Guild Wars 2

A little while ago I watched one of Arena Net’s videos on moving forward with the professions in Future updates. And I found their understanding of the Necromancer’s current abilities to be a bit lacking. So I would like to point out a few flaws they didn’t cover that I feel need to be addressed.

Stoming/Resing – This is one of the areas that necromancers are lacking. Most players abuse a bug in order to do this while in death shroud to prevent themselves from being completely destroyed. Entering and Exiting Death shroud shouldn’t interrupt our Stomp or res of a party member or foe and we should just be able to activate it while in death shroud without the abuse of a bug. This is something that has bugged me for a while and other people I’m sure.

Vampirism and death shroud Of our 2 defensive(Or self sustain) mechanics you would think they could work well together. Yet this isn’t the case. Activating death shroud makes Vampirism virtually useless for the duration its active.

We get hit by everything – This is a major problem with necromancers. We are still extremely vulnerable to CC in PvP and in PvE our amazing health bar literally does nothing for us against stronger enemies. They talked about this one a little bit but I don’t think they really got how much it actually effects us.

Stacking conditions in PvE – This is less of a necromancer problem and more of everyone’s problem. Necromancers have great pressure damage using conditions. Its a real shame that the stacks are often overridden by other players who have far weaker condition damage reducing your 2-3k tick bleeds to 280 ticks or worse, no ticks. Fix this!

I think that’s all I can think of right now. Any thoughts comments on these? Am I blowing some of these too out of proportion? Let me know your thoughts.

Getting hit by everything seems to be most annoying, but then again we got that big healthpool…. zzzz

I love being a glowing green ping pong ball.

NeXeD.3042:

I love being a glowing green ping pong ball.

Black shadowy ping pong ball.

In general, I don’t think they necessarily didn’t know of our faults (or did), it was, to me, more of a talk about where they want things to be, instead of how things are. They didn’t really mention anything that would make me think they did or didn’t know of issues like this, because they were talking very very broad things, like Necromancers can’t have good boon access. That said, this is a really good list of specifics.

1) Totally agree. There is no reason this should stop our stomping, it is our defensive mechanic, just like a guardian putting on stability + protection while ressing.

2) Agreed again. Either a trait to allow healing, or simply allow all self-traited healing (obviously change Transfusion so it doesn’t try to heal you through DS) to go through DS. Start off small, but give us something.

3) This is by design, and I think its fine. If we had ways of accessing CC immunity (stability, Shade, mechanics that aren’t stopped by it) this would be absolutely fine, we have by far the best ability to simply take hits to the face and laugh them off, the issue is that our ability to do that is stopped by CC. Give us access to these mechanics, and maybe a few slight buffs to LF gain on weapon skills (mainly scepter) and we’re good to go.

4) This is simply PvE design. Look at some of teh Queen’s Gauntlet bosses (which are trivial in a condi build, even if you have no idea what you are doing), and even some of the Boss Blitz bosses, and you can see some spots where condi is just as good as zerker.

Bhawb.7408:

In general, I don’t think they necessarily didn’t know of our faults (or did), it was, to me, more of a talk about where they want things to be, instead of how things are. They didn’t really mention anything that would make me think they did or didn’t know of issues like this, because they were talking very very broad things, like Necromancers can’t have good boon access. That said, this is a really good list of specifics.

1) Totally agree. There is no reason this should stop our stomping, it is our defensive mechanic, just like a guardian putting on stability + protection while ressing.

2) Agreed again. Either a trait to allow healing, or simply allow all self-traited healing (obviously change Transfusion so it doesn’t try to heal you through DS) to go through DS. Start off small, but give us something.

3) This is by design, and I think its fine. If we had ways of accessing CC immunity (stability, Shade, mechanics that aren’t stopped by it) this would be absolutely fine, we have by far the best ability to simply take hits to the face and laugh them off, the issue is that our ability to do that is stopped by CC. Give us access to these mechanics, and maybe a few slight buffs to LF gain on weapon skills (mainly scepter) and we’re good to go.

4) This is simply PvE design. Look at some of teh Queen’s Gauntlet bosses (which are trivial in a condi build, even if you have no idea what you are doing), and even some of the Boss Blitz bosses, and you can see some spots where condi is just as good as zerker.

I’m aware that Our inability to avoid most attacks is part of our design. But my point wasn’t that this should be completely removed, just that its a far larger weakness then the devs are aware. I didn’t mention all the weaknesses either because I feel they did do a good job of it for the most part, I just feel that a few things needed to be said regardless. Yes, Condition builds are really good in some situations in PvE. The problem is when you get into world events and even dungeon bosses. Were you have people or even party members harming your over all damage.

It seems that the Devs don’t realize that while necros in theory have the tools to absorb damage rather than avoid it, much of the pvp meta from my understanding makes it so that if you can’t avoid damage or get focused in a team fight, the overall power creep for some meta builds for professions and the crowd control techniques in use by those professions means that deathshroud and high HP isn’t enough to survive. S/D thieves survive through evasion and mobility and have a fair amount of interupts, immobolize, and overall high damage. D/D eles survive using decent mobility and boons, do damage by stacking might/fury and other defensive boons, while providing most of those boons to their allies. Warriors… enough said.

While we are designed to not be able to avoid damage, we need better ways to mitigate that damage in team fights in my opinion. How this would happen, I have no idea :o

Perhaps increased personal access to Protection and Retaliation? Or (preferably) more Weakness (Withering Precision is a fine place to start on that).

Swiftness, Protection, Retaliation, Regeneration, and Stability are the boons necros should have decent (personal) access to. Swiftness, Protection, and Regeneration I think are good right now, Retaliation needs another source or two, and Stability we really need on a utility for more than 1 second.

He agreed with you on the CC thing pretty much. He didn’t say it should be removed.

The cc thing is literally the only problem I have with this class now. I don’t even care about healing in ds or doing anything else in ds.

When you are in a wvw fight or a spvp fight and you see a warrior a guardian an ele a thief and a necro. Who do you focus and why. You focus the necro. Why? It’s not because we are just soooo much more dangerous than another class, it’s not because if you let us live it’s gg or anything. It’s because we are the one class that can be completely negated by focus fire. Sure we can take it we can even equip 3 stunbreaks and trait the kitten out if then and ds. But it won’t change the fact that as long as we are being focused we can’t to a kittening thing. Other classes all have a way of avoiding focus fire with the ability to continue attacking at the same time. We dont.

Also as a necro we can easily have 100% retal uptime.

Currently I’m trying my build with 2 in spite and taking fitg and both the retaliation traits as well as switched to axe since I decided I spent so much time in ds rather than have the steady ds gain from daggers I wanted the bustier lf gain from axe 2 with the addition of retal from axe 3. Well see how it goes.

I’d be down some vigor. Active defense.is.so much better then boons.

What I’m still confused on is.why necros.don’t.have more pulls… we have wells and marks, we need more pulls and pushes to control people.
But no we get multiple stationary skulls and no pulls not to mention cc to force us away from wells and marks… I love this class… but it’s killing me at the same time.

Our main problem is our DS mechanic doesn’t provide enough protection. Usually due to LF starvation.

It doesn’t matter if every single skill on your bar produces life force, if your enemy is constantly evading, blocking or in some way making it impossible to hit them they’ve simultaneously destroyed both your offense and defense.

For instance, we could gain life force on damage all the time. Like 1% gain on a 1s cd as part of our mechanic. Perhaps make vampire signet play into this, adding a extra 1% life force on hit on top of its normal healing.

The alternative would be to allow incoming heals to heal our DS bar if we are in DS. Also allow us to use our util, elite and heal skills from DS. This would be my preferred fix, as it would make vampire builds finally sync with Death Shroud.

Lastly, regardless of which approach they take, I would like to see LF degeneration while in DS go away completely. We’ve long since passed the design era where DS was just something we popped in and out of very briefly.

I find it interesting how little the devs understand death shroud. I didn’t say this when I posted before but this is actually what they said “We can give the necromancer lots of Movement. Imagine if a necromancer could just leave Combat any time they wand after draining their death shroud. They could just come back with full death shroud.” HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA Gasp HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA! Even if we COULD escape from combat in this hypothetical Situation, the odds of us getting back our death shroud and doing it in a timely manor that we come back in order to break their hold on that point without them actually leaving is NEVER going to happen. Its like they think Death shroud regens over time. Which it doesn’t. If you are not in combat, Death needs to occur for it to regen or you need to sit in one spot spending several minutes swapping in and out flesh golem to kill it and get it back. In a PvP match, you don’t have that much time.

nearlight.3064:

While we are designed to not be able to avoid damage, we need better ways to mitigate that damage in team fights in my opinion. How this would happen, I have no idea :o

I’ve always liked the skill Sliver Armour. Possibly as a heal skill, included with Signet of Vampirism’s mechanics.

I just like the idea of countering a focus by taking a player with you. Or, at least make them hurt. Like a focused retaliation.

But, I’m a Sylvari. I like to dream.

Because non of the devs play …Necromancer

Thief.. can use his mechanics to stomp.
Mesmer..can use his mechanics to stomp.
Guard..just stomps..
Elementalist.. can use his mechanics/utils to stomp.
Warrior..just stomps.
Ranger.. can use his mechanics/utils to stomp.
Necro.. blows 2 utilities to stomp (if they work) uses a non viable trait to stomp.. (if you are lucky with timing) abuses a bug to stomp (if you are lucky)
Engie.. just stomps.

so yeah..

DS stomp must be allowed and we need 4-5 seconds stability on one of our utilities. FitG is not the answer.