Guild Wars 2

Hey everyone, I was hoping to get a bit of constructive discussion going regarding Necromancer Utilities. In my opinion, it is the Necro’s utilities that represent the biggest weakness the class faces.

A number of problems plague our utilities: some are nearly useless or so situational that few people would run with them on the off chance they would make a difference (ie spectral wall, or corrosive poison cloud). Others are good but are too easily avoided or ignored to justify the long cooldown (Most of the Well abilities for example).

So I thought I’d quickly take a look at all of the utilities we have access to and hopefully get some community thoughts going about how we can improve them without being overpowered. (note, I will not be considering Elite skills or healing skills at this time. But feel free to talk about them if you have feedback)

You may disagree with my assessment of some of these skills and that’s a good thing. If you can show me how I should be using/approaching an ability then that will only help with my understanding of some utilities that I may have overlooked. I really hope this can be a constructive thread with a focus on utilities. I want to be able to bring some concerns of the community to the devs who will hopefully keep an eye on this thread. Our utility skills suffer from a number of the same perceived problems that ranger utilities suffer from (useless for many builds, boring, ineffective, etc) and I think many Necromancers are concerned that a disproportionate amount of attention is being shown to Rangers in this regard, while the Necromancer’s concerns are being overlooked/ignored.

I will give these all a number ranking from1-10, 10 being must-haves, and 1s being must-avoids.

(note: my perspective comes from someone with thousands of wvw kills, and 4 level 80s – necro, engineer, thief and guardian. I also have a mesmer and elementalist in the 60s, and I’ve done a lot of wvw with all of these characters. I’m not an expert but I do play a lot and so I think I can offer a pretty good opinion)

Minions 1/10 or 10/10 (see below)
I’m going to deal with these first hopefully quickly. We all know the problems that minions suffer from (they’re weak, die quickly, buggy, etc). That’s all been hashed out before so I’m not going to do it again. Instead I want to point out something else that bugs me about minion utilities: With the exception of Flesh Wurm, these are an ‘all or nothing’ utility skill. What I mean is that you either spec entirely towards minions, or you ignore them all completely. So if you decide not to spec for minions, you can immediately cross 1 heal skill, 1 elite skill and 3 utility skill off your list of options.

The exception is Flesh Wurm, which I would give a 6/10. The teleport is great, but the cast time makes it impractical as a panic/escape button. I’d like to see the other summons get utilities that could be practical in application to non minion spec builds. For example: perhaps, instead of blinding, the shadow fiend sacrifices itself to grant stability for 8s to the caster. Suddenly some non-minion builds might find a reason to run it.

Spectral Walk - 5/10
SW is a good ability but the cooldown is what kills this for me. The tether CAN be useful, but our overall lack of escape abilities makes this only delay the inevitable in wvw if we’re trying to use it to juke someone (they’ll probably catch up anyways!). The spectral ability that allows you to refill lifeforce, to me, is a bit of a waste. Most players getting beat on will go to deathshroud. If they come out of or have DS knocked off, 8 seconds of life-force generation on hit is only going to matter if they’re getting hit a lot, which means it is more likely they will die before deathshroud comes off cooldown anyways. So I see the lifeforce regen as a bit of a non-factor (which might sometimes be useful). Otherwise this is 30s of swiftness and a stunbreak on a 60s cooldown. It gets downgraded to a 5 to me because signet of the locust makes the swiftness redundant. Which makes this a stunbreak every minute. Compare to ‘Shake it off’ a warrior shout that is an AoE condition removal and stunbreak every 25 seconds. I’m not sure swiftness, the most common boon in the game, justifies this as being more than twice as long of a cooldown.

Spectral Wall 3/10
I have never really found this ability to be worthwhile. It doesn’t really act as a ‘wall’ since it neither blocks nor reflects projectiles. Which effectively makes it just another non-damaging aoe field that’s harder to hit with. As an ethereal combo field it can find some use in groups, but a lack of combo finishers from the necro make this hard to recommend as useful skill.

Spectral Armor 2/10
Similar to Spectral walk above, but on an even longer cooldown in exchange for 6 seconds of protection.

Spectral Grasp 7/10
This is a situationally useful skill. I like it but don’t use it too often. It suffers from being slow, has odd tracking/obstruction issues, and doesn’t quite seem to go 1200 as the tooltip says. But it is one of the few ‘grab’ abilities in the game and does what it does fairly well.

Wells
Like minions I’m going to lump these all together. Personally, I dislike wells. They’re so easy to avoid, and offer negligible utilities when they aren’t avoided. Alone this would be fine, but they’re coupled with absurd cooldowns and a huge number of traits which are inexplicably spread out among several trait lines. Suffering and darkness are the better ones, but I find these offer just such minimal utility for such a short period of time considering the cooldown. Compare well of corruption to null field, for example. The main goal of both of these abilities is to remove the boons of foes. They share the same cooldown, but our well also does a small bit of damage and converts boons rather than strip them. Null field, however, is by default ground targeted, and also cures conditions on allies, while lasting longer. Combine this with the fact that mesmers have several combo finishers and the ability becomes more useful still.

Wells have the potential to be great utility skills, I just think that their cooldowns do not reflect the actual utility we get from them for 5 seconds. If the wells were larger, or their traits were more focused, or the cooldown was between 25-30 seconds we’d be on to something. (I’d give darkness and suffering 6.5s and corruption and power 4 and 3 out of 10 respectively).

Signets
Personally I love the new Locust change. This gives us some much needed options. I no longer feel like I have to use spectral walk and warhorn to get around. So I give this an 8/10. It loses marks on the active ability which is again hampered by too long of a cooldown for what it does.

Undeath: 7/10 underrated in my opinion. In some dungeon fights such as Lupicus, this signet is a team saver. The cooldown is oppressively long, but not any longer than similar signets (guardian’s for example). Outside of dungeons it’s not really useful though.

Spite and plague I almost never use to be honest. Their cooldowns seem too long for my tastes, and I don’t run condition specs for the most part so I don’t find them too enticing. Can anyone weigh in on these?

I’d like to see one of our signets get stability on active since we have so little access to it.

Corrosive Poison Cloud 3/10

Think a Thief’s Choking gas, but add in weakness, self weakness, and a ridiculous 40 second cooldown. This field lasts 15 seconds, but will rarely, even against dungeon mobs, be effective for more than 5 seconds before whatever you’re fighting moves out of it. There’s a good chance the self-weakness will be on you longer than it will whatever you’re fighting. This is one of the few utilities in the game that has the potential to hurt you more than the person you’re fighting. It doesn’t get a 1/10 for a few reasons: against some bosses who are immobile, the weakness can be pretty good. It’s ranged, which is nice. And Necro’s get a few forms of condition removal which mitigates the self-weakness. Also, against globs of enemies (for example in a zerg v zerg wvw fight) it puts up a nice combo field. It can be useful in some scenarios but is so situational that I can’t see myself running this for most builds.

I’d like to see the duration cut to 7-8 seconds, the self-weakness to 3 seconds, and the cooldown to 20-25 seconds. This wouldn’t really change the ability in any real way to make it more powerful. But it would allow you to readjust it to account for enemies that move which account for the majority of enemies in the game and everyone in wvw.

Corrupt Boon 8/10

This is one of the better utilities we get. It can be great for wvw, and occasionally useful in dungeons. The cooldown seems fine, but frankly the self-poison seems unnecessary in a game where similar abilities, such as arcane thievery exist without similar drawbacks.

Epidemic 9/10

Right near the top as one of the best abilities necros have access to in wvw and spvp. It loses a few points for being useless against bosses where there are no adds. Even in a power build, this utility skill has a place.

Blood is Power 9/10

Another good ability. This also has a place in almost any type of build. It applies a bleed to the enemy that does decent damage, increases both power and condition damage for a good long time. Now if it only added fury as well…

OK that’s it for now. I hope we can get a good discussion going here with suggestions on how to make some of our utility skills more useful and fun. Because right now they just aren’t fun a lot of the time!

The TL;DR version is that roughly half of our utility skills simply aren’t up to snuff. They’re either objectively useless in almost all situations, suffer from prohibitively long cooldowns for what you’re getting, or don’t hold up to direct comparison against the utilities of other classes which do similar things.

I’m a noob to Necro, but I was trying Corrosive Poison Cloud and didn’t think it was as bad as I’ve read a couple places here. I was using Scepter/Dagger and Consume Conditions as my heal, so I never kept the weakness on myself. Scepter 3 CD’s fast enough that I was always ready to give it away, or if I needed a little bit of extra health I could consume it. I was also grouped with a shortbow Ranger, so the poison field was a nice addition.

I was trying it out with some Blood Is Power and Epidemic so I could take advantage of the corruption traits, Consume, and Scepter #3.

But like I said. I’m a new at this, so I probably could have been some more optimal skill. I didn’t hate it though.

cznrhubarb.5946:

I’m a noob to Necro, but I was trying Corrosive Poison Cloud and didn’t think it was as bad as I’ve read a couple places here. I was using Scepter/Dagger and Consume Conditions as my heal, so I never kept the weakness on myself. Scepter 3 CD’s fast enough that I was always ready to give it away, or if I needed a little bit of extra health I could consume it. I was also grouped with a shortbow Ranger, so the poison field was a nice addition.

I was trying it out with some Blood Is Power and Epidemic so I could take advantage of the corruption traits, Consume, and Scepter #3.

But like I said. I’m a new at this, so I probably could have been some more optimal skill. I didn’t hate it though.

Fair.

Like I said, there are some situations where it can be useful. I just think they’re few and far between. You only get 3 utilities. And poison+weakness every 40 seconds, in my view isn’t really worth taking up one of those spots especially when your target(s) can just move out of it.

It’s one problem a lot of Necro utilities suffer from. They can just be moved away from.

Manos.5486:

cznrhubarb.5946:

I’m a noob to Necro, but I was trying Corrosive Poison Cloud and didn’t think it was as bad as I’ve read a couple places here. I was using Scepter/Dagger and Consume Conditions as my heal, so I never kept the weakness on myself. Scepter 3 CD’s fast enough that I was always ready to give it away, or if I needed a little bit of extra health I could consume it. I was also grouped with a shortbow Ranger, so the poison field was a nice addition.

I was trying it out with some Blood Is Power and Epidemic so I could take advantage of the corruption traits, Consume, and Scepter #3.

But like I said. I’m a new at this, so I probably could have been some more optimal skill. I didn’t hate it though.

Fair.

Like I said, there are some situations where it can be useful. I just think they’re few and far between. You only get 3 utilities. And poison+weakness every 40 seconds, in my view isn’t really worth taking up one of those spots especially when your target(s) can just move out of it.

It’s one problem a lot of Necro utilities suffer from. They can just be moved away from.

Perhaps that was why it worked for me. This was PvE and the ranger pet was tanking most things and I could cripple what it wasn’t tanking.

Also, with the corruption CD reduction trait it’s only 32sec. If you can actually keep things in the field, that’s about 50% uptime.

So my opinions on this:

Minions need better AI, more damage and also ALL minion activation skills should go off instantly like that of shadow fiend. I also feel that Fleshwurm needs a much shorter cooldown – its stationary and so rather situational for minion masters.

Sprectal Wall is really bad, i think it should either be completly replaced or it should get a skill on second activation – like the mesmer wall – maybe let us teleport into the wall to give us a stunbreak and stability for ourself and all allies close to it. With that change they could make the fleswurm mobile and give it another activation skill.

Spectral Armor is also pretty useless – horrid long cooldown for very little effect. Needs an urgent buff or another effect in general – other classes get so much better skills with stunbreak.

Spectral Grasp – meh its ok. Really really unreliable and only usefull in pvp / wvw. Also its impossible to hit someone while chasing due to the low speed.

Wells are really not that bad in general – well of power is is really really situational – in a fast battle allies wont stand for long in it and i generally would never pick this skill apart from certain dungeons simply because you can “waste” one of your utility slots if the battle is on the move or your enemys dont use conditions at all- Maybe add something to make it usefull even if the enemy is not using conditions – maybe a stronger lifesteal per tick – so it would really shine against condition heavy enemys, and be somewhat usefull if not.

Signets:

Locust: is alright, speedbuff passive is usefull, active is actually traited very usefull too, only the CD needs to be reduced.

Undeath: Active is alright, passive is really really really horrible. 1% Lifeforce each 3 seconds? Only in battle? Come on, a battle can’t be that long to make it usefull anyhow… a passive like that cant be balanced imo, better replace.

Spite: passive increase is normal number wise – but rather boring, necro as an attrition based class with power passive? Thats not fitting. I Suggest a passive that increases Healingpower, Power, Condition Damage and Thougness and Maybe Condition duration – based on how long you are in Battle. Maybe start with 20 Stats and increase it by 2 per Second untill it hits 60. Also the active is weak, fixing would be rather easy though – Increase the bleeding and invulnerable stacks and add fear or stun to it – gives us an RELIABLE utility cc spell.

Plague signet – its alright i guess.. im not a big fan of it at all, but it can be good based on your build.

Poison Cloud: really lackluster – the concept is neat, a strong debuff that gets reapplied, but in this form its really really worse for anything but PVE if you can manage to keep the enemy in it. Easy fix would be a second avtivation which lets the cloud slowly move to your choosen ground target location. It could also grow much bigger over time, making it more different from the asura racial skill.

Corrupt Boons: That is another highly situational skill – i like to compare it with the guardians “Save yourself” – both have a highly situational use – but the guardian gets a second purpose thats ALWAYS helpfull – why cant we get something like that on that skill? Apart from that it CAN be really strong.

Epidemic: Meh. it is certainly really strong, but pretty much limited to condition based builds – i have never seen anyone use it in a power build – only reason to use it in another build is probably because the other utilities are not good at all.

Playing as a Condition build in PvE, Direct Damage build for WvW and Tank Support build for SPvP i would rate my utilities as:

Heal
Consume Conditions: 10/10 – One of the few skills that makes Necromancers worth playing in PvP.

Wells
Well of Blood: 5/10 – Long cooldown and terrible healing scaling but light combo field and AoE support heals, good with Ritual Mastery.
Well of Darkness: 7/10 – Shuts down Heartseeker and Backstab Thiefs and works well with Warriors and Guardians. Must be run with Chilling Darkness trait though.
Well of Corruption: 9/10 – Very good for Guardians and Warriors, helps alot on zerg vs. zerg.
Well of Suffering: 10/10 – 10 stacks of Vulnerability x 5, very good damage and a dark combo field. Wreaks havoc in WvW.
Well of Power: 7/10 – Good for support builds, can shutdown condition based builds quite easily.

Minions
Blood Fiend: 2/10 – Dies too quickly in PvP to be effective and destroy heals too slowly for AoE events. Decent for farming damage.
Bone Field: 4/10 – Takes awhile for him to engage but when he does he does decent damage at a ok rate.
Shadow Fiend: 1/10 – Terrible AI, 90% of the time he wont engage at all.
Bone Minions: 8/10 – One of the best minions, good damage and exploding for blast finisher.
Flesh Wurm: 5/10 – Mainly used for the blink, would be better if the terrain didn’t stop blinking.
Flesh Golem: 6/10 – One of our few CC’s, regenerates health after fights unlike the other but takes his time sometimes engaging enemies.

Spectral
Spectral Wall: 4/10 – OK if you can land it, but its too easily avoided and lacks the decent effects other classes wall skills have (knockback, stealth, pull)
Spectral Walk: 10/10 – A must for pretty much any competitive build. Allows perma-swiftness, stun breaker, blink and good for LF building.
Spectral Grasp: 2/10 – Buff didn’t help it, its still very easy to dodge without even dodging and terrain still messes up pulls. Can also be blocked in between the hand hitting and the chill effect procing as its delayed till after the pull.
Spectral Armor: 1/10 – Stupidly long cooldown for what it gives, Guardians receive 3 seconds of invulnerability every 90 seconds with there Elite.

Corruption
Epidemic: 9/10 – Dispite the fix on its infinite range its still one of the best skills we have, can be on cooldown as much as 12 seconds with Master of Corruption and the target blocking the skill wont affect it spreading.
Blood is Power: 8/10 – Nice for spike damage, would be a 10/10 if the bleed duration wasn’t 2 years but it combos well with Plague Signet well in PvE.
Corrupt Boon: 8/10 – Very nice for Guardians and Warriors, does what Well of Corruption does but quicker in a 1v1 situation.
Corrosive Poison Cloud: – 6/10 – Use to think this skill was worthless but its saved my life in PvE so many times now. According to ANet it should be 11/10 seen as we inflict so many poisons…

Signets
Plague Signet: – 8/10 Very good for PvP and comboing with corruption skills.
Signet of the Locust: – 3/10 Purely for Speed, life steal amount is pitiful compared to other classes life stealing signets.
Signet of the Undead: – 1/10 Terrible LF generation, cooldown longer then most ultimates for something that rezzes down-state and not dead allies.
Signet of Spite: – 5/10 Nice for when you cant decide on that 3rd utility for the +90 power and would be a nice activate if the conditions lasted longer or the signet wasnt such a long cooldown.

Could comment on a lot more, but just want to say I think wells are too much balanced around sPVP (like the whole game really) where there they can be good, because you are expected to fight on a small circle not much bigger than a well. In PVE they can also be good because mobs are dumb and come right at you. But in WvW the opens areas make these just not that appealing. Yeah you can blast them in the middle of a zerg, but you really don’t want to be there either too much.

I would like to see the cooldowns come down on these by about 25% at least.

Spectral Walk – The jaunt window is too short. Not only can enemies see where you are going back to, but much of the time you can’t even get out of LoS to ditch someone. A mesmer can put a portal entrance down and it last 60 seconds! The Necro should be able to return to his starting point at any time during the swiftness boon, now that would make it a tactical weapon. Though might have to diminish that bright green trail some then.

I’m gonna copy your post Ascii, I’m too lazy to remake it. :P

This is from a WvW point of view.

Heal
Consume Conditions: 10/10 – Agree, one of the best heal in the game, outshine the others.

Wells
Well of Blood: 7/10 – I disagree, it one of the best scaling heal in the game. Sadly it has a long cooldown, and stay in the shadow of CC.
Well of Darkness: 8/10 – Very good vs melee class, 5 sec of invulnerability, add chill to it. Only weakness is the cooldown.
Well of Corruption: 9/10 – Good combo with Well of suffering!
Well of Suffering: 10/10 – Great!
Well of Power: 5/10 – Good well, but a really long cooldown. You don’t get to use it often, and since it’s the same graphic that other well, allies don’t know they can stand in it for buff.

Minions
Blood Fiend: 1/10 -Dies fast, you have to keep tracks of him during the fight to be sure you don’t waste it. The activate is a really weak heal. Thief signet is better and you don’t risk losing it.
Bone Field: 3/10 – Not bad, have some positionning issue. The activate is really bad, it doesn’t land 80% of the time.
Shadow Fiend: 3/10 – Bad AI, weak damage, only good thing is the activate is instant cast.
Bone Minions: 5/10 – The activate is really good, and have a short cooldown. But the bugged AI is a plague. I get so mad when I try to explose them on someone, they just never get there at the same time, and I have to run around the target for 1 minute before they finally go in range.
Flesh Wurm: 7/10 -Our best pet, good damage, good hp, Really good activate that break stun and port us. Best escape ability we have. The casting time is bad tho.
Flesh Golem: 7/10 – Really good activate, really good damage and HP. Would be a 10/10 if it wasn’t of the worse AI of the bunch. It nevers attack.

Spectral
Spectral Wall: 6/10 – Not bad, insta stack 10 stack of weakness, grand you of around 6 sec of protection if you use it twice during the duration.
Spectral Walk: 10/10 – Swiftness, life force, stun break.
Spectral Grasp: 7/10 – Really useful and apply a chill to the target. Too bad it’s still pretty hard to land it.
Spectral Armor: 1/10 – Too long of a cooldown to be useful. Spectral Walk is so much better.

Corruption
Epidemic: 10/10 – One of the best spell in the game, especially in groups. Isn’t blocked by LoS.
Blood is Power: 9/10 – A bit boring, but so useful. 10 stack of might is really great, and you can transfer the condition to add more bleeds.
Corrupt Boon: 7/10 – Super good, tho not useful again every class. I don’t understand the shorter range (900). Might should be corrupted to bleeds since it’s stacking.
Corrosive Poison Cloud: – 2/10 – Used it once, didn’t like it, never tried it again.

Signets
Plague Signet: – 6/10 Can be good in pvp, but the bugs with the passive is annoying as it duplicate the conditions. I’m not a fan.
Signet of the Locust: – 5/10 Good since the buff, you only use it to travel. Activate is useless.
Signet of the Undead: – 7/10 The best signet in group if you ask me. I saved my friend so many time with it, and it rez him to 50% hp, which is pretty good. You have to use lower cooldown for signet to be really shinning. The passive is a bit weak tho.
Signet of Spite: – 2/10 Too long cooldown, passive effect is bah, but most class have a similar signet, so nothing to cry about. I never use it. The activate can be useful.

Below is my take on the utilities for Necro.

Wells – I have used Wells and there are a few flaws with the Wells. Most of these are evident in WvW but some can also be seen in other forms of the game. I would like to see a trait that offered you increased well’s just like the increased mark trait. It is far too easy for an enemy or player to get out of that tiny circle. Ive also found that Well of Power and Well of Corruption appear to do Conditions/Boons 1 per pulse but don’t quote me on that, just from what I have seen in WvW.

If your not going to do that then do all the well’s action in one swoop ie full damage or convert 5 boons or remove 5 conditions all at once apart from Well of Blood which I would keep the same. I also find the cooldown of the Well’s to be long but that relates to my previous points. If I knew I was guaranteed to get the full benefit of the Well it wouldn’t bother me but as it stands now I get a couple of pulses at best.

Heals – Consume Conditions is still the goto Heal for me and that is mainly because im more into WvW recently. You need as many ways as possible to get those conditions away and I cant see past it. Well of Blood I have used in Dungeons and can be really helpful but 9 times out of 10 ive got Consume Conditions on.

Corruption – The main issue I have with these skills is that they put conditions on your character. I don’t think this is needed as you can build up enough conditions without having to shove some on you to transfer them over. We seem to be the only class that has a good few skills that have a detrimental effect on your character. A couple of classes have the odd 1 skill maybe 2 max but they are skills that are on long cooldowns and not major skills that a specific build relies on. I would like the self conditions to be removed from all of them, maybe keep epidemic as that is a really good skill that needs a detrimental effect on it.

I understand this is probably part of the reason we have a higher health pool than other classes but its too easy for that extra health to eaten up by self inflicted conditions if timed incorrectly. More so in WvW where conditions are flying around all over the place, you cant always guarantee your transfer conditions from Staff or Dagger are going to be available when needed. Skills attacking wise Poison Cloud is the only one I find to be weak, the rest do a good job. Corrupt Boon v Guardian is just too much fun.

Signets – I will be honest in that the lengthy cooldown is what stops me using most of these. I did swap to Locust when they buff’d the speed but that is because I was never a fan of Warhorn. And you need this with spectral walk to have alot of swiftness, where as now I can be fast and have a decent off hand weapon that i like. Signet of Undeath I found to be too unreliable, unless I was standing on top of the person in question sometimes it would work other times it wouldn’t, which brings me back to long cooldowns.

If it didn’t work I had to wait ages for it to come back around again and I was finding more times than not the signet never worked unless I was right on top of my target. Plague signet ive never liked and not found a use for it to be honest. Signet of Spite again too long a cooldown and in WvW if you hit someone with it, just watch in 1 or 2 seconds as they remove all those conditions right back off themselves again.

Spectral Skills – Spectral Grasp is alot better but still can fail too often and I would rather it be made instant pull rather than a projectile. Spectral Armour – No use for whatsoever on my utility bar, way too long a cooldown for it to be effective. Spectral Wall again I find to be useless and too situational for it to be used. Spectral Walk is a nice skill and has its uses and to be honest there isn’t alot I would change about it. Maybe increase the time that allows you beam back so its a bit longer.

Minions – Everyone knows about the AI issue that plague minions also the fact they aren’t really that sturdy and are very squishy. One big AOE can near enough wipe out your little army. I do use Bone Minions but more so for the activate skill, I couple it with Death Nova. Flesh Wurm is another good minion but its static nature puts me off using it, if the Wurm moved like the other Wurm’s ingame it would be more beneficial. Not a fan of Bone Fiend or Shadow Fiend they don’t do enough and their activate skill effect isn’t upto much. Flesh Golem just to throw this in also, I find would be good if they took away its aggressive stance so it didn’t attack every little thing within a 6 mile radius. Blood Fiend I have no real use for and find not only does it have the worst activate heal but the heal tick is only good if the thing stays alive for long enough in battle. Due to minion squishiness the thing dies more times than it heals.

Heal
Consume Conditions: 10/10 – If you haven’t traited for healing this is the only heal to use, period.
Well of Blood 7/10 — If you sacrifice your entire build to use wells and use them well(pun intended) then well of blood is amazing, it scales increadibly hard off of healing power and is one of necro’s only ways to directly support allies. Haven’t used recently so correct me if i’m wrong but with a cleric gem I was getting close to 700 heal ticks in the AoE which is AMAZING!!!!

Wells
Wells You’ve either traited your whole build for them and they’re very decent… or you haven’t and the cooldown vs effect is completely deplorable. Even with the fool traiting their durrations are pretty low considering the AoE other classes can get on much lower cooldowns, often over wider areas, and almost definetly for more damage.
Minions
Blood Fiend: 1/10 I don’t care if you’re specced minion master this little kitten should never be taken, he draws more hate than anything and if I see a necro running this in PvP… I just kill him, ez.
Bone Field: 5/10 – If the bloody thing would attack he’d be ok with an automatic cripple aplication and decent range.
Shadow Fiend: 1/10 – weak damage, weak health, melle, it was created to be pitied and die, and it does a very good job of it.
Bone Minions: 4/10 – run up summon them blast them, nough said if they’re running around they’re liable to die because some dust was kicked up by your boots as they tried to follow you.
Flesh Wurm: 4/10 – Long cast time, completely immobile, would do good damage if it could follow you, relatively long cooldown
Flesh Golem: 6/10 – Given that most your other elites are situational at best you’ll be spending a lot of time with the flesh golumn, a lot of time watching it recharge… or not attack, or charging into walls, ect, ect, ect. With proper traiting (and a bit of luck) Fleshy can do amazing damage, and then the guardian swipes his sword a few times and your character expresses his disdain for his servants…

Spectral Wall: 6/10 – If you have putrid mark on cooldown use it for some chaos armor for more condition stacking, otherwise…meh.
Spectral Walk: 4/10 — Long cooldown, mobility of locust signent outstrips this single skill, if you’re not war-horn to justify it with 100 pct swift up time just grab locust if you feel too slow (which you are…)
Spectral Grasp: 2/10 – If it weren’t for the horrid design of most pvp maps allowing for ranged classes to completely abuse the terrain then this skill would have no place, use it as a swap in on keep to pull the annoying kittens from the ledge so you can try to fight them.
Spectral Armor: 2/10 – Long cooldown, no stability, really very meh skill, end up taking it most of the time cause at least the protection might save you from a 100b or backstab thief.

Corruption
Epidemic: 3/10 or 9 – PvE and WvW this skill is great, in pug matches it’s ok, and in SPvP you’re better off with something else, fights in tournaments will rarely ever have enough people to warrent this skill
Blood is Power: 8/10 — this skill is the only reason you’ll have respectable bleed ticks over anyone, Really wish it was more stacks with shorter durration but with Focus 4 or Staff 4 you can quickly apply 4 stacks o long duration bleed on an enemy. If they’re an engineer laugh as they’ll probably be on them for the full durration, otherwise watch as they get stripped along with all the rest in a short amount of time…
Corrupt Boon: 6/10 – really useless in PvE, has it’s place in pvp
Corrosive Poison Cloud: – 3/10 – face it you probably have a scepter, or staff, you apply enough AoE poison.

Signets
Plague Signet: – 8/10 Very good for PvP and comboing with corruption skills.
Signet of the Locust: – 5/10 only because necro’s are so damn slow and have no mobility options is this thing ever remotly close to useful
Signet of the Undead: – 1/10 Only ok in dungeons where you can save a few people if they make a mistake, res skills should really either be able to res defeated players in pve or get massive cooldown reductions or something…
Signet of Spite: – 1/10 No…simply no, in the time you could of casted this skill you could of applied multiple stacks of any one of the conditons, it applies a SINGLE stack of bleed with a long cooldown, if it instantly applied 8 or so stacks of bleed for the duration then maybe then this skill could have a place, I’ve only ever used it with a WvW set up that used BiP, Plague Signent, and Epidimic, so that once every other MINUTE I could apply an easy ~10 second cripple in an AoE cause all the other cripple were ground targeted and difficult to land on a particular target…

Pendragon.8735:

Could comment on a lot more, but just want to say I think wells are too much balanced around sPVP (like the whole game really) where there they can be good, because you are expected to fight on a small circle not much bigger than a well. In PVE they can also be good because mobs are dumb and come right at you. But in WvW the opens areas make these just not that appealing. Yeah you can blast them in the middle of a zerg, but you really don’t want to be there either too much.

I would like to see the cooldowns come down on these by about 25% at least.

Spectral Walk – The jaunt window is too short. Not only can enemies see where you are going back to, but much of the time you can’t even get out of LoS to ditch someone. A mesmer can put a portal entrance down and it last 60 seconds! The Necro should be able to return to his starting point at any time during the swiftness boon, now that would make it a tactical weapon. Though might have to diminish that bright green trail some then.

This is a good point and one I haven’t really covered regarding sPVP. I don’t do a lot of spvp so I can’t really comment on how useful abilities are there.

Pendragon.8735:

Could comment on a lot more, but just want to say I think wells are too much balanced around sPVP (like the whole game really) where there they can be good, because you are expected to fight on a small circle not much bigger than a well. In PVE they can also be good because mobs are dumb and come right at you.

The problem with them in PVE is that you are not supposed to stand your ground, but rather dance around the mobs because defensive measures are poor at keeping you alive. End result is that you are likely to pull the mob off the well.

digiowl.9620:

Pendragon.8735:

Could comment on a lot more, but just want to say I think wells are too much balanced around sPVP (like the whole game really) where there they can be good, because you are expected to fight on a small circle not much bigger than a well. In PVE they can also be good because mobs are dumb and come right at you.

The problem with them in PVE is that you are not supposed to stand your ground, but rather dance around the mobs because defensive measures are poor at keeping you alive. End result is that you are likely to pull the mob off the well.

Huh, I successfully face-tank mobs all the time when not in dungeons (unless it’s fractals, there I only need to kite bosses). It’s quite easy to do and not get low on health at all.

It’s good to see some constructive discussion here. Here’s what I conclude based on the few responses we have:

The Good:

Consume conditions: Seems consensus is this is a great heal ability and one of our best condition removal skills

Spectral Walk: I feel like this ability loses a lot of its luster in the light of Signet of Locust, but only because of the minute long cooldown. I’d like to see the swiftness last 15 seconds and be on a 30 second cooldown and change nothing else. Since this is a move-backward ability I don’t think it deserves to have the same cooldown as other blink abilities

Epidemic: Everyone likes this ability, although it is only useful for specific builds.

Blood is power: Probably our best utility. It is unfortunate that our best ability is a 10stack of might and 2stack of bleed though. Other classes can get might this high through weapon skills more often (ie guardian), or simply through the synergy of their traits (ie Elementalist). I think this demonstrates the poor shape Necro utilities are in as a whole.

Corrupt Boon: Considered great for pvp against certain classes, and anywhere between useless and ok in pve situations.

Well of Blood: A good skill but not better or equal to consume conditions unless you trait specifically for Wells.

The OK:

Well of Darkness/corruption/suffering: Consensus seems to be that this can be good for builds who focus on wells and only wells, and are middling/not good for anyone else. But even for well focus builds these seem to be weak compared to similar skills that other classes get, mostly because of the cooldown. This makes them unreliable to use as other players can escape them rather easily and then you’re left with a long cooldown. Compare to Ranger Traps which seem to offer more utility, are harder to avoid and are on much shorter cooldowns. Wells are close to being good, they just need tweaking.

Flesh Wurm and Flesh Golem: useful for a number of reasons but suffer from bugs (in the case of golem) and long cast times (in the case of Wurm, limiting its usefulness).

Plague Signet: Cooldown’s too long, and it’s only useful to a few builds, but is not a bad ability

Signet of Locust: Good as an option for those who don’t want Spectral walk or warhorn, but the active ability sucks.

Spectral Grasp: Only really useful in wvw and sometimes in spvp. Often misses the target. But is still good when it works.

The Bad:

Spectral Armor: poor utility, absurdly long cooldown to boot

Spectral Wall: difficult to land, offers middling utility, longish cooldown. Many other classes can stack vulnerability more quickly and easily on shorter cooldowns. Doesn’t act as a ‘wall’ like most other domes or wall abilities in the game. Lack of finishers for the class mean we can’t take advantage of the combo field it offers.

Bloodfiend/Bone fiend/Shadow Fiend/Bone minions: Poor ai, poor utility, low hp, lowish damage, requires you to put all of your skill points to make them viable.

Signet of Spite: Poor utility, poor active, long cooldown

Signet of Undeath: crazy long cooldown, crappy passive. I personally like it for some dungeons though.

Corrosive Poison cloud: Long cooldown for a poison field, can be simply walked out of.

Well of power: long cooldown like all wells, but requires allies to be around, not leave the small radius and have conditions on them to be cured. Only lasts 5 seconds.

Conclusions

We have 5 legitimately ‘good’ abilities that probably don’t need any changes to make players happy. Two of them are heals, and one of them (epidemic) is only really useful against groups for condition built Necros.

We have 7 ok abilities that only need some tweaks to be brought up to snuff. Mostly this deals with prohibitively long cooldowns.

We have 9 bad abilities: these abilities all suffer from poor performance (minions), offer minimal help to any build (spectral wall, armor), and have disproportionately long cooldowns (spectral armor, signet of undeath, corrosive poison cloud)

I’ll add my opinions to the mix. I think that all our utilities are useful in some situation and I think it is unrealistic to expect each utility to be useful in all situations.

Heals
Consume Conditions: Awesome.
Well of Blood: Good in a minion build and awesome when playing support in dungeons, outclassed by CC elsewhere.
Blood Fiend: Seems good for minion builds. Heals for less than Well of Blood, but is mobile and has much lower CD, so it depends on your playstyle and what tradeoffs you are willing to make. I think it’s fine in concept, could maybe use some number tweaking, and it did get a buff recently.

Wells
I think all the wells are strong utilities. They are tremendously useful in sPvP and dungeons. If you are contesting a point and drop two wells, your opponent basically has to allow you to neutralize the point (points neutralize in 4s) or else die and lose it entirely. They’re weaker in other game modes but I don’t think they need a buff.

Spectral
Walk: Awesome.
Grasp: Much better than it used to be, and I regularly slot it in WvW to pull people out of zergs or off walls or to stop people from kiting me. Low cooldown and it chills. Still gets obstructed by nothing sometimes but I think that is a general problem with projectiles in this game.
Wall: Awesome. Not sure why some of you guys rate it so poorly. I use it to give protection to an entire zerg as we charge a keep lord. It’s also useful in open-area fights, I usually place it on top of myself or near the enemy and make sure to run through it twice if I can. Well of Suffering does more damage but Spectral Wall is more reliable, so it has a permanent home on my utility bar.
Armor: It would be nice to see this skill get some buffs. Right now it only has two reasons for existing: (1) it is a combination of Spectral Wall and Spectral Walk, so you can save a utility slot if you’re not interested in swiftness (2) we get it automatically with Last Gasp. I think it does have a niche, but that niche is perhaps too narrow to make it useful.

Signets
Spite: Eh. All professions have a signet that’s somewhat worthless. Would be decent in a power/signet build, I think the problem is that it’s too straightforward, or single-minded, to make it attractive to slot. A lowered CD would help.
Locust: Awesome after the buff. Awesome out of combat for movespeed, awesome in combat for free heals. No further change needed.
Plague: Best team-oriented condition cleanse in the game, and synergizes nicely with the necro’s theme of condition manipulation. No change needed.
Undeath: I think this signet is fine. The cooldown is fine for what the active does. The passive effect may seem weak, but it is very nice for the builds that would run this signet, as they usually sacrifice Life Force generation for things like condition damage, and this helps fill the gap. No change needed.

Corruptions
A condition on yourself means more healing through CC, more to transfer to enemies via various means, or more to convert with Well of Power. I read that someone didn’t like this aspect of the corruptions but I think that the ability to inflict conditions on ourselves should be counted as part of the benefit of the utility, not viewed as a drawback.
Corrupt Boon: Awesome, shuts down bunkers in no time flat.
Epidemic: Awesome.
Blood is Power: 30s bleed + great boost to damage. Yes please.
Corrosive Poison Cloud: Eh. Personally I have never used this skill. It seems okay as an on-demand weaken and poison, I have just always wanted other skills more.

Minions
Bone Fiend: The immobilize seems unreliable. If it was better I think this minion would be fine.
Bone Minions: Blast finisher and good damage. No change needed.
Shadow Fiend: Eh. The reason you would take this minion is the on-demand blind, but I’m not sure how useful that is. Probably the weakest minion, could use a buff.
Flesh Wurm: Stun breaker, 10% life force, blast finisher, poison. Awesome.

Elites
Plague: Awesome.
Lich: On-demand, insane spike. No changes needed.
Flesh Golem: Awesome, except for the AI problem that all minions currently suffer from.

lettucemode.3789:

I’ll add my opinions to the mix. I think that all our utilities are useful in some situation and I think it is unrealistic to expect each utility to be useful in all situations.

That’s fair.

I think my (and other players’) disappointment with the utilities comes from the fact that they are much less useful than other classes’ utilities, and since we can only pick 3 (not counting elites and heals) we really have to give up on something to get something else. Other classes don’t suffer from this as badly, in my opinion. There are many skills that are just SO situational that you would never run with them on your bar in the off chance that such a rare situation would pop up.

I think a good example are some of the stunbreaks that we have access to.

We have:
1) Stunbreak + swiftness every 60s
2) Stunbreak + protection every 90s
3) Stunbreak + condition transfer every 60s
4) Stunbreak + teleport with a cast time if you don’t have the wurm out already

Let’s look at some other stunbreaks in the game:
Lightning flash: stunbreak + teleport
Mistform: Stunbreak + 3 seconds of invulnerability
Armor of earth: Stunbreak + protection + stability (same cooldown as Spectral armor. Are we to believe that 6s of protection and 6s of life force gain when hit is equal yo 8s of protection and stability?)
Shake it off: Stunbreak + aoe condition removal + very short cooldown
Frenzy: Stunbreak+quickness
Endure pain: Stunbreak + 5s of no damage
Balanced Stance: Stunbreak + stability (shorter cooldown than any of our stunbreaks
Lightning reflexes: Stunbreak + vigor + evade back and create distance + shorter cooldown
Judge’s Intervention: Stunbreak + AoE damage + teleport gap closer
Shadow Step: Stunbreak + teleport + reverse teleport + shorter cooldown
Elixer S: Stunbreak + 3 seconds of invulnerability + either stability or invisibility (toolbelt)

Basically my point is, just using this one example the stunbreaks that other classes get are less situational and more universal. Lightning flash can be used offensively or defensively, Judge’s intervention can be used as a stunbreak, or a teleport/gap closer, or for the damage. Shadowstep can be used to confuse foes, and both offensively or defensively. Frenzy can be used as a stunbreak, or as a quickness as it offers both.

The abilities that can only be used in one way such as for defensive reasons (ie, endure pain, shake it off, elixer s, mist form, etc) are all a head and shoulders above anything we get. Either because of more utility, shorter cooldowns, or as fantastic panic buttons etc.

I don’t think it’s too much to ask to have spectral armor on a 30s cooldown for example, or also give stability. Or have another utility that gives a teleport stunbreak. I would just like to see our utilities brought into line with the utilities of other classes. I personally hate looking at my bit list of utilities and going ‘meh’ for all of them. I’m constantly switching them up for different combinations.

I agree that the utilities are pretty lackluster, problem is that the necro is made with Death Shroud in mind. Our defensive utilities are mainly sprectal and are very lackluster in terms of boons, it doesn’t help that some of their cooldowns are huge compared to what we get back, if you want to support usually wells are the way to go if you are not going for condition/spreading or vuln stacking.

For example we lack boons greatly, we don’t have a boon with stability and our stunbreaks are not very defensive they just gain life force. we have might with BiP, swiftness with spectral walk and protection with spectral armor. It’s pretty lackluster there. We have 4 almost useless minions and situational signets, that’s 8 utilities that don’t bring much to a team except plague signetand undeath wich is pretty situational.

Therefore we are FORCED to spend trait points in death shroud to gain boons/stability and to eat burst because of our lack of defensive utilities/boons. The bad thing about that is that Death Shroud gets eaten fast/we don’t start with a full bar and sometimes we are forced to use it defensively limiting our builds but that’s another topic.

Wells cooldown is not very worth it, 60(48) sec cooldown for 5 secs of blindness and 5 sec of cond removal? not very worth it imo, but then again in a dungeon we don’t bring much else to our team beside condition management.

I’ll go back over the entire post and comment some more later, but I wanted to say something about spectral wall before I forgot: until the southsun cove zone was released I rarely ever used it (on very very rare occasion in pvp when every team I came across was 50% thieves) but when I kept getting my kitten stomped in southsun on a regular basis trying to go solo, I figured what the hell, might as well give it a shot and wow! what a difference it made!

The key to it is to pull them through it, then send yourself back through for the protection. If you time it right you can get 2 protection buffs and hit them twice with vulnerability. And when dealing with karkas there’s 2 things i found you need in abundance: protection, and ways to get around their stupid high def and hp. This does it for you. Without the spectral recharge trait though it’s not as useful as it can be, but I don’t use that trait and can get by with it. So it’s all about refining tactics to get it to work, doesn’t even really require gimmicks. Just wanted to get that out. It’s not for projectiles or to function as you would think a wall would (like guardian walls, ect) but you have to actually get them to cross the line and cross it yourself as well. Give it a shot and I think you’ll be pleased with the results.