Guild Wars 2

First: Stability. A necromancer has no stability or invulnerability. Every class has at least one utility skill that can be traited to give stability, invulnerability, or an equivalent…sometimes all three. Warriors get balanced stance, rangers get rampage as one, thieves can stealth (while not stability or invulnerability, it does stop around 90% of CC), guardians get stand your ground, elementalists get armor of earth, engineers get elixer S, and mesmers get mantra of concentration. If a necromancer wants stability, the necromancer must either 1) trait for death shroud to give it or 2) use an elite transformation skill. Now that’s fine and dandy except for the fact that one of stability’s primary uses is to avoid finisher interrupts in PvP and you cannot use the finisher while in death shroud or transformed. How come necromancer is the only class that cannot have a utility skill for stability? How come the necromancer has no way to finish someone without letting them first interrupt us?

Second: Conditions. Necromancers can’t really run a build other than bunker or condition (perhaps minion master….but probably not in light of minion AI). I recognize that most classes only really have one or two builds, and that’s fine…however, making our only viable offensive build conditions has numerous problems. First, in PvE, there is a 25 stack limit to all conditions meaning if you’re in a group event, the monster will acquire his 25 stack limit very, very quickly. This means that once a champion has his 25 stacks of bleeding, all your conditions will not do damage. Since necromancers rely so heavily on conditions, this essentially equates to not doing damage ourselves which results in bronze or silver rewards for an event we fought just as hard in. How is that fair? At least let us have a trait in curses that lets us bypass the 25 stack limit so we can contribute. Second, in PvP, every class has condition removal. Now while this isn’t so much of a problem (I can understand putting counters in for other strategies), no other strategy is so hard countered by one thing. If you run a burst build, your opponent had better be extremely fast in his blocking of your initial burst, or he’ll be nearly dead, forced to heal, and already losing. Even if he does block your intial burst, most burst builds don’t have that long between bursts…100B warriors only require 6 seconds of stalling between their burst skills, and they’re guarenteed to get you at least once with it unless you’re a bunker. However, condition builds are delayed in their effects. This means if your opponent simply waits until conditions begin to become dangerous, then cures them, we’re completely helpless to fight against them. Furthermore, there are excessive amounts of skills to purge, transfer, or transform conditions making it much, much easier to counter than a burst build which may only have one or two skills on long cooldowns to counter.
tldr; conditions are way too easy to counter. If you intend to keep it that way, at least allow us another viable offensive build.

Third: Death shroud. I have never seen a build work that doesn’t use death shroud for anything other than an extra damage sponge. We have a whole trait tree dedicated to improving our death shroud, but our skill #4 is the only thing that can really hit any damage. I know some of you are going to go “but you can crit X,XXX with life blast through yaddayaddayadda.” Yeah. Sure. You can crit an impressive number with life blast. Of course that’s assuming you crit and your life force bar is full (as life blast gets weaker the lower our life force gets). Furthermore, that’s just one damage amount and life blast has a long cast time. Compare it to some other burst builds (hundred blades, pistol whip, mug+backstab+c/d) and you’ll see that your little Xk/second falls very short. My point here is that death shroud should either have some offensive options to take advantage of all those traits, or it should have more defensive traits associated with it to make a DS build possible.

Fourth: Escapes. Every class has a method of getting away when things get too spicy for the pepper. Elementalists and thieves are perhaps the best at this for obvious reasons. However, other classes have methods of escape through stability or stability equivalents (see first point), leaps, and immobilizes/knockdowns. A necromancer only has a very few number of skills to escape with, and most are not utilized due to the fact that a necromancer must focus on more offensive or defensive things to be able to even survive a fight. Yes, we get fear. But fear is easily countered and incredibly hard to come by. We essentially have no get out of jail free card. Even with fear, we at best have two skills that can cause it, and only one is AoE. Furthermore, we only have two skills that can grant swiftness, one of which is a utility that very few people even end up using. The only other thing we could hope to use is the flesh worm which is unreliable at best, and useless at worst. Flesh worm doesn’t work when your range exceeds 1200 which means we had better have pretty kitten good prediction skills on exactly where and when we’ll need it. And that’s assuming it doesn’t die from something else killing it while you’re off doing your business. Moreover, we have only one stunbreaker (which is also fairly bad), and absolutely no blowouts, knockdowns, or leaps. Now this wouldn’t be such a giant problem if other classes didn’t get swiftness, blowouts, knockdowns, leaps, or stunbreakers either. But, every class does, and their ability to pursue is vastly superior to our ability to flee. This means if a necromancer gets in a fight, they either win or die. There is no retreat. That doesn’t hardly seem fair either.

Fifth (last): A way to counter bursts. All classes have some skill that lets them block, evade, take zero damage from, or interrupt a burst. A necromancer does not. We have no blocks. We have no evades (outside of dodge). We have no take-zero-damage skills. We have ONE interrupt, and it’s a daze that we can’t even take advantage of (this is due to the cast time of the skill equaling the daze duration). Oh yeah, and that skill is on a warhorn which is a very, very unpopular and weak secondary weapon. Our only answer to burst builds is death shroud. However, unlike other classes which can survive a burst or two then wait for a cooldown to happen to do it all over again, our burst survival skill requires charging. It’s vital to our survival and often times one burst is enough to take it from full to 0 and then still get some damage through to the necromancer. Death shroud effectively does not counter bursts all that well, plus it’s much harder and takes much longer to charge than a simple 60 or 90 second cooldown.

There are simple solutions to these problems however, these are just my answer:
First, give us some form of stability that we can slot into a utility. You can remove a useless (or less useful utility) like:
plague signet – only one stack of all conditions and only for 5 seconds is hardly worth ever activating, and the passive power is not beneficial enough to merit a spot on most builds
Signet of undeath – unable to revive dead players? Only downed ones? While that might be useful in certain situations, a 180 second cooldown is unacceptable. You mean to tell me that certain game-changing elites like lich form are just as good as the ability to pick up a downed player? No. Not even close. While the passive effect is nice, the active effect & cooldown is trash and the passive is not good enough to compensate for that.
Spectral grasp – I hate to say it because I love this skill for WvW, but other than pulling people off keep walls or jumping puzzles. This skill is completely useless. If your goal was to introduce a skill that could catch a fleeing opponent, you kind of picked the wrong class to give it to. Since most necromancers are condition necromancers, we have plenty of chill and cripple already to ensure an opponent doesn’t escape. My necro has a 9.6 second cripple on the scepter skill #2 (10 second cooldown). I can prevent escape without ever looking at spectral grasp.
Signet of the locust – One I also hate to say, but it’s also not that useful. 10% movement speed is nice for getting around faster (especially in light of the lack of uber swiftness), but when you’re trying to chase someone down or run from someone, a 10% movement speed increase hardly matters. More often than not, a cripple, chill, knockdown, blowout, leap, immobilize, pull, teleport, or rush will solve this problem than swiftness or movement speed. I think we can all agree life steals are worthless so the active effect is worthless as well.
Plague signet – I can see this has niche uses. But in all honesty, it’s not usually worth it. Even if you’re trying to help your team…we’ve already established every class has tons of excessive, easily accessible condition removal, so why should you worry about taking conditions onto yourself? The passive effect just moves conditions around, perhaps when you’re not prepared for it. Having 1 stack of bleeding on 25 people would be preferable to having 25 stacks of bleeding on you. As for the active effect, it’s essentially the same thing as skill #4 with dagger/staff. It’s nice, but I don’t think it merits a spot either when there are things like epidemic, corrupt boon, or blood is power to consider.

Second: This is just a matter of finding the right numbers for axe/dagger main hand, death shroud, and adjusting traits to support some kind of burst build instead of most our traits being tailored to some kind of over-time wear down of our opponents. I won’t tell you how this should be done, but something does need to be done here.

Third: This is another issue where you just need to change the way skills work for death shroud. I’m sure there’s ways you could adjust attack speeds or damage, change skill effects or life force pools to make it work. I, again, won’t tell you how this should be done.

Fourth: Give us a leap. Give us more fear. Give us a blowout, a knockdown, some area denial. Anything. Just give us something we can feasibly use to get out of tough spots if used correctly.

Fifth: Either adjust the way the life force pool works, or give us a utility skill that can stop a 100B 2hko. The correct answer is not “oh, you just just always have a cripple active, that should be how to stop a burst.” Because that’s now what you expect of other classes. You expect less of elementalists and eles are really quite squishy. Eles have mist form and arcane shield.

Whew. If you made it to the end, you deserve a cookie. That was a mouthful.

1) 30 point SR trait gives 3 sec of stability (while not great at least something, still would be better if it actually broke pulls, knockbacks and knockdowns as other stability sources do or to be perma stability while in ds that cannot be removed/effect stability)
2) Conditions work well, people just go for carrion instead or rampager or rabid and get slaughtered because of lack of toughness while the conditions tick off, we are pretty much immortal for 20 seconds with plague if its cast while over 50% hp
3) Kinda true, but DS can be used in a supportive build filling way for now (it should either get a 5th or even up to a 8th skill since right now it cripples us most of the time, i like my Staff 3-4 into Grasp to Doom and Dark path into Dagger swap procing hydromancy and even more chilling and transfusion heals for friends), sadly LB will always be the cripple because of the stupid do half as much damage when under a arbitrary limit.
4) Again same thing as 2 and will be the same for the 100B thing, depends on build, honestly unless the enemy had a kitten cheating trick cough moa or 4v1 with my skills down_cough_ i can always get away, especially because of our nice chill skills.
5) Warhorn is, IMO at least, our strongest offhand, at least if you dare go melee, the LF generation is great and the daze is much bigger than the animation, combined with dagger main hand, you can go from 10 to 70% LF in no time

Signet of Spite- just needs to get the recharge halved and 480 radius around the target too
Signet of Undeath – good as it is, would be cool if it revived actually defeated players as minions for 15 seconds depending on class (shade for light, wurm for medium, golem for heavy)
Spectral Grasp – Make it ignore terrain, i really wanna be a krait!
Signet of the Locust – just balancing the fact that it life stealing skills should scale their damage and healing both of healing and damage each.
Plague Signet – make it a i eat conditions for life force and instantly take all conditions to you and its kitten, ok right now (kinda stupid that if a enemy aint targeted you dont get the break but still ok)

About the right numbers and DS adapting to equipped weapons, true.

Lich form wind should be a aoe aura chill and cripple that would if activated be a pbaoe knockback on demand (maybe making it a signet with it). For else you got Plague (that should get a 4th skill trough).

I agree. No counterargument necessary. However, you can mitigate damage with death shroud of spectral armor, both of which help when someone uses whirling axes, pistol whip or 100B. I don’t mind using it because I traited it for fury and retaliation so the few seconds they hit me I can counter back when they’re finished with high-crit damage attacks as well as reflecting some of their own damage.

Lich form could be improved, I would love something like an aoe knockback or fear, considering it’s a big “LOOK AT ME, I’M A GIANT GHOST-GOD, ATTACK ME”

my fix to ds:

damage calculation should be based on (condition damage+power)/2
skill 1 should add 2-3 random conditions if it is kept the same it is now, or! improve it’s fire rate and remove the damage restriction when it low lf

plague form is quite excellent, just wish skill 2 worked with the ‘chill on blind’ trait, right now it doesn’t which makes me a little bit sad :/

spectral grasp, beside from the occasional failure due to it having terrain issues is an excellent skill, just would have prefered it if it would teleport the enemy to us instead of pulling them, although pulling the enemy over a couple of marks feels very good so the terrain issues should be fixed

@Andele.1306 carrion gear is superior to rampager since it offer vit where rampager offers no survivability

1) stability: It would be nice if the stability trait gave 5 seconds, but then it would be possible to trait/skill into having almost perm stability, but an unmodifiable 5 seconds would be nice. Giving perhaps spectral armor some stability could work, as atm it’s CD is to long to be useful. Having a stability utility that also provides protection and life force would be nice.

2) Yeah, not much to add, it’s a fairly significant issue.

3) If they removed the reduction of power on the DS auto attack based on lifeforce it would be fine, As it’s essentially some free time to do extra damage/effects. Alternatively making the auto fire faster works too.

4) At the moment once a necro commits to a fight, they’re in it to the end, it’definitely an issue, but i’m not sure what suitable skill/utility would fix it. perhaps they could make death shroud more like other transforms (so you can see your boons/conditions etc), and give it a 5th skill as an escape of some sort. Dunno.

You say we only have one stun break. Last I checked we have three, spectral walk, spectral armor and the signet.

The signet has long standing bugs, and now needs to be targeted, which is an issue, and spectral armor’s CD is far to long in my opinion, But as a dagger necro I almost always have spectral walk on me.

5) I don’t think it’s quite as bad as you make it to be, but it is notable compared to other classes.

tim.5617 – you get around 200 vit from a well balanced rampager setup will have a nice chunk of bonus vit

@ Andele.1306 you are right, i was crafting carrion exotics and was looking at stats for this gear not the pvp stuff, my bad, sorry!

1) I agree about the lack of stability. Invulnerability would be excessive, since we can go for DS to help at damage mitigation, but an stability utility would be good. 30 Points at Soul Reaping to get 3 sec of Stability is not so reliable depending of your spec.

2) In fact, Condition specs are really good. The major problem is people just stack like there is no tomorrow, and forget that the enemy have a condition removal. The idea is make some stacks to pressure your enemy to use his removal, an then make your massive stack.

3) In power builds you can get some good damages with it. Problem is since you use your 2nd life bar like a damage source, you are giving up of use it in a defensive way. Also Condition Builds can benefit of DS, since the 2nd DS Skill is a blink like that chills and causes 3 stacks of Bleeding, using fear like an interrupt or 4th DS skill to maintain the bleeding stacks.

4) We really dont have much escapes, but the reason is the necro playstyle. This may seem weird, but see Necro and Guardian like a Turtle Playstyle. They equalize their lack of escapes and movement with their superior resistance compared to other professions.

5) We have, but sometimes if you dont see where the burst is coming you cant avoid. In our case, we can avoid making use of Fear, Well of Darkness, Necrotic Transversal and using DS to mitigate damage.

@brickforlife.1364
We do get a knockback in Lich form, it is Chilling Wind (3). I think it sometimes has problems with our height, though.

On to the post, I can agree with many points here, especially the builds. I am driven to the edge of insanity when I am trying to keep my 10 stacks of bleed up to do the best damage I can do, but everyone else can easily wash them away, either passively or actively. Then, are given a burst skill that they don’t have to work hard for to do crazy amounts of damage (crazy to me anyways).

It seems like other classes seem to have much easier times stopping in our tracks. Ex: Go into Lich form, get the tiny, weak minion army up, then get Moa’d and lose EVERYTHING.

I am not sure if I am the only one that also thinks there is a problem with the way the condition stat works, but I think there is a rather large gap for more damage (With bleeds only using 5% of the the stat, and poison using 10%). All other classes have access to burning (uses 25% of condition), and I think we should have at least 1 way to burn foes.

tim.5617 – oh k, in that (the PvE) case, true, but you can mix and match stats via gear there (what to be honest would have given even more depth to it).

Sorry it took so long to respond, I kept getting an error 503 on the forum…Well, here’s my responses~

Andele.1306:

1) 30 point SR trait gives 3 sec of stability (while not great at least something, still would be better if it actually broke pulls, knockbacks and knockdowns as other stability sources do or to be perma stability while in ds that cannot be removed/effect stability)
2) Conditions work well, people just go for carrion instead or rampager or rabid and get slaughtered because of lack of toughness while the conditions tick off, we are pretty much immortal for 20 seconds with plague if its cast while over 50% hp
3) Kinda true, but DS can be used in a supportive build filling way for now (it should either get a 5th or even up to a 8th skill since right now it cripples us most of the time, i like my Staff 3-4 into Grasp to Doom and Dark path into Dagger swap procing hydromancy and even more chilling and transfusion heals for friends), sadly LB will always be the cripple because of the stupid do half as much damage when under a arbitrary limit.
4) Again same thing as 2 and will be the same for the 100B thing, depends on build, honestly unless the enemy had a kitten cheating trick cough moa or 4v1 with my skills down_cough_ i can always get away, especially because of our nice chill skills.
5) Warhorn is, IMO at least, our strongest offhand, at least if you dare go melee, the LF generation is great and the daze is much bigger than the animation, combined with dagger main hand, you can go from 10 to 70% LF in no time

1) If you have 30 points in SR, you’re doing something wrong. No necro should ever have more than 10~20 points in SR. It’s an awful traitline. And even if (for whatever reason) you do have 30 points in SR, a 3 second stability is hardly worth giving up your major grandmaster trait.
2) Conditions do work well, but unlike other classes which get a burst, necromancers cannot burst conditions. Even rangers with a condition build can burst through use of sharpening stone & quickness to quickly (under 1 second) apply 10+ stacks of bleeding. If ArenaNet would allow us one skill to quickly put 5+ stacks of one or more conditions on an opponent, that would make conditions less easily counterable. The current problem is stacking conditions to a dangerous level takes so long that any opponent worth their salt has plenty of time (and skills) to counter. Also, you’re missing the giant problem with PvE condition builds.
4) This is a problem, I’ll explain in more depth why. If you’re fighting only one person, you can probably manage to escape through chills and cripples. However, this is assuming they don’t have a condition removal skill (which we have established earlier are very common) so it’s extremely unlikely. Furthermore, without a cripple or chill, they can just use leaps or teleports to close the distance between the two of you and negate any cripple you might try to pull since you have no leap or teleport yourself. This situation becomes even worse as you consider your odds of escape get lower and lower the more people you’re fighting. You’re not going to be able to keep 3+ people crippled and in that situation, you just plain die with no escape route. Compare this to an elementalist who can simply RTL (one skill) and escape from any number of people. Now, I’m not expecting something as grand as RTL, but any form of a teleport or leap would be monumentally useful and unlike relying on cripples/chills wouldn’t be less effective when facing higher numbers.
5) Warhorn would be great if death shroud had some application other than damage sponging, but since it doesn’t, it’s not really useful for anything, mainly just granting swiftness. The dagger offhand is usually far superior as it offers a counter to other condition builds as well as a way to kitten melee classes through weakness on skill #5. Furthermore, weakness is a difficult to come by condition for a necromancer, and having a skill that can do it is usually much more beneficial than a cripple (which is #2 on scepter, #3 in plague form, and a passive of both the bone fiend and the flesh golem).

Andele.1306:

Signet of Spite- just needs to get the recharge halved and 480 radius around the target too
Signet of Undeath – good as it is, would be cool if it revived actually defeated players as minions for 15 seconds depending on class (shade for light, wurm for medium, golem for heavy)
Spectral Grasp – Make it ignore terrain, i really wanna be a krait!
Signet of the Locust – just balancing the fact that it life stealing skills should scale their damage and healing both of healing and damage each.
Plague Signet – make it a i eat conditions for life force and instantly take all conditions to you and its kitten, ok right now (kinda stupid that if a enemy aint targeted you dont get the break but still ok)

About the right numbers and DS adapting to equipped weapons, true.

Lich form wind should be a aoe aura chill and cripple that would if activated be a pbaoe knockback on demand (maybe making it a signet with it). For else you got Plague (that should get a 4th skill trough).

Signet of spite – It shouldn’t be fixed the way you talked about. I thought about it a lot, and doing what you said would just make it an inferior version of epidemic. Instead, signet of spite should be our spike condition skill; aka the skill we can use to spike tons of conditions on someone in a short amount of time. As eluded to in #3, we have no method of very quickly applying many conditions. Our best bet is corrupt boon but that’s unreliable at best since smart opponents avoid booning themselves with tons of things while fighting a necromancer lest those boons be used against them. Signet of spite should do something along the lines of 5~10 stacks of bleeding for 10 seconds, poison for 10 seconds, & burning for 10 seconds. Then we could do like that other person said; load them up slowly with conditions, wait for them to blow their condition removal skill, then pound them with our heavy hitting condition skill…It’s a shame all we can do now is transfer conditions, transform boons, and apply 1~2 stacks of bleeding per attack. It’s a very slow way to build up conditions and often they’ve already got back their condition removal skill before we can get it to a deadly point.
Signet of undeath – Love it. Love everything about it. However, for a 180 second cooldown, it should also allow us to utilize opponent corpses. Or if they just removed the 15 second lifespan thing, then it would be all right. The current problem with the term necromancer is that in practice, they don’t really do any death magic. Minion masters are kind of weak in comparison to conditionmancer, and if you’re not going to go full out minion master, most minions don’t even deserve a skill slot. It would be nice to have one utility (like signet of undeath) that could be used to grant temporary minions to a non-minion master build. Added bonus; it’s more unique than just copying that elemental glyph of revival.
Signet of locust – at the time of writing, I didn’t know that life steal was glitched to not scale properly. I guess I’d be willing to rethink my stance if they did fix it depending on how viable a life-steal build would be. Added bonus; a life steal build could finally be our non-condition build. Make it viable pleaaaase. That would be so grand.
Plague signet – I agree. That solution would make it usable, but as it stands right now, it’s definitely not one of our better skills. Something needs to be adjusted here.
Finally, can’t say much on the elites, I never was a fan of them. I much preferred the flesh golem on pretty much all my builds since it would help maintain distance from spike-y builds such as 100B warriors & p/w thieves.

War Mourner.5168:

You say we only have one stun break. Last I checked we have three, spectral walk, spectral armor and the signet.

You’re right…my bad…I was writing it at 3am, so cut me some slack…but still, our three stunbreakers are quite horrible.

Schnitter.9857:

1) I agree about the lack of stability. Invulnerability would be excessive, since we can go for DS to help at damage mitigation, but an stability utility would be good. 30 Points at Soul Reaping to get 3 sec of Stability is not so reliable depending of your spec.

2) In fact, Condition specs are really good. The major problem is people just stack like there is no tomorrow, and forget that the enemy have a condition removal. The idea is make some stacks to pressure your enemy to use his removal, an then make your massive stack.

3) In power builds you can get some good damages with it. Problem is since you use your 2nd life bar like a damage source, you are giving up of use it in a defensive way. Also Condition Builds can benefit of DS, since the 2nd DS Skill is a blink like that chills and causes 3 stacks of Bleeding, using fear like an interrupt or 4th DS skill to maintain the bleeding stacks.

4) We really dont have much escapes, but the reason is the necro playstyle. This may seem weird, but see Necro and Guardian like a Turtle Playstyle. They equalize their lack of escapes and movement with their superior resistance compared to other professions.

5) We have, but sometimes if you dont see where the burst is coming you cant avoid. In our case, we can avoid making use of Fear, Well of Darkness, Necrotic Transversal and using DS to mitigate damage.

2) As I mentioned above, we don’t have a massive stack skill. Our only method of giving conditions is slowly over time. We should have one way of giving them a massive stack.
3) But power builds are vastly inferior to a power build you could run on another class, and vastly inferior to a condition build you could run on a necromancer.
4) Try to catch a guardian when he uses that utility that gives him swiftness then traps you inside a bubble where you can’t escape. They’re much better off than necromancers, those area denial things are great for escapes.
5) Other classes get much better burst mitigation skills; ele has mist form, warrior has endure pain, thief has stealth, guardian has many blocking/area denial skills, engineer has knockdowns & elixer S, mesmers have moa (or if you dislike the idea of using an elite to stop a burst) the illusions they can swap places with at any time in addition to the ability to mirror disable conditions (like knockdown), and rangers have protect me. Necromancers get protection and death shroud. Neither of which work as well as an invulnerability skill at blocking a burst meaning necromancers are really easy to slaughter if you burst them properly.

Incredibly good argument, points, answers. I agree wholeheartedly and was afraid i was alone in this. So many people keep walking around saying “necros fine!” they haven’t done the proper comparisons. Power builds are underpowered (lol) , and DS is a sponge as you said.

I quite agree with most of the things… but
4) We have wurm…. its great stun breaker/escape we have , ofc it has problems…if it would cleanse all chill/cripple it would be great, tho now we usually end up stuck in a wall or not planting it in right place. Also…. we have 2nd escape….DS 2 ability… in wvwvw target a random mob , use it , BAM insta teleport , quite OP id say… but yea it has problems too… not very reliable… but atleast we have something , not like guardians…

Corvex.5196

4) We have wurm…. its great stun breaker/escape we have , ofc it has problems…if it would cleanse all chill/cripple it would be great, tho now we usually end up stuck in a wall or not planting it in right place. Also…. we have 2nd escape….DS 2 ability… in wvwvw target a random mob , use it , BAM insta teleport , quite OP id say… but yea it has problems too… not very reliable… but atleast we have something , not like guardians…

That wurm teleport has too many issues to be utilized fully when trying to retreat. If anything it’s used to quickly go between points, not get away when things go south. Not only can it be killed (effectively removing your escape option), but you need to know that there will not suddenly be tons of enemies coming from that direction before you place it. Furthermore, you would only have that one escape option which doesn’t help if you need to run in the other direction (which you may need to do). As for the DS #2 ability, that’s assuming you can get it off before they break your DS. Because it has a long-ish cast time, you’ll often have DS broken before you can actually cast it. Furthermore, using it on an animal to escape aggro’s that animal so now you’ve got another thing chasing you (in addition to all the people). Plus, in sPvP, there is no way to use that as an escape since the only thing to target would be the other players (that you’re trying to avoid) and wasting your DS like that would be foolish.

If they’re going to make Life Blast scale with LF amount I wish they’d make it do the same damage regardless and make it cast faster the more LF you have (200% faster for 100% LF).

Simplicity.7208 –
1) 30 SR is for me at least a must if going any kind of non condition build, since it gives you a easier life force generation (yes the +30% life force and the 5 point trait are bugged, but everything else works perfectly and never helps the enemy, unlike in every other trait line) also since they didnt actually change the 25 point trait it still gives 20 power pre 20% life force instead of being a 5% damage boost (as in it actually does give more damage pre life force instead of being a damage drop if you are under a stupid barrier like life blasts mechanic is)
3) Jon said necro conditions aint ment for burst from the design standpoint, cant really argue with that sadly
4) Hydromancy sigil on dagger or warhorn and one on the staff (or the energy one for more dodge if you dont like bursters) helps
5) As said with MH Dagger and OH Warhorn life force generation can migrate more damage than a blind/weakness from OH Dagger and is less situational, but wastly weaker for anyone who has more than 10 points in curses thus a thing of preference

Spite signet – That was kinda the idea, since its kinda more for the power builds because of the passive, thus making it a power variant of epidemic (as in damage dealing but with a selected amount of aoe conditions) kinda made sense..

Undead signet – ment it, dead allies get to be a minion for 15 seconds with 5 skills being able to help the player for a while, not as a actual minion summon (they should have worked on it and fix the reanimator to be dead enemy comes back as undead, not just bone horror shiz (ofc not working on champions and bosss).

Andele.1306:

Simplicity.7208 –
1) 30 SR is for me at least a must if going any kind of non condition build, since it gives you a easier life force generation (yes the +30% life force and the 5 point trait are bugged, but everything else works perfectly and never helps the enemy, unlike in every other trait line) also since they didnt actually change the 25 point trait it still gives 20 power pre 20% life force instead of being a 5% damage boost (as in it actually does give more damage pre life force instead of being a damage drop if you are under a stupid barrier like life blasts mechanic is)
3) Jon said necro conditions aint ment for burst from the design standpoint, cant really argue with that sadly
4) Hydromancy sigil on dagger or warhorn and one on the staff (or the energy one for more dodge if you dont like bursters) helps
5) As said with MH Dagger and OH Warhorn life force generation can migrate more damage than a blind/weakness from OH Dagger and is less situational, but wastly weaker for anyone who has more than 10 points in curses thus a thing of preference

Spite signet – That was kinda the idea, since its kinda more for the power builds because of the passive, thus making it a power variant of epidemic (as in damage dealing but with a selected amount of aoe conditions) kinda made sense..

Undead signet – ment it, dead allies get to be a minion for 15 seconds with 5 skills being able to help the player for a while, not as a actual minion summon (they should have worked on it and fix the reanimator to be dead enemy comes back as undead, not just bone horror shiz (ofc not working on champions and bosss).

1) But that doesn’t change the fact that for any other build, you simply cannot get stability. Additionally, every other class has a stability utility and we have a few skills that could have stability effects added to them without becoming too powerful. Also, aside from that really high level trait, there is absolutely no method of acquiring stability to finish someone.
3) But even having a signet doing a condition burst wouldn’t be burst damage. The idea to have a signet do 10 stacks of bleeding, burning, and poison for 10 seconds wouldn’t have any burst damage. The only damage that signet would do would come from the condition damage over time. It would only act to make the skillcap higher and the strategy of stacking conditions less easy to counter (right now it’s really, really easy).
4) Except it doesn’t really help when you consider that most bursters have some method of immobilizing, knocking down, or stunning you. I’m thinking, in particular, about 100B warriors. They can simply bull rush you then 100B and you lose 70% of your health. Now you have to fight at an extreme disadvantage and the fight has just begun. Even if you do manage to avoid the bull rush, it doesn’t change the fact that if they catch you at any point, you’re guaranteed a giant chuck of health missing. Other classes have some way of negating that giant chunk of missing health other than a dodge. We should have some way of doing this as well, other than death shroud because that requires charging and is much more difficult than a simple cooldown and often absorbs much less damage as well.
5) I guess warhorn does have its uses, but for most players, the dagger will be a superior option.

Signet of spite – If you make it deal damage + the AoE thing, then it could be utilized on some power builds, but since right now the conditions it deals are weak for both power builds and condition builds, I was thinking of making it like a powerful single target condition thing.

Signet of undeath – Oh, I see now. That would also be cool. Pretty much anything like what we’ve brought up would make the skill both more usable and more profession-unique.

Post is TL:DR but you can finish off people in plague form, same as mine things or open chests.
I usually blind and then press F

3) Still conditions aint ment for burst on necro, just to weaken a enemy over time
4) Spectral armor counters every thief and warrior who relies on burst
6) Signet it does 1.2k damage from the damage component with a solder setup, conditions are just for flavour and epidemic spread.

I rolled a thief last night. If you still don’t think condition necromancer could use some tweaking, I suggest you go make a condition thief. They are an easy button in comparison. It’s ridiculous. Thieves can extremely quickly put on around 90 seconds of poison and 12 stacks of bleeding (in under 2 seconds), then just stealth and hide/run until the conditions from the first two seconds kill you. If you don’t die from the bleeding, they can pop out and do it all over again. Did I mention their bleed-stacking skill makes them invulnerable? Yeah. There’s that too.

As for finishing people off in plague form, didn’t know that…but still, wouldn’t that be kind of inferior? Use a 180 second cooldown to finish one person…I guess it beats nothing.

3) Burst is an quick, one time damage lump aimed to quickly down your opponent. Conditions wear your opponent down over time. You’re right. But the ability to quickly stack conditions is still not considered a burst, and most condition built characters have some method of accomplishing this. Necromancers do not and they’re supposed to be condition masters.
4) I’ll give that a shot, it’s still inferior to a dodge/invulnerability/block mechanic, but maybe that will be enough.
6) 1.2k is essentially nothing. If you’re using the plague signet for that 1.2k there’s something wrong with your build. Even necromancers should be able to build a better power build than a single 1.2k hit.