Guild Wars 2

The devs say we want to get hit.

Maybe I’m doign it wrong, but in my experience as a necromancer it’s the LITERAL EXACT OPPOSITE.

We do everything in our power to avoid getting focused, because we fall over and die if we are. Sure, we can soak a bunch of damage, since we have so much health, but that doesn’t help much when you get trained. Other classes can run away, other classes can pop an invuln and avoid the burst entirely. Necros have to just take it.

But we aren’t REWARDED for taking it. The enemy isn’t PUNISHED for hitting us. Why?! Why do we want to get hit? We gain nothing from it at all, and lose so much. we get stunlocked, because we don’t have much stability to let us keep our footing, and all of our defenses go out the window. We can’t apply conditions to reduce incoming damage, we can’t CC people off of us (We don’t even REALLY have that much CC to begin with), we can’t siphon health if we can’t attack. We may have stunbreaks, but we just get dazed or stunned again immediatly after. We can’t heal under focus fire, like some classes can.

We simply don’t want to get hit.

I want us to want to get hit.

So I think that necromancer should get some traits that make enemies think twice before dogpiling us. Traits that scale rapidly the more enemies are hitting us. Let’s be a porcupine. You don’t recklessly jump on the porcupine, because you’re gonna get a nose full of quills. You don’t recklessly jump on the necromancer, because you’re gonna get a facefull of conditions and a damage spike for your trouble. That’s how our defense should be.

Just a thought.

Well… You do have to be a bit of a masochist to be a Necromancer. The new CC actually punishes for getting hit even more. It would be pretty nice if we could make it so that 5 people trying to lay into us would go down if they weren’t cautious, but the only thing that works closely to that is Retaliation, which is a boon, and we aren’t allowed to have boons, but retaliation doesn’t actually do much unless it is multiple people with Retaliation underneath a single AoE. The best trait we have to punish attackers is Reaper’s Protection, but that is more of a one time stop than a counter to focus fire.
I agree with you that Necromancers should be able to injure foes that try to focus them down. Wouldn’t getting beat up be a good reason to spite someone? However, as it is, the only traits that reward us for getting hit are spectral armor and spectral walk.

I think the devs have a misunderstanding between “can be hit more than others” and “has mechanics where being hit is beneficial”. As it is right now Necromancers can generally be hit more than other professions (though not always), certainly ideally if we had gotten better balance this would be the case due to attrition. However, we don’t truly have mechanics where getting hit is beneficial. Flat ICDs on a lot of those abilities really kills them, whereas SA, SWalk, SoV if they had per-attacker ICDs (if not no ICDs in some cases), a life-steal or LF gain when hit mechanic, a way to apply condis while being hit, things like that would all make this more accurate.

Right now the closest we have is a lot of mechanics to punish people for being close to us. Locust Swarm, a variety of on-entry and while-inside shroud effects that apply conditions, rip boons, and damage enemies, things like that make us want to be near enemies, but preferably while they are focused on hitting someone else most of the time.

“As a necromancer, you WANT to be hit. So we have you 10 stacks of vulnerability when you heal so you’re 10% more effective when you get hit.”

~ Buff is a buff folks.