Guild Wars 2

Axe:

1, Rending Claws[/u}: the damage is slightly and could be buffed by adding a bleed or poison effect.
[u]2, Ghastly Claws: The damage is on par with other skills, but could use one more condition. Weakness is perfect for this and would work with the theme of the axe skills.
3, Unholy feast: The damage for this is very low compared to other aoe abilities. Retaliation feels out of place and should be replaced with something that makes it feel like a necro skill. I suggest stealing 1 boon from all targets hit that lasts for 3 seconds. Maybe adding a 2% life force gain from each enemy hit as well.

Focus:

4, Reaper’s Touch: In my opinion, all this needs is to have its damage doubled. Everything else about it is great, but the damage is way too low.
5, Spinal Shivers: This needs a major damage boost. Boon removal and chill are great, but this would be better if it was a combo finisher (which Necros have very few) and did 2-3x more damage.

Dagger, main hand:

1, Necrotic Slash/Stab/Bite: My only real issue with this is its extremely short range. It should be 600 yards like the other two skills. Making hit multiple enemies in a small radius would be useful, and adding a short bleed on the second hit would make it more interesting.
2, Life Siphon: This skill seems balanced IMO, what are your guys thought on it?
3, Dark Pact: Would be nicer if it hit multiple enemies.

Staff:
5, Reaper’s Mark: The fear on this is way too short, should be 3 seconds, considering its long cool down.

Spear:
1, Cruel Strike: This really needs a longer range, 900 would be perfect. And it could use a poison on each strike as well. Having a long range would allow us to pull mobs easier underwater.

On a side note about underwater battle, we should be able to use our wells underwater. Guardians can use purging flames underwater, which uses the same ground circle effect, so we should be able to do the same.

Scepter, dagger offhand, and warhorn are balanced IMO.

I agree with dagger, it should have cleave, but not extended range. It’s not a sword.
Dark Pact would do better with lower cooldown, making it AoE would be overpowered.
Life Siphon is fine.
Axe 1 should be stonger at the sacrifice of 1 vuln stack.
Axe 2 is fine. Don’t mess with it.
Axe 3 is slightly underpowered at best.
Focus 4 should have another effect, giving it 2x power would be too much power, maybe 1.5×.
Focus 5 totally agree.

For spear it’s kinda a power not a condition weapon, so maybe a vuln stack like axes? It needs slightly longer range because you’re thrusting not throwing but riht now you’re doing kind of a weak stab. Maybe 200 range or so.

Here’s the thing. With Elementalists, they use their daggers as a catalyst more so than a weapon. Lightning whip hits multiple foes and has a range of 300-450 or so. The fire one, has around a 300-600 range as well and hits 3 times simultaneously. Scholars don’t use the dagger so much for melee as they do a catalyst. Dark pact has a range of 600 or so and immobilizes so why can’t the other ones? At least give us a little room over a warrior or thief or so.

As it is now, a Dagger power / crit build, while it does good damage, gets absolutely thrashed by warriors and thieves due to heartseeker spam or other such high burst potentials. You literally can’t be at a safe range to avoid them. Daggers can have a bit more range to them. Just because a necro has higher HP doesn’t mean we have higher armor as well. Case in point, when you have 19-21k hp + and people are bursting you for 14k or more, that’s a bit negligible. Especially when they’re coming from stealth and you have little to no time to react at all.

Life Siphon (dagger #2) is great for damage done but quite lacklustre in terms of healing received. Make it a cleave effect and it becomes much more useful!

Kinohki.3470:

Especially when they’re coming from stealth and you have little to no time to react at all.

To be fair, if they’re coming at you from stealth then having extra range won’t help. On the whole though, having extra range on the #1 skill would be very nice

All I’d want to see is the damage roughly doubled on one skill, from each mainhand weapon. Axe2, Dagger2, and Staff1. Not familiar with the sceptre skills, but probably one of them, too. It can even just be single-target, I’m fine with that balance limitation. I just want ONE high damage skill to use, that isn’t a long cooldown utility.

I don’t know how anyone can say dagger2 does great damage. Have you played ANY other class? Seems to me like they made it weak to balance the lifetap, but the heal is so weak, I don’t think I’d miss it if it were removed entirely.

edit: oh, and underwater.. I just don’t get why neither weapon is ranged.

I am a tank build and I love the retaliation on my axe3. Greater attack power doesn’t necessarily mean better skills for everyone hehe.

I agree with the wells underwater though. Having my main skill type completely nullified underwater greatly discourages me from underwater combat.
Also, has anyone gotten Signet of Undeath’s active to work underwater? It seems to target the ground and never resses anyone for me :/

Dagger Mainhand range is fine, imo.
Its supposed to be a melee-weapon, you know?
Same with the spear.
Dagger auto-attack could need some extra tho, like the weakness you want to give to the axe.

Life Siphon is a bit boring, most of the time i dont use it and auto-attack instead. Could use some more healing and i wouldnt mind a trait (Bloodthirst maybe) that turns it into an AoE-Heal.

Dark pact would be OP, if it would hit multiple enemies. RIght now, it is okay. Useful in WvW, somewhat useful in PvE.

Reapers Touch: Good skill; its the vulnerability/regeneration that counts, not the damage. Let regeneration have an effect while in DS and all is fine.

Spinal Shivers: Good skill in WvW, in PvE it WOULD be good if there were some mobs that actually use Boons. So far the only boon-using mobs i have encountered are some undead in Orr, some Jotuns and the dredge (and its a waste of time to remove the boons from dredge). Could need some higher Damage or shorter Casting time or both.

Reapers Mark: 3 seconds of fear is too long; the mobs would wander to Narnia in that time. I’d prefer 1,5-2 seconds of fear or a shorter Cooldown.

Spear-ability no.5, Dark Spear, needs some changes. That self-disable has to go. Why would you pull yourself to an enemy and disable yourself when you can just pull the enemy to you (Spear-skill no.4)?

Trident-abilities are horrible imo. Its supposed to be a ranged weapon but has 2 point blank-AoE-skills.
And Sinking tomb has nothing besides the sinking-effect, while other classes’ sink-skills have stuff like damage, regeneration (for allies) etc.

Axe needs overall the flat damage increased, as in fact pretty much every Necromancer weapon. It is just plain awful when it comes to dealing damage.

Also as you said Unholy Feast just seems out of place for it, it really feels like it should be more of a melee focused weapon’s ability. Also Warhorn’s Locust Swarm needs a complete overhaul, it is so awful for anything. Swiftness doesnt last, the damage is nothing and it’s so easy to get away from the Cripple.

With the Axe, I’d like to see Rending Claws have it’s attack speed pushed up to that of the dagger so you can actually stack noticeable amounts of vulnerability, that and maybe make Ghastly Claws a cone AoE so the Axe can be a solid weapon for short range AoE and not have Unholy Feast be so out of place.

The dagger (both MH & OH) are fine imo, the damage of the auto attack could be bumped up a bit but it’s still pretty solid where it is.

I agree with you about Reaper’s Mark on the staff, but personally I’d prefer a 2s fear. On that note I don’t think any fear ability should ever have more than 2s base duration for it (I’m looking at you “Fear Me!” & stolen Skull Fear). It’s pretty sad when fear, something that was introduced as a necromancer signature ability is now much better on anything but necro.

The reason I called for a 2-3x damage boost for Spinal Shivers is that currently, it does about the same amount as the number 1 attack for the axe. But it has a long cooldown. A comparison, the 5 ability for daggers, does about 1200 dmg with the bleed effect (if the mob stands in it for the duration) for a level 58 necro.