Guild Wars 2

Necromancer Status Quo – October 2012

The Necromancer community
The design philosophy behind the Necromancer
Community concerns and issues
Life Stealing
Condition Cleansing and Application
Death Shroud
Minions
Other

The Necromancer community

Time is precious for the developers, finding, understanding, testing and writing bug fix takes weeks, so the intention with this thread is to give ArenaNet a clear and precise list of the top issues concerning the Necromancer class. While it does not cover all the bugs with the class, it is not intended to, it is meant as an overview for class functionality which the community as a whole feels isn’t up to par or functioning as the community feels it should.

So lets try and keep the discussion going in one thread, instead of spread out over several. By spreading across several threads we as a community reduce the chances of having these issues addressed in a timely manner.
We know the next balance and content patch is due on November 15th, so lets see if we can get some of the issues addressed by then.

The community greatly welcomes and appreciates the participation and answers from JonPeters, Karl McLain and JonathanSharp as well as other Arenanet developers whom may be directly involved with the Necromancer class design.

The design philosophy behind the Necromancer

“The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.” JonathanSharp – Game designer ArenaNet – source

Also, some of the things you THINK are bugs are actually working, and other things are by design." JonathanSharp – Game designer ArenaNet – source & source

Community concerns and issues

Life Stealing
As an attrition class it is important to be able to not only whittle your target down, but also keep yourself from going down, either through recovery of health or avoiding damage all together. One of the tools the class has for that purpose is Life Stealing.
There are several traits and skills with the purpose of stealing Life from the target and returning it to the Necromancer, however they are underwhelming on their own or even combined together due to several issues.

• Life Stealing issues
  • General issue: Low amount siphoned and lack of scaling with Healing Power.
    Vampiric heals for an insignificant amount (25/38 with Bloodthirst) and isn’t affected by Healing Power.
  • Vampiric Master is underwhelming in amount stolen, even with the maximum possible Minions active. Neither is it affected by Bloodthirst.
  • Vampiric Precision underwhelming amount stolen, especially compared to the Sigil of Superior Leeching (975 HP) and Omnomberry Ghost (325 HP). Also doesn’t scale with Healing Power.
  • Vampiric Rituals is underwhelming, as it only heals for 42 HP per target at a maximum of 210 HP with 5 targets. It also doesn’t scale with Healing Power.

Condition Cleansing and Application

To win at attrition means we need to be able to deal out conditions in regular amounts, as well as keep them off ourselves efficiently.

• Condition Cleansing
  • Deathly Swarm currently only removes 1 condition from the caster, sometimes it doesn’t even remove any at all and it seems slow to cleanse the caster when it does cleanse.
  • The ease of condition removal from other classes. Since conditions is a fundamental aspect of the Necromancer class, the community feels that other classes have too readily available Condition Cleansing abilities at hand, especially passive passive effects which require no effort on the player to utilize.

• Condition Causing
  • Condition Stacking from multiple sources. In particular of note is the 25 Bleed Cap Stack, which is severely detrimental to the performance of the class. Other conditions also have issues given the way Conditions which stack on Duration is working.
  • Some other classes have access to rapid application of conditions compared to the supposed master of conditions. Bleeding is perhaps too common on other classes.

Death Shroud

Death shroud is a hotly debated topic amongst the community. Many feel it doesn’t compliment the playstyle of an attrition / condition playstyle very well and rather lends itself towards being used with a Power/Precision focused playstyle.

• Death Shroud
  • Since the functionality of the class mechanic revolves around the Life Force resource, the class mechanic is inaccessible from the beginning of many fights. A lack of passive out-of-combat Life Force generation or quicker initial Life Force ramp up would address this concern.
  • Functionality difference between the on land and in water effects is a concern for the community. Ideally they were more similar and not different. Underwater skills feels underwhelming in comparison to on land skills.
  • Weakening Shroud only applies 1 stack of Bleed instead of the 2 Bleeds as the skill Enfeebling Blood does. Perhaps Weakening Shroud should instead be changed to be similar to Death Shiver so that the effect is continuous while in the shroud. This should benefit Condition playstyle more.
  • Death Shroud interface completely strips awareness from the Necromancer, as the player cannot see any Boons, Conditions, Endurance or use utilize utility skills while in the Shroud such as Minion skills.
  • Death Shroud, and Lich for that matter, lacks the basic Auto-Attack functionality on their 1 skills Life Blast & Deathly Claws.

Minions

“Necro minions are supposed to aggro based on what you attack only, so if this particular minion is not following that rule that is the real problem. We are currently investigating it and will make any changes we think are necessary.” - JonPeters source

Minions do not follow the described intention of Jon Peters.

• Minions
  • All Minions randomly idle while the caster is engaged in combat.
  • All Minions randomly attack nearby enemy targets while the caster is idling.
  • With the exception of the Elite Skill Flesh Golem, none of the minions recover Health out of combat. This is a huge issue for Minion Master builds.
  • The Jagged Horror from the Reanimator trait functions as a regular minion, but this also means it keeps the caster locked in combat while it is still alive.
  • While likely intentional the community feels that Minion Master should also reduce the Cooldown of Minion skills and not just the cooldown of their summoning skill cooldown.
  • The Flesh Golem should function underwater. The availability of Elite skills underwater is limited to 1 skill currently. This would also solve the issue of losing the Flesh Golem when entering areas of water, as it de-summons minions not equipped underwater.
  • The Flesh Golem skill Charge is an issue in PvE as it ends up charging far away after hitting it’s intended target and picks up stray aggro from nearby mobs.

Other

• Axe
  • Damage is underwhelming. It has no niche as it doesn’t have the damage or utility of the other weapons.
  • Vulnerability debuff is underwhelming compared to other classes, which have much easier access to the condition such as Elementalist with Vapor Blade or Engineer with Precise Sights and Steel-Packed Powder spamming Grenade.

• Plague Form
  • There is little to no reason to choose Plague of Pestilence or Withering Plague over Plague of Darkness, continued application of the Blind condition trumps the low amount of Bleed stacks being applied, or the Weakness & Cripple. This isn’t call to reduce the effectiveness of Plague of Darkness, but to put a spotlight on the underwhelming performance of the other plagues.

• Fear
  • The supposed master of terror has little access to a reliable Fear condition. Reaper’s Mark, Doom, Fear of Death all have a 1 second duration and Reaper’s Protection have a 2 second duration, but none of them stand to gain a significant benefit from Master of Terror..

The intention with this list is to serve as a quick hand-off to the developers, so that they may bring it with them to the next design or QA meeting, and so we can expedite the hot topic issues for the class sooner rather than later. It’s not meant to encompass every tiny little bug with the class (there’s already a thread for that), but illustrate the community concerns in broader strokes.

I tried to include all the recently discussed issues, if I missed any I do apologize and will include it in the list when informed about it.

Also there’s a better formatted, easy to print gdoc available here.

vote for sticky

Very well laid out summary of issues with todays necromancer.

could do with a section on boons that are hard/impossible to get.

This seems like a well-constructed post that accurately reflects our concerns without resorting to the petulant hatemongering that seems to be slowly permeating these forums. Well done.

Excellent post, Aexrael. I’m hoping it makes a difference.

Echoing what others have posted above, excellent post highlighting all recently discussed issues; thank you for this post.

My thoughts:

Life Stealing
Your numbers are correct, but I think you underestimate the effectiveness. A dagger 1 combo is 4 hits in about 2 seconds. All four hits with Vampiric Precision (heals for 51 with Bloodthirst) and Bloodthirst will heal you for about 250 hp. That is a LOT imo. Especially considering that you will get multiple dagger combos off during a fight, and the life siphon also works on any damage done by all your other abilities…it’s not unreasonable to assume you’d heal several thousand health during a fight.

Especially with dagger 2. In WvW recently I have noticed this ticking for over 300 healing on myself. I can’t remember the exact number so we’ll say 300. It hits 8 times, so that is 2400 healed. PLUS 38 * 8 = 304 from Vampiric, PLUS an average of 51 * 4 = 204 with Vampiric Precision (if you crit on half of the hits). That is almost 3k healed with every dagger 2, and I was underestimating because I know it siphons for more than 300 per tick. With traits you can put this spell on a 10s cooldown.

TL; DR: I think siphoning is fine as is.

Warhorn
I’ve used the warhorn extensively and disagree that it is an underwhelming weapon, especially in WvW. Even classes that are built for condition cleansing can’t get away if you run alongside them with Locust Swarm on. With the trait, you can improve the daze from Warhorn 4 to 3s – that an AoE daze, remember. Super useful for cancelling heals.

Fear
Not sure why you say we don’t have access to fear. We have 5 fears (DS 3, Staff 5, Reaper’s Protection trait, Fear of Death trait, and down state 2). If you build appropriately you can get these up from 1s duration to 2.5s duration, as mentioned in some other thread a while ago. I’d rather have several good fears than the 1 great fear that some other classes have, personally.

I agree with everything else, nice post, and thanks.

Nice. Now lets see recognition. How long would you think an expert who built the class could read this post and quickly respond with…

A. Definitely a bug
B. Working as intended

I can’t answer the questions officially, but It took me about 5 minutes. If a developer dedicated to class balance, ect, doesn’t have 5 minutes, we should all be extremely worried and baffled…considering the Necro is by far in the worst shape and should obviously have first priority.

I do agree with most thing.

The only thing I’m not sure, is Warhorn being lackluster.

I started using it with Dagger, and I think it’s really strong. The #5 skill give swift and slow! You root someone with dagger, run to them, cast #5, and they are stuck with you for the entire duration. It does a lot of damage, plus you stay in range for dagger.

1. is great too, but I agree that it’s a little boring. Daze for 2 sec, nothing else. It’s a bit hard to aim in pvp too, and low range.

But I still think warhorn is an underused offhand, and it stronger then people think. Really useful for farming too!

I will also add that I tried a Fear based build, and it didn’t work out really well. adding Fear duration doesn’t do much really, I had like 80% fear duration and I didn’t really see it.

The damage on fear traits is good tho, free damage on a CC is good!

Our “fear when getting downed” traits seems to be bugged tho. I didn’t test it, but sometime it doesn’t seem to cast it. And sometime it put our #2 downed state fear on cooldown?

Overall, I want to say that I think Necromancer are a lot better in PvP then people think. I use my magic find gear in pvp, and I do fairly well! Sure I don’t have my Engineer burst, but I can take a punch(Thanks DS) and outlast people!

Love the class, love our balance (maybe condimancer lack a bit), just resolving our bugs and making Axe a bit better so I can use it would be really great

I just wanted to chime in (in response to the Devs Philosophy) that the Necro is one of the easiest class to escape from.

In contrast, the classes that you can’t get away from are actually the very same classes that can easily escape any situation—that is, the thief and elementalist (and warrior too if they spec a certain way), because of their great mobility.

One way to resolve the problem with the Necro is to possibly give it a special ability/condition (e.g., a speed boost to catch up to its target, or a special non-removable condition that can be cast on its target to slow them down). As a remark, I think that a “condition” would be more appropriately thematic for the Necro, but may be too powerful if it can be cast too frequently; it should probably be something that the Necro will have to contemplate about using.

Cleaned up some of the sentence structures/grammar, and added the lack of minion out of combat health regen and lack of autoattack for DS/Lich to the list.

I played some spvp and it seems like Jagged Horrors last a lot longer now and do not keep you in combat. Anyone could confirm this stealth fix?

agreed on a lot of topics especially the minions

Thanks for the well-constructed post. I agree with the issues you list for the class. I’m currently stuck at level 36 (my highest character) and advancing at about a level a week. I’d love these issues addresses or more build flexibility. I got the Shadow Armor garb a little while ago and specced into Healing Power ready to become a vampire and was so greatly disappointed in the siphoning. It’s so miniscule as to be unnoticeable, and why not just spec into Condition Damage and burn your target down at a reasonable level enough to where you’re not taking ANY damage since it’s dead? There’s no diversity in this class. You’re either Condition Damage or bust.

Thanks for taking the time putting it together.

I would add stability in a utility slot to the list so, the class really needs it to be a contender

I’m not a developer, and feel free to tell me to shut up and go away (although I warn you, I will grumble!) but the Life-Leeching complaints are symptomatic of a much larger problem.

That problem being: We, or the other professions in the game, or perhaps healing mechanics entirely, scale poorly with Healing Power compared to some other stats. Not all stats are created equally!

Allow me to provide an example in the form of a stat called Prowess, also known more commonly as Critical Damage. In Guild Wars 2, all Critical Hits have a base damage of 150%. So a 3000 damage sword swing from a Warrior clocks a 4500 critical hit. According to the wiki, 1 point of Prowess equates to an extra 1% on top of the baseline 150%. So, with 30 points in Soul Reaping, your prowess is 180%, your crit does 180% damage (in the Warrior example this makes the crit 5400 damage).

Healing Power on the other hand scales linearly and rather feebly at that. Regeneration is a common boon for us to throw out – it comes from Staff 2, Focus 4, and the 5-point minor in Blood. Regeneration scales at a rate of 1 point adding 0.125 health to a Rejuvenation tick.

To provide a more anecdotal example, by kitting myself out entirely in Exotic Clerics’ armour with 6/6 Superior runes of water, and rare Cleric’s Axe/Focus and Staff, as well as full exotic Sapphire Jewelery and 20 points down Blood Magic for good measure, I clocked in at nearly 1800 Healing Power.

My Regeneration still healed for less than 300 a tick out of a 20-21000 health pool.

If Life Leech and siphoning do indeed scale off of Healing Power (and we have no reason not to believe this) then their weak performance are part of the problem that is Healing Power as a stat scales horribly. Professions such as Guardians make it through by simply having a large pool of on-demand burst healing skills – it’s the sheer high base numbers given to them and the multitude of them that makes them effective healers. For everyone else with low initial values, even a significant chunk of Healing Power won’t do much to budge your healing up.

The optimist in me would love to see a build focused around Life-Leeching. Really, I would. The realist in me says: If the developers can figure out how strongly they want Healing Power to impact the metagame of PvP without it spiralling out of control, then we might be able to make some progress with a Life-Leeching build.

As it stands, Healing Power is woefully underscaled for the concerns of level 80 PvP, and life leeching ends up falling under this category.

As much as I appreciate a dedicated writer to put out concise information for the devs, I think its best if the information is only firmly rooted in facts. I think the suggestions you put out are very debatable in some areas.

Kaarnak.2865:

I’m not a developer, and feel free to tell me to shut up and go away (although I warn you, I will grumble!) but the Life-Leeching complaints are symptomatic of a much larger problem.

That problem being: We, or the other professions in the game, or perhaps healing mechanics entirely, scale poorly with Healing Power compared to some other stats. Not all stats are created equally!

Allow me to provide an example in the form of a stat called Prowess, also known more commonly as Critical Damage. In Guild Wars 2, all Critical Hits have a base damage of 150%. So a 3000 damage sword swing from a Warrior clocks a 4500 critical hit. According to the wiki, 1 point of Prowess equates to an extra 1% on top of the baseline 150%. So, with 30 points in Soul Reaping, your prowess is 180%, your crit does 180% damage (in the Warrior example this makes the crit 5400 damage).

Healing Power on the other hand scales linearly and rather feebly at that. Regeneration is a common boon for us to throw out – it comes from Staff 2, Focus 4, and the 5-point minor in Blood. Regeneration scales at a rate of 1 point adding 0.125 health to a Rejuvenation tick.

To provide a more anecdotal example, by kitting myself out entirely in Exotic Clerics’ armour with 6/6 Superior runes of water, and rare Cleric’s Axe/Focus and Staff, as well as full exotic Sapphire Jewelery and 20 points down Blood Magic for good measure, I clocked in at nearly 1800 Healing Power.

My Regeneration still healed for less than 300 a tick out of a 20-21000 health pool.

If Life Leech and siphoning do indeed scale off of Healing Power (and we have no reason not to believe this) then their weak performance are part of the problem that is Healing Power as a stat scales horribly. Professions such as Guardians make it through by simply having a large pool of on-demand burst healing skills – it’s the sheer high base numbers given to them and the multitude of them that makes them effective healers. For everyone else with low initial values, even a significant chunk of Healing Power won’t do much to budge your healing up.

The optimist in me would love to see a build focused around Life-Leeching. Really, I would. The realist in me says: If the developers can figure out how strongly they want Healing Power to impact the metagame of PvP without it spiralling out of control, then we might be able to make some progress with a Life-Leeching build.

As it stands, Healing Power is woefully underscaled for the concerns of level 80 PvP, and life leeching ends up falling under this category.

I disagree I don’t think healing should be strong as it’s unfun for a game to have unkillable self-healing classes, I’d prefer healing as a sort of alternate tough/HP, it extends your effective health and time to kill but doesn’t actually replenish HP at a rate higher than damage.

I think we just need to have effective damage capable of making use of the extra time it buys us. We currently do not.

I disagree I don’t think healing should be strong as it’s unfun for a game to have unkillable self-healing classes, I’d prefer healing as a sort of alternate tough/HP, it extends your effective health and time to kill but doesn’t actually replenish HP at a rate higher than damage.

I think we just need to have effective damage capable of making use of the extra time it buys us. We currently do not.

I agree, nobody wants unkillable healers. It’s un-fun and it sucks from both ends of the perspective – the healing party doesn’t want to end up as little more than some unkillable piñata who doesn’t have any wiggle-room for tactics beyond “Soak up damage and pray backup comes along”, and the damaging party gets frustrated because they’re tied up in combat against something they can’t feasibly kill without back-up. Nobody comes out of that scenario having had a particularly fun experience. Furthermore it’s contrary to the action-based, Neverwinter Nights-esque combat the game is built on.

Which is why I wasn’t advocating that Healing Power become some sort of god stat that scales as well as Prowess. What I would rather see is pretty much exactly what you said – healing as an alternative to stacking Toughness or Vitality, or something that’s beneficial to grab while grabbing a bit of Toughness or Vitality on the side. In an ideal situation, Healing Power, along with some Toughness or Vitality, and grabbing siphoning traits/skills, and regeneration scaling better than it currently does, should be a viable form of damage mitigation. Not enough to turn you into an unkillable beast, but enough to draw out the fight. Currently this is not the case – far from it, because of how poorly Healing Power scales as a stat in comparison to others.

As for effective damage, to requote Johnathan Sharp from the OP quote:

It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

To me this says that direct damage or, dare I say burst, isn’t something the developers particularly have in mind for this profession in regards to the design philosophy. At least at this stage of the game – who knows what’ll happen a few months, maybe years down the road? As it stands our axe could certainly use a booster in the old damage department mostly stemming from how poor Rending Claws’ Vulnerability lasts. I for one would welcome swapping the functionality of Rending Claws and Ghastly Claws so that the latter applies Vulnerability that sticks around a little longer, and the former is a simple hack n slash that builds Life Force. But I digress!

kKagari.6804:

As much as I appreciate a dedicated writer to put out concise information for the devs, I think its best if the information is only firmly rooted in facts. I think the suggestions you put out are very debatable in some areas.

Feel free to add examples you feel isn’t a community concern. Everything on the list is taken from the past 10 threads in the Necromancer section save for one note on the Weakening Shroud/Death Shiver.

If there’s an issue which a greater part of the community feels shouldn’t be on the list, I’ll take it down.

Aexrael.5918 <— Somebody bring him a beer, cheers!

I’m in the same both as kKagari here: while I can appreciate the nicely written overview, I also think that some of the things you bring up are more personal rather than community concerns (and then I also don’t believe the community concerns to be 100% accurate either, but that’s another issue).

Aexrael.5918:

Feel free to add examples you feel isn’t a community concern.

This would be the most obvious one, imo.

• Warhorn
  • Warhorn feels underwhelming compared to other offhand weapons.

I honestly don’t know where you got this from? I see plenty of necromancers running around with warhorns (both in-game and on this forum) and have hardly seen any complaints about it (well, you see complaints about everything, but some stuff frequently recurs and other stuff doesn’t). Then again, maybe I’m just reading (a lot of) the wrong topics?

Imo, there are definitely bugs that need fixing, minion AI could use improvements, axe is weird as its use seems unapparent (improving its damage is just one way to address this) and a lot of traits just feel underwhelming (although they might not necessarily be). But more importantly, it’s about time for the community to snap out of it imo… It’s entirely possible to make due, and even make a build that fits your playstyle, with the tools we have (and I’m sure a lot of people do just that), but at the same time our forum is full of all this coulda-shoulda-woulda stuff that is completely useless at this point, except for making people feel bad about their class. In-game (and I have to admit: I’ve never liked pvp very much, so I only play pve and some wvw) I never feel weak or underwhelming and there are plenty of opportunities where I feel unique as a class and that I can do stuff that others can’t. But every time I visit these forums, I go away depressed about my class…

Warhorn has been removed from the list.

As requested, the area I disagree with most is the lifestealing section and the general populace of the necromancer community throwing in the ‘does not scale with +healing’ argument. Whilst in a lore sense I see this is perfectly logical, gameplay wise 25hp stolen base is actually quite decent when using a dagger but subpar when using a Staff. But that would merely be my opinion, and if I was to approach this issue and offer a suggestion, I would think an adjustment to the base amount should be different depending on the skill used, and similarly, though I wouldn’t expect you to include that in your post.

TLDR: with reference to lifestealing; highlighting that 25hp base lifesteal from Vampiric is subpar is good, suggesting that it should scale with healing is bad (IMO).

Again, I’d like to thank you for your effort in putting this together.

Everyone runs around with warhorn for WvW for the swiftness uptime.

@Arvid

I disagree with some of the points you made. It’s obviously possible to make a build and perform the basics with each trait setup, but it’s lackluster to say the least. Asking the community to snap out of something just doesn’t hold well because we seem to be the least played profession for a reason.

I agree with everything the OP pointed out, and they really need to focus on conditions in its entirety.

There are massive issues with healing power.
No 1 issue being that actually healing scales better with toughness and protection than it does healing power. I think if you have tried healing power vs toughness you would agree though i have no numbers to back this statement up. Basically if u have higher tough/mitigation, each heal is worth more effective hp to you.
Life leech scales so poorly with healing power that toughness is the stat which buffs it. Only reason to take healing power is for regen or well of blood/consume conditions which scale better than life steals do (although the scaling is pretty bad here too…). I would probably always take some other stat instead.

I think it’s a bit shortsighted of the devs not to see toughness as an alternative (far better) healing power. Why shouldn’t healing power be as good a stat? I remember earlier comments by them along the lines of they’ve tried to make all stats equal power in scaling etc, along with making a user-friendly game [i.e. no noob traps of bad stats or bad traits/abilities]. guess that went out of the window. Especially with necro.

“So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get”

Death shroud works in the exact opposite of this statement.

Underwater death shroud isn’t underwhelming its actually fairly decent with condition builds. Which is why both shroud should be available at all times to complement both builds.