Guild Wars 2

In light of the recent update, which hurt necromancer to the point where I’m going to continue not touching this game until after the expac launches, I wamted to point out a similar trend that happened pre HoT. Before HoT launched, Necromancer was nerfed to oblivion. Terrormancer was shreded, everything else got better, Master of Corruption became the biggest joke trait in gw2, allowing Necromancer to kill themselves at record speeds.
This time is very similar. I am appalled by the changes to SoS, which takes plague signet to MoC levels of stupid while also removing the one thing that made the signets good in the first place. On top of that, the straight up removal of Vital Persistence just makes every build worse.
Having learned more about game design in college, I can’t help but notice all the terrible choices being made here. When you nerf more than you buff to such a significant degree, you lose the support of your community. Personally, I’m not playing this game again until the profession balance reaches a more coherent destination.

Couldn’t agree more, not only using signet of suffering grandmaster in combination with plague signet a complete joke but they also nerfed vital persistence which makes many other skills and traits also worst. As a side note I have not seen buffs to power reaper.
I am not playing this game till they fix this.

The problem that a lot of people are seeing is what Necromancer has always been known for: Open world durability with low-to-moderate damage. The issue arises when ANet takes steps to reduce the durability of Shroud and a Necromancer’s reliance on the mechanic, but doesn’t actually replace what was lost. For all intents and purposes in this patch, builds that weren’t running Vital Persistence saw no significant changes, while builds that were running Vital Persistence had their sustain reduced rather drastically. This means that the identity of Necromancer is muddied even more than before: now we’re in a position where we’re not as durable as we could be before, but our damage still sucks. It’s one thing if you try to craft a different identity, but to maintain the same identity you had before, just a worse version of it, the community is able to feel that. And it feels bad.

I’ll be honest, I have no issues with the Signets of Suffering change, even though I used it to achieve very disturbing results. The larger ensemble issue that I see here is that what we saw last time was a modification of synergies, what we see this time is a modification of mechanisms. What I mean by this is that last time, we saw things like Dhuumfire change because the correlation of Death Shroud to Reaper Shroud meant that if Dhuumfire was good for Death Shroud, it was broken for Reaper Shroud, and so got preemptively changed (read: nerfed) in order to accommodate the upcoming addition of Reaper. This time around, since the correlation of mechanisms is having Shroud versus not having Shroud, a much more drastic change to the functionality of our class, we are seeing larger changes to functionalities where there will be conflicts with one versus the other, and for the time being that means making the picture as it is currently painted uglier.

It’s probably like that, we will obtain good things from the next expansion.
There also will be a rework for the Reaper, to make it totally Power based.

The problem is that now the necromancer is total garbage until the expansion. We have to play more than a month with the worst necromancer ever appeared, with traits reworked without any wisdom (plague signet that steal 2 condi while in shroud is a suicide) or made purely to make Scourge better than the Reaper and Core (Vital Persistance)

We can only hope. Also because pre-Hot the necro was not so bad, able to kill all the enemy condi spec. Right now the necro/reaper is worst than the necro pre-hot.

Till the expansion we can do nothing more than play with what we have.

With ignorant widespread changes like this (that includes quite a few classes) how many xpac purchases do you think they lost. The negative to positive responses is probably 90/10 for this “balance” AND scourge. If you hear something enough (complaints about this balance) then there is probably something to it. It won’t matter though since nobody from Anet will ever have an intelligent conversation about such changes. We will always get “here’s the changes….deal with it or don’t play” mentality

Well, I’d have explain that a bit differently but it work as well…

Signet of Suffering was overstepping the boundaries of the next e-spec. Because this e-spec have traits that make the shades corrupt boons and grant might… See? SoS in a nutshell.

Lich form change is meant to allow a shroud/transform feeling with modertly high damage by combining the effects of lich form and desert shroud.

Change on other spectral skills are mainly convenient change to make those skill pay off without the investment of a trait while subtly introducing in a skill that is supposed to easily recharge LF. (Except that Anet never listen to the fact that the issue of the skill is it’s inability to connect reliably. That’s your gacha skill!)

The various stacks of torment added talk for themself.

And a few shroud traits have been modified to make sure that they are appalling with the shade mechanism.

The other changes just make sure to add insult to injury.
- Shadowfiend underperformed due to it’s attack speed. Slow hard hitting thing don’t work in game we all know it intimately.
- Spitefull Spirit gain bug fix. Yeah! that took them all this time to allow this trait to grant retal again. A bug fix…
- It took them years to discover that nobody was using spiteful renewal and they decided to add the effect on healing skills. I hope the effect apply after all the effects of the necromancer’s wonderfull skills are applied. Maybe that way I won’t have 10 vulnerability stacks on me after healing myself.

- Ritual of life… revive trait… Life from death… revive trait… Yes, they buff our unwanted support. because they still think that revive is wanted. They still think that going to the fight by assuming that your allies will be downed is the right state of mind for a necromancer.

- Vampiric ritual. Actually this one made me laugh. Now PvE players have 5 seconds prot from it instead of 3 seconds… awesome. And they double siphon effect… well that might allow the necromancer to survive a little longer.

A lot of those changes are disappointing, especially when we’ve seen the Scourge spec, especially when there are people that think that the scourge spec could be a support spec. However, none of those change none of those change will allow this spec to stand it’s ground as a support in PvE. The scourge as it stand will only shine in wvw and maybe in high level fractal (which is basically nothing new for the necromancer).

Before HOT there were threads on the forums where we could interact with developers. That’s missing here. Things are much worse now.

Some core issues were resolved, and we got input on why, for example, the developers will never allow axe to be a “good” weapon.

Second, people were excited for reaper. It solved the problem of not having a dash, having poor access to CC, having poor access to AoE, and having no stability. Who is excited for scourge? It’s got all of the issues of base necromancer, turrets that nobody wants, and 5 new buttons on the keyboard that existing necromancers don’t have muscle memory for (making the necromancer have more buttons in the rotation than elementalist & the new more complicated rotations with these buttons doesn’t do anything new).