every single class (with maybe an exception for ranger) felt so much fun compared to necro. At first, I thought, well maybe it’s just the way it is, it is how necro was designed and it reaches different playstyle preferences. Then I started to see the bigger picture and I want to share my ideas and how to fix things with everyone here and now.

Ad. 2.
With no further ado I’d like to talk about necro weapon sets. I decided to talk about it shortly because I believe it to be the basic reason that necromancers aren’t as awesome as they could be.

In general I believe weapon sets are all this ‘fire-and-forget’ type with very little synergy. They of course are designed to somehow work together but they lack the flow.

To explain what I mean let’s take a look at every set:

• MH dagger has: tri-stage auto-attack, a stale channeled life siphon and immobilize.
• Axe is similar with: two-stage auto-attack, a stale channeled claws skill and a PBAoE skill.
• Scepter isn’t much different: tri-stage auto-attack, an AoE, and a single hit skill.
• Off-hands are just as boring: focus has a 2 skills, one to provide vulnerability and regen, second chilling the target and rending boons. The warhorn has caster-exclusive swiftness and an AoE daze. Dagger has 2 condition AoE’s.
• We’re left with a staff that has 4 marks providing various effects and a very bad auto-attack. Boring!

Now, to somehow summarize it all – necro weapon sets are all designed to provide 3 things: boons/conditions, damage and life force. Necro has little to none access to control effects (dazes, stuns, knockbacks, launches, knockdowns, you get the meaning) as well as no block, no evades, no invulnerabilities, no movement skills (necro is the only profession without a leap), sequence skills outside auto-attack (every other profession has them).

I want everyone to understand one thing – necro weapon sets aren’t weak, on the contrary, they are very strong. They are just very boring, simplistic. What’s even worse, they do not provide possibilities for fun and deep combinations (anyone who played an ele or some of the well-designed classes knows what I mean). They lack combo effects. There is a fun fact related to this – necro sets have almost no projectiles, what counters many defensive reflection/block abilities, but at the same time gives no finishers so that playing a necro doesn’t feel cohesive and adds to many design flaws necro has.

Ad. 3.
Necro utility and elite skills are very strong. I can see no major problems with them with few exceptions.

• Pets are weak and boring, the only pets I find use of are bone minions, because there is a minimal AI involved – you just summon them and make them explode few seconds later.
• Signets are either very bad overall (Signet of Spite), have stupidly weak active effect (Signet of the Locust), are broken (Plague Signet) or ridiculously strong (Signet of Undeath). Signet traits are bad.
• Wells are strong and have a great traits attached. They are just very boring.
• Corruption skills are very nice and powerful.
• Spectral skills are rather underwhelming and not worth taking over other skills. They provide some fun and utility in WvW though.
• Elites are good, the Plague is great, Lich Form is amazing under Time Warp, the minion is as dumb as other minions and doesn’t always KD because it likes to block on vertical routes. I don’t find it a big problem though since most classes have useless elites.

Ad. 4.
The Death Shroud is very strong, I mean, VERY. It has many great traits available. I think it’s one of the best designed profession mechanics. The only problem I seem to have is that the auto-attack is rather useless even if traited. Death Shroud’s strongest usage comes from DS in&out jumping for various effects and for utility from Dark Path, Doom and Life Transfer. I rarely find the auto-attack worth staying in the Death Shroud. But overall, DS is strong and fun.

Ad. 5.
Many people complain that the necromancer doesn’t feel like one. They don’t like poor minion design, they would like more dynamic gameplay. They would love some more survivability outside of DS. While I agree to some of the countless issues people seem to have, I’d like to propose some changes that would in my view make necro amazing. I have put a lot of thought into necromancer and have spent a long time thinking about suggestions.

1. Weapon sets: there are two things I had an idea about: necro isn’t too dynamic and it doesn’t feel as a true minion master profession.

• Firstly, I thought that Lich Form skills should be given to the staff. Just think of how more interesting would it be to have the quick Lich attack on your staff. You would have a knockback with chill under ‘2’, the vulnerability mark, this great ‘4’ that summons short-living bone minions or jagged horrors that you could explode for some burst damage and a great support/offensive ‘5’. I think this skillset would be just super fun for the staff. It gives great utility and support, allows people to feel like a minion master and summon those little horrors, then explode them to poison everyone around on the second trigger sequence.
• Secondly, I’d add some flavor to other weapon sets. Axe comes to mind, being the 600 range weapon. It could get a leap skill allowing you to close the gap and switch to dagger or staff to bomb the opponent. It could use cleave damage and get weakness instead of vulnerability. What about a block skill that provides Life Force for example?
• Daggers are okay, but I’d see Life Siphon more interesting if it provided smaller but AoE leech or was faster so the weapon feels more coherent.
• Other offhands could get some changes. Mainly warhorn to provide some party-wide buff (swiftness for everyone, locust swarm for the necro) and possibly a short AoE fear on ‘5’ (like Fear Me! Or Steal) instead of the daze to make it more necro and make the class the real king of fear.

2. Death Shroud auto-attack (Life Blast) could be changed to make it a cond/power hybrid nuke. The idea I have is pretty simple – Life Blast is supposed to be used when Life Force pool is higher than 50%. What about making it a channeled skill (like the ele scepter lighting auto-attack) that drains your Life Force or a skill that gathers it in front of the necromancer so he can release it at the target providing a burst + few stacks of bleeding. It solves something I always feel when I play Death Shroud builds – running around spamming auto-attacks continuously just isn’t fun.

3. Necro’s weakest in the beginning of a match when necro has no Life Force. LF generation could get some number shift from deaths around to utilities and weapon sets to make it so necro can reliably get the resource while fighting so it becomes more of an attrition fight. I don’t have much problem with it as it is now though.

I’d love to find out what you guys think about these ideas. Now I know that with their small balance team, possibility of such an overhaul is probably null. With that in mind, I really tried to propose changes that do not require much additional design/art work. Sad thing is, these are things that seem so natural to have for other professions, while necro just doesn’t seem to get this much attention. I only hope someone at Anet reads it and realizes that it really could work and make necro so awesome.

Find it abit hard to read this, would be better if it was more clear if the weapon/skill you talked about was more highlighted and the suggestion for it.

Disagree completely on Death Shroud being best designed class mechanic. If you spec condition dmg 1 is useless , 2 you use for the chill bleed but gets annoying because of the forced teleport , 3 is an interrupt not fear , 4 is pretty bad for condition but adds a little ekstra tanking. Would rather they give us the underwater ds on land.

Leap for axe wouldnt make sense for it being a ranged weapon and death shroud 2 is pretty much there for this job.

I very much agree that Necro needs more depth. In particular, as you state, the weapon skills mostly feel stale and uninspired. It’s not an issue of effectiveness, but rather it lacks interaction and often comes down to watching yourself autoattack. Death Shroud is great for survivability, but also suffers from the boring factor.

wiazabi.2549:

Find it abit hard to read this, would be better if it was more clear if the weapon/skill you talked about was more highlighted and the suggestion for it.

Sorry for that. I had no time earlier to format the post properly. I did some formatting now.

wiazabi.2549:

Disagree completely on Death Shroud being best designed class mechanic.

What I mean by saying that DS is well-designed is it has the great depth and offers a lot of possibilities. I think it is what class mechanics should be about.

Warrior’s or Guardian’s mechanics for example are also strong but have a rather narrow usage. For me it makes DS better than these sample mechanics.

Draehl.2681:

I very much agree that Necro needs more depth. In particular, as you state, the weapon skills mostly feel stale and uninspired. It’s not an issue of effectiveness, but rather it lacks interaction and often comes down to watching yourself auto-attack. Death Shroud is great for survivability, but also suffers from the boring factor.

That’s the biggest problem, I don’t know why they were designed in this way. Possibly the DS + health pool design was creating lots of balancing difficulties so developers had to cut something off. I can only guess.

I still believe necro deserves more depth and fun factor in both weapon and DS divisions. This game is all about working with your teammates supporting each other. For me, necro lacks this feel of contribution and accomplishment on his weapon sets.

Knowing any rework is extremely unlikely saddens me.

Much better to read now thank you.

Get same impression that death shroud created ALOT of balance issues which left it underwhelming in pretty much everything.

What a necro need for group support is actual curses that help their group but they took em out in gw2 so we dont really have any real support beside wells on long cd short duration.

leman.7682:

Ad. 3.

• Secondly, I’d add some flavor to other weapon sets. Axe comes to mind, being the 600 range weapon. It could get a leap skill allowing you to close the gap and switch to dagger or staff to bomb the opponent. It could use cleave damage and get weakness instead of vulnerability.

Bit of a wall of text coming.

I agree with just about everything you said, with the exception of the cleave on the axe. I’m not sure why nobody seems to realize, but a 600 range auto attack with cleave is just too much. If it wasn’t auto attack, and say the #2 or #3 ability with a cooldown that’d be fine. But 600 range is WAY too far to have a continuous auto attack. The first thing that comes to mind is Ele’s Dagger, Fire attunement auto attack. It is a cleave but only 400 range. While I would love a 600 range one, it would just be too overpowered.

I’d like to see the dagger skills all reduced to melee range, 400 range, or PbAoE. I think that the Axe #3 (Unholy Feast) should be on the dagger since you need to be melee range for auto attack anyways you have a better chance of hitting someone with it.

While I love the daggers #2 (Life Siphon) with its high damage and nice amount of healing done, I feel it should be made PbAoE as well. Either around the caster, or targeted enemy. It would just fit the melee range weapon better in my eyes. It always felt a little funny having 600 range on all of the daggers abilities, except the auto attack.

The axe should be given the dagger’s #3 immobilize (Dark Pact), as currently its hard to keep the enemy in the 600 range, but out of melee range.

I do really like the staff, I think its probably our most useful weapon overall and I never leave home without it. But I like your suggestions better about giving it some of the abilities from Lich Form, that would be amazing.

Something that I’d like to see is a nice boost for condition builds in the form of a trait that makes bleeds life siphon, or if that is too OP, then generate LF. I don’t play a condition build, but Life Siphons are supposed to be one of the defining features of a Necromancer in my eyes, and it only make sense that draining the blood of your enemies is beneficial to you. It would also go perfectly with A-Net’s idea of us being an attrition class. Conditions are meant to slowly wear down your enemy though attrition, and some form of regeneration is key to attrition as well.

While on the topic of regeneration, why not completely do away with all of the Regen boons we can get (there aren’t many), and change them all to life siphoning? Maybe a boon that makes all of our attacks siphon health or something.

Flesh Golem dies when you enter water because you cannot use it in there.
Which is absolutely horrible, as killed minions will make the skill go on cooldown.
This makes the whole skill useless in an area with swim-able water. As once you touch it, it will go on cooldown.

Giioohn.4370:

Flesh Golem dies when you enter water because you cannot use it in there.
Which is absolutely horrible, as killed minions will make the skill go on cooldown.
This makes the whole skill useless in an area with swim-able water. As once you touch it, it will go on cooldown.

Do we know why we can’t use Flesh Golem underwater? We can use our other minions just fine (not sure about Flesh Wurm, probably not).