I’d say they are tied with engineer for bad design award. Their utility skills are generally good while their weapons are much less so, makes me with I could put util skills in my elite and weapon slots. Necro is not very versatile and a lot of their stuff needs multiple major traits to make it useful. Typical example are wells which need at least cooldown reduction trait and trait that makes them castable at the distance (should be the default functionality).
Another example is life steal build. Without any traits there’s like 1 ability on dagger that does lifesteal. Then you have a bunch of major traits that add lifesteal on some aspects (like crits). You need to spend a kittenload of traits and the life steal amounts are small and don’t scale with healing power or power. Which brings me to the next thing:
They don’t have a good healer build and in general can’t utilize healing power well.
You can make a condition build, but it’s weaker than ele/engineer builds that stack bleeds and burning. Against bosses (i.e. anything that stands still) an engineer build with triple nades + explosions have chance to bleed + crits have a chance to bleed + explosions cause vulnerability + crits cause vulnerability + crits burn (2 of these are minor traits) an engineer can stack the boss with 25 stacks of bleed, 25 stacks of vulnerability and constant burning and constant poison with some added chilled, just with grenade kit. It’s obvious which class I’d rather have with me in dungeons.
Another important issue for dungeons is that necro only has 1 good immobilize skill which is on a really short ranged weapon that you don’t want vs a boss.
Another pvp issue is poor access to hard CC and poor access to stability. Necro has no good stability options, there’s one grandmaster trait that gives 3 sec of it when entering death shroud. That is not very practical and it shares the slot with trait that reduces death shroud recharge.
As far as hard CC goes, you have 2 sec daze on warhorn with all the problems of a cone attack and like 2 fear abilities with 1 sec fear (one in death shroud and one on staff). That is quite bad. (obviously there is other CC available like lich form, golem minion etc). I mean 1 sec fear vs long launches (2-3 sec cc), knockdowns and stuns (for instance 2 sec on mesmer pistol) or heck even warrior gets up to 3 sec fear.
Fear is special as a CC in that it’s a condition. That allows you to run extenders (food+gear), but even then it’s 2 sec tops (can’t make conditions last longer +100%).
On the other hand it means that not only do stun breakers remove it but also condition removal, making it the only CC that can be removed by allies of affected targets. In this regard, fear should be either more common on necro or last longer.
So as a necro you’ll pretty much helplessly observe an ele bounce you around like a volleyball.
Necro is also pretty much forced to facetank all the damage coming his way.
No invul, no vigor, very little in way of escape. You might be thinking “I have tons of HP and death shroud”, to which my answer is “not that much you don’t”. This game is all about hard defenses, that is, avoiding the damage completely (especially dungeons), necro is therefore weaker defensively than, say, a mesmer who has less HP but tends to avoid the damage completely. Necro does have a teleport on the wurm but you need it placed already, because wurm cast time makes it not very useful in “oh kitten” situations.
Axe is boring, no utility and gets murdered by retal. Scepter has short conditions on autoattack and the #3 skill is pure power skill which just doesn’t belong there. Dagger #2 is inferior damage to just autoattacking, plus it’s channeled so no dodging while you’re channeling in someone’s face. Staff #1 and DS #1 are super slow projectiles which is very noticable at 1200 range. Their cast times make me wanna stab myself in the eyes. Staff #5 has too long recharge for what it does, I consider mesmer’s Chaos Storm several times stronger. DS #2 doesn’t belong, why would I pull myself to something when I have a long ranged attack? It would make more sense on axe or dagger.
Generally if I could run double staff, I would.
Cast times on necro in general are too long (just like in gw1 lol) and the class doesn’t feel responsive.
Necro has one thing where it really shines. Boon/condition manipulation. It’s better than any other class. But in some dungeons mobs don’t use either much so it’s wasted and if I have 5 slots on the team and I need boon removal, condition removal, I can clutch it with a mesmer or someone else.
In any case the whole class seems to cover this one niche and everything else is just an afterthought. Changing some damage numbers won’t fix this. It might make necro powerful if they buf his numbers, but the class will still be incredibly one-trick-pony.
