Guild Wars 2

Do you ever use it aside from blinding? It’s so week compared to my scepter skills, i think it’s necessary a buff to those 2 skills noone uses so that this elite can be used outside dungeons too.

Never use it, well except as icon for when im underwater.

We have high base hp an ekstra hp bar in death shroud so i dont see the reason to have a tank elite, we kill slow enough as it is.

Sometimes I use it for the AoE cripple, especially when we’re trying to skip a section of a dungeon and a few people start getting caught. Since I’m practically invulnerable in Plague Form, it doesn’t matter if it takes me a little longer to get to the aggro drop spot, and it practically guarantees the escape of my allies.

You can do the same thing with the blind if you have the chilling darkness trait, but I can’t always spare the points in Curses, depending on what kind of build I’m trying to run.

I don’t think I ever use it for the bleed, oddly enough. Applying two stacks of 2 second bleeds looks okay, but “I want to do condition damage to five targets” just isn’t why I pop Plague Form. I pop it because I want to shut down five targets to keep them from killing me or my friends.

A lot of necros use plague form because it is one of our only ways to get Stability. Once Stability gets ripped/converted, the elite becomes worthless.

I use it for blinds and the aoe cripple/weakness, I don’t think (aside from when I was first learning how to use it) that I ever use the bleed skill because it’s mostly worthless. If this elite didn’t have stability I’d never equip it even underwater, I’d rather have a blank slot. My underwater skills trump this one 20x over.

Even the blind on it though, is pretty worthless, especially on bosses that seem to ignore the fact they’ve been blinded. There is only 1 dungeon I have ever used this on and it’s CoF path 2 when we’re playing the kite game to protect the npc blowing up the door, then I attempt to use the blind (which usually fails) and use the cripple, which is much more effective.

I use it in WvW on a daily basis. I find it to be one of the most overpowered abilities in the game, especially from a zerg vs zerg perspective.

On one side it can be a god send, I don’t know if its overpowered but the fear it can instil makes the enemy in WvW run to get away from it. There is a few times that ive activated it dived into a bunch of enemy and watched as they all spread to avoid me. I also guided people off a keep wall who were dug in deep by just activating it and moving towards them, apparently jumping off was better than standing in my plague cloud.

But if you come across a really organised team you get the other side of the coin. If you get stability stripped off you then its useless, add onto that really good teams will just unload you with conditions to get that health down. Against those more times than not ive had to drop out of it early to use my consume conditions as my health was dropping fast.

I use 2 mainly if they are dug in deep and then switch to 3 if they start running away but rarely ever to I use 1. I would actually quite like 1 to be changed that when it pulsed it transferred the conditions on you back to the enemy but again that’s me wanting all the cake again rather than just a slice. With all the speed boosts going on it could also do with a slight speed increase as sometimes it can be hard to catch people with its slow pace.

It has its uses but the radius is too small for it to be considered overly powerful in WvW.

yeah idk what guy is talking about it being op in wvw, they must have some horribad zergs on their server or something lol.

Drop the radius, make the spells aoe’s, and keep the stability and durability increase the way it is. I think this would buff the Elite without making it op.

Honestly personally the only reason I don’t use Lich Form (I know we’re talking about Plague form) is because I find it just hideous. I’m a master of death and decay… why the heck do I transform into a giant floating radioactive neon green shining muscle buff dude… what…? Not only does it make you the center of attention in PvP, but it looks kitten ugly.

So I’ve ended up either using Plague form which I personally actually adore, or Flesh Golem. Plague is awesome when I’m running a tanky build (which I usually do), it makes me nearly invisible with the ton of HP and armor, plus cripple, blind and thanks to traits – chill. Although it does indeed deeply sadden me that many attacks and enemies just do ignore the fact they’re blind.

So answer me this, how come when I am blind and I use an AoE skill, it just misses EVERYTHING… however when my enemy is blind and THEY use an AoE skill they just bypass blind completely? What?

sostronk.8167:

I use it in WvW on a daily basis. I find it to be one of the most overpowered abilities in the game, especially from a zerg vs zerg perspective.

Consider the following: Maybe you’re just terrible at using it yourself.

I think people expect Plague to make them completely immortal for 20 seconds, while all it does is make you almost completely immortal for 20 seconds. As someone who loves their Necro and realizes that Necros do have significant flaws that should be looked into (no cleave? really?), and considering that it’s a 20 second duration. 180 second cooldown elite, I think immortality would be a bit much.

As it is right now you can barrel through crowds and survive things no other class (save for maybe a full-bunker guardian) can even dream of surviving. You are not, of course, completely immortal. Yes, an organized 10 men team can kill you relatively fast. This is true for any class in the game, except you’re more likely to survive the focus fire considerably longer (even if not for very long in absolute terms).

Plague is my default elite on the necro in WvW, with Lichform being a prefered option when I’m expecting “open terrain” skirmishes, when I can best control my spacing and can use the temporary damage boost. Plague has let me not only tank, but actually considerably injure (through constant cripples, weakness, poison, bleed and blinds) entire mobs, often turning the tide of a fight. It makes me completely immortal against single targets or small groups. What it doesn’t do is make me untouchable by any means. I’m ok with that.

In PVE, I use Plague for the bleeds sometimes, but mostly just while I’m waiting for my heal to come off of CD, etc. 30s worth of bleeds from any source often trims down the enemies nicely.

(I agree with @Delryn, that Lich mode does look a neon freak – kinda like a cheesy cartoon superhero.)

It’s amazing for tanking a massive amount of damage in lord’s room defense or holding a supply camp until reinforcements get in. Once I survived vs 20 enemies and 2 omega golems in garrison defense solo with the plague form, allowing for reinforcements to come in time to wipe them.

Usually people don’t know what’s happening to them and ignore the plague.

I use flesh golem though for most situations.

i use it very often

the blind is good to help ur team while they are killing also the poison lowers the heal resived, the bleed is also good but not when under focus fire.
It also grants more hp and if u have syphon hp trait it gets hp from everyone it hits and can help to survive longer.

2 Words.
Chilling
Darkness

Turns plague from not bad to holy crap kill it kill it now!
Seriously blinds were annoying enough but you can get through it with multi hit attacks. 20s+ of chill thrown in though is just obscene

Plague is awesome, I laugh every time I use it. Bliss running through the zero. I’ll flip briefly to cripple or bleed depending on whats going on.

I use it a lot.

Chilling Darkness + retal from heal + retal from DS dance = epic hurt across 5 players. If I’m in small scale PvP it tips the balance massively in our favour. In 1v1, I can guarantee I’m able to tank until my heal comes up again. I can use it to stomp, and I can use to to snare a couple of runners.

With 30 points in spite the chill lasts 1.25s (rounds to the nearest 0.25s) so it quickly adds up. And 20×1.25s blinds to up to 5 targets? Heaven.

It’s great.

I tend to Dark Path, WoS, WoC, perhaps pop my heal for the 5s retal, then hit Plague and chill/blind the enemy until I can’t hold out any more.

I love it. I use it more than lich form, which I find to be a bit tedious and only really effective when paired with Time Warp.

Just a note, but there is no rounding with condition duration. The tooltip gets rounded down, but the actual duration does not.

That’s a heck of a difficult thing to prove Drarnor, what’s your source?

Either way, with 30 points in Spite (which I had to have for my power build anyway) and Chilling Darkness, Plague Form is a frickin great ability. It doesn’t net me badges, but locking down 1-5 players for 20s is amazing.

I use it in PvE for when a champ is “out to get me” and has locked on to my backside. Not only can you keep the champion blind, but you take next to no damage while others in the area pound it into dust.

I haven’t used Plague form since October when I got a Mad King rune set.
Those runes have turned my Flesh Golem from ok to actually Elite.

The birds are triggered on Golem charge and add a 2k+- AoE untargeted damage to my golem charge, also since each bird hits 16x times I can regularly stack 5+ bleeds with barbed precision.
Also Golem Charge for me is around 1.6k damage + KnockDown.
Unlimited targets Knockdown, ever used it in melee against a zerg in WvW? It’s kinda like bowling.

All of this with a 45 second cd (bird activation actually has a longer cd than the Golem Charge), so yeah Plague got out-classed.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Just a note, but there is no rounding with condition duration. The tooltip gets rounded down, but the actual duration does not.

I actually just tested a bit with this on Plague Form, and you’re right. With 10 points in spite, the tooltips don’t indicate any increase in condition duration (The base poison is still shown as 1 second) but using it on a training dummy you could see the leftover 0.1 of a second adding up, since the poison would have more and more time left on it before it was reapplied. (With 0 points in spite, it always expires right as it is reapplied) By the time plague form expired, the dummy still had about 2 seconds of poison left, as compared to without the 10 points in spite where the poison ran out at the same time as plague form.

In fact i started this topic to complain that the 2 skills that do not have blind are not on par with the blind one. As soon as i get into plague form i press 2 to get the blind form. There’s no way i would use the others ever, because blind beats them all. Maybe we could get 4 blleds instead of 2 (since they last just for 2 sec) and some bleed on the pestilence one too.

well, the Weakness plague gets used on dredge, but otherwise I’m like you: all blind spam.

Hammerheart.1426:

A lot of necros use plague form because it is one of our only ways to get Stability. Once Stability gets ripped/converted, the elite becomes worthless.

This. This is a great reason to use plague form. Also, it’s a great Oh Crap! button.

plague form is my main elite skill, it allows you to easily tank very large (yes, larger than normal!) groups of mobs