Guild Wars 2

Since they nerfed Weakening Shroud I find myself rarely entering DS. A condition build loses a lot of bleed stacks when entering DS, Weakening Shroud made up for it by inflicting 2 (4) bleed stacks, so I used to stack 2 (4) + 3 (5) when entering DS, casting Dark Path and some extra stack when my life force wasn’t full with Life Transfer crits.

So DS was sort of included in my rotation, it was like stack some conditions, enter DS, stack some more while mitigating damage, exit and stack more and so on. It was a fun play style, to the point I used to assign 20 points to Soul Reaping.

Now I actually feel discouraged to use it since I don’t trait Weakening Shroud anymore so by entering DS I would lose a lot of my damage. DS became just a “oh crap” button for me, I use it only when I’m low heath in the hope my cooldowns will be over before my life force is or when I need to interrupt, but for the whole time I’m in DS I’m doing close to 0 damage and I’m just waiting there since I don’t have anything to do while in DS.

Consequently, playing Necromancer became less and less fun for me and I find myself rarely logging the character that had basically become my main. Anyone else?

Anet have sent a clear signal that they don’t like conditions.

There’s now tons of condition removal, conditions have been nerfed across the board and there’s even condition immunity now.

I would switch to power and (as much as possible) enjoy your Necro again.

I won’t build a power necro. I have 6 80 and geared classes, and I already have 3 power specced characters. I raised a necromancer specifically because I wanted a condition aoe class, I have no interest for another power spec…

The weakness reduction was the biggest hit to it imo. Now it runs out before they can even walk a few steps to land the hit, so it might as well not even be there. I’m not saying the loss of the bleeds isnt detrimental to it, but bleeds can be reapplied easy enough. You only get one 2 second shot at trying to negate that burst on you now though with the non-existant weakness.

Druss.6917:

The weakness reduction was the biggest hit to it imo. Now it runs out before they can even walk a few steps to land the hit, so it might as well not even be there. I’m not saying the loss of the bleeds isnt detrimental to it, but bleeds can be reapplied easy enough. You only get one 2 second shot at trying to negate that burst on you now though with the non-existant weakness.

I agree and the loss of weakness is the reason why I don’t trait it anymore. Even if they let 2 bleed stacks 10 secs, what would be the point to enter DS, since you could stack those bleeds without losing Life Force with AAs? Meanwhile, before the nerf you could stack bleeds, absorb damage through Life Force and still have damage mitigation once you left DS.

Still better than any other trait at that spot.

alanis.6094:

Still better than any other trait at that spot.

Not if you running power builds with wells…
But jokes a side for condi necros the rest is useless or highly situational

This trait was far too strong and needed a nerf. The only problem is they balanced it assuming NtD.

Bump weakness up to 3s, make ICD 9s (to bar NtD being an issue) boom good trait again.

I still don’t really get ‘how’ this was sooo OP.
Other class’s can maintain 100% weakness up time, from weapons. Thief even on auto-attack.

That it was close to meele ‘hug’ range. In a tree that’s condi/ranged. Was a little weird. (As Power is meele ranged weaps)

That we had to invest traits, were forced to pickup bleed on crit, (which in power builds, usually just hinders the groups by removing 1 stack of bleed on crit, for like ~100 dam).

Anyways what the dev’s said:

“This trait as it currently stands on live is a borderline grandmaster trait. It is near 100% AoE weakness uptime for a small investment. The new version is still probably worthy of master tier with almost 50% AoE weakness uptime. This line has a lot of powerful traits, but suffers from having only 1 choice at grandmaster tier.”

On the trait line:

“I feel like Spectral Attunement and Master of Corruption could be adept tier, but they would be really strong there and we would have to move 2 traits up to accommodate them. If we did that the first candidates are Chilling Darkness and Weakening Shroud (closer the old version). This is totally worth a discussion, but at the end of the day all master tier traits in this line are overshadowed by Terror which is the real problem.”

On Terror:

“I can’t tell you how long we debated moving this trait to grandmaster tier last time around, and this time again. The problem is a huge % of Necromancer builds are hinged on this trait. There is a gaping hole at grandmaster here with Withering Precision (barely worthy of adept tier in our opinion), however we were really hesitant to either move terror and didn’t have a good alternative for redesigning Withering Precision”

On Death Magic line, but sota a closer to the talk & I think encompasses what they are saying overall:

“This line receives a lot of discussion as well, but any proposal we talk about always ends up with more work than we have time to build, much less test. "

Anet ran their uptime calculations using max +cond duration. No comment from me, havn’t tested it, but it explains why the weakness duration is so short.

Bweaty.9187:

I still don’t really get ‘how’ this was sooo OP.
Other class’s can maintain 100% weakness up time, from weapons. Thief even on auto-attack.

And? Its not like it is all that difficult to maintain high uptime on our own either, if you want to look at actual builds.

Look at the Thief trait that causes weakness, since its the only other reliable weakness on-trait (that I know of) that isn’t our GM trait (which, btw, is strictly WORSE than the 10 point for uptime, even now). It is base of 27% uptime. Ours is a base of 20% uptime, with a bleed thrown in as well. Very comparable uptimes, especially considering theirs is slightly more expensive and ours can be significantly buffed.

But this trait was too good in sPvP, which is where balance happens. Every high tier Necro I’ve talked to since the patch agreed that it needed a nerf (and we all agree we’d have preferred they drop the ICD to 9s and upped the base weakness to 3).

And…
There’s 9 skills on weapons that require no traits. One’s that allow for 100% up time of weakness at 1,200 range with auto-attack.

What’s the numbers on every high tier necro? Didn’t I hear the dev’s say it’s less than 2% of players that play GW2 for mostly sPvP?

Well I’m glad they focus on such a huge issue to soo many of there players.
It was worth getting a nerf on something that’s weaker than others auto-attacks, so the top tier pvp’ers are happy. Glad they didn’t waste there time on something like making a pvp round that wasn’t stand in the circle, or make a score board that says you didn’t do terribly bad for standing in the circle the longest…