Guild Wars 2

I would like to know what the Necro forum thinks of the Death Magic passives. Personally I think it only has one good passive, Deadly Strength. The other two are almost useless and could be useless if you do not have a MM build.

Also, what are people opinions of the first passive, Reanimator. I find that the jagged horror is horrible. It lasts ~7 seconds with a 30 second cooldown from killing an opponent. It has horrible attack and attack speed. Along with it’s degeneration it can be killed in as little as 1 hit. I read that it can be used to rally an enemy player, too. Does anyone find this guy beneficial?

The most I made of him was in an MM build where I had the Death Nova trait – whenever a minion dies, it explodes into a cloud of poison that lasts for 3 seconds. The cloud of poison does no initial or pulse damage. It only gives the condition poison which the 3rd skill of the Staff, Chillibans, already does and does better.

In terms of the Reanimator trait, I don’t mind it in its current iteration if:

1) It added 20 toughness when paired with Protection of the Horde
2) The Death Nova field serves as a poison combo field (like Corrosive Poison Cloud)

I don’t mind it bleeding to death either, but I think that it should last maybe 1-2 seconds longer when bleeding out and it should cause bleeding on its auto attacks ala GW1. As of right now, it serves merely as a distraction (very situational in terms of usage) to anyone speccing into Death Magic but not going MM.

Protection of the Horde is great when you use 3 or more minions. Extra toughness never hurt, and you can notice a small difference even without going a full MM bar. Again, however, it is a wasted passive if you do not use any minions at all. It could be better to bump up the toughness a bit and work it into the major traits and put a new, more generally useful, passive there.

Deadly Strength is great, especially when going for an MM using an axe. I love going 30 in Spite and 30 in Death Magic with Axe Mastery and Deadly Strength. I think it works just fine.

do you feel your necromancer is strong when you selected deadly strength? every classes have traits like deadly strength. i dont think it is very useful because people do 20k damage with one hit in world vs world without this trait.

I’m not saying the 5% of toughness applied to power is strong; I am saying that it is the most useful because it would apply to all builds, not just MM. The other two passives only are useful when your build is MM.

I feel like any minor trait in the game should not directly depend on what skills you are bringing. Since I’m not a MM, but still benefit from high toughness, anything minion related in that tree is completely useless to me, especially the two 30 pt ones. I feel like the minors from the toughness tree should mirror some other classes more:

5- Demonic Flesh: Gain 30 toughness for each condition on you.
15- Insidious Parasite: When your life is below 50% you life siphon foes who attack you.

And I feel like the base attributes on the trees need to be reworked:

Spite: Power and Crit Dmg
Death Magic: Toughness and Condition Duration
Soul Reaping: Boon Duration and Life Force Pool.

It breaks their mold of pairing power with condition duration, but I always feel like the two never go hand-in-hand with Necromancers compared to other classes.

BobJoeXXI.2493:

I’m not saying the 5% of toughness applied to power is strong; I am saying that it is the most useful because it would apply to all builds, not just MM. The other two passives only are useful when your build is MM.

I feel like 5% toughness applied to power ONLY applies to MM. If I had a power heavy non-MM build I wouldn’t even want to touch the toughness line because I would be going down Spite, Curse, Blood, and SR instead. But if I was full MM, I would be stacking power and going down Spite and DM while using Axe/Focus to support minion damage on top of mine with Dagger/Warhorn or Staff on swap.

What’s the point of toughness and condition duration? I mean if we’re going to pick and choose let’s pick what would sync the best:

Condition damage + Condition Duration
Toughness + Vitality
Healing + Boon Duration
Precision + Crit Damage
Power + Life Force Pool….meh can’t be perfect >.>

Outlaw.4078:

What’s the point of toughness and condition duration? I mean if we’re going to pick and choose let’s pick what would sync the best:

Condition damage + Condition Duration
Toughness + Vitality
Healing + Boon Duration
Precision + Crit Damage
Power + Life Force Pool….meh can’t be perfect >.>

To take this a bit further…

Condition damage / duration also syncs with precision, as there are a couple of things that cause bleeds on hit

Toughness / Vitality syncs with anything you want

Healing syncs with minions and ‘bunker’ well necros

Boon syncs with pretty much nothing, since we do not grant/gain boons other than the mark of blood 5 second heal, & the 3 second ‘upon entering deathshroud’ effects

precision and crit damage were made for each other, but power syncs with them best; you can crit everything but wouldn’t matter too much if you had 0 power

power and life force sync well together, because power is the only thing that makes life blast worthwhile. Power makes life blast and life transfer decent damage output

Outlaw.4078:

What’s the point of toughness and condition duration? I mean if we’re going to pick and choose let’s pick what would sync the best:

Condition damage + Condition Duration
Toughness + Vitality
Healing + Boon Duration
Precision + Crit Damage
Power + Life Force Pool….meh can’t be perfect >.>

Its not necessarily about picking and choosing the best combination, its about making choices. Spite and DM are both lines that don’t directly help condition damage so making either of them have condition duration makes you make a choice between going down one line or the other. The problem with the way its setup right now is everyone elses ‘toughness’ line makes sense with what its paired up with.

Warrior, Engineer, Thief gets toughness/healing
Guardian, Ranger gets toughness/crit dmg
Elementalist gets toughness/condition damage
Mesmer, Necromancer gets toughness/boon duration

It makes little sense for necromancers to have boon duration there when they have the least amount of boons they can apply of every class (except maybe thief and ranger?). But it does make sense to have boons on SR because of all the traits that grant you boons when you enter DS (fury, retal, stability).

So even when you make these choices, you are still benefiting no matter what. But a condition necromancer, who benefits from having toughness, cannot benefit from the DM line because of its traits.

this has been brought up countless timesssssssssss T 0T

Each time someone (inc me) suggest we rework the death magic line the MM players QQ. So unless we can somehow balance without shafting the MM builds, it’s unlikely to be changed.

Do I think it needs a rework? Definitelyyyyyyyyyyyyy. Do I think it’ll be anytime soon? Not likelyyy.