Guild Wars 2

If you missed the news: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/Defiance-and-Soft-Crowd-Control/first#post5495163

They are trowing everything, chill included, in the defiance bar mechanic creating a huge functionality overlap.

I fear soft CC will become like Vulnerability: everyone has some so there is no place for a dedicated build or a profession with good Vulnerability application like Necromancer and Engineer.

Why should you bring a Reaper with chill when a hammer Warrior hits hard both the HP and defiance bars while giving party support and applying defiance DoT with cripple?
Why should you bring a Mesmer with slow when a Thief with pistol off-hand provides the same functionality with zero investments?

I honestly don’t understand why they fear debuffs when buffs are melting the hardest bosses in 20 seconds flat. Debuffs should be as valuable as buffs, period. If they are too strong reduce their effectiveness, but they should stand on equal ground as party support as buffs.

How can people pretend this is a nerf when chill previously DIDN’T APPLY AT ALL. Now it applies through the break bar to make traits work and people call it a nerf!?

Really, I understand where people like spoj and drarnor are coming from, but I don’t think they realize what an impact things like chill or weakness would have on bosses. Bosses are far easier to balance and far easier to make diverse and challenging when you don’t have to balance them under the presumption that they’ll be suffering 100% chill and weakness (which good organized groups would obviously take advantage of).

If Necromancers are valuable in raids, it will be for Vampiric Presence, Transfusion, and boon corruption. That would be true even with the changes being suggested to chill and weakness uptime on bosses. With the break bar functioning as Robert Gee mentions, it’ll be far better off in general for boss design.

Dristig.9678:

How can people pretend this is a nerf when chill previously DIDN’T APPLY AT ALL. Now it applies through the break bar to make traits work and people call it a nerf!?

It is a nerf because other classes have way to significantly break defiance bar. Necromancers however do not and Arena net was aware of that fact while designing the reaper.

Other classes get to break the bar, while we get the honor of sneezing at it.

silvermember.8941:

It is a nerf because other classes have way to significantly break defiance bar. Necromancers however do not and Arena net was aware of that fact while designing the reaper.

Other classes get to break the bar, while we get the honor of sneezing at it.

Please do not downplay how good Necromancers are at CCing. Just because we currently opt to forego tons of weapon-based and utility-based CC in PvE does not mean that we don’t have access to it. Short of Headshot spam on Thief, when you factor in chills, blinds, hard CCs, and especially fear we are a clear #2. Let’s not forget that Headshot does very little to a break bar, so we may very well be #1 in HoT.

I anticipate weapon swaps like Staff and utilities like Spectral Grasp will be far more useful in raids than they are anywhere else in PvE.

@Dristig: Were did I said this is a nerf? It sure is a buff against previous iteration of defiant bars. But you are missing the point and in the wrong compared to current state of the game. Currently chill applies to unshakable mobs. It seldom has effect because most bosses have no skills with cooldowns and they are treated as auto attacks. But against some defiant bosses it’s really valuable, e.g. you can kill the legendary shaman in two phases if you use chill, since he phases on a timer and not on HP thresholds as most peoples think.

The point you are completely missing is the flattening of functionality that makes unique or thematic profession effects replaceable by any hard CC, blind and cripple. If everything has the same functionality (defiance bar stripping) the profession will be judged by party support, group utility and, least important, DPS.

You can already see we are going to lose on 2 of 3 points and even if dps is on par it won’t be enough.

Answer to my question, if a hammer Warrior hits hard both the HP and defiance bars while giving party support and applying defiance DoT with cripple, why would you want a Reaper with chill?

silvermember.8941:

Dristig.9678:

How can people pretend this is a nerf when chill previously DIDN’T APPLY AT ALL. Now it applies through the break bar to make traits work and people call it a nerf!?

It is a nerf because other classes have way to significantly break defiance bar. Necromancers however do not and Arena net was aware of that fact while designing the reaper.

Other classes get to break the bar, while we get the honor of sneezing at it.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means…

It can’t be a nerf because we are gaining valuable functionality. You may not think it is a big enough buff but that still doesn’t make it a nerf.

The ridiculous overstatements from this community erode the confidence in our feedback.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Really, I understand where people like spoj and drarnor are coming from, but I don’t think they realize what an impact things like chill or weakness would have on bosses.

We do realize it. That’s why we are asking for them to work but in a weakened fashion. And we realize that the impact of boons and buffs can melt every boss in 20 seconds flat so worrying about debuff being OP makes no sense. You have to make debuffs as meaningful as buffs if you want to gain a place alongside buffing professions.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bosses are far easier to balance and far easier to make diverse and challenging when you don’t have to balance them under the presumption that they’ll be suffering 100% chill and weakness (which good organized groups would obviously take advantage of).

Bosses aren’t balanced against 100% fury, 25 might and banners uptime, nor they are balanced against the spamming of aegis, quickness, reflects and vigor. I repeat, it’s ok to melt bosses in 20 seconds flat by staking boons and buffs but not to debuff them albeit in weakened manner?

Rising Dusk.2408:

If Necromancers are valuable in raids, it will be for Vampiric Presence, Transfusion, and boon corruption. That would be true even with the changes being suggested to chill and weakness uptime on bosses. With the break bar functioning as Robert Gee mentions, it’ll be far better off in general for boss design.

A thief can stealth ress allies better then any necromancer, warriors can trait banner regen that laughs at our vampiric presence, mesmers can rip boons more effectively than us. Let’s be honest, we are mostly a debuff profession, if our debuffs have no effect, or are easily replaceable by the gazillion of other defiant stripping skills/effects, we have no place in high-end PvE. Do you think chill will be mandatory to strip a defiance bar?

Charblaze.6958:

You have to make debuffs as meaningful as buffs if you want to gain a place alongside buffing professions.

You’re making the assumption that the role of a Necromancer is strictly to apply debuffs, which is not the case. ANet is operating under the assumption that there are three roles: support, DPS, and control. In that context, the Necromancer will be critical for control coupled with its unique support assuming the content is hard enough to validate it (and strengthened if they make buff sharing 10 people).

Charblaze.6958:

Bosses aren’t balanced against 100% fury, 25 might and banners uptime, nor they are balanced against the spamming of aegis, quickness, reflects and vigor.

They are in HoT. The only way I could see chill and weakness being supported on bosses would be if they worked at 10% effectiveness or something completely equally insubstantial. It would be essentially just as worthless as them not doing anything, and in the current form it enables them to have boss movement be a more key component of the boss’s mechanics.

Charblaze.6958:

A thief can stealth res allies better then any necromancer, warriors can trait banner regen that laughs at our vampiric presence, mesmers can rip boons more effectively than us.

Your first false assertion here is that a person is being downed in a location where there is no cleave to worry about. What if you’re downed in the middle of a huge AOE that will surely kill you regardless of if you’re stealthed or not? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could teleport the downed player out of that AOE?

Your second false assertion is that a Warrior’s banner regeneration and Vampiric Presence are mutually exclusive. The content may be (and supposedly is) hard enough to justify both in unison. We don’t know yet, and ANet keeps reassuring me that that sort of over-the-top support will be necessary to win.

Charblaze.6958:

Let’s be honest, we are mostly a debuff profession, if our debuffs have no effect, or are easily replaceable by the gazillion of other defiant stripping skills/effects, we have no place in PvE. Do you think chill will be mandatory to strip a defiance bar?

Of course it won’t be mandatory, but when you need to strip a break bar everything will help. Those will be timed, and you’ll have 5 seconds to fully clear a highly resistant break bar or your entire raid group will wipe. When that comes up, you’re going to throw everything you have at it, and every bit will help. When you combine everything together (chill, fear, hard CC, weakness, blind) you get an absolute truckload of powerful break bar clearing items together.

And really, I think saying “we are mostly a debuff profession” isn’t giving the Necromancer enough credit. The strongest role we have in WvW is bulky, high damage boon corruption, and that carries extreme weight in PvP as well. Similarly, in raids, if we’re useful it’s going to be because of boon corruption, high durability even in DPS gear, and unique support options. Those are things other classes cannot currently compete with, and if the content is hard enough you can bet your britches that it will matter.

Nothing a necromancer does is unique or better than what every other class can do.

The best hope is that the finalized damage on Greatsword comes in top tier high (It’s a highly telegraphed glass cannon that will never hit anybody good in Pvp), and the Reaper assumes a DPS role while the other professions provide the support that keeps the reaper alive.

PS Life steal isn’t a thing. It is two different things, damage and healing. Boon Corruption isn’t a thing, it is two different things, removal and application. Condition Transfer isn’t a thing, it is two things: self removal and application.

I may be mistaken but does this not shut down the advantage of one our greatest pvp mechanics: boon corruptions? From what I understood is that bosses will have break bars up while they are charging up for their big moves. So it’s not up all the time. Boons on the other hand will be most likely be placed periodicallly during the fight and most likely not when the break bar is being charged. So when we corrupt fury when the break barr is not up, is the placed blind usefull at all? No. So is it not better to just invest in boon removal then corruption since corruptions come with wasted conditions which consume the skill budget?

It’s pretty clear they don’t want necros in raids. They keep beating us with the nerf bat when it comes to raid viability.

We bring nothing of value to raids. Our “lifesteal” is so pathetic that passive heals from other classes vastly overpower it. Our rezzing pales in comparison to stealth invuln rezzing, and our healing through transfusion is just sad compared to an ele blasting a water field. Boon corrupting is the only thing left, but 90% of the boons we corrupt don’t affect bosses, and boons are just spammed in PvE, so it won’t actually keep them off the bosses. Cleansing is far superior and faster than transferring so we won’t ever be needed for that unless it is a gimmick fight.

That covers all our “unique” things. We offer no group buffs and subpar DPS so there is really no reason left to take us.

RIP the debuffing role.

nekretaal.6485:

Nothing a necromancer does is unique or better than what every other class can do.

This is wrong.

Tim.6450:

I may be mistaken but does this not shut down the advantage of one our greatest pvp mechanics: boon corruptions?

The only other classes with valid boon removal are Mesmer and Guardian. While Mesmer’s boon removal on sword auto-attack has been largely sufficient in dungeons, the idea that we’ll always be able to melee raid bosses is certainly not going to be true. Other than that, the Mesmer’s role will demand its utility slots be taken by things other than Null Field and such, so there’s no room for them to take this role. Similarly, Guardians aren’t going to have enough boon removal even with the traits to handle what I’m being told raid bosses and encounters will demand. There is no class that can so easily constantly burn away boons both at range and in melee like a Necromancer between Signets of Suffering, Well of Corruption, Corrupt Boon, or Path of Corruption. Two of these, Path of Corruption and Well of Corruption, can also see use within the standard builds that we have right now without severely reducing our DPS. That will be where the Necromancer’s value from boon removal comes in handy.

the necromancer has outstanding sustainability now and can hit extremely hard with sustained damage. Other professions have much higher burst damage than we do, like elementalist and warrior, but their sustainability is no where near as high. As fights last longer the necromancer has an advantage in that regard since our life force generation has actually improved greatly over the years letting us quickly build our bar back up. This means we can stay in the fight much longer. We’re also very self sufficient as compared to other professions. We can stack 25 might without the use of foods are relying on ally buffs. We can also dish out 25 valn on our own meaning we literally don’t need anyone else with us in a fight.

WIth the reaper elite specialization our sustain becomes even stronger and we can stick it out in the front with Valkyrie and Cavalier armor while still maintaining 54%-100% crit chance at all time without any aid from allies. With our high raw defensive capabilities and our high damage this makes us the perfect profession for the front line in a raid which is expected to wear the party down heavily over time. A attrition based profession like us who actually has the ability to play attrition now will be highly valuable.

Granted we still have gaps in our armor. We currently lack scaling defensive abilities. We can’t defend against projectiles. We can’t escape very easily. We still rely on being hyper aggressive to maintain our attrition, even with blighter’s boon. And when we really need help we often can’t receive it until we’re in a seriously dire situation.

Even with all that said, the necromancer has a unique combination of high valn, long chill, and a large amount of boon stripping that if we’re expected to use all of our mechanics in Raids the necromancer will have a solid spot on a team.

fyi, rshroud 5 + 4 = bye breakbar. it’s 11 chilling bolts + pulsing chill from the field, there is no way any breakbar is gonna survive that.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bosses are far easier to balance and far easier to make diverse and challenging when you don’t have to balance them under the presumption that they’ll be suffering 100% chill and weakness (which good organized groups would obviously take advantage of).

I want to quote this, because I don’t think this people realize the importance of this.

Leaving bosses open for soft CC can create a bunch of technical difficulties with encounter design.
I don’t think they offer as much dept as some people claim they do, because you either:

a) Design encounters with the idea they are always up. Make encounters tough and requiring a 100% uptime on chill / cripple and the like. This means that you NEED these things up all the time. It makes group composition a bit more rigid and makes encounters very binary in the sense that if you drop the soft CC, you’re going to lose.

Yes, this would possibly open up a slot for the necromancer, as we’re one of the few classes that can probably keep a 100% uptime on weakness and chill. But I don’t think it would improve PvE as a whole. And this game desperately needs to have it’s PvE sorted.

b) Design encounters with the idea that without them you’ll succeed as well, but with them it’ll be easier.
The problem with this design is that it leads to a LOT of exploiting and wonky mechanics.

Think about Cripple kiting a boss around.
Think about chilling a boss so it skips certain mechanics
(example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZP9z7MY8tw)
Think about a combination of protection + weakness allowing you to circumvent certain mechanics easily.
Etc.

I’m not saying the way they use soft CC as a Defiance DoT is the best solution. But I think people severely misjudge the “added dept” that soft CC would bring to raid boss fights. (Because we’re talking about end game content, which will be certain raid bosses I’d guess).

Jekkt.6045:

fyi, rshroud 5 + 4 = bye breakbar. it’s 11 chilling bolts + pulsing chill from the field, there is no way any breakbar is gonna survive that.

There is a limit of 5 chills. after the 4th bolt the other 7 do nothing. Additionally chill is being changed to a break bar degen effect meaning it will be a constant degen as long as chill is on the target, meaning after the initial chill field application the other 11 chills will do nothing to the break bar.

If you want to break a break bar bring an ele. In fact if you want to do anything in this game, bring an ele.

@Rising Dusk:
Control is attained via impairing debuffs. If all of our signature control effects are no different than what available to other professions because everything goes in the defiance bar, we can be easily outclassed by any profession with better support on top of defiance stripping.

We can easily perma move 25-33% faster but slowing with cripple or chill bosses by 15% destroys key mechanics? LOL How about we make them 15% faster to level the ground with swiftness and so a 15% speed reduction from chill and cripple is substantial? Why protection isn’t destroying “key mechanics” right now? It’s much more effective than weakness.

Reapers are melee, even base necromancers are melee since dagger is our only viable weapon. When the situation gets hairy we’ll be in cleave range in the middle of your hypothetical huge AoE with everyone else. Do you really play necro? Have you ever played a thief in dungeons/fractals? Your remarks are making me question your experience.

Warrior’s banner regeneration and Vampiric Presence aren’t mutually exclusive but the spots available in a party are limited. So for all practical purposes they may very well be. Again, are you familiar with party composition?

That’s the issue if everything helps in defiance striping nothing is really necessary, so professions will be valued for what they do on top of that, and we have little to offer because our base profession is weak. How many professions are currently valued for their vulnerability stacking? Defiance striping will be the new vulnerability if everything affects it.

Are you kidding me? Boon corruption IS debuffing, you are literally converting buffs in debuffs. And then you insists we are not a profession with a huge debuff component…
(-_-")

The real Reaper niches are:
1) Nearly zerker DPS while wearing more defensive gear thanks to the traits boosting our crit chance.
2) Good sustain against 3-5 foes without giving up too much damage.

Unless the majority of HoT raid encounters are designed with those exact two points in mind, it won’t be enough. It still wouldn’t fix our problems with the current content. Either Chill DoT is high enough to stop defiant bar regeneration (unlikely) or they need to make debuffs into true party support tools.

The Reaper is a good and fun specialization. I just want to play it in high end PvE while feeling as effective and useful as when I’m playing with alts.

I feel like some of you are underplaying what the class is capable of while others are overplaying what it can do.

Necromancer second best at control? Not likely. Ranger is far better at this role while also dealing substantially more damage AND providing worthwhile group utility to boot.

Ranged Boon Removal being a thing? While you’re right that this is the one real niche the Necromancer will fit in, the only way this will be viable is if bosses are designed to only reboon once every 30 seconds. If they work the way they do now with steadily stacking boons and such, Mesmer will always be more valuable regardless of its range.

The Necromancer is not in a very good place right now and overselling what it can do to fit hypothetical PvE scenarios that don’t exist and are easily circumvented does far more harm than good.

Lily.1935:

the necromancer has outstanding sustainability now and can hit extremely hard with sustained damage. Other professions have much higher burst damage than we do, like elementalist and warrior, but their sustainability is no where near as high. As fights last longer the necromancer has an advantage in that regard since our life force generation has actually improved greatly over the years letting us quickly build our bar back up. This means we can stay in the fight much longer. We’re also very self sufficient as compared to other professions. We can stack 25 might without the use of foods are relying on ally buffs. We can also dish out 25 valn on our own meaning we literally don’t need anyone else with us in a fight.

I’ll never understand the need to point out the 25 self might and vuln stacking as our strengths in a team environment…which is exactly what raids are. Those things are redundant and therefore not selling points in a team/raid environment. It doesn’t matter if we need anyone else to accomplish this….because there are guaranteed to be 9 others there whether we need them or not…and we will actually need them since raids will require it.

I would also dispute these sustainability claims. Yes, we can take multiple smaller hits over longer durations, but the sustainability falls apart when the hits are one shots or for short durations…that are able to be blocked/invulned/evaded. Our self spike heals are pretty weak…and the same can’t be said for our counterparts. Its not like they are lacking top tier recovery options.

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Rising Dusk.2408:

Really, I understand where people like spoj and drarnor are coming from, but I don’t think they realize what an impact things like chill or weakness would have on bosses. Bosses are far easier to balance and far easier to make diverse and challenging when you don’t have to balance them under the presumption that they’ll be suffering 100% chill and weakness (which good organized groups would obviously take advantage of).

Its not that simple though. Bosses in the base game can already be affected by most of those conditions and it isnt broken. The only one that is broken for is slow (so give it the blind treatment).

Another major problem with this is it creates a huge purity of purpose overlap. Essentially 6 completely different conditions will be doing the exact same thing. I honestly cant understand how anyone can accept that kind of overlap as ok.

If certain bosses require immunity to certain debuff conditions to prevent trivialising content then you can just use the same methods as the old content does (100% X condition duration reduction). Or better yet just create a weakened state for these conditions on breakbar mobs. Or even have tiered breakbars. So bosses get this current breakbar but veterans, lesser bosses and trash mobs get a simple one which is only affected by hard CC and blind.

Also since breakbars are now going to pretty much every veteran and a ton of regular mobs this isnt just going to effect big bosses. Its going to destroy the use of soft cc on probably over 50% of HoT enemies. Those big hammer vets have an inactive breakbar until they charge the slam. So until they start that attack they are completely immune to all soft CC. And maybe you dont want to just break the bar and get a predetermined stun. Maybe you want to kite until he starts his slam then use hard CC to break the bar. Its taking away huge parts of the game all for the sake of easy balance.

This single poor design decision could seriously prevent me from enjoying the game. Thats how serious it is to me.

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Your first false assertion here is that a person is being downed in a location where there is no cleave to worry about. What if you’re downed in the middle of a huge AOE that will surely kill you regardless of if you’re stealthed or not? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could teleport the downed player out of that AOE?

The inevitable response to people getting downed in the middle of aoe is to expect them to stop failing! Even better, run a build that has the tools to get themselves out of a jam…versus having to have a dedicated babysitter in the raid …gimping their own build just to constantly save people. Best case scenario, this ability to teleport downed players may be used when people are learning raids…but once it is on cruise control…bye bye babysitter.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Your second false assertion is that a Warrior’s banner regeneration and Vampiric Presence are mutually exclusive. The content may be (and supposedly is) hard enough to justify both in unison. We don’t know yet, and ANet keeps reassuring me that that sort of over-the-top support will be necessary to win.

This would end up being a huge can of worms in and of itself. Mandatory requirements for enough support builds to keep the group alive?!? You may as well add inspect to the game.

Rising Dusk.2408:

And really, I think saying “we are mostly a debuff profession” isn’t giving the Necromancer enough credit. The strongest role we have in WvW is bulky, high damage boon corruption, and that carries extreme weight in PvP as well. Similarly, in raids, if we’re useful it’s going to be because of boon corruption, high durability even in DPS gear, and unique support options. Those are things other classes cannot currently compete with, and if the content is hard enough you can bet your britches that it will matter.

I agree…the boon corruption is something other classes can’t compete with. The other things…I’m not in agreement with. Our “unique support options” include lifesteal….which is extremely weak, teleporting downed players…easily solved by people learning to play, spreading condis….entirely dependent on there being enough mobs in close proximity on encounters that matter. There’s literally nothing else that we offer that is unique. The lifesteal is outclassed by pretty much every other shared heal in the game. Like before, if you ramp up required party healing to the point where you really need a ton of stacked healing…you may as well add gear checks/inspects to ensure you have the required amount of healers…hello trinity.

Nyth.3492:

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bosses are far easier to balance and far easier to make diverse and challenging when you don’t have to balance them under the presumption that they’ll be suffering 100% chill and weakness (which good organized groups would obviously take advantage of).

I want to quote this, because I don’t think this people realize the importance of this.

…snip…

Problem is that its not just raid bosses. Its all veterans and many regular trash mobs. And some even have inactive breakbars for 90% of the time. Which means they are completely immune for 90% of the fight.

The game is not so complex that they cant account for 6 debuff conditions when balancing bosses…. In reality it would only be 3/4 because blind and slow are obviously too strong on bosses. But those 2 conditions need to work on vets and trash mobs otherwise they are useless as conditions.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bjarl_the_Rampager

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bjarl_the_Rampager

lol you chose to pick 1 champ that is … immune most of the time except when he decide to knock down himself. Wich is btw very close to what break bar will be

ODB.6891:

Lily.1935:

the necromancer has outstanding sustainability now and can hit extremely hard with sustained damage. Other professions have much higher burst damage than we do, like elementalist and warrior, but their sustainability is no where near as high. As fights last longer the necromancer has an advantage in that regard since our life force generation has actually improved greatly over the years letting us quickly build our bar back up. This means we can stay in the fight much longer. We’re also very self sufficient as compared to other professions. We can stack 25 might without the use of foods are relying on ally buffs. We can also dish out 25 valn on our own meaning we literally don’t need anyone else with us in a fight.

I’ll never understand the need to point out the 25 self might and vuln stacking as our strengths in a team environment…which is exactly what raids are. Those things are redundant and therefore not selling points in a team/raid environment. It doesn’t matter if we need anyone else to accomplish this….because there are guaranteed to be 9 others there whether we need them or not…and we will actually need them since raids will require it.

I would also dispute these sustainability claims. Yes, we can take multiple smaller hits over longer durations, but the sustainability falls apart when the hits are one shots or for short durations…that are able to be blocked/invulned/evaded. Our self spike heals are pretty weak…and the same can’t be said for our counterparts. Its not like they are lacking top tier recovery options.

Because there will be times when the group needs to split up, leaving a couple people either to hold the line til the last possible second, or clear a path. This was referenced in one of the Points of Interest streams, with a particular mention of a big raid boss having a wipe-type attack that pulses out slowly, and there is a barrier in the way of retreat, so a couple/few people will have to clear that path in time for the team to escape and glide back in to attack further

xadine.7069:

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bjarl_the_Rampager

lol you chose to pick 1 champ that is … immune most of the time except when he decide to knock down himself. Wich is btw very close to what break bar will be

All they asked is that I provide a boss who can be chain cced and doesn’t have the Unshakable buff. You can try to diminish the value of my pick as much as you want but Bjarl fulfills both of those criteria, and my original point still stands—Not every enemy (or even boss) in this game gets defiant stacks.

Just Phantasmal Disencanter Rips 2 boons at range every 4.5 seconds at range and with 4 bounces.

Just that one skill is light years beyond anything necromancer has in terms of boon rip potential at range.

What about the Engineer Skill Throw Mine? Ranged, good damage, blast finisher, 17 seconds cooldown, removes 5 boons (if the boss is big). And has a tool belt skill that also removes Another 5 boons on a 17 second second cooldown.

Is dedicating a whole character to a boon removal necromancer really better than an engineer who can swap skills right before the one boss that needs to have a boon ripped?

Necromancer really is tops at nothing.

Rising Dusk.2408:

silvermember.8941:

It is a nerf because other classes have way to significantly break defiance bar. Necromancers however do not and Arena net was aware of that fact while designing the reaper.

Other classes get to break the bar, while we get the honor of sneezing at it.

Please do not downplay how good Necromancers are at CCing. Just because we currently opt to forego tons of weapon-based and utility-based CC in PvE does not mean that we don’t have access to it.

Unless you know something i don’t, you are not in the position to tell me whether or not I am downplaying it.

Dristig.9678:

silvermember.8941:

Dristig.9678:

How can people pretend this is a nerf when chill previously DIDN’T APPLY AT ALL. Now it applies through the break bar to make traits work and people call it a nerf!?

It is a nerf because other classes have way to significantly break defiance bar. Necromancers however do not and Arena net was aware of that fact while designing the reaper.

Other classes get to break the bar, while we get the honor of sneezing at it.

I don’t think that word means what you think it means…

It can’t be a nerf because we are gaining valuable functionality. You may not think it is a big enough buff but that still doesn’t make it a nerf.

The ridiculous overstatements from this community erode the confidence in our feedback.

If the only flaw you found in my argument is that I used a word “nerf.” I am Ok with that.

The fact is it is a flaw because this new system benefits other classes more so than it does for the necromancer. Our whole thing is chill and if child isn’t that useful compare to other skills, why bring the necro.

But like I said, if your whole argument revolves around disconstructing the world nerf. That is cool with me.

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Gerrark.9870:

I missed the part in the original post and thread where a dev said literally every boss and enemy is going to have a defiance bar. Would one of y’all mind pointing that out to me?

Every boss has a defiance bar, it is the replacement of the defiance buff, which every champion or higher level enemy in the game currently has.

Additionally in HoT, most elites and some vets also have defiance bars, as per the BWE’s.

Well, not every boss had a defiance buff, so I could be wrong, but that definitely leads me to believe not every boss will have the bar either. All speculation on both of our parts considering we don’t know what raids will actually contain though, I guess.

Please point out one boss currently in the game that you can chain Ckittenil it is dead?

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bjarl_the_Rampager

I’ll admit he doesn’t have the actual buff… but he is still immune to all CC except when he CC’s himself…

see video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkb_Oo11ikg

he just ignores the CC instead of having a buff icon. Not seeing how that is any different. He is still a boss who can’t be CC’d unless very specific conditions are met.

Nah he just has a special armour buff which reduces CC duration by 100% (creating immunity). But if you always interrupt that he can be perma CC’d. Its not specific conditions need to be met. Its just preventing him from using his one buff ability (has a pretty big tell).

I’m a bit skeptical about the value of the soft CC that our dungeon and fractal referent overvalue.

In fact, weakness is less effective than protection and you can perma weakness with :
- Elementalist : earth staff auto attack or air proc (trait/glyph)
- warrior : mace auto attack
- ranger : Axe main hand/pet
- Necromancer : dagger offhand/CPC/traits
- daredevil : dagger auto-attack (required deadly art spec)
- Engineer : Elixir gun auto
Pretty easy to apply, same value as protection. Does boss attack bypass protection? no.

Chill sure is harder to get, it’s available for :
- elementalist
- necromancer
- ranger
- Engineer
The basic effect on a mob (boss or “trash”) is that it slow down it’s movement speed. How the hell is this supposed to be overpowered?

I really don’t get how someone can support a nerf to soft CC and be okay with the state of the boons. What plague the necromancer is the fact that the developpers want them to support their teammate via this same soft CC and that the very reason why they say that they won’t give direct support to him.

Necromancer have poisons field. Blasting a poison field inflict weakness to foes around. If weakness wasn’t irrelevant in PvE, you could see this as blasting for some protection. It would be ok, but it isn’t.

The point is that actually, a party that use every tool/ IG mechanic to enhance themselve have more value then a party that a party that will try to play the soft CC card since soft CC have no value in PvE. In the end, a part of the game mechanics are discarded for the sake of another mechanics. And that’s precisely why there are profession that are unwanted while other are seeked atm.

I think someone said on the Anet team that they wanted to promote IG mechanism that weren’t used in the current state of the game with the introduction of these raids. And I hope that by that they thought :
- debuff (they’ve been nerfed to the ground since launch for PvE)
- retaliation (no point in this since mob kill you with a sneeze)
- healing (no point in healing allie since you can’t overheal the damage done by the mobs)

The necromancer lack synergy with other profession, it’s his plague. No reliable finisher and useless combo field. There is no other solution than designing the content so that the necromancer’s combofield become at last a bit usefull. Which mean :
- poisonfield : weakness.
- light field : retaliation.
- dark field : life siphon → healing.
If these 3 thing aren’t needed then the necromancer won’t be needed either. Even if he is top dps.

spoj.9672:

This single poor design decision could seriously prevent me from enjoying the game. Thats how serious it is to me.

I really… Don’t agree with you, honestly.

Blind not working on vets that have a break bar sounds great to me. Why does it sound great to me? Because in my opinion, blind trivializes trash encounters, and having some trash that’s immune to it is awesome in my opinion. The same applying to Weakness, Slow, and Chill all seems fine to me as well because they trivialize a certain aspect of an encounter to the point where the encounter is no longer fun for me. Dredge are annoying in that they’re immune to blind, but it also adds to their difficulty and forces you to adapt your approach to beating them, creating complexity in encounters by diversifying the roles you’re forced to fill.

I wouldn’t mind a significantly weakened version of a condition being in place when used on foes with breakbars, but surely you recognize that in order to make that balanced the effect would need to be so insignificant that it may as well not do anything at all. Bosses are calibrated around a specific movement mechanism so that they are constantly threatening players, being able to range and kite a melee boss enemy indefinitely through chill is impossibly bad design and trivializes the encounter; a boss needs to hit a player with some frequency to legitimize actual defensive support (something I know Anet wants to do). Furthermore, the cooldown reduction would need to be completely removed; there simply cannot be allowance for mechanics such as entirely bypassing a boss’s phase (like Legendary Grawl Shaman) simply because it takes too long for the skill to reload.

I appreciate that this means a lot to you and that you claim you’re not going to enjoy HoT at all if it goes through, but I seriously think you’re overreacting. Please note that my opinion disagreeing with yours doesn’t mean my reports won’t recognize your opinion fairly, I just don’t personally think it’s a big deal at all.

I wouldnt be this up and arms about it if it was only bosses. But its going to be over 50% of enemies. I just severely dislike the idea of a game where all debuff conditions all do the same completely unneeded thing. Like i said i can accept it on slow and blind and even immob. But not on weakness, chill and cripple. Those are weak effects.

Weakness wont stop a high damage hit from destroying you. It will only help on the lower hits. So depending on the boss and the type of attacks being used. Its balanced. Chill isnt exactly overpowered. Cooldown increase is a really good tool that should be encouraged (it is essential for some necro solos). Wouldnt it be nice if it was highly desirable for defensive reasons even in groups? This raises a question though. Whats going to happen with Power Block on mesmer?

And movement impairment can be overpowered i admit. But there are plenty of ways to balance them without completely destroying the purpose of the conditions. Tone down the movement speed debuff on bosses for example.

PS. The whole of rT whatsapp was in complete bafflement about this. Noone on a high level likes these changes and this is coming from players that dont need these debuffs to beat content (kite and recover etc). It only hurts player choice. Which is something i thought anet wanted to give us more of. So it doesnt make sense anyway i look at it.

I really don’t think it will apply to 50%+ of enemies. Nothing in the normal game but those currently with Unshakable will get the new breakbar, and when I was running around Verdant Brink it really didn’t seem too bad to me.

Interrupt-interaction traits in general trigger on interrupt, which won’t be possible with breakbars. There’s really no way to balance that, though, so I think that’s okay. Weakness isn’t too strong alone, but imagine a boss with 100% weakness uptime and other things like that. You could easily negate innumerable small attacks just with that, and coupled with protection would totally nullify the enemy’s threat except through massive attacks. Chill is really strong, though, and either component of it can be devastating to an enemy who is calibrated to provide exactly a certain amount of threat at exactly a certain interval. When you can change that through debuffs like slow, chill, or weakness, it creates a serious balancing dilemma that either results in encounters being too easy if the buffs are used or too hard if the buffs aren’t used. From a development standpoint, none of those solutions are valid.

spoj.9672:

PS. The whole of rT whatsapp was in complete bafflement about this. Noone on a high level likes these changes and this is coming from players that dont need these debuffs to beat content (kite and recover etc). It only hurts player choice. Which is something i thought anet wanted to give us more of. So it doesnt make sense anyway i look at it.

It’s a false choice, though; that’s my point. You either have to have these debuffs in order to succeed, or by virtue of having them you make the content too easy, or you weaken the debuff to be essentially worthless to have limited effect regardless. There is no alternative.

Yeah and i completely agree with you on all terms apart from chill. And sort of on weakness. If bosses hit hard enough and are designed with cleanses then even 100% weakness wont save you. If chill worked to just increase cooldowns (works like this on lupi) then it wouldnt be even remotely broken as long as chill uptime is harder to maintain (boss cleanses again). Its no more broken than alacrity and quickness. Slow is the only completely broken outlier in the selection of alacrity, quickness, chill and slow. Chill is clearly the weakest of the 4. Which is why it makes so little sense to me.

But the big clincher is that it isnt just bosses. And having vets and trash mobs being immune to these conditions just because of boss balance doesnt make sense. Which is why they need to either scrap this idea completely or create tiered breakbars for different tiers of enemies.

As rare as this is, I agree with spoj here. One thing I’d like to comment on:

Charblaze.6958:

I fear soft CC will become like Vulnerability: everyone has some so there is no place for a dedicated build or a profession with good Vulnerability application like Necromancer and Engineer.

This is something I’m really not sure is true. Vulnerability isn’t nearly as ubiquitous as people give it credit for, and soft CC even less so. Let alone on a practical build with practical tactics. I would be hesitant to assume that we’ll automatically end up with capped chill, cripple, immobilize, blind, and slow in an AoE by just existing.

You would be surprised. Cripple is capped passively very easily. Chill not so much but its easy to get large portions of it for frequent bursts thanks to icebow. Immob has to be invested in. And blind we dont really know because of how it works on current bosses. But its fairly accessible even on meta builds. And hard CC’s are very accessible on meta builds.

So even if soft CC on its own doesnt become like vulnerability. It will still be rather pointless because we already have way too much hard CC available to us. In fact we have more access to hard CC in the current meta than we do vulnerability. So this further emphasises the pointlessness of soft CC affecting breakbars.

Blind and Slow I’m fine with keeping limited effectiveness, they’re just very powerful. Chill and Weakness on the other hand, naw. Chill can be huge, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not overpoweringly strong.

Weakness is too inconsistent to be a concern really, if you hit a lucky streak it might make something easy and if unlucky it has no effect at all. The only argument I can see for that being bad is RNG is kittening dumb.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing to have us really focusing on chill. In fact I think we should. It’s not so limited that it would force certain professions, not any more than projectile defense, not any more than needing a lot of dodges/blocks, not any more than really any other mechanic in the game.

Depends on the group composition and build. Cripple is easily capped because there are a lot of classes that can do it fairly easily. Thief and Ranger in particular. Otherwise it is build specific or tactic specific.

Ice bow isn’t as good at chill as you’d think. Frost Fan resets all chill stacks, so even with 10 frost bows you’ll only end up with 5 seconds of chill or so. Unless you specifically stagger bow usage.

I don’t get why they feel it’s fine to gut all conditions, especially Slow which they’ve JUST introduced to the game, if they’re not going to allow them to function in serious PvE.

If slow is too powerful, reduce the slow from 50% to 25% on boss/champs. Same goes for effect of chill or weakness.

And blind in general needs to be reduced across all classes, it’s too easily available. If blind was a more precious commodity, and it only worked on boss autoattacks, you could allow it to work on bosses.

Although making blind work on some but not all attacks would lead to the same annoying problems with Mai Trin, so I’d rather they just come up with another functionality for blind on bosses, like reducing personal enmity to a boss so groups could then play around with aggro manipulation.

I understand anet´s reason.

But i don´t like their “solution”.

Necro has lots of chill and cripple as well as hard CC. If anything we will probably be one of the best (if not the best) classes to take down defiance. Necro has a lot more CC than the OP gives it credit for.

That being said, I don’t really like the solution to this problem and I’d have prefered to have these debuffs working on defiant enemies, even if heavily toned down.

Potential boss fight concept:

Boss is a melee fighter with rapid,smaller hits, but still puts out good DPS. Boss also has a skill where he leaps to an area and pulls everyone within 600 range in with an undodgable shockwave. AI is set to use this attack on the largest concentration of players, but won’t use it if most players are already in melee range.

So, now we have a fight that Cripple, Chill, and Immobilize would be really handy in. However, they do not win you the fight as the boss will get most players into melee range anyway. Strong Weakness uptime is also valuable to mitigate the rapid hits. Because the pull is a disable, stunbreaks and stability become helpful to perhaps allow players to maintain the kiting.

Very simple idea that shows an importance on debuffs, but that is not the only way the fight can be won. You could instead kite with Swiftness (guess what, this will happen to any melee boss, regardless of how break bars work) and could potentially even melee the boss with good Toughness and Protection. Also, due to rapid hits, Retaliation is actually helpful.

But this choice for break bars negates half the options right off the bat.

OlliX.1705:

Necro has lots of chill and cripple as well as hard CC. If anything we will probably be one of the best (if not the best) classes to take down defiance. Necro has a lot more CC than the OP gives it credit for.

That being said, I don’t really like the solution to this problem and I’d have prefered to have these debuffs working on defiant enemies, even if heavily toned down.

I’m not questioning the amount of soft CC necro has. I’ve even said we are a profession with a huge debuff component. My argument is that if everything goes in the defiance bar then our debuffs are no different from the hard CC of, for example, a hammer warrior which can bring way more support and utility on top of that.

Necromancers are designed to fight their enemy by debuffing them. Kitten, the whole Reaper theme is to bring the enemy down to its level with chill. It’s pretty obvious that professions are designed to bring support by either empowering allies (ele/war/guard), weakening foes (necro/ranger), or a mixture of the two (engi/mes). But then the weakening part was neutered in high end PvE.

You guys are wasting your breath. You’re forgetting the very important statement made by Anet that they want raids to work with ANY group composition. They don’t want any required classes, which also means that every class is viable.

Basically, you guys are expecting these raids to be waaaay tougher than they actually will be. Reaper or not, selfish dps or not, you can play whatever class you have the most fun with and you’ll be fine. I guarantee you there will never be a situation where a raid wipes and somebody thinks “I bet we died because we brought the Reaper…”.