Guild Wars 2

Death shroud is not a useless power build tool.
Trait 25 points into blood magic, DS4 will heal you for roughly 1/5 your hp as well as heal your teammate’s hp bars by 1/5 to 1/4. (Thieves and guardians with low vit will thank you a lot)
Trait into Soul Reaping for Death shroud cooldown, LF decrease modifier, and Fear modifier. You’ll have a super long instant fear on cooldown every 15 seconds. Beat that.
DS2 is a crazy good gap closer (it homes in) if you are locked out of swiftness utils or skills. pop DS, hit 2, un-DS, and begin your chain. As soon as the hand lands, you’re on top of your target. Don’t wait for it to fly. it’s meant to be timed.
DS1 is a fantastic weakener, opener, might builder, or solid Auto-attack to use while you wait for your opponent to burst/open on your LF bar. With 10 points in soul reaping and spite, you can make it build might and vulnerability on your foe per hit. Get sum.
You don’t need to have high power to use any of those strengths. Not to mention its a second refillable life bar. (figure out your LF generation, you can pop it at least 3 times full in a hard-locked duel)

We are not unwanted in dungeons. People ask for the Wells a lot in fractal. Well of Power, Well of corruption, And well of darkness are extremely useful safety fields as well as combo openers for your team. WoP can be used in the Giant Fractal at the part with the fire fields. WoP gets rid of the burning while you use the chaos hammer.
Well of Corruption can be used to absolutely NERF guardians and warriors to heck when they rely on Boons to bolster themselves. Guardians without boons and no condition removal= 15k hp at best with nothing but raw armor in your way. Think of how you can destroy 15k hp. Well of Darkness provides safety from the awful Thief combo, protection from a cluster of high-power mobs in a dungeon, and combined with Plague form: darkness, you can provide 35 seconds of mobilized invulnerability to your team from any power-based mobs. No other class can do that. Not even with aegis, walls, and reflections.

I wrote this thread to address the re-occurring “i want to roll a necro, should i?” threads. I’m disappointed with how many players are turning away people from this profession.

Just because we don’t win with ease by min/maxing two stats doesn’t mean we suck.

Some of the best players in gw2 are necromancers. We’re a complicated class. intelligent playing will get you far.

I also wrote this thread to point out some very proud strengths that are in the class as it is right now. I’m tired of people whining about parts of the class that don’t actually have problems if you just build it right and use it accordingly. The point of the trait system isn’t just to make it so every single button press should exude OPness, but that a players can pour thought and invest time into crafting a specific character that destroys their target in a way that isn’t easily stopped by the opponent hitting one skill. (short version: you can’t stop us easily.) i.e thieves can be stopped with well of darkness, and even though condition removal can remove a current stack of bleeds, doesn’t mean we don’t have daggers, staff marks, control skills, Death shroud, and many sources of blindness on hand— oh, and most of the time, when a player hits their condition removal, it has a long cooldown. be persistent.

Finally some inspiration instead of all the depressing stuff about necro being useless, thanks man. Only playing this game for a little bit more than a week and all the stuff on these forums can really bring your enthusiasm towards the class down. Rolled a necro as my first since im a necro/warlock/witch doctor type of guy and was planning to stick to it through fire and ice but the forums were still getting to me sometimes, lol.

I absolutely understand you, iceflame. As a 450+ hour Necro player, it was time to put the foot down on relatively new players shunning the class. it’s the jack-of-all-trades that can also be the master of a couple things.

keep working on it! you’ll figure out the strengths.

morsel of advice, endgame gear should either be Power/tough/vit for powermancer or cond/tough/precision for conditionmancer.

Yeah, thx man i will be looking into different builds and will check out your thread again too. I’m planning to mostly be doing PVP but i guess I’m not gonna go there until i reach level 80, grow familiar with the class and gear system as well as get the whole map explored heh. A lot of times in a lot of games it goes that the bads whine about a lot of things ( some of the issues might actually be a problem but usually it’s a minor part of all the whines ) while the good players enjoy themselves playing and being good, heh.

Sheobix.8796:

I absolutely understand you, iceflame. As a 450+ hour Necro player, it was time to put the foot down on relatively new players shunning the class. it’s the jack-of-all-trades that can also be the master of a couple things.

keep working on it! you’ll figure out the strengths.

morsel of advice, endgame gear should either be Power/tough/vit for powermancer or cond/tough/precision for conditionmancer.

nah. I’ll stick with my berserker gear for now =)

Thats your opinion, tpvp teams number of necros used would not agree with your opinion.

That said with Mesmer and Guardian nerf with the minor fixes to necros, necros are more useful. Its not a terrible class if thief burst gets the tone down and some other burst does then necros might be a viable strat used by more teams.

AMEN BROTHER…too many self proclaimed elitists on here really give the class a worst rep than it deserves

I started a Necro two weeks ago, I have a 80 Ranger and 80 Warrier and i must say I love the Necro. I have got to level 30 so far and things are getting better with the necro, i think i still need to do some reading up but i am very happy with it so far.

Totaly loving my necro, switched to a power/cond build after being fed up of not getting any kill credit during events..

Now it’s great tagging mobs is easy.

Spent last night giggling at idiots on walls in wvwvw who just stand in my marks and wells as they melt.. was first time my mate who sits on pc next to me said “umm bugged class with no burst… Lies!!”

I’m expecting Necro to be like the old Warlock… some will be bad on it while others do fine while bugged.. followed by fixes resulting in those who were bad are now good but those who were good will look totaly OP.

I found funny how many people who play as necros or plan doing so, after reading those post that necros can`t do anything, reply like “yeah that`s true, I should probably play as somebody else” without even trying and giving a shot. I for example love playing as necromancer, I`ve also played as guardian, engineer, elementalist, but none of them provided such survivability and especially damage as necromancer. Of course there are some things that I don`t like in necromancer, but it doesn`t affect my gameplay since there are so much more things that I like.
As far as I see people concerned more with which most effective class they should play, rather that who they like the most.

There’s one key issue with your post though. It mostly praises wells, however the things people complain the most about aren’t wells but everything else.

-Minion AI is still bunked (not to mention the bugs along side it like the fact blood fiend still has it’s default health steal on it’s auto attack, bone minions still have a 3 second delay on blast finisher combos, flesh golem dieing in water, jagged horrors in general).
-Conditions have many caps in PvE despite little to none existing on power
-The life force trait line isn’t all that beneficial
-life siphoning is still messed up (the 50% increase trait only increases it by 9 instead of 16. However even if it worked transfusion would be better in all cases due to how much it can heal allies for.)

Each of these issues cripples a specific spec pretty severely.

Good post mate, you beat me to it. Necro is my main. I was planning on dinging the other characters and then creating a “necros rock and I know better so shuttup” post. I feel you need to put some serious man hours into each char to truly be able to compare effectiveness. nobodies really interested in whether a necro beats a thief at 40 or not. I must confess this weekend I leveled a gaurdian and he is… wow. Can start to understand where people get ‘kitteny necro’ ideas from. Irritates me though coz people playing the gaurdian with pretty much any choice of skills works well and their 7 braincells have discovered virtues should be activated when you’re about to get downed or w/e and suddenly you think you’re a skilled GW vet, its time to rag on other players and classes. Get a necro/ele and player properly

striker.3704:

bone minions still have a 3 second delay on blast finisher combos

I’m pretty sure they actually give 2 blast finishers: one on activation and one a second (or two) later when the animation finishes. I use this all the time with Well of Suffering to give me somewhat of a merger between Well of Suffering and Well of Darkness: the damage and vulnerability of Well of Suffering with 4 area blinds (not to mention, the damage from Putrid Explosion isn’t shabby either) gives you a very solid combo.

You don’t need toughness/vit/power gear to pvp as a necro. I’m in berserkers and level 80 greens and my closest 1v1’s are when I have 1-2 vets on me as well lol. Necro really isn’t hard to play, and if you are smart then realy any build you use could work (if pet AI gets fixed)

You are only right about “We are not squishy” but everything else is bullkitten.

Agreed. I started with a Mesmer but got bored around 20. Took an engineer to the mid-20’s, and will probably revisit him. Took an Elementalist to the mid-50’s, and will definitely continue to play him. Took a Thief to 30 or so and will definitely continue to play him. Finally tried a Necro — with a lot of hesitation, since they’re supposed to be “the buggiest class” — and LOVE it.

I’ve bought every single skill, and each is useful under the right circumstances. On my Elementalist, by contrast, one 10-point Elite skill is useful, the others are useless. Heck, Tornado is the only Elite skill I’m aware of (and a 30-pointer!) that is actually harmful to use.

The Necro is actually more of an instant-cast profession than Elementalist, and many of our skills can be targeted more flexibly than an Elementalist’s. Marks can be dropped behind us as we run, and can be pre-laid so they’re faster than instant-cast.

Some hate on Death Shroud, but it’s actually two different things rolled into one, depending on whether you dip into it or stay in it, and whether you have more than 50% life force or not. Warrior-level vitality and multiple health bars? Yeah.

Minions? OK, minions are stupid (literally, as in broken AI). Right now, I generally run minionless, but it’s not like I have to equip non-useful skills to do so. There are so many useful skills that I don’t miss minions in general, and I can equip them when they might be helpful.

Speed? You can be near-perma-swifted by equipping the Warhorn and Spectral Walk. With some traiting and perhaps equipment enhancement, it’s perma-swifting. I usually just equip Spectral Walk, which provides swiftness 50% of the time and is also a very useful return-blink tool at the same time. (Plus, it has a wonderfully cool visual effect.)

The OP has a lot more experience and makes a solid technical case for the Necro. I have a lot less experience, but it’s not difficult to see that it’s a fun and competitive class (at least in PvE and WvW) and all of this mis-informed whining is self-fulfilling prophecy that leads ignorant party leaders to say — according to the whiners — “LFG, No Necros”.

+1

P.S. Whenever people complain that condition builds suck because of condition caps, I wonder why they don’t also say that other professions with condition builds suck too? As the saying goes, “it takes two to tango”, and if another profession’s capping your damage because they’re also running a condition build, that profession must also suck, right? But somehow, that never gets brought up — because it’s obviously not true, and even thinking about it illustrates that the condition cap is not totally what it’s made out to be.

Not to mention that if someone else is taking a boss to the condition cap, a Necro can push those conditions to all nearby mobs. So unless it’s a lone boss, a Necro can actually leverage other professions’ condition stacking. (And can turn mobs’ conditions back on them in multiple ways.)

Also like wells if it wasnt for their long cooldowns and unusable under water AND if you trait for wells you have traits that are wasted under water.

We lack combofinishers dagger+offhand dagger, axe, scepter, warhorn, focus, trident have none.

staf got 2 and Spear 1 but 0 combofields for use underwater.

Our class mechanic is horrible from the start, it works as a health buffer, tank like mechanic and to balance an entire class around it is a terrible thing.
Thing about it you dont have a choice to go full glass cannon, your dmg skills will never be in line with other classes. We also have to deal with stuff that dont scale like lifeleech and minions further limiting our spec choice.

But sure its fine we have lower dmg than other classes unless we blow several long cd skills that others do with 1, anyway it would be fine if we had uniqe skills that would make us more attractive like hexes/curses.

Curse targets in area to give back health to attackers for instance.
Link bond to target dealing dmg and draining health back to user, drains lifeforce <- could add trait to make it heal people near you aswell. Cool thing about that would be unlike Life Transfer it actually doesnt take control away from user.

Can the class be viable ? absolutely, but doesnt change the fact the class feels like a complete mess that was dropped during devolpment. Should we accept the minion AI is so bad that everytime you use em you know that at some point their just gonna stand there looking.

@Arvid.3829 Only 1 delayed blast finisher pr minion.

Edit forgot to ask which builds you use for dungeon’s , pve event , spvp , tpvp?

Arvid.3829:

striker.3704:

bone minions still have a 3 second delay on blast finisher combos

I’m pretty sure they actually give 2 blast finishers: one on activation and one a second (or two) later when the animation finishes. I use this all the time with Well of Suffering to give me somewhat of a merger between Well of Suffering and Well of Darkness: the damage and vulnerability of Well of Suffering with 4 area blinds (not to mention, the damage from Putrid Explosion isn’t shabby either) gives you a very solid combo.

Actually no, for some odd reason your character also gets a blast finisher from himself. Then the delayed blast finisher comes from the minion.

I have a level 56 necro and a level 45ish Mesmer. I had started the mesmer before my necro and it felt really powerful, more so than any other class. I was able to take on Champs and manage to stay alive for a long time while whittling them down. Was starting to get bored and heard that the Necro is the red headed step child of all the classes. Call me a machosist but I seem to gravitate to those type of classes.

So I get my Necro to 56 and working toward my Jekyl & Hyde build and am feeling really powerful. I don’t play with any pets and feel that playing this class has made me a much better player.

Since then I have gone back to the Mesmer for a bit to dabble around and miss all of the condition removal from the Necro. I miss the survivability when situations get really out of hand.

I like a lot of the other classes but I love my necro.

How can you say Necros are not broken with a straight face?

I only have to bring up ONE example…Minion AI

Watching a flesh golem do NOTHING over and over and over again is a complete joke. Any slight bump in terrain totally ruins his charge too.

Even WOW 1.0 had better pet UI than this ten years ago.

Whoever programmed this should be embarrassed.

Whoever reviewed it in BETA and still released it this way should be more embarrassed.

Whoever has continued to do nothing after 3 months shows complete ignorance or incompetence.

Sorry…You can’t have a minion based profession with this poor AI and say it’s NOT broken.

SPESHAL.9106:

How can you say Necros are not broken with a straight face?

I only have to bring up ONE example…Minion AI

Watching a flesh golem do NOTHING over and over and over again is a complete joke. Any slight bump in terrain totally ruins his charge too.

Even WOW 1.0 had better pet UI than this ten years ago.

Whoever programmed this should be embarrassed.

Whoever reviewed it in BETA and still released it this way should be more embarrassed.

Whoever has continued to do nothing after 3 months shows complete ignorance or incompetence.

Sorry…You can’t have a minion based profession with this poor AI and say it’s NOT broken.

What if I told you that you can choose something else besides minions.
But srsly, I partially agree with you, I would really like to play minion based necro, and having minions standing besides you with pom-pons is ridiculous. But then again you can`t say that class is a total failure when you have alot of other builds that you can effectively use.

I always said necro are decend class, but we aren’t top tier.

You say we have as many bug as other, I disagree. We have bug that just make some build so hard to play (MM), it just isn’t worth to spec for it.

I’M now an Hybrid Power/Condition, and I still suffer from the conditions being weaker then power. Why Power user are strong vs every ennemies, when condition user have so many weakness.

Condition removal, Bleeds caps, Damage over time, Boss/mbos immune or resistant to conditions.

All this affect any build that have some conditions spec. It wouldn’t bother me if it was worth it. If our conditions damages was better then direct damage. But it’s not the case. Thought I will admit our Epidemic work like a charm in group fight.

By the way Sheobix, will you explain me :

“You’ll have a super long instant fear on cooldown every 15 seconds.”

You lost me there? If you fully gear and fully traits for fear duration, you’ll have at most a 2 sec fear. That’s super long? For focusing everything on a single ability, it rather short.

I always roam in WvW, running with a friend of mine. He plays Mesmer and Ele. I can assure you that I feel less efficient then him in every aspect. Except maybe swiftness when playing with is mesmer.

We aren’t bad, we do fairly well. But some class like Mesmer and D/D Ele, do better.

I’ve played 350 hours on my Necro and 500 hours on all my character and I partially disagree with you.

Of course, Necromancer isn’t that broken to be unplayable, but it is by far on the weak side.

I’ll list you some reason because I think Necromancers are worse than other professions:

1. Horrible traitline design: All the traitlines seems like a strange hybrid between all the possible specs a Necromancer can play, forcing you to use more than a single traitline to focus on a specific skill type or weapon. Take, for instance, Spectral skills. Trait which interacts with Spectral skills are split between Curses (major) and Soul Reaping.
Trait which interacts with Minions are split between Death Magic, Spite and Blood Magic. Trait which interacts with wells are split between Curses and Blood Magic. And so on. This is a clear disadvantage to the when you try to build less specific.
Minor traits, also are a clear mess. Most of them are useless, others don’t work at all and they are of course tied to a specific build (see Death Magic). Plus, we have Precision and Critical Damage split in two traitlines, which, added to the all disadvantages I’ve listed, make the Necromancer trait design the worse in the game.

2. Weak damage: compared to other professions, the Necromancer raw damage is subpar. Our damage weapons are Axe and Dagger MH, both are extremely weak in damage compared to other profession’s damage weapons.

3. Lack of real defensive capability: all professions in this game have intrinsic defensive capability tied to profession mechanic. Necromancer is the only profession who hasn’t that. The only compensation is Death Shroud which isn’t enough if the profession itself has no way to mitigate the damage. Stacking HP on HP is not enough if the damage you take is always all and the maximum. Warrior has high armor and damage reduction skills, Guardian has ton of boons, Engineer the same, Thief has amazing mobility and stealth, Ranger has lots of evades and defensive skills, Elementalists have tons of boons, blocks, invulnerability and mobility, Mesmers have clones, a bit of stealth and teleports and Necromancers? They have only Death Shroud, which is a very situational additional HP pool available only if you have enough LF.

4. Minion AI: this problem is underrated. When putting point into Death Magic you are implicitly forced to deal with the stupid Minion AI, because of how that traitline is designed. Plus, 1/4 of the utility skills and an Elite rely on minions, which means that if those utility doesn’t work, you are actually losing a whole traitline, 4 utilities and an Elite.

5. Transformation Elites: this is also a great problem. Transformations are actually the worse elites in the game because they completely throw out all your skill bar, giving you no access to heal, utilities and death shroud. While Plague Form gives you great survivability, Lich Form is an “I want to die” button. Plus, they actually destroy any minion you have and also all the spectral boons.

6. Horrible Mobility: I’m of course not talking about swiftness, which isn’t mobility. I’m talking about skills which instantly gives you a positional advantage. While other professions have a discrete amount of mobility (most have access to an AoE teleport, others have access to tons of gap closers etc.) our mobility is tied to the quite bad Dark Path skill which is only an offensive mobility, unwanted in most cases. When you add this to the already said low defensive capability of Necromancers, than you have the picture clear.

I have play a lot with my necromancer in sPVP and no one can stop a good necromancer with all his cool-downs, is just to hard to kill and the “conditionmancer” is no only stack bleed and wait for the enemy die, because the necro has the BETS condition control, transferring conditions with the Plague Signed & Deathly Swarm we add a loot of survival and damage potential to our game, we have the best healing skill ever Consume Conditions potentially 13 K + of healing is just too good and removing all the conditions in our selves, no one condition based class can beat us in 1 VS 1 we just strike the with their own conditions.

The people who say the necro is under power is just because they are a loot of noobs, they only want a 2 seconds kill like a warrior or a thief waiting for a super burst and in this kind of play style are not skill involved is just roll face in the keyboard, if any one survive his first burs they don’t know what to do.

I think that people too often think that you have to go with one of two specs… all power-based damage or all condition damage. Necros are meant to use both.

Rampager gear Power/Precision/Condition damage works exceptionally well for our class especially if you are focusing on staff and scepter damage. Then you get the goodness of both aspects of our class.

I’m personally using a mixture of Rampager, Knights, and a few pieces of the karma gear that has power/toughness/vitality. In WvWvW this allows me to take maximum advantage of my staff marks and wells.

striker.3704:

Arvid.3829:

striker.3704:

bone minions still have a 3 second delay on blast finisher combos

I’m pretty sure they actually give 2 blast finishers: one on activation and one a second (or two) later when the animation finishes. I use this all the time with Well of Suffering to give me somewhat of a merger between Well of Suffering and Well of Darkness: the damage and vulnerability of Well of Suffering with 4 area blinds (not to mention, the damage from Putrid Explosion isn’t shabby either) gives you a very solid combo.

Actually no, for some odd reason your character also gets a blast finisher from himself. Then the delayed blast finisher comes from the minion.

So it’s actually yes then? You’re probably right about the source of the blast, I’m normally in melee range when I use this combo (and I don’t even have room for Focused Rituals), so I don’t really see the difference. I would dare say that it’s even better, as it gives you the opportunity to blast your Well of Blood, Healing Spring and similar fields that generally end up somewhat away from your enemy. I’m just praying they don’t remove it.

lord.4607:

I have play a lot with my necromancer in sPVP and no one can stop a good necromancer with all his cool-downs, is just to hard to kill and the “conditionmancer” is no only stack bleed and wait for the enemy die, because the necro has the BETS condition control, transferring conditions with the Plague Signed & Deathly Swarm we add a loot of survival and damage potential to our game, we have the best healing skill ever Consume Conditions potentially 13 K + of healing is just too good and removing all the conditions in our selves, no one condition based class can beat us in 1 VS 1 we just strike the with their own conditions.

The people who say the necro is under power is just because they are a loot of noobs, they only want a 2 seconds kill like a warrior or a thief waiting for a super burst and in this kind of play style are not skill involved is just roll face in the keyboard, if any one survive his first burs they don’t know what to do.

Such a good reply. Contgrats man. If you don’t agree with me, you are newbs.

We have the best conditions in the game? How? Did you play any other class? Necro are far from being the best at stacking bleeds and conditions.

We are the best at manipulaton conditions, this is a different thing.

So you are telling me, you never lose a fight vs a Ranger, some Mesmer and some randompeeps? Because you know most class sPvP build aren’t focused on condition right?

I give you that : Our Conditiosn consumer is one of the best heal in the game. But Conditions removal are way too numberous in this game. So many ways to remove them, some are even passive.

Your post lack any kind of arguments, but you still call “noob” everyone that disagree with you . Really nice post.

Amount of bugs + bad scailing on a lot of weapons and traits = sub part =/= broken
with full soliders armor and knights jewlery you do a nice chunk of power damage with ds, but a to 50% LF Life blast spam does less than 1 cast of symbol of wrath/whirling wrath/zealots defense in same amount of time (hell even sword wave/basic sword chain of the guardian does more with the last hit than 1 life blast while taking the same amount of time).

Sheobix.8796:

Death shroud is not a useless power build tool.
Trait 25 points into blood magic, DS4 will heal you for roughly 1/5 your hp as well as heal your teammate’s hp bars by 1/5 to 1/4. (Thieves and guardians with low vit will thank you a lot)

Huh?

Unless you time it so that you start DS4 the moment you are about to run out of LF, it will cut off the instant you try to drop out of DS.

Btw, did you really need to spam 5+ threads with a link to this one?

sorrow.2364:

I’ve played 350 hours on my Necro and 500 hours on all my character and I partially disagree with you.

Nowhere near 350 hours, but…

sorrow.2364:

1. Horrible traitline design:

You get similar complaints in other professions. Elementalists complain basically the opposite: it’s stupid to break the traits up into elements when the Elementalist is meant to swap attunements, which makes 30 Arcana an absolute requirement.

sorrow.2364:

2. Weak damage: compared to other professions, the Necromancer raw damage is subpar. Our damage weapons are Axe and Dagger MH, both are extremely weak in damage compared to other profession’s damage weapons.

Personally, I think the Scepter MH is more damage than Axe, and Scepter/Dagger seems fairly strong to me.

sorrow.2364:

3. Lack of real defensive capability: all professions in this game have intrinsic defensive capability tied to profession mechanic. Necromancer is the only profession who hasn’t that. The only compensation is Death Shroud which isn’t enough if the profession itself has no way to mitigate the damage.

You can’t just write off Death Shroud because “the profession itself has no way to mitigate damage”. Death Shroud is the unique core of the profession. It may not be a great mechanism, but it’s not like it’s something separate. Mesmer clones are made of paper and certainly don’t buy you anything in PvP. (Not clear if you’re talking PvP or PvE in your notes.) Elementalists complain about being “all glass no canon”.

Not to mention that Necros have zero problems with conditions, and can not only remove conditions but actually sling them back. And Necros have several AoE blinds, Warrior-capacity vitality, and basically three life bars if they want.

sorrow.2364:

4. Minion AI: this problem is underrated.

Yes, broken AI can’t be overrated. Agreed, it’s a game-breaking issue for Minion-based Necros. At least Necros have Elites that may be useful. Elementalists have one (10-point) Elite that’s useful, and two (10- and 30-point) that are absolutely useless. Especially the 30-pointer, Tornado. Have you actually ever seen an Elementalist pop Tornado? Tornado makes Lich Form look OP.

sorrow.2364:

5. Transformation Elites: this is also a great problem. Transformations are actually the worse elites in the game because they completely throw out all your skill bar, giving you no access to heal, utilities and death shroud. While Plague Form gives you great survivability, Lich Form is an “I want to die” button. Plus, they actually destroy any minion you have and also all the spectral boons.

Elementalists have Tornado as their top Elite. Tornado functions much like Plague Form except with none of its benefits or abilities. Plague Form can actually be quite useful. (Again, depends on whether you’re talking PvP or PvE.)

sorrow.2364:

6. Horrible Mobility: I’m of course not talking about swiftness, which isn’t mobility. I’m talking about skills which instantly gives you a positional advantage. While other professions have a discrete amount of mobility (most have access to an AoE teleport, others have access to tons of gap closers etc.) our mobility is tied to the quite bad Dark Path skill which is only an offensive mobility, unwanted in most cases. When you add this to the already said low defensive capability of Necromancers, than you have the picture clear.

I can’t recall AoE teleports for “most” professions. Spectral Walk is a nice bit of mobility: it’s an inverse Blink but it also ignores all LOS and terrain requirements, which most teleports do not. (Thieves also have their inverse Blink which seems to operate similarly, but is more useful if you have a target and less useful if you do not.) Warhorn 5 also gives swiftness combined with repeated AoE cripple.) Underwater, both Necro weapons have gap closers, if that’s any consolation. (Actually, Necro Underwater weapon skills feel amazing to me.)

I don’t see Necros has having low defensive capabilities. Perhaps you’re talking about PvP, but I’ve not seen any consensus — even in this Forum-o-Whining — that Necros have poor defenses.

Lol @ Horrible Mobility. All mobility options aside (spectal walk, dark path, flesh wurm) aoe cripples, fears and permachills make your enemies mobility much more cumbersome.

Personally besides minion AI, my major complaint is that I wish Death Shroud wasn’t such an obstructive/intrusive interface.

Otherwise great thread, I think Necros bring a lot to the table and are underrated as a whole. Being short/mid-range focused, I find myself to be at lower hp than my teammates a lot in dungeons, but I think a lot of that is doing more than my fair share of tanking. And of course, inherent melee disadvantages.

Druitt.7629:

Mesmer clones are made of paper and certainly don’t buy you anything in PvP.

In terms of damage perhaps. but they excel at confusing the human element at the other end. This more so than PVE mobs that can happily ignore clones and make a direct line for the toon.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

Personally besides minion AI, my major complaint is that I wish Death Shroud wasn’t such an obstructive/intrusive interface.

Yep. Had it behaved more like engineer kits than a modified down state (inherited from the beta days where it actually was a down state), it may be easier to get into the flow of things.

Druitt.7629:

You get similar complaints in other professions. Elementalists complain basically the opposite: it’s stupid to break the traits up into elements when the Elementalist is meant to swap attunements, which makes 30 Arcana an absolute requirement.

Actually, as Elementalist that makes sense because not every trait of the Elementalist are tied to the specific attunement in and, basically, all attunements are still good without the need of heavy traiting in. You can still get defensive utility when switching to Earth also when you put no trait points in that traitline, also you can still get healing when switching to water magic, probably not that much, but you have. You have access to all the traitline capability by base, but you can of course spec into a specific magic. As Necromancer, you have to put trait points in 3 different traitlines to get one weapon or just one utility set effective, which is quite disheartening when you want to make any balanced or more versatile build.

Druitt.7629:

Personally, I think the Scepter MH is more damage than Axe, and Scepter/Dagger seems fairly strong to me.

I was talking about raw damage. By the way, other professions are still better at stacking conditions up.

Druitt.7629:

You can’t just write off Death Shroud because “the profession itself has no way to mitigate damage”. Death Shroud is the unique core of the profession. It may not be a great mechanism, but it’s not like it’s something separate… cut

The point is that stacking HP over and over isn’t enough to get enough defensive capability. Actually, mesmers have a lot of visual confusion thanks to clones, making most the time an hard to kill target. Plus, they have access to tons of invulnerability (Distortion), something that Necromancers have no access at all. Their defensive capability is all linked to Death Shroud, which is situational and not enough at all.

Also many other professions have no problem with conditions if the correctly built into. AoE blinds of the necros is just Deadly Swarm (which isn’t actually AoE) and WoD, both on a relative enough recharge time. Not enough at all to mitigate the damage. Obviously I don’t take into account Plague which is another topic.

As I said before, there is no point to have 3 life bars and no way to protect your beloved HPs.

I honestly don’t get the point of taking elementalists into that answer.

Druitt.7629:

Yes, broken AI can’t be overrated. Agreed, it’s a game-breaking issue for Minion-based Necros. At least Necros have Elites that may be useful. Elementalists have one (10-point) Elite that’s useful, and two (10- and 30-point) that are absolutely useless. Especially the 30-pointer, Tornado. Have you actually ever seen an Elementalist pop Tornado? Tornado makes Lich Form look OP.

Actually Fiery Greatsword isn’t that bad. Tornado, also, is just the same as Lich Form, except the fact that it has bunch of CC, blindness at the cost of low range.

Druitt.7629:

Elementalists have Tornado as their top Elite. Tornado functions much like Plague Form except with none of its benefits or abilities. Plague Form can actually be quite useful. (Again, depends on whether you’re talking PvP or PvE.)

PvP of course. There is not so much point to talk about balance in a non-competitive gamemode.

Druitt.7629:

I can’t recall AoE teleports for “most” professions. Spectral Walk is a nice bit of mobility: it’s an inverse Blink but it also ignores all LOS and terrain requirements, which most teleports do not. (Thieves also have their inverse Blink which seems to operate similarly, but is more useful if you have a target and less useful if you do not.) Warhorn 5 also gives swiftness combined with repeated AoE cripple.) Underwater, … cut

You talked about underwater, in which Necro are quite good, but it’s underwater, come on. It is about 5% of the fights if not less.

Swiftness isn’t mobility. Mobility are skills like Ride the Lightning, Blink, Lightning Flash, Burning Speed and so on. Skills that make the player hard to target, to catch and gives him great advantage with way faster movements. Necromancers have only Spectral Walk, which is only 6 seconds of recall time, not enough by far (I can’t even jump down in WvWvW dropping wells on the zerg without getting Spectral Walk finished before I dropped all the wells). Excluding that skill, they are static as statues, by far subpar compared to any other profession.

Necros have low intrinsic defensive capability, probably none have noticed because of the trend to build with high toughness with conditions (by far the only really viable build at the moment), but once you leave the toughness out of your equipment, you are most likely dead in few seconds, while other professions have tools to survive also with low toughness.

digiowl.9620:

Druitt.7629:

Mesmer clones are made of paper and certainly don’t buy you anything in PvP.

In terms of damage perhaps. but they excel at confusing the human element at the other end. This more so than PVE mobs that can happily ignore clones and make a direct line for the toon.

From what I’ve read, an experienced player can straightforwardly tell illusions from the Mesmer. They don’t necessarily hold the same weapons as the Mesmer, they stand still and use their weapon skill #1 repeatedly, you can throw a mark on the real Mesmer and it sticks, etc. I’d be fooled, but that’s not saying much. I’d also imagine that AoE or bouncing damage eliminates illusions rather quickly as well.

Not useless, but not some huge defensive capability that Necros can’t make up for.

Our Traitlines are horrible, just look at the ARMS line from warriors, it also does Prec+ Cond Dmg.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warrior_traits

Tell me which tree you want more, ours or theirs?

I’d like people to look at Deep Cuts and Attack of Opportunity specifically.

@Druitt

Trust me, when I was running with my mesmer friend, everybody was focusing on me. I had to go Bunker build because of that. My mesmer friend was glass cannon, and was still harder to kill then me.

Why? Because he had defensive mecanism that were a lot better then my fast draining life force bar.

They knew they would miss a lot of their attack/combo/Condition on mesmer clone/invis. So they went directly for me. Because I’m don’t stealth, I don’t stun people, I don’t have high armor, burst dps, block, endurance regen or anything else.

I only have DS, that doesn’t dodge anything. I absorb some damage while I have to lock every abilities I have in exchange of 4 static abilities.

Elementalist complaining about being all glass? What? If there is something they are good at, is surviving!

When I see a Thief trying to burst down a D/D ele hybrid, I laught. The ele full heal right away, his -33% damage and stability for 12 sec pop up. He also get the best mobility around.

So no, I don’t think Ele should say anything about not being able to tank.

@Kiriakulos
Yeah, well I’m sure Arms would rather have Barbed Precision over their 5 pointer (33% chance to bleed on crit). Also 2% damage per condition is legit if it works as 2% per stack, not by type. But I suspect it’s type of debuff, which is still a solid damage increase in groups.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

@Kiriakulos
Yeah, well I’m sure Arms would rather have Barbed Precision over their 5 pointer (33% chance to bleed on crit). Also 2% damage per condition is legit if it works as 2% per stack, not by type. But I suspect it’s type of debuff, which is still a solid damage increase in groups.

Why would a warrior prefer to have a trait which gives you 1s of bleeding on a 66% chance on critical while Sigil of Earth gives you 60% chance to inflict 6s of bleeding on critical?

Also, 2% damage per conditions works by single condition, not stacks.
Sad thing that it boosts direct damage and all the high-damage weapon set of Necromancer inflict at max 4 conditions (Axe/x), which gives 8% damage boost which can easily become less once a condition ends. Only Vulnerability is mantainable by Axe autoattack.

Warrior have 10% damage boost only tied to bleeding. Sword autoattack inflicts 8s of bleeding untraited. Rifle autoattack inflicts 6s of bleeding. You have always at least 1 bleed stack on your foe, that means granted 10% damage boost.
I’d happily change Target the Weak for that trait. I’d also give them Reanimator, Gluttony, Parastic Bond and Barbed Precision, also if ending with empty trait slots, if needed.

Would this be a bad time to mention that mesmer warlocks get a 10% damage increase pr condition on target, and they share power and precision stats with the mesmer?

sorrow.2364:

Actually, as Elementalist that makes sense because not every trait of the Elementalist are tied to the specific attunement in and, basically, all attunements are still good without the need of heavy traiting in.

My point is that the Elementalist forums complain just as strongly as you do about Elementalist traits not making sense. The consensus is you pretty much need 30 Arcana and that entire element-based trait lines (Fire and Air, I think) are basically not very useful. Necro trait lines may be scrambled, but they’re not uniquely messed up or uniquely hated.

sorrow.2364:

AoE blinds of the necros is just Deadly Swarm (which isn’t actually AoE) and WoD, both on a relative enough recharge time. Not enough at all to mitigate the damage. Obviously I don’t take into account Plague which is another topic.

Well of Darkness is an AoE pulsing blind. Deadly Swarm isn’t AoE, but: 1) a bouncing effect can have more reach than AoE, and 2) I believe offensive AoE doesn’t affect more than 5 targets and Deadly Swarm bounces to 4 targets. Signet of Spite is a single-target (1200 range) blind plus a boatload of other conditions. As you mention Plague of Darkness adds a blind, and if you like minions the Shadow Fiend has one as well.

sorrow.2364:

Actually Fiery Greatsword isn’t that bad. Tornado, also, is just the same as Lich Form, except the fact that it has bunch of CC, blindness at the cost of low range.

Fiery Greatsword is a niche at best. It has a cooldown, a time limit, a charge limit, and it replaces your 20 weapon skills (counting attunements) while active. It’s pretty cool, but in reality the only summoned weapon that Elementalists routinely use — if they build for it — is the Lightning Hammer.

Tornado is like the worst combination of Lich and Plague. Like Plague, it has no abilities and the only thing you can do is choose one of three “stances” that change its behavior slightly. Like Lich, it only doubles your Vitality and Precision (and triples Power). Oh, and it can also knock back enemies beyond its attack radius.

By contrast, Lich has five abilities that you can actively use — including ranged abilities — and Plague triples Vitality and quadruples Toughness (which are both higher for a Necro than an Elementalist). However much you hate Lich, you’re doubling the already-higher Vitality of a Necro rather than doubling the lower Vitality of an Elementalist, plus you actually have skills to use.

sorrow.2364:

PvP of course. There is not so much point to talk about balance in a non-competitive gamemode.

Yes there is. Half of the whines in this forum are about “No one invites me to dungeons because every other profession does everything I do, except better.” Balance matters there. Also, PvP is broken up into several aspects, including WvW. If you’re talking about sPvP, you should state that clearly.

sorrow.2364:

Swiftness isn’t mobility. Mobility are skills like Ride the Lightning, Blink, Lightning Flash, Burning Speed and so on. Skills that make the player hard to target, to catch and gives him great advantage with way faster movements. Necromancers have only Spectral Walk, which is only 6 seconds of recall time, not enough by far (I can’t even jump down in WvWvW dropping wells on the zerg without getting Spectral Walk finished before I dropped all the wells). Excluding that skill, they are static as statues, by far subpar compared to any other profession.

To be more precise, swiftness by itself is a weak form of mobility. So are stun breakers. So are cripples, chills, and other abilities to slow other players. Combining swiftness with cripple creates a larger gap in capability.

I know it’s not an important example, but your WvW example happens to illustrate this: let’s see you jump off of a tower wall and drop one good Elementalist AoE spell, then make it back up onto the wall. An Elementalist can’t do it, since none of their teleports will work across height changes. (Heck, RtL hasn’t historically even been reliable for moving uphill, which it’s supposed to do.) In an open field, the Elementalist is the master of movement, of course, but in your example you could drop into a crowd, drop one or two marks, and return to exactly where you started, even with LOS and height changes. (And you could trait to have targeted wells, just like an Elementalist.)

The bottom line is that once you write off DS (which basically doubles your HP), regard only teleports as mobility, and talk only of PvP, you have a point. The problem is that whiners in the forum are whining about PvP, WvW, PvE — all aspects of the game — and so a newbie comes along and reads your posts and will figure Necros suck at PvE, which then becomes “common knowledge” because even the Necros themselves seem to be saying it. Then we get people saying that they run into “LFG, no Necros”.

Druitt.7629:

sorrow.2364:

PvP of course. There is not so much point to talk about balance in a non-competitive gamemode.

Yes there is. Half of the whines in this forum are about “No one invites me to dungeons because every other profession does everything I do, except better.” Balance matters there. Also, PvP is broken up into several aspects, including WvW. If you’re talking about sPvP, you should state that clearly.

Indeed. One of the selling points was that they broke the trinity, meaning that you could slot any profession into any position and in theory gain the same results.

Thing is that Anet went a step further and more or less eradicated tank and healer in the process.

Tank in that there is no consistent aggro behavior. This again mean that there is no consistent way for one or more toon to act as designated tank.

Healer in that there is no reliable way to put a heal on a single toon or group without walking in the middle of them with a PBAOE.

End result is that everyone either bunker up, or go out and out damage hoping they can use self heals and dodge/mobility as a way to outlast the mobs.

Druitt.7629:

Fiery Greatsword is a niche at best. It has a cooldown, a time limit, a charge limit, and it replaces your 20 weapon skills (counting attunements) while active.

Holy kitten cat katface!!!

you guys get 20 weapon skills????

surely to get to use the extra 10 you lose access to your heals and utility skills as that is double what most other classes get for weapon skills?

I mean at the very least while using all these extra weapon skills your UI is mostly removed right? one shouldn’t get that many weapon skills and still be able to see things like endurance and buff and conditions, amiright?

sorrow.2364:

Mega Skeleton.8259:

@Kiriakulos
Yeah, well I’m sure Arms would rather have Barbed Precision over their 5 pointer (33% chance to bleed on crit). Also 2% damage per condition is legit if it works as 2% per stack, not by type. But I suspect it’s type of debuff, which is still a solid damage increase in groups.

Why would a warrior prefer to have a trait which gives you 1s of bleeding on a 66% chance on critical while Sigil of Earth gives you 60% chance to inflict 6s of bleeding on critical?

Because it’s twice as good as theirs. I figured that would be obvious.

Either way, making class comparisons such as that aren’t totally fair, for a lot of reasons. Not saying your judgments are invalid, but it’s worth taking it with a grain of salt.

If target the weak works with other’s conditions, then in group situations you can get it a lot higher than 10% a lot of the time.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

If target the weak works with other’s conditions, then in group situations you can get it a lot higher than 10% a lot of the time.

and when He says a lot…….what he means is 2% usually.

Did I mention I run epidemic? I can keep bleeds, vulnerabilities and chills up on most enemies at most times, so 6% by myself, not including all the times I damage targets while they’re weakened, crippled, immobilized, feared, blinded (this is quite often). Then throw on all the other times targets are confused, burning or poisoned along with any other classes who apply the same conditions I do. I’d imagine it’s considerably higher than the 2% you seem to think. Or maybe I’m playing my class wrong.

Dredlord.8076:

Druitt.7629:

Fiery Greatsword is a niche at best. It has a cooldown, a time limit, a charge limit, and it replaces your 20 weapon skills (counting attunements) while active.

Holy kitten cat katface!!!

you guys get 20 weapon skills????

surely to get to use the extra 10 you lose access to your heals and utility skills as that is double what most other classes get for weapon skills?

I mean at the very least while using all these extra weapon skills your UI is mostly removed right? one shouldn’t get that many weapon skills and still be able to see things like endurance and buff and conditions, amiright?

We get one weapon — no swapping as all other professions except Engineers get — and with that one weapon we get the standard 5 skills which change depending on which of 4 attunements (air, fire, water, earth) we switch to. So we end up with 20 weapon skills versus most professions’ 10. Engineers, however, could equip four kits and thus end up with 29 weapon (plus toolbelt) skills.

We only get five weapon skills at one instant, just like other classes, so the UI is just like other classes and weapon swaps. The Fiery Greatsword, however, replaces our weapon and doesn’t change based on attunement, so we go from 20 weapon skills (with attunement changes) to 5. If we drop the Fiery Greatsword, it disappears and we can’t swap back until the cooldown is up and we can resummon it.

(OK, technically, when we summon it, we get one in our hand and one falls on the ground and can be picked up by anyone. If no one else picks it up, we could use that one if the first one is dropped or uses up its charges. It’s still subject to the time limit and will disappear after the allotted time, even if it has never been picked up.)

I think you missed the sarcasm his post was dripping in, sorry. :\