Guild Wars 2

Hi all,

Raising a necro as my 4th 80 and seeing the various problems with the class, I figured I would take a shot at adding my own idea for improvement of the class.

New Mechanic: Rot

How Rot Works:

Rot is a simple direct damage balancing mechanic that will help bring very weak pure power builds in line with necromancer condition builds. The goal of rot is to reward necromancers who are able to prolong attrition fights and effectively keep up condition stacks by providing them with a means of direct damage that scales as the fight persists.

Rot is a mechanic that scales with POWER and works the following way:

Rot
-For each condition on an enemy, the necromancer gains a slight passive damage bonus. This holds true for condition stacks as well as unique conditions. Rot tends to favor scenarios where enemies that have large amounts of condition stacks (like 25x bleeds or vulnerability). Additionally, Rot deals a direct damage bonus to each tick of lifesteal that the necromancer lands on an enemy. This lifesteal bonus scales with power and is only direct damage, it does not return health to the necromancer. This is to allow Rot to benefit both direct damage life steal builds and condition stacking builds.

Effects of Rot:

-This helps balance the necromancer by making it the only class that can surpass and actually benefits from the condition stack limit on enemies. When enemies have high stacks of condition damage, the necromancer deals significantly more damage.

-Rot favors attrition fights and the longer the fight is prolonged and the more conditions a necromancer is able to stack. The more effective the stack, the more damage the necromancer deals with Rot.

-Rot increases the effectiveness of the axe and dagger weapons. As a direct damage weapon that stacks vulnerability very fast, Rot increases the direct damage of the axe. For a lifesteal weapon or build (like dagger/x), Rot applies additional direct damage per life siphon. This increases the direct damage for non-condition based options as well. Scepter and Staff gain the least direct damage bonus from Rot due to their current effectiveness as fast condition stacking weapons. Necromancers should be promoted to stack heavy amounts of conditions with one weapon, then switch to another to capitalize.

(Cont.)

Weapon and Skill Changes in Support of Rot:

DAGGER:
-The final strike of the dagger chain now applies a very weak life steal. This is simply to proc direct damage from rot and bring the weapon in line with other weapons improved by rot.

SIGNET OF SPITE:
-Instead of granting power, the signet now passively increases the effectiveness of Rot.

GHASTLY CLAWS (AXE):
-Rot now makes this skill an effective spike attack when used on condition stacked targets. The CD may need to be adjusted to balance it.

Build Options with Rot:

Direct Power Axe Builds:
Now benefit heavily from Rot and pure power stacking. Pure power axe necromancers now can use conditions stacked by teammates in order to deal much heavier damage to enemies using Ghastly Claws, which becomes a very effective burst damage attack when the enemy has a massive amount of condition stacks.

Dagger Lifesteal Builds:
Now do extra damage with lifesteal, allowing the necromancer to be more effective in melee range due to rot. Rot makes the dagger weapon a direct damage pressure weapon that wears the enemy down while keeping the necromancer in the fight with siphoning. The life siphoning and dagger chain end will now do more damage due to rot, causing prolonged attrition fights with life-steal dagger necromancers to become more deadly.

Pure Power Rot Damage vs. Pure Condition Damage:

Necromancers now have two roads the damage. Necromancers who build pure power lose a significant amount of condition damage but deal much more direct damage to conditioned enemies or by using life steal. Pure power necromancers become more dependent on secondary weapons to apply conditions or the aid of teammates to apply conditions for them so that they can capitalize on damage. Life steal necromancers become effective pressure players that sacrifice spike damage (from a weapon like axe) in order to deal more consistent direct damage and remain in the fight.

Necromancers that build pure condition damage (such as epidemic bomb) gain a much smaller damage bonus from rot due to sacrificing pure power for condition damage as a stat. These builds are much more effective at condition stacking and damage over time, but lose direct damage and rot bonuses that come with.

Necromancers with the rot mechanic can now efficiently build for direct damage or for condition damage, or they can find a healthy balance in between. The passive effects of Rot make the necromancer more formidable but also does not overpower the necromancer by giving it an immense amount of direct damage at the start of a fight. The requirement of building condition stacks or using teammates to build stacks causes the necromancer to stay true to the idea of an “attrition class.” The direct damage bonus to life steal improves necromancers that opt to avoid conditions by improving their damage in situations where they are using life steal skills to stay in the fight, wearing down the enemy through pure pressure.

I believe that this new idea will fix many problems with necromancer class without transforming it into something that is not in line with its original class purpose. With rot, many grand master abilities (such as life siphoning from wells) become more effective and will lead to new and exciting build options for a very stagnant class.

Thanks for reading and I hope some of these ideas lead to improvements to the necromancer -or act as inspiration to some of the developers struggling with options on how to improve the necromancer as a whole.

-Helmos

Rot Icon Indicator:

In order to indicate the effects of Rot (which is a passive mechanic), a new icon is added to the right of the life force gauge. This icon shows a healthy corpse that decomposes as the necromancer stacks more conditions on the enemy. When the corpse is nearly a skeleton, this indicates that the necromancer has reached maximum Rot damage for the targeted enemy.

For life steal builds, Rot simply passively increases damage done during life steal that scales based on the necromancers power.

Hovering the mouse over the Rot icon displays the following tool tip:

Rot:

Passive. Increases damage to enemies based afflicted conditions. Increases damage when siphoning life.

So basically what you’re suggesting is a new condition that is not wipable, and will guarantee the kill only because of a passed amount of time.

Not to be a killjoy (this was well thought out) but it’s not in anyone’s favor to give us a condition that simply exponentially buffs our damage output over time. Because then we’d just have Power base builders building total bunker builds that wait for “Rot” to build up until they can just finish a whole HP bar with one auto attack.

Sheobix.8796:

So basically what you’re suggesting is a new condition that is not wipable, and will guarantee the kill only because of a passed amount of time.

Not to be a killjoy (this was well thought out) but it’s not in anyone’s favor to give us a condition that simply exponentially buffs our damage output over time. Because then we’d just have Power base builders building total bunker builds that wait for “Rot” to build up until they can just finish a whole HP bar with one auto attack.

Rot is not a new condition at all, it is a passive build directly into the necromancer class. You don’t apply rot to the enemy, it simply affects everything you do based on power scaling.

Rot is meant to be an adjustable core class mechanic that can be tweaked to balance necromancer direct damage with condition damage. Please do not mistake it as a condition.

Additionally let’s put this idea into play theory. Say you build a 30 death, 30 spite necromancer (toughness/power) as a bunker.

In this particular fight you bring a scepter/dagger as a primary set for condition stacking and run an axe/dagger secondary set for spiking and direct damage.

Rot causes the necromancer to scale in damage (at a rate justified by game balance) based on condition stacking.

At the start of the fight the necromancer stacks bleeds and poison. This increases the necromancer’s damage due to rot, but since the necromancer is using a scepter the damage is still not high.

The necromancer switches to an axe, and starts to apply vulnerability, which further increases rot damage. Now stacked with bleeding, poison, and vulnerability stacks the necromancer has primed the target for direct damage.

Necromancer strikes the low HP enemy with ghastly claws, which deals significant damage.

This build up is not instant and takes time. Additionally if the enemy removes conditions, the necromancer loses passive bonuses from rot. So the necromancer’s entire spike can be mitigated with condition removal.

Now in a situation where you allow your opponent to stack a massive amount of conditions on you then swap to a direct damage weapon like dagger and axe, that is when the necromancer becomes much more dangerous. But you have to think of the work it took him to get you there.

In a life steal situation, the dagger’s damage is simply just increased slightly for life steal based abilities. Daggers simple get a direct damage buff out of this, which was needed.

As a scaling passive, Rot would not be implemented to a degree where it would buff the necromancer’s damage to the insane degree that you stated in your post.

given that minion damage also is level-locked, you’d really only need to build a total regeneration and toughness build and play hide-and-go-seek behind your pets until rot is screaming at you to just hug them to death.

OP much?

edit: or sorry, not condition.. this would be considered a boon.

whats with people making new mechanics for necromancers these days?

Derk.3189:

whats with people making new mechanics for necromancers these days?

idk. i honestly just want DS tweaked and the horrid UI to change.

Honestly it should be called Spiteful spirit in memory of the guild wars 1 skill…. The necromancers on guild wars 1 could do both direct damage and conditions/leaching as a attrition class…. They really need to look back at some of the blood and curse builds and bring the gw2 counterpart in line with it… Till they do that the class is going to be sitting below other attrition builds that are from completely different classes that are ment to do different roles.

Honestly the 25 pt curses minor should be passive for our class to allow direct damage to get ramped up per conditions so that our direct damage attrition would work better…. Atm only real attrition we have is conditions which doesn’t work well with such a wide variety of condition removals in the game.

edit

Sheobix.8796:

Derk.3189:

whats with people making new mechanics for necromancers these days?

idk. i honestly just want DS tweaked and the horrid UI to change.

I edited to comment on this because I didn’t see you guys saying that…. The DS UI they already stated they are working on it though we need ds to last longer so that the damage when above 50% works better….

And to the other question the reason why people keep making up mechanics at least this one is because as a attrition class we are lacking in multiple areas…. We can only be true attrition as condition spec even though we are supposed to be able to do both direct damage attrition and condition damage attrition…. Atm we only do 1 and it’s mediocre due to how much better some of the other classes do it see thief/engie and mesmer… This is just the vane attempts to get a devs attention to have them change something so that we excel at what we are designed to do…

Honestly though I don’t expect them doing crap for our class for at least 2 years due to that’s how we were treated on guild wars 1…. We were only good as minion masters till around 3-4 years in when they finnaly opened up heavy attrition type builds direct damage and degen type builds…. I just hope I don’t have to wait 3+ years again to be able to fully enjoy the class…… As I said they need to step back and take a look at what was right about the necromancer from guild wars 1 and then redesign the guild wars 2 counterpart to function that way…. Death shroud is a good mechanic but it’s so poorly executed that it needs to be tweaked hard.

When they fix all our bugs and we find out where the class is at in reality, then we can discuss buffs/nerfs. For now, it’s not even worth taking about.

Shouldn’t this belong in the Suggestions forum?

The base idea is not bad, but might be op for reasons Shoebix stated above.

Yet, as I’ve stated above, the base idea could still be used to supply the necromancers with additional damage based on the amount of conditions and stacks on the target.

Lets face it, we do not scale well with power, regardless of build and gear, no necro power build can do (nor is meant to do) heavy direct damage.

That implies that all necro adjustments should be made with conditions in mind.

The above idea could be reworked to scale with the characters level, the number of conditions and the stacks of conditions on the target a without making it op in any way, here is an example that just might work, would make the necromancers shine in their home terittory (conditions and condition damage):
Change each attack/skill that now does direct damage to do a small amount of pure (armor ignoring) damage that would scale with the above. The increase from scaling would not need to be exponential since the damage would be armor ignoring and based on the number and stacks of conditions.

For example:
Let say one attack does 30 base damage. Let that damage be further increased by 1 per level, 0,5 per 100 condition damage, 5+(2% of weapon used), 5% per each unique condition on the target and 2% per stack of a condition (the % bonuses would be cumulative).
So on a level 80 character, that uses a weapon with 1000 stated damage, that has 1500 condition damage, that attacks a target that has poison, chilled and 25 stacks of bleed the above attack (30 damage base) would do:
30 base damage
5+20 from weapon
80 from level bonus
75 from condition damage
5% from poison
5% from chilled
5% from bleed + 50% from 25 bleed stacks
in total 210+65% = ~346 damage

While it may not seem like much, do not forget that the damage would ignore any armor, it would scale depending on a lot of things, and would efficiently solve all of the necromancers damage problems, while still keeping the class unique (it would be the only class that does such a type of damage constantly). The only problem is that all of the current skills would have to be reworked damage wise (as a high base damage on a low cooldown would become op)