Guild Wars 2

I want this thread to be about what the players think they need to be useful in PvE (without having to berserker).

My suggestion is better access to Torment and less access to bleed

We need cleave for better DPS, and we need that change to DS reverted. Not the bug they fixed, but the fact that damage taken in DS now leaks into our life pool. We need better defensive options against one-hit kill attacks, which PVE is infested with. We also need a change to Defiant, so we can use CC against bosses like our class was intended. It is one of our only means of defense, and the fact that EVERY boss and champion is immune to it is ridiculous. Defiant is broken. It scales with the number of players fighting a champion, but not with the number of players actually using CC on the boss. If you can’t CC a boss when you need to, because you have to take down stacks of Defiant, then CC becomes useless. I think they should either remove Defiant, or make it a boon that we can remove instantly.

Also, a faster projectile on staff 1 would be very welcome. That thing is so slow, you can run faster.

I want blinds to work on Dredge so I can stand in one place as my vampire wells spec when running Sorrow’s Embrace, like I do just about everywhere else. >_>;;;

Otherwise, I don’t have many problems!

Spamming all the blinds it my personal favourite as a necro.

I am also levelling a condi necro just to try something different. It’s real fun in general PvE, but once I hit PvP I kinda wish I could do more than 20 into Death Magic to improve my capabilities. Bigger, unblockable marks and shorter CDs is great, but I never really find a scenario where either one would be especially useful (in both PvE and sPvP), and often just stick to scepter/dagger for most fights.

It kinda feels like I can’t hybridize a good bunker/condi spec as a necro, which is something I would looooove to do.

Lastly, I want necro elites that aren’t Blood Golem (since it already does this) to NOT destroy minions when used – at least Plague form. Blood Fiend has become my favourite healing skill as a necro, and I hate killing it in favour something that will either save MY life, the lives of my allies, or murder everything with hundreds (okay, maybe a dozen) little bone minions. Blood Golem is awesome – don’t get me wrong – but in a few of cases it’s better to have a more defensive option (Plague) or something with greater AoE damage (Lich).

The cd reduction on wells and the 1 second stability on WoP was a step in the right direction. DS overflow was a step back. The fact that we have no cleave in a dungeon meta that revolves around melee stacking is problematic – axe is the most obvious candidate for it. As stated above defiant really hurts us when fear is our equivalent of aegis or distortion. Our secondary defenses (chills,blinds, cripples) are all hit hard by unshakeable.

We will never be strong in dungeons until (or if ever) defiant and condition capping is resolved. We could be more playable of we had any tools to deal with one shot mechanics, and if we had some sort of direct damage cleave. I suspect this wont happen though because balancing at the moment is focused on class differentiation in pvp (ie making us more bursty but less survavible then engis), and giving us those things would just be giving us the “tools of other classes”.

Good stuff, thanks guys. Defiant is definitely a problem and something that’s been brought up here and in other class forums. Hopefully this post can get some attention, as it is highlighting areas of general PvE that could use improvement.

2 things i really want for pve – swarm/hive mind and wall
Swarm: ability to actually use minions/damage by proxy whos damage is actually influenced by your management skills, not the fact that you are or are not in range of a boss while a skill is on cooldown
Wall: Plain being able to tank/control a enemy (or group of enemies) to do specific patterns instead of others (e.g. forcing the lovers in AC story to try and drop their high damage skills instead of consistent dps or making alpha use jormag instead of mordremoth or crystals)

A wall like guardian staff wall?

I can think of three solutions for Defiant:

1: It’s a boon, you can simply strip it, but also slowly peal it down as you can now. Stripping it is of course faster. No matter how high the stack, one boon removal and it’s gone.

2: Replace it with stability entirely. Why invent new mechanics that break the game, when you can use existing mechanics?

3: Make Defiant a temporary buff, that wears off after a few seconds. A boss can instantly receive Defiant after being hit by any CC skill, to prevent them from being stun locked. But then it quickly wears off, and the boss is vulnerable to it again.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

3: Make Defiant a temporary buff, that wears off after a few seconds. A boss can instantly receive Defiant after being hit by any CC skill, to prevent them from being stun locked. But then it quickly wears off, and the boss is vulnerable to it again.

I am actually quite content right now.

A few tweaks aside, the main problem ain’t the Necro, it’s the dungeons.
Right now the most effective way to do/farm a dungeon is to run a high dps party with full zerker equipment. The reason being that most boss fights are against one single opponent with a huge amount of hitpoints, a Damagesponge.

The Necro (and probably Engies as well) would really shine in content, where utility is needed.
Also, we rely on mitigating damage by CCing (Fear mostly, but also cripple, chill, blind, immobilize and torment). But defiant bosses take most of that away.
Balancing this will be extremely difficult. You either have a defiant boss or you will see parties perma-CCing any boss so much that the whole fight turns into a joke.

I guess you’d have to reinvent boss fights to solve that problem.

Introducing new boss-fight mechanics instead of wailing on a Damagesponge would not only make our class more valuable, it would also make dungeons a lot more fun and entertaining.
I think the developers might have caught on to that a while ago. Looking at the Aetherblade dungeons and some of the fractals you can see them trying out new things.

EDIT: Coming to think of it there is one thing I’d like to see: When one condition type is capped out at 25, it would be an interesting mechanic to add a new condition then. E.g. if bleed reaches 25 and is KEPT at 25, the target gains a new condition that…maybe stuns for a second or increases bleeding damage by 5-10%. This new condition would disappear as soon as bleed stacks drop down to 24, and it would need a cooldown. This way you’d actually reward players for keeping conditions up and running.
It would be interesting to see individual “max-condition-rewards” for each individual condition type. These would only be able to be applied by maxing out the conditions we have.

Increasing the bleed damage after cap is an interesting idea to solve the cap problem that I haven’t personally seen on the forums. After 25 stacks, additional bleeds increase blead damage instead of adding more bleeds.

That sounds fun. It could be a new debuff or even an inherent effect of intensity stacking conditions. It would cap out at 100%, doubling bleeds, and bringing their effectiveness closer to that of burst damage.

How would it be applied? 1% for each bleed after 25 stacks? More? Considering this would only be useful in groups of 2+ bleed stackers, where caps are a problem (generally world bosses or longer, static fights), it couldn’t add too much percentage per extra bleed, because then in smaller groups it would certainly be too OP.

This is a very interesting idea and so far the simplist, most effective way to solve cap problems I have seen. I’d suggest posting this idea elsewhere in the forums.

Give us vigor and cleave and we will actually become pretty strong in pve. A unique team damage buff would also be nice (some kind of aura which grants the group extra damage or life steal or conditions on hit/crit). Auras could be a new utility skill theme for necro’s.

Maybe even boon sharing. Blood is Power = group might instead of selfish might. Make furious demise group fury. And spiteful spirit group retal. Instantly become more useful in dungeons.

Would also like the spite minor traits to be completely remade. The only one which is semi useful is the 5 point one, but I still feel thats a blood magic themed trait.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I can think of three solutions for Defiant:

1: It’s a boon, you can simply strip it, but also slowly peal it down as you can now. Stripping it is of course faster. No matter how high the stack, one boon removal and it’s gone.

2: Replace it with stability entirely. Why invent new mechanics that break the game, when you can use existing mechanics?

3: Make Defiant a temporary buff, that wears off after a few seconds. A boss can instantly receive Defiant after being hit by any CC skill, to prevent them from being stun locked. But then it quickly wears off, and the boss is vulnerable to it again.

Or just make it rewarding to keep defiant stacks low or completely off of the boss. Bosses toughness is increased with each defiant stack. Or boss takes extra damage for a few seconds after being succesfully cced.

Defensive/Magic tree’s Both mostly fail at PvE.

Minions that could handle a dungeon?

Vamp that wasn’t a waste of traits. (Heal in DeathShroud/Heal the Party, still weaker than Guard/Ele passive heals idk somethin)

Non-competative with other PvE’ers

Combo Finisher that’s not 20% on staff or eating our good group utility on staff. (Or a minion that’s prob died and on CD)

Vigor on crit/something that lets us avoid as many avoid attacks in boss fights as other class’s.

Weap range that allowed you to say stack with party in Arah, without being staff only.
Meele cleave/some benefit of being meele or close to on a clothie with no protection cept DS.

Condi
Condi/hybrid glass cannons seem to be the current necro vision. Not my cupa. But, in PvE…
Condi groupwide cap.
Boss’s etc with reduced condi/condi clears.
Objects (doors/turrets/etc) take no dam from condi.

Thats a really good point you mentioned Bweaty. We need more finishers. They designed us to have lots of fields but having so few blast finishers really isnt fair. And the fields we do have generally arent used or popular. Dark fields are good for fractals other than dredge though. We have more combo’s underwater. I want a blast finisher on a popular weapon. Warhorn 5 or axe 3 could quite easily become blast finishers.

Great thread.

We need combo options on axe/dagger, cleaves on dagger, more powerful life steal with siphon buff, scepter needs access to more torment, more skills that we give life to cast like GW1 etc. etc.

Generally, i think necro needs one more weapon set with combo options and utilities.

MM needs to be rethinked from start for PvE and PvP. Giving all the minions from enviromental targets %95 damage mitigation from aoe skills (%65 in PvP, just brainstorming ) and access to m0ar minions from kills, also death nova damaging as well as poisoning, calling auto minions every 10 seconds or so within combat ( maybe a new signet passive ) and a new skill like “Blood of the Master” from GW1 might make MM real fun with a bit more balancing.

Also something has to be done about the bleed caps. Having multiple condition players on a single target is a major dps fail.

spoj.9672:

Or just make it rewarding to keep defiant stacks low or completely off of the boss. Bosses toughness is increased with each defiant stack. Or boss takes extra damage for a few seconds after being succesfully cced.

That’s not a bad idea. However, we still need to be able to use our CC skills as a defensive measure as well. If we first have to peal down stacks of Defiant, we can never fire off that fear when we most need it. The stacks of Defiant make it impossible to use CC skills at the right moment.

The extra damage would be nice. But I think they need to get rid of this idea of having to peal away at the Defiant stack. It’s not fun, and it makes people not want to use CC at all.

First of all, we ARE useful. Never forget it!

Second, I only dream for some decent minions, that at least attack the same target that I am attacking, when (if!) I attack it!

Cleave. Cleave. And then some more cleave.

Then let’s address the fact that my power necro has more combo finishers with his spear than on all my land weapons combined…

Morbridae.8607:

First of all, we ARE useful. Never forget it!

Second, I only dream for some decent minions, that at least attack the same target that I am attacking, when (if!) I attack it!

Ok lets play a game. Tell us whats useful about necro’s and ill either shoot it down as not important or can be done by other classes with more useful utility.

I’ve suggested something that will help necros in another thread I made, which I will now shamelessly pimp:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Fixes-for-damaging-conditions-PVE/

For those who can’t be bothered with shameless view grabbing and bumps, the gist of it is that I want necros to inflict torment as their primary condition instead of bleeding. That way, a condition necro can work right alongside of a condition engineer or condition ranger, and still maintain nearly full offense. Of course, the individual skills would have to be evaluated to come up with a torment equivalent, since torment and bleeding aren’t identical. But all in all, I think this could really help out the necro.

Only problem is, I make the same suggestion for mesmers, so condi mesmsers will be a bit incompatible with condi necros, but that’s better than everything being incompatible with everything.

I like that idea Blood, I think Torment should be more heavily implemented in our builds.

I think conditions are in a position where they are fine as they are. We just need bosses and game mechanics which rely on condition damage improving the kill speed (high toughness and low hp). Also torment will never make necro useful in pve. Mobs dont move and bosses dont move when doing a dungeon efficiently.