Guild Wars 2

These are things I have noticed while playing tournaments on my Necromancer, has to do with traits, things that I don’t think are working correctly and things I believe might be more beneficial to the class and play style of the game.

I will start off with Corrupt Boon , the utility that seems to work about roughly 60% of the time. One thing I have noticed is that it gets obstructed by the ground just like an engineer’s net shot can get obstructed and just behaves strangely. Which is in terms with people saying this spell is an “invisible projectile” however it can pass through Sanctuary and other projectile barriers. Some information on how this spell actually performs would be much appreciated because seeing it obstructed on a piece of floor is not very fun. Personally I think it should behave like Epidemic as it is a corruption skill.

Second matter is the Terror trait (VI) in curses. It says that it will make fear deal damage which it does and increase damage by 50% if there is another condition on the target, which it does. However I have 1406 condition damage (and the trait that increases Fear Duration by 50%) and when I cast doom on a target with no other condition it ticks once for 784 damage; when I cast doom (or fear mark) on a target with another condition on them it ticks twice dealing 1117 damage a tick for a total of 2234 damage per fear with having no extra duration on the fear which makes no sense to me so some insight on how this trait works would be fantastic as well.

Finally I would like to give just an opinion about a trait that I use most often which is Epidemic a 15 second cooldown 1 second cast spell that transfers all conditions on your target to all enemies. Now I think it would really benefit gameplay and lead to smarter gameplay if the cooldown was doubled to 30 seconds and the cast time reduced to 1/2 of a second making the Necromancer use it more strategically however it would have a much higher success rate. I can’t tell you how many times I am just about to get a great epidemic off and it all gets cleansed a split second before it finishes casting due to random condition removal. Just a food for thought but I think it would dramatically increase how people play the class and make it a smarter gameplay. Please give me feedback on what you guys think of this.

Please leave any questions in the comment section or message me if you have any questions about sPvP Condition Necromancer builds, I would be more than happy to answer.

For the Terror, it has to do with how conditions are counted. When ticking things are applied to a person (conditions/boons) then everything else that is applied later ticks at the same exact time. This means that if you apply 1 stack of bleeding, then apply a 1.5 second fear 0.7 seconds later, the fear will last until the 2.2 second mark; ticking twice.

For epidemic, it really needs smaller CD with the way it works. You just need to plan ahead, and right now with the low CD there isn’t a huge problem with missing one every once in a while.

Gibbly.5480:

I will start off with Corrupt Boon , the utility that seems to work about roughly 60% of the time. One thing I have noticed is that it gets obstructed by the ground just like an engineer’s net shot can get obstructed and just behaves strangely. Which is in terms with people saying this spell is an “invisible projectile” however it can pass through Sanctuary and other projectile barriers. Some information on how this spell actually performs would be much appreciated because seeing it obstructed on a piece of floor is not very fun. Personally I think it should behave like Epidemic as it is a corruption skill

So Im not going mad. Leveling a necro in WvW at the moment and my corrupt boon fails more often that it succeeds. I thought I was newbing it up, but glad Im not the only one that has issues with it. Extremely annoying bug/issue/design

Yes Corrupt Boon as always been a hit and miss, I have noticed you are much more likely for it to work when you are closer to your target, which is really not great because as a Necromancer you want to stay away if you are condition spec.

However I don’t think Epidemic should be reduced, this will lead to mindless gameplay and make the game dull not to mention really overpowered if we could Epidemic even more often. From my past experience in games when you have a problem like this the solution has been to decrease the amount of times you can do a certain skill but increase the success rate, makes for a smarter player; this is strictly in tournaments though, can’t speak for hotjoins, WvW, or PvE as I don’t play those competitively. In my opinion anything that leads to gameplay that is just mindless will lead to a bad game because then you get those “faceroll” classes that kitten everyone off and make the game less enjoyable. However if you get out played and the opponent sees you used and Epidemic skill at the correct time when you needed to it will show a much higher level of player skill and awareness of the fight. Eventually this will progress skill/gameplay in the game making it more enjoyable to play because you will have to be smart with how you play instead of just popping everything whenever the cooldown is up.

Sorry, I didn’t mean that epidemic should have an even lower CD than now, I meant that you should not increase the CD, for really no reason. An instant cast with a longer CD does not make it more of a skill to use, and in fact is a huge nerf. A skilled player that is smart about when they cast epidemic right now can spread conditions every 15 seconds; with your suggestion even someone who knows the perfect time to use it will only be able to do so every 30 seconds.

Right now epidemic is far from mindless, you have to anticipate any cleanse skills being used soon, and almost preempt your team’s big condition burst. You can easily be a noob and use epidemic on CD, and having it have an instant cast will just mean people will use it the second they see a target with a bunch of conditions, without needing to put any thought about their cleanse rotation or your team’s condition rotation.

I understand where you are coming from it just seems that during this one second cast everything gets cleansed right as I am about to finish no matter how perfectly I time it. I would love for them just to make epidemic a lower cast time but it would then be overpowered. (even though the cast time for epidemic underwater is 1/2 second which makes no sense). I am trying to find a common balance in terms of higher success rate and amount of power, you want it to be balanced because at the moment splash condition removal or just straight condition removal because most classes have a form of group condition removal making it almost impossible to be able to have an open box of no possible condition removal at all. Timing is obviously key at the moment for epidemic however the way the game is working at the moment it makes it very difficult to land just due to randomness or constant condition removal.

I’m all in favor for the epidemic CD to be slightly reduced to even 3/4 a second. The one second cast time as you have said is a pain at times. That being said reducing the cast time would make the skill OP imo. It’s already borderline OP because of how much damage it puts out when you get a solid epidemic off.

It is certainly difficult to time right now, but that is what really separates the great from the average (or bad) in using epidemic. 1 second is a huge cast time, but honestly as necro’s we should be used to it; a lot of our bigger skills have long cast times. As for group removal, its just the current meta of the game. Even a not-so-good epidemic can still drop 10 bleeds and various other conditions on a group, which is hardly bad at all (that is 50 bleeds, even if they only last 5 seconds that is HUGE damage).

Def not in favor of a 30 sec cooldown on epidemic. With its current cooldown most of the bleeds you spread are gone by the time epidemic recharges. Which is perfect since u can bust it out again. I dont think its OP either since conditions can be removed easily. The damage done from spread bleeds slowly gets weaker dps as the bleeds end, since it is spread at current duration(unless you hav a ton of condi duration). You can expect an immediate drop in dps soon after the bleeds are spread since usually about 3 bleeds end right off the bat(at least most of the time for my setup). I say leave it as is. I really want to see some changes to other utilities so they would b on par with bip and epidemic :]

Good feedback, it really is frustrating at the moment with how Epidemic works in the meta. And in terms of player skill, not really necessary to be honest, its mainly luck; if it just happens that the other players are not around or not in the proper attunement or just missed the cleanse. I would say that 50% of it is skill and the other 50% is just luck from randomness (things like 2 conditions removed every 10 seconds). Which is possible to time but with all the other removals near impossible unless in a 1v1.