Guild Wars 2

My main is necro with over 200 hours of playtime. I made four alts hoping that I’d slowly level them up, discover more of the different parts of the story, get some crafting done, etc., but firmly set in my decision to play Necromancer as my main class, the same as in GW1. I only started to make alts when my necro hit 80.
I never visited any of the build forums or sites, preferring to do my own research in-game. As an opportunity or an idea came up, I tried to capitalize on it as best as I could on my own. “Oh look, daggers could be fun in melee range with my boatloads of health and healing and condition control.” I thought, and went out to try a dagger/dagger + axe/warhorn build. I wasn’t impressed, but I chalked that one up to gear unavailability. I then tried dagger/warhorn + scepter/focus well support, thinking that pbaoe fields would be effective in buffing the front line and creating combo fields for the engineer, ranger and warrior I often partied with. Wasn’t impressed. The minionmaster with a scepter/focus + staff for both minion heal skills? Yeah, minions are ineffective if they live, are easily killed by stray gunfire, and only ever get me into trouble. A few builds later, I finally came to the scepter/dagger + staff condition spammer. 104 damage bleeds, now we’re talking! Bleeds that last for FIVE whole seconds! With a bit of set up, some preparation and a short window of being left alone, I could even max out 25 stacks of bleeding for a quarter of a second, and then spread the ~14 or so stacks out to multiple targets, plus the poison, chill, blind and whatnot. I thought I was doing good, being effective.
I’m always on TS with my guildies when we’re doing a dungeon. It took about three minutes for me to realize that what my entire build revolves around, massive-damage stacks of conditions, is easily achieved by the party engineer and warrior as an afterthought. “Hey guys, check this out, I can keep 15 stacks on a target PERMANENTLY!” I said. “Yeah. OK. So?” was the almost unanimous response. The warrior crits for 3-4k with his autoattack, I crit for 300-400 with mine. He can stack up to 12 bleeds trivially easy, I can do 15. His tick for 92 damage in a power build, mine tick for 104 in a condition damage build. I wasn’t exactly feeling the love.
I started playing my alts some more. I made a warrior, engineer, ranger and elementalist as well as a guardian up to level 11, but ended up axing that one.
Things. Are. So. Easy. Sure, the elementalist dies to a sneeze, but that’s pretty much the only vulnerability of the class, and when combining earth and water, it’s pretty much nullified. The engineer can stack up conditions like a pro, and when they don’t work or when it’s time to do some burst damage, he can easily switch to grenades or bombs for some pretty sweet DPS. The ranger’s shortbow is trivial to spread conditions with when compared to the necro, and the class is equally resistant to conditions from the enemy. And the warrior? Everything is such a joke. He can kite exceptionally well with bow or rifle, but doesn’t need to, thanks to the highest health and best armor. His axe, sword and greatsword kill enemies faster than a necro can reach five stacks of bleed. Hell, he’s even better at regenerating health, spreading fear and causing bleed than ANY of the necro builds I came up with.
I… have no idea what I’m supposed to do. In dungeons, the only place I shine is the CoF farm runs, the little room when we’re supposed to run around in circles and evade the dozens of elite enemies that spawn; I last eleven seconds more than other players, on average. In a support spec, elementalists, rangers, guardians and engineers are all just flat out better, and all these classes outdo my DPS and control in that same build.
I was hoping that a patch would come out and fix me. Today, I heard from a friend that a massive balance patch, the FIRST, was out, and that it fixed ALL of the classes! YAY! FINALLY! I went to see what was changed. Traits switched around? Better minions? Skill and trait bugs fixed? Maybe even a use for my Axe and Dagger?
I came. I saw. I puked a little into my mouth.

My main is an engineer with over 11 hours of play time. I also have four alts, a necro, a ranger, an elementalist and a warrior.

I empathize with you. My main is a necro also, but I’m much more interested in leveling my ranger alt right now. I really want to be a minion master, but that build just does not work, and the minion’s AI seems to have gone back to the broken state it was in during the first BWE. I’m just waiting for Anet to make necro fun. The potential is there.

I rarely post on official forums but due to the frustration that has been building in me for about 2 weeks (since lvl 80), I thought I would for once.

I agree with this thread and every other thread that has been made about the uselessness of Necromancers. At first I was in my little happy bubble of denial. I thought we were fine.
I do decently in PvP, slowly learned how to counter other profession like Thieves, Warriors. I run a Axe/Focus Dagger/Dagger Power/Tough/Prec build that works pretty nicely.
I do quite well in PvE, I have my bleeds to 101 per tick! I have decent support, my wells are, in my opinion, quite handy. Our Elites are kinda lack luster.. especially our Flesh Golem considering the AI of minions is atrocious. I do not use minions because of that.

However, slowly but surely, I became to notice things. What is the point of a Conditionmancer in any game type when:
1) We stack Bleeds so much SLOWER than any other class
2) We do TINY damage when we’re stacking them

On top of that, 2 of our most important traits don’t even stack. And I’m not talking about PvE or PvP atm, it’s in both.

Seriously, what is the point? I don’t know anything about any other profession because I love my Necromancer. I do not want to reroll. But seriously, how much damage can a Warrior/Engi/Thief do whilst stacking bleeds?

What is the point of trying a Power/Prec build when our TWO burst skills in TWO different weapons do a MAXIMUM of 3000 damage? Not to mention they’re on a giant cooldown and when they are down, yay! 300 damage for the next 15 seconds whilst the Warrior I’m trying to kill who has just as much HP and more armour, is going to slam my face into the ground if I get stack in any form of stun. I’m sure all the PvPers are saying “Death Shroud, stun break” etc. That’s not the point. The point is that I do 3k dmg to these people when they don’t use a CD. They don’t need to. Because we are so weak. What if they use Protection when I did that? 2100 dmg if my math is correct?
That doesn’t even scratch an Elementalist in Fire Attunement.

Fear. Almost the definition of the Necromancer. Why, pray tell, do our 2 Fears last a TOTAL of 2 seconds. 2 Fears. 2 seconds. 1 second each.
Thieves stolen Fear: 3 seconds.
Warrior’s “Fear Me!”: 3 seconds.
What?

Damage is my main concern to be honest. We are out matched by everyone else no matter what we do. Conditions are our forte, yet we’re the weakest in it. We are useless in zergs because bleeds are capped at 25. I love getting bronze because I can’t do any damage!
Suggestion: Lose the cap, use diminishing returns.

Again, I don’t want to reroll. I like my Necromancer. It has flaws, as do all the professions.
But when Necromancers don’t even get a single Mod response in the forums. When GUARDIANS get “Some hammer love” and Necromancers don’t even get acknowledged!

Sorry, Arena.Net. Not good enough. Get your priorities straight. At least TALK to us and let us know what you’re doing.

as a main necro myself i feel the pain. im gholding out that the reason for no necro changes is because there holding out for a bigger change and not bothering with little changes that will still leave them underwealming. ANet always going on about how they wont bother doing somthing unless it can be done right. have a little faith

I agree that the silence on their part atm, is quite frustrating. I only hope the reason they haven’t made any changes is that they’re planning a major class overhaul of the majority of necro skills and class mechanics.

If you’re even reading this forum Anet, just acknowledging the issue would do a lot to reassure the majority of the necro playerbase.

.. haha Vaati, you read my mind .. I was writing the same post, you beat me to it xD

I am almost certain that they are holding out on fixing necros this update because of the sheer amount of update that needs to be done, and that we can expect fixes soon. I gagged a little when I read the update notes myself. I’m happy to wait as I have convinced myself they are going to give us a big fix soon, but they are making me stupidly nervous by not saying anything about what they plan on doing. The silence is killing me.

Really? It made me hopeful. It seems they see the other professions as ones that can be done with quick fixes here and there. That the necro didn’t receive any updates would indicate that it probably needs a lot more work, or is perfect. We know from previous posting by Arena Net they do see the necromancer as needing the most work.

On some level I’m happy that bandaid fixes aren’t being heaved on the class. It obviously needs more love than that, rather than trying to polish a deuce. However, after 75 levels of deuce, I have to shelf my necro. I can totally echo the sentiment that the class is intriguing both in mechanic and concept, and I really hope it can be rescued from the obvious obscurity that it faces.

Going to switch to a guardian I think. I like the idea of a more potent support class. Engineer looks pretty neat, too. I’m going to avoid the cloth caster archetype if only for armor type reasons. Ultimately, I don’t want to spend my time getting my muscle memory acquainted to a class that should be heavily tweaked. I can’t bank on promises…

Anet sold the professions in this game in a way in which each one could be built to play just about any style.

Yet the Necromancer struggles mightily to play any high or burst damage role. Let alone to have it available at a moments notice in any other build that isn’t entirely dedicated to sacrificing everything else just to fail to achieve it equally with others.

The example of the engineer is especially painful, or equally ranger, how they can rival a Necro in condition stacking, but then also flip a switch and turn on high damage almost on demand.

I agree, although I am only level 60 with my necro, it seems every other class in the game is much better at most things than me. I do enjoy playing the condition build, the only thing that sucks is when I come across a quest that requires me to destroy objects with a health bar (walls, turrets, etc.) it takes absolutely FOREVER because no conditions apply to things that aren’t mobs. I’ve spent about 20 seconds whittling something down before and it’ll be at maybe half HP, when a warrior or thief walks up and nukes it the rest of the way down in a few seconds without even using their ultimate.

I’ve literally gone AFK to get a drink when killing objects.

The sad thing is no changes at necro in patch notes

ya killin lvl 78 risens 20 secs using staff to dot them up and then axe for DD…nother play comes by i watch him…3 secs same type of mob…dead… somthen ant right here….necros have always been master DOTers and FEARers…i just dont see that AT ALL. and i dont do alts so im stuck with a REALLY GIM.PED class (necro). during zergs i cant even get enough dmg on a vet to get xp even if im on it from the get go and i pop everything. the only way i get silver or golds on events is if i use SUPER LICH form to do 1.5-3k dmg…then i get to wait 180 secs. sigh*

(side note aperently gim.ped gets edited to kitten..really….sigh*)

It is not often you see a unanimous agreeing response to a QQ thread (albeit well written one). The discussion should be kept up and more constructive feedback provided and I believe ANet will fix Necromancers and bring them up to par with other classes (I’m a very happy panda regarding Heartseeker nerf).

As far as I can spot, major considerations atm seem to be:
- slow DoT build up comparing to other professions , even when those are not in DoT (condition) spec
- DoT damage being too low (given it’s our profession’s defining trait)
- CC skills too short in duration
- minion AI

You forgot traits. Both minor and major traits are either random, non-sensical, or just don’t work. I can think of maybe three that are unique to the necro, helpful and functional right now.

I would like to point out that the increased bleed/condition duration actually does work but does not update the time on the tool tips. Just try it on a mob and mouse over the bleed and you’ll see that the duration does not match the tool tip.

Not saying that I don’t agree with your concerns but I’d like to point out that the condition duration traits actually work.

Yeah, I am happy with the game, just not my class right now.

Have yet to reach 80(71), and haven’t had too much time to pvp(almost rank 10 glory), and have only spent about 10 hours in the WvW areas, mainly EB.

I really enjoy the class as a concept, and love the design style of the scepter a ton, death shroud is interesting, but feels like it is missing a lot of consistent use.

DS I think should be tweaked to me more readily available for one of its first major improvements, it shouldn’t be an after-thought as a design for our class, it should be one of our main attractions.

Mobility could use some work, and getting better at disengaging fights/players.

Our viable roles in tpvp especially could use some bolstering. I am sure many classes would like more options here as well.

After going trough the LvL 30 and 40 instance in story and explorere mode, and trying doing the lvl 50 instance, I kinda felt totaly useless in the group. My dps was just bad compered to the others, my healing hardly helped. And me pulling agro like creasy just being in the area without doing anything, ending up with me on the ground more or less.
Pets AI that is totally broken, it does not need a tweek or small fix, it needs a total overhall. Pets that is useless.

There are so many bugs and problems with the necromancer class and we have not had 1 fix to it since release. Every other class has gotten som small or bigger fixes, but necroes has not been looked at ones.

Rerolled guardian. Cant belive how much healing he has. O.o Who needs a necromancer. A class that is so broken that it is more against the group the helping it in a dungeon.

This is why I’m not playing the game so much anymore. Necro is my main and until it’s fixed, I don’t feel like playing PvE as a subpar to EVERYBODY class. This is probably why I’m dying so much too… other prof just melt enemies before they get a chance to deal damage, whereas with Necro we give them all the time they need. There’s no point on starting another character fr me cause I’ll just being doing everything I’ve done over so many times aleady (replay value is lost on me). And Death Shroud is the most boring, BORING profession mechanic.

I honestly felt more excited about the game when it was in beta than release form. The game is out now. So what? I’ll go back to doing chores or watching tv instead.

I am sad my necro is 37 and i stopped playing him becuase of all the bugs i would like to see a fix. I sure it will in time i hope

I didn’t read your post but i’m starting hating anet… on the otherside all classes got a change except for necro which COULD mean they are chaging the necro completely..if not.. thanks anet for you ignorance

Yeah, that’s how I interpret it: they could fix a lot of the small broken traits and skill aspects but that wouldn’t really do all that much. They must know they nerfed the necro too much since the beta weekends, and they must be figuring out what to revert, whether to do some new traits etc. and it will take a bit of time until they check the balance of it all.
After all they woudlnt want to make another round of changes that turns out to not work, would they?

Although when I am reading other forums I see a lot of people saying dungeons are too easy, not enough of a challenge etc. so perhaps the mistake isnt that the necro isn’t powerful enough but that too many of the other classes turned out to be too easy

On an ironic note, if you go look in other class forums everyone who posts in the forum seems to think their class is the worst and bugged etc.

People in the elem forum claim other classes can kill in 1-2 skills when it takes them longer. They say “how come a necro can kill an elementalist just with the basic scepter skill?”
People in the engineer forum saying their class feels sub par in PVP and PVE.
People in the mesmer forum saying they feel useless in PVE

Maybe it’s just that we’re good at overestimating how “easy” it is for the others, because we notice the times where they get everything right and a bit of luck and they down a whole group in 3 skills, and we don’t notice the other 99% of the time when they bumble about like everyone else?

It’s not hard to realize how that is not the problem here. In the other class forums, if someone says “I think this class is UP and broken and unplayable”, a maximum of 40% of the posts will agree witht he OP, and at least half of those will be the OP bumping his topic and defending his argument.
On the necro board? 97% agree we’re broken.
Hell, necro is the ONLY CLASS that has NO “That class is OP” thread in any other class’ forum. They’re also the only class with no “this class is kinda OP” thread in its forum either.
So no, it isn’t ironic, we’re not overestimating what other people do, and this is not just a huge case of the greener grass effect. This class needs help.

I was so excited to play a necromancer (female of course) and pick up where I left off in GW1.
It seemed that the more I played (up to lvl 50 now) the more disenchanted I became. I am not an expert player by any means but the balanced feel and class power is gone. If in Minion Master spec GW1 was a fine balance keeping your minions alive. You were avoiding damage and pumping life into your creations as they became low on health at the same time watching yours. With other builds you were able to hold your own in any party and you were a respected class.
Now not so much. I have been searching for a powerful build that works for me and I think I have gone thru all available options. I have used Death Shroud a lot and thought that might be the key to this class, but was not impressed. The DPS is just not there. I think back to the first time I used fear and saw last for 2 sec and thought really? That’s useless, maybe it will increase with my lvl? But it does not….
I changed my traits sooooo many times looking for the elusive combination that would flow with the sinister dark power of the class, and I am still looking.
And as I have said in another post, I am very disappointed that the Necromancer class has lost the sinister/gothic/dark look. Anyone else feel the same?

/Shrug

Squeaky wheels get the grease….well eventually I hope….those notes were kinda depressing this week.

While I do at times feel underwhelming, as a vet of the genre I’ve been through way worse. And while I do have alts there’s some funky synergy or perhaps lack thereof that brings me back to my necro.

If those patch notes made you queasy enjoy reading what JonPeters opinion of Necro atm is, I wouldnt get my hopes up about us being balanced DPS wise anytime soon. I was getting depressed playing necro in Group PvE seeing evry other profession doing things we could do just much better but hey i was just gonna wait for that “love” they promised . It seems unlikely we are getting that in the future unless its in another form of “love nerf to the scepter”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/I-play-a-necro-but-I-traid-a-warrior-for-one-play-session/first

Did he just say what I think he said? Did he really just tell the necro community that “the necro is fine, l2p” and this is from a developer! WTF, kitten unprofessional ..

Venom.6189:

Did he just say what I think he said? Did he really just tell the necro community that “the necro is fine, l2p” and this is from a developer! WTF, kitten unprofessional ..

Jon Peters said so during the betas that the necro was hardest in his opinion.

Guess he still thinks it.

Also something aboutmus needing the most love and we all know what came after that, our scepter got nerfed hard

Hope they don’t mess this class up. Warlock was my favorite when i played wow but they tinkered too much and not in a good way seems anet is doing the samething. They’re ex-blizzard? If they are this class might not have a bright furture. lol

Necro is a real mess atm. Enjoying other classes while my 80 necro collects dust. I do alright with PvP and PvE but why put in 500% effort while other classes can do it better and faster with ease.

Beating a dead horse but hopefully ANet gives us the love we deserve.

I stopped reading after the first few posts….. my only complaint is that people seem to think that the elementalist is actually powerful. They aren’t. Go look at their forums. The elementalist is incredibly weak and requires much more work than the necro does.

Demonical.1039:

If those patch notes made you queasy enjoy reading what JonPeters opinion of Necro atm is, I wouldnt get my hopes up about us being balanced DPS wise anytime soon. I was getting depressed playing necro in Group PvE seeing evry other profession doing things we could do just much better but hey i was just gonna wait for that “love” they promised . It seems unlikely we are getting that in the future unless its in another form of “love nerf to the scepter”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/I-play-a-necro-but-I-traid-a-warrior-for-one-play-session/first

I am sorry, but there is not much to master when it comes to the class. You can go condition spec and do sub par dps. You can try a DS spec and basically have the same problem especially because DS may not be available to you when you need it most and minions…well, you have more or less next to no control over your minions. They just attack anyone. And this is actually the worst problem when you want to play with minions – this and that the flesh golem gets killed by water (it is fun when you jump down from the “Raid on the Capricorn” red team start location to see your pet vanish – or to switch into plague form underwater to see ALL pets vanish…kittenthis is so idiotic it hurts)

It doesn’t matter so much for me, however. I play less and less and in October there are games like King’s Bounty: Warriors of the North and X-Com. Why should I invest a lot of time then to level another character, level his crafting and so on only because I was unlucky enough to choose a bug ridden, semi-complete underpowered class?

The Boz.2038:

It’s not hard to realize how that is not the problem here. In the other class forums, if someone says “I think this class is UP and broken and unplayable”, a maximum of 40% of the posts will agree witht he OP, and at least half of those will be the OP bumping his topic and defending his argument.

You have not visited the elementalist forums =p. The sheer amount of complaining on that class is so severe that practically the entire first page is filled with them, and the same ends up happening for a lot of the other GW2 forums as well (GW2guru, for instance), even those where necro complaints are relatively tame.

Honestly, though, I’ve seen people in the necro threads posting “grass is greener” posts about the elementalist that are not even remotely true (there was a post about how elems are good nukers in PvP that pretty much floored me), many of whom have claimed to “play an elementalist”; consequently, I’ve seen people that main elementalists post similar things about necros that sometimes showed blatant lack of knowledge of the class, while claiming that “switching to necros made my soloing much easier!” Perhaps I can’t comment as much from the perspective of other classes, but that alone is making me thing that there is a significant amount of people that are just riding the bandwagon or colored by their own builds rather than the class as a whole.

If nothing else, though, it’s making me want to alt a necromancer to see why the opinions on this forum (necromancers are terrible, period, PvE and PvP) differ so much from the ones on the GW2guru forums (necros are bad in PvP, but is excellent in PvE, easier than the other two scholar classes, and offers plenty of support with dark fields).

(Also, please do not compare experiences against a warrior or guardian, since every class will feel pretty inferior when matched up against those PvE monstrosities =p).

I have a low-level Elementalist alt, and I know they’re not in a great place. I also have an Engineer, who is doing well, and a Warrior and Ranger, who are lulzworthily strong in questing and WvW (haven’t yet dared to enter S or TPVP with them). Necros are, I think, the worst off of the bunch, but Elementalists aren’t far behind.

I have seen some elementalists that can be absolutely devastating in the right hands. However, it requires being able to press like 50 buttons simultaneously and juggling your attunements to get the boons from attunement swapping effectively. Elementalist isn’t broken it’s just a much harder twitch finger based class than anyone to do anything effectively.

@Boz
Elementalistas are fine. Just because you can’t play it well doesnt mean its bad.