Guild Wars 2

I’ll get straight to the point.

Arena Net’s descriptions of the Necromancer are as follows:

“Practitioners of the dark arts, necromancer summon the dead, wield the power of lost souls and literally suck the life force from the enemy. Necromancer feeds on life force, which they can use to bring allies back from the brink or cheat death itself.”

“Necromancers summon undead minions to attack foes and do their bidding. Whenever they wish, necromancer can sacrifice their minions for a powerful spell effect.”

“The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escapes of damage reduction capabilities that other classes boat, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necromancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, which allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.”

Are these descriptions true? Not really… but let’s see if we can change that.

Search a term below using CTRL-F to find it quickly.
Utilities

• Summon Bone Fiend
• Summon Bone Minions
• Summon Shadow Fiend
• Summon Flesh Wurm
• Signet of Spite
• Signet of the Locust
• Spectral Armor
• Spectral Wall

Traits

• Spite
• Curses
• Death Magic
• Blood Magic
• Soul Reaping

____________________________Utilities______________________________

Summon Bone Fiend
- Delivers a 0.5 second cripple attack with every hit. 1 second total per attack.

• Rigor Mortis
  - Sacrifice your bone fiend and it will immobilize foes near itself for 3 seconds.

- A more reliable immobilize that has synergy with new minion traits.
- Maintains its usefulness as a movement hindrance by inflicting short cripple with every attack.

________________________________________________________________

Summon Bone Minions
- Summon 2 bone minions that activate putrid explosion if killed.

• Putrid Explosion
  - Explode a bone minion.

- Eliminates its uselessness.

________________________________________________________________

Summon Shadow Fiend
- Summon a shadow fiend that delivers a 1 second blind with every attack.

• Haunt
  - Command your shadow fiend to teleport to a foe, sacrificing itself at the destination and blinding all foes nearby for 3 seconds.

- Slightly decrease attack speed.
- Blinds should work with Chilling Darkness trait.
- Remove the casting time from the player, Haunt itself already has a delay.

________________________________________________________________

Summon Flesh Wurm
- Summon an immobile flesh wurm that delivers 2 seconds of poison with every attack.

• Necrotic Traversal
  - Sacrifice your flesh wurm and teleport to it.

- Remove poison upon sacrificing.
- Make every attack cause poison.

________________________________________________________________

Signet of Spite
- Improves power.

• Active
  - Inflict bleeding, blindness, weakness, vulnerability and fear on your foe. 60s cooldown.

- Reduce cooldown to 60 seconds from 90 seconds.
- Remove cripple effect.
- Add fear effect.

________________________________________________________________

Signet of the Locust
- 25% movement speed increase.

• Active
  - Steal health from nearby foes. 45s cooldown.

- Reduce cooldown to 45 seconds from 60 seconds.

________________________________________________________________

Spectral Armor
- Receive protection and stability. Gain life force as your take damage for 6 seconds. Removed when you enter death shroud. 60s cooldown.

- Reduce cooldown to 60 seconds from 90 seconds.
- Add stability.

________________________________________________________________

Spectral Wall
- Create a spectral wall that protects allies and makes foes vulnerable, granting you life force whenever a foe passes through.

- Increase cooldown to 60 seconds from 40 seconds.
- Add effect to gain life force when opponents pass through wall.

______________________________Spite_______________________________

• Adept – Reaper’s Might – Life Blast and Plague Blast grant might for 15 seconds.
• Master – Death into Life – 5% of power is given as a bonus to healing.
• Grandmaster – Siphoned Power – Gain might when hit and under 25% health.

Adept – Death’s Embrace – Deal 50% more damage while downed.
Adept – Spiteful Talisman – Focus skills recharge 20% faster and have 1200 range.
Adept – Spiteful Removal – When you kill a foe you lose 3 conditions.
Adept – Signet Mastery – Signets recharge 20% faster.
Adept – Spiteful Spirit – Gain retaliation for 3 seconds when entering death shroud.
Adept – Parasitic Bond – Gain life whenever you kill something.

Master – Unyielding Grasp (Spiteful Marks deleted) – Necrotic Grasp causes vulnerability.
Master – Conditional Might (Signet Power deleted) – Gain 1 permanent might per condition on you. Lose 1 might per condition removed. (Maximum of 11 might possible if you have 11 separate conditions on you)
Master – Training of the Master – Minion damage is increased by 30%.
Master – Chill of Death – Cast spinal shivers on an enemy when they hit 25% health.

Grandmaster – Axe training – Axe damage is increased and skills recharge 20% faster.
Grandmaster – Close to Death – Increases damage by 20% to enemies below 505 health.

____________________________Curses_______________________________

• Adept – Barbed Precision – Critical hits have a 66% chance to cause bleeding.
• Master – Furious Demise – Gain fury for 5 seconds when entering Death Shroud.
• Grandmaster – Target the Weak – 2% increased damage for each condition on a foe.

Adept – Toxic Landing – Creates a poison cloud when you take falling damage. Take 50% less falling damage.
Adept – Hemophilia – 20% increased bleeding duration.
Adept – Chilling Darkness – When you blind a target, you also apply chill for 1 second.
Adept – Weakening Shroud – Cast Enfeebling Blood when entering death shroud.
Adept – Reaper’s Precision – You have a 33% chance to gain 1% life force on critical hits.
Adept – Terror – Fear deals damage, and it deals an additional 50% damage if the target has another condition on them.

Master – Master of Corruption – Corruption skills recharge 20% faster.
Master – Banshee’s Wail – Warhorn skills recharge 15% faster, and their effects last longer.
Master – Dagger Mastery – Dagger skills recharge 15% faster.
Master – Vampiric Precision – Siphon health whenever you critical hit.

Grandmaster – Lingering Curse – Conditions inflicted by scepter skills last 33% longer.
Grandmaster – Withering Precision – 25% chance to cause weakness on critical hits.

___________________________Death Magic___________________________

• Adept – Dark Armor – Gain 400 toughness while channeling.
• Master – Death Shiver – Apply vulnerability for 10 seconds every 3 seconds to nearby enemies while in Death Shroud.
• Grandmaster – Deadly Strength – 5% of toughness is given as a bonus to power.

Adept – Reanimator – Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe.
Adept – Greater Marks – Increases area of marks and marks become unblockable.
Adept – Focused Rituals – Well skills use ground targeting.
Adept – Ritual of Protection – Wells apply protection for 3 seconds when cast.
Adept – Staff Mastery – Staff skills recharge 20% faster.
Adept – Shrouded Removal – Lose a condition when you enter death shroud.

Master – Spiteful Vigor – You share retaliation with minions for 3 seconds.
Master – Reaper’s Protection – When disabled (by stun, daze, knockback, knockdown, sink, float, fear, or launch), nearby foes fear you. This effect can only trigger once every 90 seconds.
Master – Weakness of the Horde – When a minion dies it inflicts weakness on nearby foes for 3 seconds.
Master – Flesh of the Master – Minions have 50% more health.

Grandmaster – Death Nova – Whenever a minion dies, it explodes in a cloud of poison that lasts for 3 seconds.
Grandmaster – Necromatic Corruption – Minions have a 10% chance to remove a boon when they attack.

___________________________Blood Magic___________________________

• Adept – Blood to Power – Deal 5% more damage while your health is above 90%.
• Master – Vampiric – Siphon health whenever you hit a foe.
• Grandmaster – Deathly Invigoration – Heal in an area when you leave death shroud.

Adept – Quickening Thirst – Move 15% faster while wielding a main hand dagger, move 10% faster while wielding an offhand dagger.
Adept – Bloodthirst – Siphoning health is 50% more effective.
Adept – Mark of Evasion – Leave a Mark of Blood when you dodge.
Adept – Ritual of Life – Create a Well of Blood whenever you revive an ally.
Adept – Protection of the Horde – Gain protection for 3 seconds whenever a minion dies.
Adept – Transfusion – Life Transfer heals nearby allies.

Master – Vampiric Master – Minions siphon health and transfer it to you.
Master – Ritual Mastery – Wells recharge 20% faster.
Master – Full of Life – All life siphon abilities also heal minions.
Master – Soul Marks – Marks generate 3% life force when triggered.

Grandmaster – Fetid Consumption – Minions draw conditions. Each minion can draw one condition every 10 seconds.
Grandmaster – Vampiric Rituals – Wells also siphon health every time they pulse.

___________________________Soul Reaping___________________________

• Adept – Gluttony – Increases life force gain from skills by 10%.
• Master – Last Gasp – Gain Spectral Armor at 50% health (60-second cooldown).
• Grandmaster – Strength of Undeath – You do 5% more damage if you have more than 50% life force.

Adept – Fear of Death – Apply fear to foes when you are downed (90-second cooldown).
Adept – Vital Persistence – Life force drains 25% slower while in death shroud.
Adept – Path of Midnight – All death shroud skills recharge 15% faster.
Adept – Spectral Mastery – Spectral skills recharge 20% faster.
Adept – Speed of Shadows – Move 25% faster while in death shroud.
Adept – Unyielding Blast – Life Blast pierces and causes vulnerability.

Master – Mark of Revival – Create a Reaper’s Mark while reviving someone. Can only trigger once every 45 seconds.
Master – Decaying Swarm – At 25% health, you become surrounded by a locust swarm.
Master – Master of Terror – Fear you inflict lasts 50% longer.
Master – Spectral Attunement – Spectral skills have longer durations and grant life force on use.

Grandmaster – Foot in the Grave – Gain stability for 3 seconds when you enter death shroud.
Grandmaster – Near to Death – Death Shroud recharges 50% faster.

Wow those changes are massive nerfs to minion masters. You made it to where all of their actives kill them but left in all the traits that boost their damage and health (both of which are pointless with these changes) AND you removed the only trait that was beneficial to these changes (the trait called minion master).

Don’t listen to him, those are amazing fixes to minion skills, which at present cannot fully do what they are intended to do. Only suggestion is that Bone minions can be activated still to detonate when in best positioning (if you meant that, then don’t mind me), and for the bone fiend to do it at range; since it is a ranged minion it will not likely be close enough to immobilize the right person unless the range is large.

MMs would be competitive with this.

All the other skills look good, but I cannot say 100% if those are still balanced skills, but it looks good to me. Traits look great, I don’t know power/condition builds well enough to know if this nerfs them, but if it doesn’t, then I’d say nearly every change in this is darn near perfect to what I’d like to see, without unbalancing necromancers. In fact, most of these seem more like fixes to things that didn’t work as intended, rather than buffs.

Great job, hope ANet reads it and at least looks into these ideas and tests them.

Shadow fiend’s active is already an AoE blind. And the Bone Fiend already cripples on autoattack.

As for the traits…I don’t know. Some of them seem useful but I don’t like how you moved Spectral Attunement down to the Soul Reaping line. It screws with my build a bit and I like it up in Curses because it hints at what trait lines the designers wanted you to take when using Spectral things. You also nerfed Spectral Wall which I don’t like. I know it grants life force now but that’s a bad change. Also Focused Rituals is too strong to be Adept level, it should be Master level.

Agree with striker, the new minion abilities are cool but sacrificing the Bone Fiend, for example, when you can’t even control where it runs is weird, and it just stands around mostly anyway, meaning you have to rely on your opponent to run near it. He’s right about Minion Master too, now we sacrifice all our minions but we lost the ability to bring them back sooner.

Good potential and a good conversation starter though, thanks for the post.

EDIT: And I think you mean 1200 range for spiteful talisman…they already have 900 range.

I’ve always found it odd that wells were never just ground target skills to begin with. To me it’s like they just ran out of ideas and decided to give us an option as a trait, rather than an actual in game option in the options menu. I think another class has this trait too.

Can anyone elaborate as to why ground-target wells are considered powerful enough to need 20 trait points to use?

I mean it’s not like anything really changes. Opponents can still get out of the wells like they normally would. The only difference is that you don’t need to run up to the opponents to use them. But then isn’t this just countered by the fact that casting a well at 1200 range simply encourages opponents to run out of them anyway so that they can get up to you and attack you? It even works like this in PvE because even mobs will run out of the well towards you.

Ruufio.1496:

Can anyone elaborate as to why ground-target wells are considered powerful enough to need 20 trait points to use?

Well, since I’m the one who said that it should cost 20 points, I can :P

If nothing really changes with the trait, as you say, then why didn’t you just delete it and come up with something new? Clearly it has some value. This trait has great value in WvW when defending a keep, holding a choke point, or other pitched zergy battles. Otherwise you’d have to run right up close to do any damage with them, right? It has value in sPvP since you can stand safely out of the fight over a point and supplement your marks with strong support or damage. I see it taken often in PvP and PvE builds even though it costs 20 points to get there, so it’s worth 20 points to a lot of players already. Being able to cast such strong AoEs at range is a great advantage, and it’s enough of an advantage that I think it’s worth 20 points.

These changes are actually not bad. alot of thought must have gone into it, I dont know how this will affect the game as a whole but I wouldn’t be surprised if at least some of them were implemented. Love the one where bone minions explode when killed and balancing the spec armour with spec wall.

These changes seem kind of nice but here is a problem that i see:
with vampiric precision in curses while all other vampiric traits are in BM people who want a vampiric build will have to go 20 points into curses
This is hardly fitting seeing as so few other build possibilities exist for vampiric builds. They most commonly focus on dealing damage while leeching life and protecting that life as best as they can. Improving life leeching cries for using a mainhand dagger which has no damaging conditions.
i know that curses have precision on them but they have barely anything to do with healing or supporting making vampiric a fish out of water there.
Instead the combination of crits and conditions should be tightened

also: why is reapers precision still so bad?
Its already the worst trait the necro has.

The thing with the vampiric traits is that there were originally 2 similar traits in Blood Magic.

Bloodthirst – Siphoning health is 50% more effective.
Vampiric Precision – Siphon health whenever you critical hit.

This was bad because no one would ever use both. There are much better options than using both of these combined. I think it makes more sense for Vampiric Precision – Siphon health whenever you critical hit to be in curses where the other critical hit traits are and it makes more sense there as well with the Dagger Mastery trait being relocated there. Dagger Mastery itself was also a bad trait in Blood Magic because of the better options.

I am sorry, but you must not play a Minion master. This an absolute death to MM tanking or burst builds. It would be absolutely pointless to have so many sacrifice traits especially considering your removed their reduced CD’s.

The point of minions is to keep them up longer and resummon them quicker, not let them die off faster to buff me. MM is acceptable damage wise in it’s current state. The major changes that minions need is a slight bump in responsiveness when I am attacking a target, and a slightly better avoidance to aoe damage since we can’t pull them out.

Personally I would prefer to take they take away the summoning time of minions, but it’s not horrible. The CD is mandatory.

Here are the reasons your minion changes are either oddly placed or will essentially kill the two viable minion builds.

1. You have essentially turned the minions into buff bot version of mesmer clones. This is completely ridiculous and I can guarantee you it could be seriously OP. i can think of two builds that would absolutely destroy people with a full minion destruction build.

2. The Flesh Wurm as it’s currently constructed is amazing damage and is most useful as a stun break or return portal. Changing it into a posion machine would reduce it’s usefulness by half and be completely pointless in pve where there are already numerous classes that perma attach poison to a target. Leave the Flesh Wurm alone he is the best of our minions.

3. You have way too many sacrifice traits and removed the CD reduction, and the Adept tree is complete crap in your Death Tree for any real minion player now unless you are running staff. I know you think that’s the only way to play it, but for those of us who play MM bunker or MM cannon we never use staff as it’s perhaps the most useless cannon ability. In fact, a majority of us run Axe/Focus and D/W which makes that Adept changes worthless to every single one of us.

4. Thanks for taking away our toughness per minion alive, that will make it so much easier to choose MM over other builds.

In the end, I prefer not to have my minions be uglier versions of the mesmer, and that’s essentially what you have done with them.

You have some good trait changes, but none that actually benefit MM at all. And moving the bonus dagger traits to the Curses tree that just killed every Dagger MM out there who likes to have reduced cooldown.

It’s almost like you have never played serious MM before, and made all these changes based on running around with a staff and wondering why your minions don’t do more. As a serious MM tourney player, and dungeon runner, not one of yoru MM changes makes sense outside of fixing Bone Minions. Some are overpowered changes, and others are just poorly thought out.

Your changes actually greatly benefit anyone who isn’t a decent MM player.

Bhawb.7408:

Don’t listen to him, those are amazing fixes to minion skills, which at present cannot fully do what they are intended to do. Only suggestion is that Bone minions can be activated still to detonate when in best positioning (if you meant that, then don’t mind me), and for the bone fiend to do it at range; since it is a ranged minion it will not likely be close enough to immobilize the right person unless the range is large.

MMs would be competitive with this.

All the other skills look good, but I cannot say 100% if those are still balanced skills, but it looks good to me. Traits look great, I don’t know power/condition builds well enough to know if this nerfs them, but if it doesn’t, then I’d say nearly every change in this is darn near perfect to what I’d like to see, without unbalancing necromancers. In fact, most of these seem more like fixes to things that didn’t work as intended, rather than buffs.

Great job, hope ANet reads it and at least looks into these ideas and tests them.

For the first time, I completely disagree with you. These are the death knell in any serious MM build. If I wanted glorified Mesmer clones than sure this works for MM, but the changes to many of the traits are awful.

Bone Minion changes are nice. Flesh Wurm would never be taken with those changes. Shadow Fiend becomes OP and Bone Fiend becomes Bone Minion light. All the changes would do would be to remove Flesh Wurm completely from any play. Make Shadow Fiend mandatory, and turn us into Mesmers with ghouls who uses Bone Minion and Bone Fiend only to sacrifice them repeatedly for buffs.

How is this beneficial in any way to the play of MM builds?

@Bas Essentially, the changes he proposes turn the minions themselves into a much tighter micro-managing setup, with higher reward for skilled play, then they currently are. Right now, the biggest skill factor in using an MM is making sure you keep your minions on the target through CC, aiming Flesh Golem and using his CC properly, and timing Bone minion explosions. With this, minions will be able to apply their standard conditions through auto attacks, instead of relying on active effects only, and give their actual active effects a higher return for skilled play. You would need to judge when the cost (losing a minion temporarily) is less than the benefit gained from the damage/conditions gained.

That was a big idea in making non-elite minions: have strong actives that require a lot of skill and micro managing to maximize their efficiency. Shadow fiend breaks away from that by having a skill that is, lets be honest, something you can press every time its up and lose almost no utility, and Bone fiend, whose active is okay, on the very rare chance it works.

Flesh Wurm would be much better, as is his poison is absolutely useless, and he is only good as an “oh crap I need to get out of here” button, and one that I very rarely find myself pressing, because by then he is dead, I would get downed anyway and his extra damage is more helpful than another second of life, or killing him off would actually hurt me.

I wouldn’t say that these changes are PERFECT as is, I think they are very liable to make MMs far too strong and turn it into a near-mandatory build in PvP. However with balance the idea of slight changes to auto attacks (and applying conditions), with slight nerfs to the damage output to match is good. Along with that, useful actives, whereas right now 3 of 6 actives are arguably useless. The fixes presented aren’t necessarily great, I think they are conceptually good though, and bring minions more in line with what their concept was, which seems lost along the way.

In response to your # posts:
1. Minions should be auto attacking based, with actives that present to you a cost-reward problem. This retains that idea, by giving fixes/tiny buffs to their attacks, while making their actives an actual choice (in PvP its almost never a question, when your shadow fiend skill comes up, use it. When bone fiend’s active comes up, who cares, it never hits anyway, and Flesh Wurm’s will always stay up, since it is a rare, niche use).

I agree this makes them too OP, and would need tweaking (shadow fiend would be disgusting with his current idea, I’d keep him the same as he is now, but with a chance to blind, or blind every X seconds or attacks, and the active suggested).

2. His port is already terrible except across flat terrain, and as an escape only, at least as I have found him. You can’t use him to port in any vertical direction, and anything horizontal is fairly limited in use; except as an escape. His damage is nice, but half of his active is nearly useless right now. Yes it makes him a bit weaker because he will possibly add poison to poison, but it keeps his tele and brings the poison to a useful spot.

3. I agree, too much towards killing them, which isn’t the focus of MM at all, it is keeping them alive, and then killing them yourself either with situational timing or at the very end for some bonus damage/utility. And frankly, I think all the exploding would end up OP or useless, but never balanced, I just don’t see how you could balance the current minion state of decent DPS/life length and expendability.

4. I agree that those should be left in, however with what he is proposing in changes to minions balances it out. Minions will be more directly supporting you and keeping you from dieing (actually getting cripples off, having more consistent blinds, poisons). It makes you a bit less tanky (I think 140 toughness at complete max?), but with less incoming damage anyway.

I have a feeling this will be a giant wall, but just to summarize everything, I don’t agree specifically with all his changes to minions or minion traits, there would need to be a lot of balancing. However, I like the concepts of making minion’s attacks and the conditions they are designed with more meaningful, and making the choice to use their active more of a decision. I’d even take the second half, making their actives a more meaningful, skill based decision than it is now.

@bhawb, The changes he has made are too drastic for MM. If you look at the changes it would essentially make it more valuable to destroy your minions than to use them or keep them alive. This isn’t skill it’s simply staging as opposed to using your minions aggressively you would simply be sending them in to purposely die. Not to mention if this was the case. Your minions would simply be ignored, and since they can’t have that big of a bonus plus do consistent damage, they would hit for almost nothing.

1. The only changes that Minions need are an aoe damage reduction, and a better responsive timing to Targeting. They should neither be a fire and forget or a mandatory part of any build. The changes indicated especially to the Bone Fiend and Flesh Wurm would make them ridiculously worthless because their damage would have to be reduced to makeup for the condition add, the Shadow Fiend would be ridiculously op, and the Bone Minions would be fodder as usual.

2. The reason the Flesh Wurm hits hard is because he has no condition attached to his skill. I would prefer it not be changed. We have completely opposite takes on Flesh Wurm and Bone Minions. I find the Bone Minions to be the most useless in PVP and Dungeons, but much better for high movement fights. In PvP, I go nowhere without the Flesh Wurm. It does the most damage. Allows you to port vertically as well as horizontal as long as you can walk up there. The poison is simply a side benefit, and not the main purpose of it.

I have actually used the Flesh Wurm to protect a point, then when it was under attacked ported away from a guy trying to get me, and then moved towards the point. It can and will port you anywhere you can run within a certain distance. I have ported through walls, up ramps, across stairs. I never use it for the poison field, as the poison field is just a side benefit.

3. This was my point. It was as though he had made the changes completely dismantling the current state of MM, and making them exactly like the Mesmer clones.

4. I agree here, but our minions are in a good state damage wise. The key is that killign off the minions to survive is either OP or UP. If you are in tPvP they would simply be ignored because killing them would give you greater benefit than leaving them up. As they currently stand, if you ignore them, they will kill you. If you focus on them, i will kill you. With the changes indicated, the damage would have to be nerfed which would make them nothing more than mesmer clones.

Finally, you can’t have a consistent blind without it being OP. As it stands now, when running minions, Shadow Fiend, Bone Fiend, and Flesh Golem are the only ones that are consistently used. With Shadow Fiend the active is constantly used because it applies a blind, how is that boring. If we had an attack with a blind it’s also used all the time, is that more of an active playstyle? I don’t see your issue with the current minion active abilities.

You have three situational abilities in Bone Fiend Immobilize, Flesh Wurm Stun Break, and Flesh Golem Charge, two consant usage in Bone Minions and Shadow Fiend. How is that not significantly better than running corruption (situational on half, with blood is power being spammed everytime it’s up), spectral utilities (situational for every single one), or Signets (crap). In the end, as it currently stands you have a decision as to when to use half your actives with minions.

I stopped using Blood Fiend recently, and haven’t noticed it’s loss at all which is really sad.

Good points.

I also agree with the Blood Fiend, I stopped using him after Beta (MMs were just plain OP in beta, so you could get away with Blood Fiend and still be able to 5v1 just about anyone), but his healing/damage her hit is pathetic. He doesn’t bring enough damage to be offensive enough to work, doesn’t bring enough healing to work on defense (unless you are telepathic and can use his heal right as he is about to die), and doesn’t bring enough mixed to warrant it. I’ve felt bad for the lovable little sack of organs and bones since release, he’s just bad outside of easy-mode PvE.

Edit: not to say you can’t use him, I still mess around with him sometimes, but he isn’t worth the 20 toughness and small amount of healing in most situations.

Bhawb.7408:

Good points.

I also agree with the Blood Fiend, I stopped using him after Beta (MMs were just plain OP in beta, so you could get away with Blood Fiend and still be able to 5v1 just about anyone), but his healing/damage her hit is pathetic. He doesn’t bring enough damage to be offensive enough to work, doesn’t bring enough healing to work on defense (unless you are telepathic and can use his heal right as he is about to die), and doesn’t bring enough mixed to warrant it. I’ve felt bad for the lovable little sack of organs and bones since release, he’s just bad outside of easy-mode PvE.

Edit: not to say you can’t use him, I still mess around with him sometimes, but he isn’t worth the 20 toughness and small amount of healing in most situations.

I only dropped him in pvp play because healing is situational, and he will be dead sometimes when I need a heal. In pve, and dungeons the added small heals are worth keeping him since he usually stays at range. I am usually partnered with a guardian or ele so condition cleansing is not something I worry about. In pvp, he is just so lackluster, and rarely there when you need him. If he moved a little more or had the ability to avoid damage by retreating every 10 seconds if something hit him, I would use him.

But I think everyone agrees there really is only one heal to use in pvp. It isn’t Well of Blood or Blood fiend ;p. You only get one guess.

Yeah, in PvE he’s fine because, lets be honest, you should be able to go through most situations without a designated heal. I wish he’d just heal a bit more on hit, or something to increase his viability. I feel so dirty playing MM and yet having to tell him to stay home, its wrong ANet, you shouldn’t force families apart like this!

And yeah, Consume is just too good to not take. WoB I could see if you were running a supporty build, or happened to have so much condition removal the thought of more disgusted you.

I agree on all points, these changes are amazing, some of them sound like mine.

Consume Conditions should be a corruption skill though.

I want to make a suggestion if I may : it’s about the SR trait Speed of Shadows.Now let’s be honest – nobody will take it since there are better options.

So, make it a 15% move speed, down from 25, BUT make it stack with all other movement speed buffs.The current maximum is 133%, with swiftness being the hard cap when out of combat, and with this, make us the only class able to go to 148% out of combat with swiftness.
This change will give us the mobility we so desperately need without being too OP(but it may be,so consider moving the trait to Master instead of Adept).
It will also improve DS and add another tactical use to it instead of the 1second button mash of F1-3-F1 every 10 seconds.

A very big no to dark armour replacing reanimator. We want something that isn’t terrible and fits with all builds.
I’d prefer they fix the horror, it’s a billion times better than 2% reduced damage for a few seconds for an Axe/Dagger Necro. In fact, the horror is (when they fix AI) One of the best minor adept traits.