Guild Wars 2

This is a topic that sort of bugs me a bit. I main my Necro and my Warrior both, and my Necro has a special spot in my heart. That said, Necros are pretty underwhelming in PvE, particularly condition specs. Why? Because damaging conditions are terrible in PvE.

• What good is a difficult-to-maintain build-up of 25 stacks of bleeding for 140 dps each if a Warrior, for example, deals 10k dps with the 100 Blades burst or 3.5k dps with axe autoattack that stacks linearly?
• What good does adding burn do to team-based PvE where Guardians and other classes can inflict their burns already, and your burns don’t stack in intensity with theirs? (This same issue is prevalent with poison as well)
• The chief strategy in PvE is to hold enemy mobs stationary to burst them down, which makes Torment totally useless against them. What good, then, is Torment in PvE?
• What good is a weakness buff in PvE when Unshakable makes it nearly totally ineffective against the enemies that you need it most against, bosses?
• Condition damage doesn’t scale to armor, hindering condition specs against bosses with special armor-driven mechanics like Dredge Powersuit when superheated.
• The above means that power-damage benefits enormously from vulnerability, whereas vulnerability is completely wasted on condition damage.

These questions wrack at the back of my mind as I read all of these changes. I would like to know what, if anything, is being done for PvE balance only to resolve these issues and truly help ameliorate class imbalance in speed runs of more difficult content. One large thing that could happen to help with this is to remove the bleed stack limit. All power-based damage in-game stacks linearly, whereas condition damage stacks linearly up to 25 stacks and then is wasted afterward. I realize there are technical challenges inherent to that, but that is just one thing in a long list of things that could help condition specs in PvE.

I’d like to hear some discussion on the matter because no matter how you cut it, condition specs are weak in higher-end PvE, and people always groan about it and kick others about it. Something absolutely must be done with it to make these specs meaningful in a PvE environment.

Some very interesting points here Dusk.

Amidst the excitement of promised changes for the 25th, I completely failed to
consider how such changes would assist the PvE Necro.

Truth be told, most of what i’ve read so far seems very much targeted towards PvP in general, as you are no doubt implying.

I’m hoping that we haven’t seen the full story yet, and that PvE love is coming. Personally I don’t really care if I do only half the DPS of a warrior in dungeons, the reason being that we aren’t competing with our group members.

Sure, the group could bring yet another Warrior instead of my Necro, if pure DPS is all that matters, and in alot of cases it is. However, i’ve also saved the group from wipes many times, gotten off some clutch wells of power, or just generally positively contributed in other ways outside of raw dps.

That being said I do wish we were more competitive, and in fact I wish the same for any class outside the current “tier 1 trinity” that is war mes guard.

In any case, well said Dusk, but lets just wait till the 25th before we start fretting.

PvE necro will remain fine but unwanted in PvE until they change the PvE mechanics themselves. We are king of debuffs, but with debuffs being lesser than the other mechanics we aren’t the best picks for a team.

Arena Net doesn’t want what dominated the GW1 PvE experience to return in GW2. I don’t know this for certain, however there are several signs pointing to this. In GW1 mobs acted much like players would to an extent. Outside of bunching up, they would try to make calculated decisions with their skills and use there energy and cool downs relatively wisely. Granted, they are AI so they will mess up on this allot. Enemies in GW2 don’t act like players do. They don’t try and get a flank on you, dodge your attacks(exuding a very small number of them) share nearly all player skills, and really test your ability to play the game.

The GW2 mobs are mindless and will run to their death while you trash them with huge numbered attacks. These mobs are designed to be killed with heavy damage because that is what most players seem to like to do. Having enemies that dodge or try and change there position makes the player base think too much, making boon removal matter makes players have to adapt and Arena Net has a rather Non-challenge policy with there PvE.

Some might argue that GW1 wasn’t challenging. Yet I would argue that it was. And that challenge isn’t the same thing as difficult. But it was rewarding because of it. I felt accomplished when I completed the bonus objectives for a mission. I didn’t get anything out of it besides helping a title and a gold marker on my map with 3 weapons crossed off over it. And did we complain? NO! We loved it.

GW2 just gives you things and doesn’t really make you actually push yourself to get them. The Legendary weapons don’t test your skill, they just test your patients. You don’t get the piece that you need from completing every dungeon for every path. You get it for grinding the same dungeon over and over again. This isn’t skill. And things that really reward you in GW2 don’t take any skill either. I go to Teq and spam number 1 over and over again. Yay! Gold!……. But it doesn’t mean anything. It feels more like a chore then an accomplishment.

There was one thing that was very rewarding in GW2. And that was the flames and frost dungeon. after playing that, I thought “What will arena net do next.” that dungeon was a good example of challenge and reward. Sure you probably didn’t get anything out of it most the time, but the dungeon was so fun you went back into it anyway.

GW2 is a skinner’s box that tries to satisfy with shinnies. It is a trap. And adding challenging AI while promoting a more skill based PvE experience goes against this idea. Why would casual gamer’s with a low attention span play GW2 if they actually have to think when fighting?

There are a few things which, although I don’t have a warrior, I presume has placed the profession where it is in being so attractive for group play; good base survivability, group utility, and DPS.

From release, it’s very clear that condition specs are /supposed/ to be bulkier. You can’t stack condition damage without stacking a bunch of toughness, vitality or healing power along the way. Matching our damage to a zerker warrior requires something then, either a new stat altogether, or changes which make a new OR existing glass cannon stat combo (Rampager’s) have better synergy with a condition build. As is, I truly feel like a hybrid build is underwhelming for scepter, because it scales so poorly with power, given its focus is pumping out conditions.

Why not just have power improve the intensity of conditions then? Make it the ‘critical damage stat’ of condition builds in some way. That would fit with some of their plans, I mean Zeal in Guardian trait lines is supposedly 10% Power->C.D. which is laughable with something like this implemented.

The problem there is that it’s a buff to zerker specs which inherently apply conditions already without thinking about it, so some clever balancing or equations may need to be done, either that power’s effect on conditions is dependent on the amount of condition damage held, or something like that.

Finally, I think that vulnerability should also influence the damage of conditions, I think it’s pathetic that it doesn’t and that any group with a vulnerability stacker is actually favouring power DPS by a further 25% …

I don’t want to go on for too long, but I should also say, I want our group utility to go up too. 3 seconds of protection on a single type of utility skill after sacrificing a fair amount of damage and preventing effective hybrid builds is just lame. That’s pretty much the best we have to offer.

I also want encounters to be more challenging and reward players who have stacked up conditions. i.e. see Grawl Shaman in the Grawl Fractal, able to inflict conditions through shield and continue DPS while a zerker warrior cannot do any damage, is close to something which would be appropriate, but I feel this is unintended mechanics honestly. I’d like to see this, in comparison to the blatant favouring of power specs in many other encounters where inanimate objects immune to conditions are an important component, where we just sit there and hit stuff like a wet noodle.

You have to look at things in more perspective than just the DPS of the attack themselves. You have to consider the following:

*How much damage is done in an AoE, and how big that AoE is.
*How long is the recharge for these attacks
*How safe are these attacks to use.

Now, 100blades warrior is currently the best DPS in the game… against 3 targets that don’t do a lot of damage back. They run up and root themselves for 3.5 seconds and then they have to wait 8 seconds to do it again. I do not know the warrior’s auto attack speed, but assuming they just auto attack during that time, you can average out how much 100blades really increases their DPS.

Necromancers have something just as potent in our arsenal. Its called epidemic. It spreads all the conditions on the target towards up to 5 targets in a very large AoE at 1200 range. On best case scenarios, we can copy 25 bleeds, poison, and burn to everything in the room every 12 seconds. From there, no almost no matter what numbers you use you’ll end up doing an insane amount of damage in that time: Going off of your listed damage of 140 per bleed (1950 malice):

25 bleeds: 140 × 25 = 3,500 DPS, x 5 targets = 17,500 DPS.
Poison: 279 DPS x 5 targets = 1,395 DPS
Burn: 816 DPS x 5 targets = 4,080 DPS

Total DPS: 22,975.

And that is for however long those conditions are sustained. It’s quite easy to reach that mark, too. Due to conditions from the necromancer being mostly in an AoE, they just need to use their AoE skills to prime a room with 11-13 stacks of bleeding, then use epidemic to give everything but their target max stacks. If you have another condition spec on your team, then this makes stacking bleeds twice as fast, letting the necro use epidemic twice as quickly and more often. It is also worth noting that epidemic goes through a lot of defenses, since it technically isn’t an “attack”. This lets it pierce things other than just protection.

Now, as for the changes, I really don’t think they help the PVE condition Necro. Sure, we get burning now. But, everyone gets burning already. Burning is currently unreliable as a form of damage in PVE because it is constantly being overwritten by a guardian or a mesmer or a ranger or engineer that isn’t using condition damage but nonetheless has burning for some reason. Because of this, Necromancers getting burning contributes very little to their overall DPS. The burning can help stoke the fire in hopes that one enemy can get a long duration to maximize epidemic with, but otherwise conditionmancer DPS isn’t changed by burning.

Probably the biggest boon to necromancers, should this change be true, is in Spectral Wall. The ability to cause fear when crossing means that Terror can tick twice, causing massive damage to anything that attempts to run across. This isn’t good for sustained damage, but hitting everything that walks by for 3k damage is still pretty good. If you have a particularly mobile boss and good teammates, they can run that boss through the spectral wall over an over again, giving themselves protection while causing 3k damage to that boss with each passing. Otherwise, putrid curse becomes a bit more valuable and Signet of Spite becomes more valuable, but again I say condition necros won’t see much of a buff. But with the powerhouse that is epidemic, I’m not sure they need one.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I forgot about Torment. Right now this condition is shaping up to be one of those conditions that doesn’t have an adequate way of stacking, and so unless the few paltry skills that get it can do it well, it won’t contribute significantly to necromancer DPS. On the bright side, it does give condition necros something to do while in Death Shroud.