Guild Wars 2

Hello,
Since last week, I’ve read multiple QQs, whines and nerf calling for “new” necromancers. People call for witchhunt, not realising that witch was always there. Furthermore, they don’t even know what the real “witch” is.
I’m tired of these nonsenses where people call nerfs for Conditionmancers for dealing conditions and Powermancers for doing direct damage. So I’ve made couple changes, nothing really big, to balance out meta for necromancers as it should be, splitting couple major effects. I’m not a Master of Masters, Pr0 24/7 player or selfcalling The Only Teacher, but I have some experience with necromancer so, in my opinion, these changes are viable and interesting. Keep in mind I’m not an author of all suggestions in here, no, many of them come from other people!

First of, burning. We all know adding this to necromancer has greatly improved Conditionmancer’s spike damage. I’m not a fan of it, but I know 30/20/x/x/x are extremaly viable as going for damage right now. I don’t want Necromancer to lose that condition, my opinion on it is simple: It’s misplaced. But back to subject:

Dhuumfire
Burning does not inflict damage to you. Instead, you get Life Force. If your Life Force bar is full, you get normal amount of damage. Inflict burning (3 seconds) to nearby enemies when you reach 50% health (15 second cooldown).
It’s just my free thought. Generates Life Force, forces you to spend it, increases you survability, grants counterpressure when low on health.

Death Nova
When minion dies, it explodes in cloud of poison and inflicts burning to all nearby enemies. Lasts for 4 seconds.
Minor change, slight improvement to unused Gm trait. Could be interesting

Doom
Make your foe flee in fear. Increased duration when stunned.
Normal: Fear (1s)
Under control effects: Fear (1,5s)
Slight change, reducing offensive valor of Terror builds, however, as we lack Stability, gives a little more space to breath when under crowd-control effects. Valuable change in my opinion

Soul Reaping Master Trait: Terror
Curses Master Trait: Master of Terror
Explanation not needed. Just a simple place-switch, but not really necessary after changes for Dhuumfire

Torment cannot be spreaded with Epidemic
Really necessary change and major “witch” in here. Being able to stack 6 or even more Torment stacks, only by yourself, on any profession with companion is sick as it does around 1k damage per second when moving.

Tainted Shackles- unchanged Very good skill as it is, counter for stealth professions Necros have problem with, attrition skill somehow, needed

Deathly Perception -> Dhuum’s Kiss
Nothing changes, just name. Current is so lame . To be honest, I like this trait. People may complain, but now they’ll complain about every single Necromancer ability or trait. That made DS dps builds viable and I love that in PvE

Feast of Corruption
Strike your target, dealing additional damage and gaining life force for each condition on them. If target has 5 or more boons, strip one.
Minor change, needed IMO after Corrupt Boon nerf. Little more counter for heavy-boonage professions ONLY. Not every class and every spec can get 5 or more boons at the same time, and you strip one, not corrupt. Furthermore, can be blocked or evaded

EDIT:
Protection of the Horde →Price of Failure
When you dodge an attack, steal 10% of attacker’s current endurance for each minion under control (5 second cooldown).
We don’t have access to vigor. Also, that minor trait is kinda…too minor. So, to fix that, I came up with that idea. It gives you profit for evading attacks, makes you to bring more and more minions, it’s not gamebreaking and easily counter-able (Don’t attack Necro with some kind of powerful attack at 100% endurance!). Heck, I think that’s one of my best ideas to fix Necromancers a little bit. In PvE, Mobs would have 100% endurance everytime (for now, dunno, maybe it’ll change) so it’d be really helpful in boss fights. It can be also switched places with current 25 point minor trait. Trait name taken from GW1 Necromancer Curses skill

So that may be it. Necessary changes. Dhuumfire change is very…weird, but I found it interesting and don’t have any other cool ideas (Inflicting Torment with this trait may be good, but… Torment, same as Confusion, lack in PvE and in game with mostly PvE community, It’d be just skipped )

That’s it for now, thanks for reading !

Dhuumfire: nice idea to make it more about lf regen.
Imo this trait shouldn’t allow access to burning at all though…

Death Nova: Interesting… a condi MM.

Doom: intersting idea, could work.

Terror trait switch: No. This would mean you can’t have a condition build without either going 30 in Spite or 20 in Soul Reaping, or both. This would heavily limit build diversity, but as you said… not a necessary change if it wasn’t for Dhuumfire.

Torment – Epidemic: again… not a big issue if you didn’t have 7 sec burning to spread along with it.

Feast of Corruption: Sounds like a reasonable change.

@flow.6043 As for Dhuumfire, Burning here is kinda for situations when you don’t have burning on yourself. It’s something like change from “Don’t stand in fire!” to “Stay in fire, but not too long!”. It’s grandmaster trait so it should be compareable to Close to Death. Plus it puts often counterpressure when you’re focused. Cooldown is pretty low and to gain that burning (not in range, it’s melee range, keep in mind!) you have to bring yourself down to 50% hp which is very risky.
As for Terror switch, I agree, it’s not necessary
For Epidemic Torment – yes, it’s a problem, Rennoko has pointed that somewhere

As for Death Nova – it inflicts both Poison and Burning so it may be worth to consider for more creative builds

Edited, added “Price of Failure” trait fix.

Dhuumfire – Not sure I really grasp the exact suggestion here. So the GM trait is, if you are not full on life force, burning damage will fill up your life force (and not hurt you)? If you happen to be full on Life Force, the burning then deals damage to you? I would wonder how this would work if you get burned while in DS… would it keep your DS going?

The burning in AOE at 50% is meh for me… I don’t like auto activation skills. This would be replacing a rather uninteresting automatic mechanic with another one, that is far less effective. All in all I could say (if I am understanding this one right), that I would avoid this entire tree if this was the change, as would most others. It doesn’t have a strong enough universal application.

I would also severely imbalance us against condition engineers, who wouldn’t really be able to damage us much without their burning proc…. it would open up a lot of problems.

Doom – Good suggestion all around. Makes using the fear in response to a stun/disable more rewarding, and less rewarding to just randomly use it as spike damage. I would almost say you could go 0.75 and 1.5.

*Terror swapped with MOT" – Don’t like this one…. this just would further encourage the old build (now avoiding spite tree), and wouldn’t really change much.

Torment/Shackles Not sure this is necessary outside of SPVP. Right now you cannot avoid torment if you stay with 600 units of the necro; that should change first before we talk about locking it out for epidemic. You can still dodge roll the immobilize, so that part is fine. An easy fix would just be to make torment a stun style debuff that cannot be epidemiced, but again I don’t think its a problem outside of coordinated pvp. Perhaps a split here.

Feast of Corruption – Should be lower, possibly 3 boons. Like the change though, the skill is horribly lacking on a condition build.

Minion thing – no comment here… not really sure how the game would work with that, and it seems like it would just be abused in some odd way to keep people from dodging. Minions are just not really a pvp thing, and I think it is better to focus on keeping them alive in PVE, the only place people use minions at.

At the end of the day, they need to divorce burning and terror. The two biggest spike conditions available is not good.

For Price of Failure I’d disagree. Death Magic atm is a traitline where you go for Greater Marks and that’s it. I’d like to see it being viable. And strictly for the minor trait: It doesn’t really abuse you from dodging since no real competitive build would run like 5 minions. However, it’s really good thing for PvE as it doesn’t stack with Vigor so you can dodge all day around if you have all minions up. On the other hand, it’s small change to really trash trait as it can generate some minor endurance to help you keep on feet (since we don’t have any block etc, more dodging seems legit) and can mess up and slow down some enemies. Better than nothing and good for halfway trait tree line. Most necros in tPvP have at least 2 minions: golem and jagged horror, some bring Flesh Wurm so it can be already 30% more endurance every few seconds for you and 30% less for foe. Still works better in PvE, but it’s not useless in here.

As for Dhuumfire : I’m currently theorycrafting a little bit about it. I’ve been thinking about some kind of Sacrafice/Risk factor for getting Burning but, as said, still working on it
Also, I’ll rework Reanimator

Rym.1469:

For Price of Failure I’d disagree. Death Magic atm is a traitline where you go for Greater Marks and that’s it. I’d like to see it being viable. And strictly for the minor trait: It doesn’t really abuse you from dodging since no real competitive build would run like 5 minions. However, it’s really good thing for PvE as it doesn’t stack with Vigor so you can dodge all day around if you have all minions up. On the other hand, it’s small change to really trash trait as it can generate some minor endurance to help you keep on feet (since we don’t have any block etc, more dodging seems legit) and can mess up and slow down some enemies. Better than nothing and good for halfway trait tree line. Most necros in tPvP have at least 2 minions: golem and jagged horror, some bring Flesh Wurm so it can be already 30% more endurance every few seconds for you and 30% less for foe. Still works better in PvE, but it’s not useless in here.

As for Dhuumfire : I’m currently theorycrafting a little bit about it. I’ve been thinking about some kind of Sacrafice/Risk factor for getting Burning but, as said, still working on it
Also, I’ll rework Reanimator

You could always have it proc burning on the necro and the target, which would make it very double-bladed if you didn’t have enough condition transfer/removal up. Or it could make things worse as the burn time could be double if you transfer it back.

Sort of like how Blood is power works right now. Leaving it on my deals over 4000 damage. Not really sure if that would help though.

Dhuum’s Kiss is the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Please no!

burn is not for necro 2-3 stacks of terror or something like that is much better