Guild Wars 2

Good day everyone…

Some of us were pleased with the december 10 patch, most of us were displeased…
Initially i didn’t want to say anything about it, i waited to see what the other usual Guild Wars 2 content producers have to say, and strangely no one has yet addressed some of the things in the patch…
It is a major patch that i believe demonstrates a lot of things… about the direction of the game, both PvP and PvE.

So i took the liberty of explaining some of the things that this patch tells me personally when it comes to the necromancer, but also when it comes to the game’s balance in general.

Overall PvP balance, bugs and the necromancer… after the dec 10 patch

This video is for anyone who wishes to become seriously involved in PvP, especially as a necromancer…
I know that i have not spoke about everything in this video, because i did not want to make it a 3 hour long video, but i have touched a few very important aspects regardless…

Feel free to leave feedback here, on in the comment section on youtube… i am really looking forward to what all of you think… especially those who still defend the patch…
I wish to have a long constructive thread, build in a civilized manner… so with that being said, let the feedback commence.

I completely agree with what you said, and I think that this whole “blanace patch” is a complete flop. I do not understand why the reduced amount of bleeding from all the skills on which the build is based. It seems to me also that the AN simply has no idea how to balance a necromancer, and where to put him.
After the patch I played dozens of games, and I was wondering what is wrong. (I did not read the patch notes) because I was sure that the change will only Staff 2.
What was my surprise when my burst is cut by half
Generally, the necromancer again as a player was forced to switch to MM, but as it showed in the film, playing MM is exactly how the RNG, you never know what you will draw: D

Clear and honest video,

You have basicly touched on the most general reason why necromancers are up in arms.

I believe it is time to really bring our “bugs” and other issues to the attention of the balance/skill creating team.
That is what bothers me the most, filling out bug reports that will be buried under all the pve bugs reports flowing in every patch.

The same is with all those “big balance patches” every few months they making some class usless, and need to wait again few months and praying, that maybe today i will back to game.

lol@AN

Dear Nemesis!

I agree with you on most points, the Weakening Shroud nerf is really like a raging guy’s work who can’t play properly, and I won’t comment on Diamond Skin, because I don’t want to be vulgar.

I’ve been watching your videos for roughly about a year now, and for the first time I think your maths has a flaw in it: you compare active skills to a passive trait.

Duumfire in my oppinion is a passive trait, because all you have to do to proc it is to attack the enemy somehow, and that’s a thing everybody does, so as long as you attack it will be used on CD. Even if your opponent dodges/has condi immune when you would crit and it would proc, it won’t because it’s passive, so it just waits for its turn, uses itself roughly perfectly every time, independent on skill level. The only true counterplay to it is condition removal.

All the skills that have been nerfed are active skills, you press a button to make them work, yes even terror is sort of an active skill, because you have to press a button, and time it properly, because enemy can dodge it, be immune to it, etc, you actually need skill to use them, and not waste them. And in addition to that they are not necessarily used on CD. For example in some scenarios when my opponent is squishy and easy to CC I don’t even use Mark of Blood at all, so in thoose fights the recent MoB nerf don’t really has an effect on me. Grasping Dead, Doom, and Weakening Shroud are a differend cup of tea, because they are almost used on CD, because they are key spells to the terrormancer, but still the enemy can dodge/immune them. The counterplay to them is dodge, condition immunity(if timed well even the best players can waste a CD to it), and condition removal.

To sum up, you can’t really compare toose skills, but we are in a worse position then we were before Dumbfire was added, less build diversity, and less skill needed to play, but this is something that’s happening to every profession: Necro – Dumbfire, Warrior – Heal Signet, Elementalist – Diamond Skin

I really don’t like where this game is going.

I can’t get my head around how Anet talks about Balance then in the next sentence release a Patch that completely destroys the capabilities of one or more classes leaving them beyond vulnerable to most other classes.

Necromancers… I played necro before the patch.. I had almost no issues killing thieves or eles. unless they where really good or running a strong group composition.

which is how it should be. Good vs Good = good fight.

Since the patch Decent thieves have become unkillable.
They stealth so often you don’t have enough time to target them and get a cast off.
There IS NO BALANCE about that.

I would have to build specifically to kill thieves which would leave me at a disadvantage against other classes.

This is NOT how balance works folks. I don’t care who you are… what degree you have in from school. its simple common sense.

The word Balance insinuates Equality. each spec/class combination should be capable of killing the other spec/class combination at ALL times. 100% without question.

Elementalists…. This new diamond skin crap makes them IMMUNE?? to conditions.
What then does a condi mancer do?
Since one who is built for Condi has NO way to hit a player for 10% of his health with a single shot. Sure I could D/S then Life blast which is always get dodged then they charge and stun you. ultimately wasting what little Life pool you have built up and you’re back to throwing conditions at an immune target.

So in Anets view.. to balance the game we should Force the Necro into a POWER build.

maybe I don’t LIKE to run the power build. its not my perfered playstyle.

So I guess I can put the necro away and play something else?

Necro gets a healing signet.. that heals when you are attacked. for less than 1/25th of what you normally get hit for in wvw. It doesn’t heal on Condi attacks.
It doesn’t siphon heal when the necro attacks.. nor does it heal passively.
It should act like the warrior signet. THAT would make it viable
otherwise it’s 100% worthless to necros. period.
It’s also trash as group support.
I’m better off CC’ing a problem target than trying to heal my allies with this stupid signet while being at risk of getting destroyed myself.

You guys really have no idea what you are doing.
Stop releasing crap you haven’t tested in a REALISTIC manor.

Hello,

I think Anet could change lot’s of things on the necro for more diversity of viable builds… Today there are two diferent builds … one is with conditions and the other is with pure berzerker ability… they killed one of them, so…

Yes ok there is some hybrid builds … but the problem is that patch have an impact on all builds with conditions…

And i’m sorry to tell that i do not consider the MM build like a competitive one… minions are buged as hell like the first day of the game,they are never here when you need them and gives you gameplay with no reactivity, just a lot of crap on the screen for the enemy.

I am, personaly, waiting for new traits and skills who will permit to play with other builds with for example the use of the dagger on the main hand or the possibility to play with a vampiric build without having to kill enemy by “sleeping”.

The conditionmancer was realy a little bit overpowered in my opinion but … dat nerf…
The new heal is not that bad, i was realy excited when i saw the name of it. After some uses i realized that was a situational one who takes his sense in pve.

Same problems as the beginning but still no solutions for the necro.

I’m sorry for the bad english but i have the impression that my forum is never read by some guys of Anet staff… so i had to try here^^.

Thanks for a great review.

But just something to add, about dumbfire. You cant just look the damage (or passive-active). One of the focus of cond builds before that was to apply bleeds from different sources, because the duration didnt matter much if was cleansed. The buff dumbfire also brought was to actualy have 1 more condition (with relatively short cooldown) and making ppl cleans condition overall harder. Ofc if you play class with spells like transform ALL conditions into boons and have lots of smaller condition remover the fight would be more or less balanced (speaking in a very broad way). But if you fight a build or class that doesnt have acess to strong condition remover/immunity you would completely destroy him.

And this thing also makes the big gap between builds and harder to balance. At old necro you just had to use your cleansing wisely (if you were a class with little acess to that) and necro himself had hard time against those who could cleans realy fast and often or could burst you down fast enaugh while you could hardly apply conditions to them (aka specific thief build).
The terror damage was in my opinion too high, or at least it should be moved higher up the traitline (i dont say the “necro damage” was too high).

In my opinion the bigest mistake anet made was to give us fire dmg and not balanced us with what we had before. And also as nemesis said in video about spliting spells to pve and pvp. So confusing :p.

I dont play team arena (since dont have team) after we got solo arena and i am not top 100 player either. I dont play condition necro since little after dumbifre and i dont play minion master either (i did try it tho). I was playing around chill hybrid build for some time until i discovered this build

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW3djMaV6Zaab07JEoH5St4MRFQGqHuD78hA-TsAA2CnIqRVjrGTNyas1MoYRxuAA

With this build you do good damage and you are not so squishy. Just today i survived focus fire with around 60-70% life force from 3-4 ppl while was immobilized and they could barely break it (after they used all their usefull damaging skills). With this build you should stay also in where the fight is thickest since when you activate 2 wells -> ds -> ds 4 you do so much aoe damage while you regenerare lots of life force from crits and ds 4. So in one way necro is atrition class, just not in condition build (or at least you have to sacrifice lot of damage for lf generating spells/traits).
Only thing bug me too much as it should is that life siphion doesnt work while in ds.

Also i think i didnt hear in video about 1 more nerf (or i missed it?). The nerf of corrupt boons to 5 max. Now its completely useles :p, never removes stability or the thing you need the most :p. Or was that before dumbfire? Also dont know why they didnt also change spells that convert all conditions into boons to 5 max :o.

Just my opinion. And sorry to hear you are taking break from necro pvp, i also like to theorycraft builds by myself so am sad to see that, since i enjoy your guides specialy about necro, my fav class.

edit: oh and dont forget ppl of damage increase due to added torment.

Thank god im not the only one feeling like this… Prior to the dhuumfire/terror nerf, i felt like a boss. Sure certain builds smashed me but i still felt like i was strong in most situations. Then came the dhuumfire/terror nerfs. I thought to myself, “ok i can still do this. Definitely harder but im up to the challenge”. And then this patch…. I feel so watered down that i get my kitten handed to me by engi’s/ele’s that have condi immunity, mesmers now have great access to condi removal, stun lock warriors still ruin me if i make too many mistakes – even after their damage nerfs… Not to mention that so many of our skills have rediculously long cast times and can be easily dodged, and as you mentioned bugs around our signets etc… Its almost like if you don’t get your spite sig off its gg for you. Terrormancer build doesn’t really feel viable anymore which is sad because it was tons of fun :/. And i REFUSE to play crappy mm builds. Switched to mesmer for the time being, but miss my necro :<

It is a bit disheartening all the things that are being done in these balance patches. I myself quit playing the game a few months ago, sans those OCPD times where I want to re-evaluate a build.

The scariest thing about this patch is that it was open to player feedback before implementation. I wasn’t around for this discussion, but I always assume that I am not the sole voice of reason regarding balance issues. People voiced their concerns on the matter, and yet Anet still produced a patch like this. The fact that Nemesis is losing hope on the issue hits me hard, since he is the one who made me optimistic about Necromancers in the first place.

Take, for example, the change to weakening shroud. This skill was the greatest tool for attrition that necromancers had. Without blocks, vigor, skill dodges, invulnerability, or massive heals, the necromancer’s only defenses were spots of protection, alongside of the very finite and deteriorating defense from death shroud. Now, widely available weakness for Necromancers made sense because of this:

A)It provided greater attrition to a class that is otherwise defenseless.
B)It was a debuff, making it useful for a team environment.
C)It wasn’t OP, since weakness could be cleansed or transferred
D)and it wasn’t OP because weakness is the weakest form of defense in the game.

Instead of making Weakening Shroud require greater trait investment, they just nerfed it into the ground, so now you’ll need 30 trait points, 100% condi duration somehow alongside of this, and then you’ll have to spam the skill at point blank range every 7 seconds in order to be… still nearly useless. But hey, since it has rapid application + short duration, now condition cleanses and transfers are meaningless against it.

It isn’t just the changes to necromancers. The direction this game is being taken is for hyper specialization, and going for too much specialization just leads to paper/rock/scissors gameplay. Skills require traits to be useful, and those traits require other traits to be useful, and those traits are assuming specific food and sigils/runes to be present, and it is done assuming you have other team mates who are doing certain things with their trait dependent trait dependent skills…

The cornerstone of diversity is freedom of choice. If skills and traits were made to function independent of each other, then you could pick the skills and traits you wanted, leading to diversity. But when you make a skill require a trait which itself requires a trait which also requires food and runes, this is not diversity. It is constraints.

Worst part is, I’m starting to believe that Anet is beyond hope now. If they make a massive thread asking for feedback, and upon getting that feedback still make horrible updates, then what can I we do? When the sensible is drown out by the selfish, when Anets personal agendas win out over reason, what is there to do?

Man do I miss City of Heroes.

Hail Nemesis!
The video you made is completely true and honest.
And btw, can you pls tell me if your " the ultimate necromancer damage hybrid build v2.0 " is still usefull, because i want my necro to be lvl 80 soon (play some WvW with him), and I’m watching your tutorials for necromancer, because you make the best ones clearly.
Keep up with the good work!
Cheers

Hey Nemesis. Always enjoy your videos. Just one question: when calculating the amount of total damage condition builds have lost since the dhuumfire patch, you did not take tainted shackles into account. What would the damage comparison look like if you include torment as well?

Great video. Some folks in this thread have mentioned other considerations that I think are worth mentioning, but overall, it’s a really interesting perspective on the flow of changes.

Nemesis, i think while its true that we, number wise, now do less damage than before the dhuumpatch there is one mistake you made. Before the dhuumpatch the problem was, atleast in spvp, to get even high bleed stacks as we didnt have that much cover conditions (condition damage wise we were always fine), to protect or bleeds. Now we have torment, burn and better poisen uptime with szepter auto.

But that doesnt change the fact that your conclusions are right.

You hit the nail on the head Nemesis, with all the nerfs to Terror and Grasping Dead and now Weakening Shroud, our damage output is worse than before Dhuumfire, and our survivability much worse. since we have to invest 30 trait points to get the only trait that keeps our damage competitive.

I don’t understand why they don’t see how much harm this one trait has done to build diversity and the class as a whole! People have been saying this for months and theyu’ve been completely ignoring us, even though they’ve been receptive on (a few) other things! Is Dhuumfire some dev’s secret lovechild and they don’t want it harmed or something?

I believe I heard you mention that canceling Signet of Spite would put it on its full cooldown. In WvW just now, however, I cancelled it out of reflex and it just put it on a 3 second cooldown. Is this an sPvP only thing?

Kind of funny… When I first heard that Eles were going to get that immunity to conditions trait, I was playing my ele a lot. Really enjoyed it. But the first thing that came to my head when I learned about that trait was “Darn… now condi necros won’t be able to PvP anymore.”

Your video (and others) have only proven that this is true. A full condi build can’t touch an ele with that trait.

Not sure why you don’t like minion builds, unless it’s because they’re the necro meta (I’ll admit I may have missed an explanation in the video). I have a great time with it in hotjoins, though I still have trouble with some classes. I have to say that once this patch came out I think my minions got a lot… less intelligent. Now they’re just A without the I.