Tl;dr What can they give necro that will stick to the design they want (low mobility, slow but hard attacks, very selfish oriented, debuffer not buffer) that will give it valuable use in PvP tournaments?
Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the profession due to the recent specialization reveal. I’ve been seeing a lot of PvE threads discussing how to make the necro more wanted in groups, but I haven’t seen as much talk about the PvP necro.
If you really think about it the necro suffers from the same problems in PvP as PvE, being they don’t have the stuff meta builds currently do. We lack mobility besides pre cast ports. We have no active defense or sustain. We have slow cast times and avoidable attacks. We have long cooldowns/ramp up time on our burst. We start matches with no lifeforce, and it’s hard to generate for condi builds. We have gimmicky things like lich form, procs, and our downed state damage keeping us relevant. I don’t think many necros like that we have such cheesy things, but it’s all we have. We need the most support given to us even though most of our builds never spend time on point because against any decent team you will be focused first and hard, and we also have the hardest time being peeled off for due to no heals in death shroud, our bad mobility, etc.
Power necro is our best build currently. Lich form swings team fights. Life blast hits hard. Our wells are also very nice cleave on downed/area denial. The 3rd utility is usually a preference. Most people will take a stunbreak so you’ll see like Spectral walk/armor/wurm. The problem is how easy it is to kill a power necro. If you get focused there’s literally nothing you can do. Our defenses are bad, we don’t get heals while bailing in DS. Now I honestly don’t see much of a problem with this since we are zerker. The problem it feels like is classes like thief/mesmer/guardian all have nowhere near the same risk as running zerker. I’m not sure if this is more of a necro needs buffed or other classes toned down sustain wise. Of course you can’t really balance defense/sustain when 2 of the classes have access to great in combat mobility/stealth.
For condi necro damage wise we don’t have a very good condi build right now stacking mainly bleeds from scepter 1, and the occasional torment from DS 5. With the amount of condi clears provided by shoutbows alone it’s very hard to be useful in team fights. Ele and Engi and Guardian also all have group cleanses which basically will negate any condi build. Do people think this is more of a the meta classes are too well balanced and these classes are too good, or what specifically could be buffed to help condi necro breach in/help change the meta? I know some people seem to think reaper dhuumfire is going to be amazing but I’m not so sure. I still find it ridiculous incendiary powder still exists after what happened to dhuumfire and that our nerfs never got fixed but that’s another discussion.
For MM necro I have my doubts about an AI build ever being useful in PvP. For one the minions of any profession all seem to have random phases where they will or won’t work. They’ll almost always be aoed and a casuality in team fights. And mobility wise they’re not very good because they’ll get stretched out. They can excel at 1v1s on point that I’ve seen, but judging from how many of the PvPers see AI I don’t think Anet will have have another turret level of usefulness into a profession. I know it’s not as passive as people to make it out to be, but I’m not sure of how it’d ever get into a meta.
Any type of defensive/bunker necro I will never see happening atm. The incoming damage reduction modifiers seem like a step in the right direction since they seem to not want to give us blocks/invuln/vigor, but I still have my doubts.
Basically from the tone of this post I guess I’m feeling either the other classes have too much or we just have too little. It seems silly to think that only the necro and maybe to an extent the ranger are the only professions balanced correctly, so I lean more toward the we don’t have enough. I know a lot of numbers and traits haven’t been finalized, but judging from what we saw from the core trait revamp and specializations so far, it seems like a bigger power creep is coming into PvP. Reaper was very aesthetically pleasing, but it can’t save the profession and the core problems. I know things are still subject to change but I think the other classes getting power creeped after already being ahead of us by so much and not having a design that seems to conflict with most game modes will leave us in the same spot as now.
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