Based on what we’ve been getting from the devs in terms of necromancer design goals / the ‘stencil’ of how they should function, not only is it impractical but it will never work in the environment GW2 has made with SPvP.
First I will address the ‘inescapable’ issue. The idea that necromancers, once engaged are hard or impossible to escape and because of this we give up OUR escape abilities.
We all know that this is, currently, not true, lets just slide aside the fact that we are very escapable.
Now in order for this class design to work a few things must be true. One is that we must not just be a good 1v1 class, which currently we are not. We must be the BEST 1v1 class as we have only the option to ‘lock horns’ as they say and duel it out. What good is the ability to lock horns if it’s a lost cause and you can only see defeat?
Secondly, what’s more important than being able to keep up with a target – if this is your design intent, to stay on our target indefinitely – is to keep the target from escaping to seek help, because once the target is able to retreat to their team, you’ve lost your fight and you aren’t really preventing them from escaping at all, they’ve escaped and it’s done.
If we COULD lock down an enemy and prevent their escape entirely, not only would we need absurd amounts more CC than we have, we’d be absurdly overpowered.
Moving on to the idea we are ‘attrition’ based. This doesn’t work in current GW2 SPvP meta. Slow damage is simply not valuable, you need to get your target OFF the point so you can cap it, this relegates us to a bunker/defensive role only. This brings us back to our other issue, we cannot effectively 1v1 most other classes, and even coming close to doing so requires kiting and significant movement, and you CANNOT ‘bunker’ a point while kiting!
Now a slight aside from function facts vs. fiction is how this play style effects ‘fun’ for public matches.
It’s quite simple really, you’re not in control of the outcome of public 8v8 matches, you’re 12.5% of your team, if the other 87.5% of your team is bad you aren’t going to have much fun unless you’re effectively capable of killing an enemy in a reasonable time frame to glory farm.
Lets be realistic here, most people doing 8v8 measure fun on glory, score and kills, not on the success or failure of their team, as playing to win often costs you more glory than if you’d lost and farmed kills all match. Because of this a class that performs poorly in 1v1 or at collecting kills in general is not incredibly fun to play for the average person in a public match, so when you’re team is bad, like really bad, like 500-100 at the end, being spawn farmed, you get NOTHING and have an abysmally unfun time.
At least as a burst class you can just about guarantee a kill every time your burst combo is off cool down, you can reap SOME benefit despite being on the losing team.
As a Necro you basically have one option. Return to Heart of the Mists, try another match.
Please stop ramming your head against this broken idea of a necro and create the class we need.