Guild Wars 2

A while back ago arena net put up a post describing what each class was to be .
when they got to the necromancer they thought that necromancers were meant to be an attrition based class . A class that is meant to wear down an opponent slowly and win a fight as long as the battle continued forward in their direction . However the necromancer has the tools to be considered such a class that is attrition based with abilities that it uses like fear , root , snare , and for survive ability they could life steal and have pets that would also attack their opponent and dish out dots that would do plenty of damage over time . The problem is very clear .
These abilities that the necromancer have are under powered , please let me explain myself .
A 2 second root that can only be used for up close combat or 2 second root that can be missed or dodged from a necromancers pet , a life steal that can only be used for up close combat , a 1 second fear that would only serve purpose to interrupt instead of actually fear for a good duration , life steal that is very very low that hardly makes up for damage in mitigation and last but not least conditions that can be removed as soon as you placed them on your opponent . These are a few of the things i tend to notice that hurts the class in that attempt to try and wear down someone when the crowed control is so short and meaningless it hardly makes up for the use at all .
But what about death shroud ? Death shroud is what I would consider a last ditch effort to try and sustain the life of a necromancer but fails at every attempt in doing so . Skill 1 is such a slow attack that it is hardly worth the use since it misses it’s attack more than it hits , skill 2 could have been great if the attack speed were faster but it misses more often than hits and the worst of all is that it ports you to who you are attacking { NO} this is not what i want to do , I want to stay where I am and they stay where they are during a fight not be up close in combat , after all necromancers are a caster class and not a melee based class . Skill 3 is once again a dreaded 1 second fear , however it is nice that it is and instant attack , and then we have skill 4 which is a pbaoe skill that does a lot of good damage for a short duration of time . So out of the 4 skills when a necromancer goes into Death shroud only 1 skill which is skill 4 , is the only good one ? Im sorry but that will simply not do .
Then you have the shroud it self . It acts as a buffer to take damage and prevent the necromancer from taking damage .
Once again this is a last ditch effort to try and save the pathetic necromancer with it’s already hindered skills to make up for the consistent problems that continue to plague the necromancer class .
People will argue with me over the semantics on why I am wrong and why they are right . But I assure you that my attempt for this post was with the best intentions of opening up peoples minds and to get them to think about what could be done more for the necromancer class than what there is currently on display . and I do not apologize for my opinion on what I see that is a problem that continues to fester the necromancer class .

Holycrapwalloftextl2formatman

Anyway, while this was hard to understand (at least for me), there are a few things I can say.
1) Yes, necromancer needs a few fixes, we could use a few tweaks here and there, but its really not that big of a deal.
2) We are perfectly capable of outlasting opponents right now.

We have tons of soft CC. Axe 3, Dagger 3, Staff 3 and 5 (and 4 depending on what conditions you transfer), Scepter 2, Focus 5, Warhorn 4 and 5, and to a degree Dagger 5 (applies weakness to slow the amount of dodges they can do). It is literally impossible to have a weapon set without 1 form of soft CC, and impossible to have your 2 sets have less than 3. That doesn’t include any traits (like the chill on blind), utility skills, or the fact that every one of our elites has soft CC as well. Nor can you tell me that ANY class in the game, including necromancers, can cleanse or dodge all that soft CC without using all their endurance and cleanses, leaving them completely open to far more damaging conditions or leaving themselves with no way to dodge bigger abilities.

Our life steals aren’t that strong in PvP, I agree, but they would only need very minor tweaking to be completely in line. They also require almost no thought to do, other classes actually need to trait for HP gain, we just get it in the process of doing something else, in most cases. In PvE our life stealing is very powerful.

DS should always be used proactively, even as a defensive tool. It shouldn’t be an “oh crap I’m low HP better stall button” so much as “hey look that thief is about to burst me, time to completely negate it”. Also, the only time people should be dodging your DS is if you are full power/crit build, otherwise they are wasting it on nothing. DS needs some UI updates, and they could tweak it to synergize with every build better, but otherwise it is pretty solid.

“Caster” classes have melee range weapons, “melee” classes have caster weapons, get with the program. You are perfectly able to go in close range against a warrior, the only true difference that our class has to more “heavily” armored ones is a bit of armor, and it really doesn’t mean much.

The class isn’t broken. The class doesn’t have gaping holes in its design. It requires a few bug fixes, and a few tweaks to make some of our more useless utilities better. That is it. We aren’t underpowered, we aren’t overpowered, we are completely competitive, and in fact can easily counter the “OP” classes (which are also more or less balanced).

It was the same way since beta… you are a bit late to the party.
And why the bloody hell you place . with 2 spaces… Pardon me . . .
Well actually that does look pretty cool :P

I do love my Necro and have great fun with him in WvW but I do admit that compared to the power of Shatter/confuse Mesmers and d/d Ellies, we are the Ginger-haired step child of the caster classes :-(

Bhawb.7408:

Holycrapwalloftextl2formatman

Anyway, while this was hard to understand (at least for me), there are a few things I can say.
1) Yes, necromancer needs a few fixes, we could use a few tweaks here and there, but its really not that big of a deal.
2) We are perfectly capable of outlasting opponents right now.

We have tons of soft CC. Axe 3, Dagger 3, Staff 3 and 5 (and 4 depending on what conditions you transfer), Scepter 2, Focus 5, Warhorn 4 and 5, and to a degree Dagger 5 (applies weakness to slow the amount of dodges they can do). It is literally impossible to have a weapon set without 1 form of soft CC, and impossible to have your 2 sets have less than 3. That doesn’t include any traits (like the chill on blind), utility skills, or the fact that every one of our elites has soft CC as well. Nor can you tell me that ANY class in the game, including necromancers, can cleanse or dodge all that soft CC without using all their endurance and cleanses, leaving them completely open to far more damaging conditions or leaving themselves with no way to dodge bigger abilities.

Our life steals aren’t that strong in PvP, I agree, but they would only need very minor tweaking to be completely in line. They also require almost no thought to do, other classes actually need to trait for HP gain, we just get it in the process of doing something else, in most cases. In PvE our life stealing is very powerful.

DS should always be used proactively, even as a defensive tool. It shouldn’t be an “oh crap I’m low HP better stall button” so much as “hey look that thief is about to burst me, time to completely negate it”. Also, the only time people should be dodging your DS is if you are full power/crit build, otherwise they are wasting it on nothing. DS needs some UI updates, and they could tweak it to synergize with every build better, but otherwise it is pretty solid.

“Caster” classes have melee range weapons, “melee” classes have caster weapons, get with the program. You are perfectly able to go in close range against a warrior, the only true difference that our class has to more “heavily” armored ones is a bit of armor, and it really doesn’t mean much.

The class isn’t broken. The class doesn’t have gaping holes in its design. It requires a few bug fixes, and a few tweaks to make some of our more useless utilities better. That is it. We aren’t underpowered, we aren’t overpowered, we are completely competitive, and in fact can easily counter the “OP” classes (which are also more or less balanced).

Holycrapwallofdisinformation.
“You are perfectly able to go in close range against a warrior, the only true difference that our class has to more “heavily” armored ones is a bit of armor, and it really doesn’t mean much." You have no idea what is required to be considered melee class do you?
The class doesn’t have gaping holes in its design. Bob you are definitely confusing this with mesmer forums.
Trait lines that are a mess? Check.
6 months later no fixes for 1/3 of traits that are either broken or garbage? Check.
Mechanics that simply don’t work? Check.
Minion AI makes egyptian statues cringe? Check.
I could go on forever but ignorance is a bliss. I bet you will dismiss everything and continue to sing praises to anet for their shi… Err I mean “wonderful” job. 1 dude fixing bugs and nobody told him that there’s necro class, yep everything is working as intended.
Just like lich form/plague and minions disappearing , oh that’s right they disappear from any polymorph… unlike for other classes. Or they simply didn’t give a monkey and just changed tooltip. We shall never know.
Even if one would dismiss common sense and go bout saying anets way is the right way. Brush off all minion issues… god forbid dots are treated same way as any other damage source and not get capped and replaced by something that does 1/10 damage, trait lines making no sense, the fact that minions are wet noodles and there’s not even a single measly way to heal them under water. Forget about golem drowning… etc etc. When was the last time you checked actual bug list? Mhm? Approaching a 100? There were about 5 or so things that got “fixed”. I’m not counting slapping a new tooltip and saying working as intended as “fix”. Rest were nerfs and things just working even worse then they did before. Plague signet etc. But yeah… go ahead live in denial see if it makes it more fun.