Guild Wars 2

Another attempt at expediting resolutions for the top issues for the class. Give the designers something easy to digest.

Feel free to get as descriptive as possible, but limit yourself to 3 issues maximum. Also include whether it pertains to Tournament PvP, WvWvW or PvE (and which aspects of PvE if possible, such as Solo play, Dungeons ect.).

Preferable format

• Issue #1 Brief catchy headline
  • Elaborate description of Issue #1
  • Use as many as you need to adequately describe the issue.

• Issue #2 Brief catchy headline
  • Elaborate description of Issue #2
  • Use as many as you need to adequately describe the issue.

• Issue #3 Brief catchy headline
  • Elaborate description of Issue #3
  • Use as many as you need to adequately describe the issue.

Note: You can make bulletpoint lists using 1 star for the first indent, and 2 adjacent stars for subsequent indents.

This is not intended as a discussion thread, so while you may disagree with someone else’s top issues, it is largely irrelevant, keep the thread clean please.

• Bugged Minion AI
  • Minions not attacking during a fight. Minions not attacking your target. Minions attacking mobs when you are just passing by (Flesh Golem) putting your in combat (slowing you) and dying. There is so many issue with minion AI, that’s the reason I’m backing off from my minion build, even If I said I wanted to play it even if it was bad.

• Conditions vs Direct Damage
  • Conditions seems to be a lot weaker in this game then Direct Damage. Player have so many way to remove conditions, most of our damage are just wiped after 2 sec. You need more time then DD to build your damage, and it can be removed right away. It also cap at 25, so during PvE event or Dungeon, sometime you can’t max your damage output. Also, DoT usually do more damage then DD, since it require more time to be effective. In this game, the increase in damage is minimal. Some will say : “But conditions aren’t affected by armor!”. You are right, but conditions also aren’t affected by power ups. Most traits adding damage only affect direct damage, and not conditions (Ex : Our 2% damage by conditions). Vulnerability also doesn’t affect condition damage.You also get kittened in WvW because your main damage source, Condition, don’t affect door and siege.

• Casting time
  • Something that most necro tend to forget, we have a freaking lot of casting spell that require 1-2 sec to cast. The other classes I play don’t have that. We have too many spell that take more then 1 sec to cast. My second main is Engineer, and when I played with it after my necro, It felt so much better. I felt quicker and better. Engi spell are mostly instant cast, or .5 cast time. MM casting time are horrible, each summon and each activate spell from minions require horrible delay.

•Everything we can do other classes can do better
•But we’re not using death shroud properly!

•100+ bugs at the start of the game
•But not it’s ONLY down to 69! Perception is everything, and this shows that necromancer’s are either not on the priority list, or the developers simply DO NOT KNOW how to fix us.

• Everything thing that makes a necro a necro is garbage.
•Condition damage? Crap
•Minion AI? Crap
•Power Builds? Lol roll elementalist
•Survivability? Lol roll mesmer
•Our traits don’t sync with other trait lines
•Hell, most of our traits don’t even work.

1) Power ratios on many skills. They’re too low in many instances and I often find that autoattacking does better damage than actually using a skill. Marks are definitely too weak. Life Siphon and Dark Pact are a couple of other good examples. Often enough I don’t need to steal health or immobilize an enemy. Having these at least do a small amount of damage better than autoattack would great much more engaging combat.

2) Lifesteal is laughable. Everyone else seems to agree on this one. I don’t think much else needs to be said on this.

3) Death Shroud is dull. It has so much potential, but doesn’t really engage you very much as far as adding gameplay options. It’s great for keeping me alive, but the problem is the design more so than the effectiveness.

Minion AI

All the reasons stated above, but I’ll suggest a (fairly) quick fix. At the cost of complicating the description of the necro’s profession mechanic, borrow some basic pet management from the ranger. Two buttons for “Attack my target” and “Don’t attack anything” would suffice. If those were available, unreliable pathing AI wouldn’t be that big a deal.

I know this would be unpleasant for Anet in terms of neat profession description, but it would revive one of the most popular build concepts across GW1 and GW2 alike, WITHOUT requiring the huge burden and delay of solving tough AI problems.

1. Deathshroud, apparantly soo powerfull that all other skills/traits must be bad and boring to use. Like long cast time long cooldowns.
2. Lack of synergy between traits skills, other classes have traits for their elites ( ignoring golem traits )
3. Communication with a.net whether their happy with the current necro or what we can expect in the future. Go through the bug list say which is a bug and which is working as intended.

1. Reanimator
2. Reanimator
3. Parastic bond

I think that it doesn’t need any description.

Issue #1 – Death Shroud Bolt (Attack #1) does significantly less damage at low life force. This makes bolt damage too low, especially when taking damage and dropping LF fast.

Issue #2 – Staff auto attack (Attack #1) is too slow and too low damage. Piercing hardly ever happens and very situational.

Issue #3 – No easy source of stability.

1. Casting Times – everything takes far too long cast. Combat is faster than this. Long casts also are not helped by…
2. Lack of Stability – and boons in general, though stability being the biggest factor. Our long cast skills are easily interrupted, and we’re very susceptible to chain CC. This is one of the bigger reasons why Necro’s are mostly limited to niche condition control roles in PvP groups.
3. DS is a Slow Mechanic – I’ve probably been beating this notion to death lately but it bears repeating IMO. The LF accrual rate doesn’t match the rate at which it is expended. Starting a match at 0% LF makes sense but the rate at which we accrue (and I spec for max LF gain) is still too slow which leaves us without our primary defense and a third of our overall class functionality for far too long. This is definitely not an issue for any other class.

1) Long cast time, referring to staff. Make the staff damage/AoE better.
We only have marks when it comes to the staff which is fine, but at least buff its
damage. Unless you crit you are dishing out 200-400 damage with the staf Put
together its cast time and you do the math on how kitten it is.. Although i like the
utility the marks gives its damage is a joke.

2) DS is too weak and the skills are too boring. Time to revamp the whole system.

3) As someone posted before. Anything a necro can do another class does it x10 better.

ANET fix your kitten, you are starting to bore me. My respect is going down by the day with you guys. Look at all these threads making your lives easier to fix bugs/balance problems and yet nothing is being done, you should thank us.

Mine atm is downed state.

I have noticed in Fractal when i fall off one of the jumping parts. I get the downed state but I never recover and die. I have seen ele, mes. thief, warrior, and ranger all die from the same thing. Yet they can all recover from the downed state and rez. I have to be rezzed by them. Why is my downed state not strong enough to live like all the others.

• Lack of survivability traits/Utilities
  • The lack of pretty much any endurance regen traits/ temporary invincibility utility skills makes some encounters more difficult than they should be – such as Lupicus.
  • Although you could soak up the damage with death shroud, its quite difficult when it takes forever to recharge, especially during boss fights or as a conditions build in sPVP.

• Lack of Stability/Stun Breakers
  • This makes killing certain classes such as CC engineers near impossible
  • It also makes killing classes such as 100b warriors more difficult, especially considering most necros use Plague signet to stun break, and thats on at least a 48 second cooldown.
  • Its pretty much also annoying wasting a useful utility such as Plague signet just to break a stun, then just to be stunned again.
  • 3 sec stability on deathshroud does not break stuns.

• Useless utilities/traits
  • Theres a significant amount of traits/utilities that no skilled necromancer uses, thereby significantly reducing build variety
  • I don’t believe anyone uses minion utilities (Besides flesh golem, and possibly bone minions to explode) on non-minion builds. Minion builds aren’t even that viable.

Having given one point above, let me echo another:

Buff Staff #1.

Damage is not viable for the length of time it takes to build up Life Force. Either give it respectable damage or make it a crazy-fast Life Force builder at the cost of doing lousy damage for a while.

• Condition Damage vs Direct Damage
  Power/Precision reliant damage frequently outclasses condition DoT by a large margin in practice. This is not Necromancer specific, but it does seem to affect this profession by a disproportionate amount thanks to how many Necromancer skills rely on conditions in some manner.

• Non functional traits and/or traits that have barely perceptible effects.
  The disappointingly huge thread list of Necromancer bugs has a pretty detailed list of these.

• Death Shroud
  This ability interferes greatly with many builds thanks to it locking you out of your normal skill bar when in use, and does not even come close to benefiting the various functioning builds in any sort of equivalent manner. I’m not sure any other profession gains the same degree of benefit from using their class mechanic as little as possible.

• Death Shroud feels terrible unless you’re using a highly specialized build.
  • The unevenness of class mechanics is sort of a universal complaint, but it really feels like Necros got the shortest end of the stick here.
  • Initiative is amazing. An absolute godsend to the class, even right out of the box and you can easily trait to make it better. And I’m not even going to mention Steal.
  • Adrenaline is pretty good because even if the burst skill on your weapon sucks (Arcing Slice, Flurry), it’s incredibly cheap to get a really nice passive damage increase from Berserker’s Power.
  • Shattering is nice because only Mind Wrack really depends on you speccing to make it attractive and while the other 3 are certainly situational they’re nice to have regardless.
  • Virtues are basically some free signets and have decent passive and active effects out of the box.
  • Attunements & the Tool Belt both give great utility to their respective classes without any need for investment.
  • And while Ranger pet’s are kind of a grab bag with the various AI issues and whatnot they’re at least an extra utility skill you can pick up and swap to meet your needs.
  • Meanwhile Death Shroud gives you extra HP at the cost of removing all your normal skills and severely limiting your UI. Life Blast is all but useless for people who aren’t speced heavily into power and traited accordingly. Dark Path has extremely limited uses if you aren’t melee. Doom is ok, but suffers from the duration issue that all Necro fears must endure. I don’t have anything bad to say about Life Transfer, except that maybe it’s CD is a tad long.

• Cluttered traits.
  • Another somewhat universal issue, but I feel that Necros are at least near the bottom of the barrel.
  • As examples, take the staff and dagger CD reduction traits. For every other class that had CD reduction traits that only affected one weapon (except Guardians for some reason) the weapon skill CD reduction traits were combined with other weapon specific traits back in beta to give them more pizazz. Hell, some even got their utility CD reduction traits combined with other traits; see Signet Use, Inspiring Banners, Master of Consecrations, etc. Staff Mastery and Dagger Mastery probably deserve to be combined with Greater Marks and Quickening Thirst respectively. Spiteful Talisman and Axe Training both have this already.
  • Speaking of Axe Training, no other weapon skill DC reduction trait is Grandmaster level. I don’t see why it couldn’t be bumped down to Master.
  • It’s also sodding annoying having the Well CD reduction trait and the Well ground targeting trait as Master level traits in separate trees. Couldn’t they either be combined or have Wells be ground targeted by default? Or at least move both down to Adept? Hell, maybe combine the CD reduction with the Wells apply Protection trait. The point is that is takes a very large investment of points and traits to use Wells effectively without being in melee, arguably too great an investment.
  • Some traits just seem so niche I cannot conceive of them being used in any great capacity. Dark Armor is a good example, given that the only channels the Necro has are Life Transfer, Ghastly Claws, Life Siphon, and Life Leech. Terror’s damage coefficient is staggeringly low for a condition that lasts 2 seconds max. All the leeching traits are dubious because of the pathetic state of life stealing that isn’t gleaned from Leeching Venoms or Superior Sigil of Leeching. Reaper’s Precision feels decisively middling. Fear of Death’s ICD is hilariously long for a 1 second fear on being downed.

• Mobility
  • This is coming from a WvW point of view. Contrary to statements of intent the Necro is both very easy to get away from while also being very easy to catch.
  • The Necro has zero access to Vigor. No access to permanent Swiftness without specialized runes. And no movement skills apart from the Flesh Wurm and Spectral Walk teleports, and even those only take you back to places you’ve already been before.
  • Necros can have decent access to both Chill and Cripple, but they’re outclassed in both by similarly prepared Elementalists, Thieves, and Rangers.
  • While not dead last, Necros are pretty much on par with, or slightly below, bloody Guardians of all things when it comes to Immobilize. My mind boggles.
  • On paper Necros do have a nice pull in Spectral Grasp. However, due to the bloody slow projectile speed making it easy to avoid, in practice they’re once again outdone by Thieves, Mesmers, Engineers, and Elementalists.

• Accessibility of gear.
  • While not a huge deal, it is really bloody awful that the only way to get a full set of Condition Damage/Toughness/Precision armor is from running dungeons or getting Khilbron’s random drops from the AH. And there seem to be ZERO options for upgrades or exotic jewelry with that stat distribution. So aggravating.

CurtMonash.3498:

Having given one point above, let me echo another:

Buff Staff #1.

Damage is not viable for the length of time it takes to build up Life Force. Either give it respectable damage or make it a crazy-fast Life Force builder at the cost of doing lousy damage for a while.

I agree, good point. I’d rather have the staff #1 skill to go super fast and to leave the damage alone. Only then will it be useful.

Minion AI. Most other “Bugs” seem to just be complaints about the way a Necro works, but this is one thing that needs to be fixed. Minions don’t attack when they’re supposed to. I’ve gone through multiple fights with my flesh golem, or shadow minion just standing there doing nothing.

1.traits. their placement, their uselessness etc.etc.. if someone needs an explanation for this one, just pick 3 threads in the necro forum at random and read.

2.slooooow skills. like staff (all of it), focus#5, DS#2 and many more. this is annoying, not fun and it happens way too often that enemies get away because your cast animations are that kittening long.

3.Death shroud. You dont see your cooldowns, you dont see your boons, conditions, other effeccts or your actual health. Its kittened up that your enemy basically knows more about you than you while youre in Death shroud.

Attic.1562:

• Necros can have decent access to both Chill and Cripple, but they’re outclassed in both by similarly prepared Elementalists, Thieves, and Rangers.

Most of what you wrote was spot-on, especially in regard to the traits. However, I have to completely disagree with this point, particularly in regards to Chilled. We have absolutely the best access to Chilled of any profession, especially in regards to AoE applications and duration.

alanis.6094:

However, I have to completely disagree with this point, particularly in regards to Chilled. We have absolutely the best access to Chilled of any profession, especially in regards to AoE applications and duration.

Yeah, I should modify that section somehow ‘cause I totally forgot about bloody Chillblains and was directly comparing Well of Darkness vs Frozen Ground; where I believe the advantage lies with the Elementalist, if only because it’s a bloody ice field so incoming projectiles can easily make its Chill effect outdo Well of Darkness.

Thieves and Rangers I threw in ‘cause they’re both pretty kitten good at doing single target Chill and venom sharing builds are nasty, but the major point that I was hoping to make was that Necros don’t do disruption as well as Elementalists. Necros are kitten good at it, but they’re better at supporting a staff Ele than replacing one. At least in WvW (which is all I play).

I’ll rework it later when I have time.

I will start with #3, and move up from there.

#3
Soul Reaping. Now, this has supposedly been resolved, but the fact that this happened in the first place, and took more than a month to even be noticed, is indicative of the near total lack of attention the Necro class gets both on the forums, and presumably amongst the developers. Our Dev time was clearly wasted, because we have a staggering amount of bugs. Too many in fact, to even tell the overall power level of the class at present. This is egregious almost beyond belief, the broken (and when I say this, I mean as in not functioning. period. not the usual mmo meaning) state of this class outright makes me feel like a secondhand citizen for choosing to play the class I found the most thematically appealing.

#2
Minions are not even remotely viable choices. In fact, the overall lack of viable skill options really does pigeonhole us. But Minions are easily the one thing I was looking forward to the most when I rolled Necro. I anticipated the Necro that all of my friends who played GW1 talked about. The guy who might not have been the top powerhouse class, but who can swamp ‘em with minions. Nope. These ones behave like bad Skyrim mod NPCs. Their AI in inexcusable, they don’t regen health, their CDs are ridiculous, and Reanimator is a top contender for the worst trait in the game. There is, aside from flavor, no reason whatsoever to specialize in pets. A Guardian with Spirit Weapons feels more like a pet class than we do.

1. “Mastering Death Shroud”. This was pretty the worst PR move I have ever seen in this context. I appreciate Dev attention, because without it, we all might as well go roll Thieves and start complaining about nerfs. But trying to deflect attention away from the horrific amount of bugs (seriously, Windows Vista shipped with less issues), we get a response that basically trolled us. Summed up, we got told L2P. I know I, personally, do not respond well to being told this even by random people I don’t care about. Few people do. But when it’s Jon Peters, it hits a good bit harder. The community’s response to this has not been overdone.

Those are my big 3. Taken together, it seems like Necro was barely playtested, if at all. It feels like the leftovers of every other class thrown together into our traits and skills, and given a visual facelift.

No communication from devs explaining to us which of the issues on our bug lists are actually bugs and which are working as intended.

That’s my only issue atm…

1. Fears Fear was originally going to be a “necromancer only” condition, but we are the worst with it out of all the professions that can cause it (namely due to pathetic durations). While we can get our downed state fear to last 4 seconds (30 spite, plus master of terror, plus 6 Runes of the Nightmare), that is our only downed state defense and we simply don’t have the quantity of fears to make that investment worthwhile.

2. Signets Only Plague Signet has a worthwhile active, but it’s buggy/misleading and its passive is non-functional in my experience (save once in Battle for Claw Island). All of our signets have recharges that are too long for their active effects and only Locust and Spite have decent passive effects.

3. Long casting times This one wouldn’t be an issue if we had access to stability, but we don’t, so necros are the MOST susceptible to CC out of any profession. It’s a serious problem when most of our ground-targetted effects are counterable by walking (not dodging) out of the area before the casting time completes.

1. Minions: not atacking/sticks in every wall

2. Lack of stability/vigor

3. Wells: too long CDs

1) Minions have a mind of their own … strangely out of sync with mine.

2) Stability or rather the lack of it can be painful. It is not so much stomping but more just capping wihle there are classes present with several knockdowns/knockbacks.

3) Axe/focus feels insufficient for power-builds. Especially the control-part feels a bit weak.

I still like to play it though

• Lack of consolidation/streamlining on Traits
  For example, if I want to run a power build necro, I have to juggle between three (or four) trait lines because the traits appear to have been “thrown together.”

Specifics:
Close to Death – an awesome trait for a power necro, but it requires 30 points in Spite.
– arguably, one could pick up Spiteful Marks and Reaper’s Might, but these traits feel situational at best. However, the 20 extra points could be best used elsewhere.
20 points required for Curses in order to pick up Reaper’s Precision/Hemophilia and Focused Rituals (for range-friendly fights)
10-20 points in Death Magic in order to get Greater Marks and Ritual of Protection/Staff Mastery (again, for range-friendly fights)
30 points in Blood for Dagger Mastery/Bloodthirst, Vampiric Precision, Ritual Mastery, and Vampiric Rituals

In total, in order to get a well-rounded power necro, one would require 80-100 trait points because the power necro traits are scattered throughout in four trait lines. More consolidation/streamlining is required/needed/mandatory/etc.

Suggestion:
Close to Death should be moved to the 10 point category in the Spite trait line.
Consolidate some of the like traits such as Spiteful Marks/Greater Marks and Ritual of Protection/Focused Rituals.

• Death Shroud
  The only useful ability in DS is the ⁴ ability. While ¹ can become useful with Reaper’s Might (if taken; see previous issue), the other two are rarely useful – emphasis on rarely.

Those are my main two.

1st issue: Minions don’t scale-up with your stats, but instead with your level.
This is totally ridiculous, because something like this happens: The other day at Caudecus’ Manor, Explorable mode, you are scaled down to lvl 40/45 I think, yet, the mobs inside can literally 1 hit-kill ALL of my minions, just summon your beloved flesh golem, and the instant it pops out it dies by a random enemy AoE, and eat the full cooldown… seriously?

2nd issue: Said countless times already, minion AI is detrimental, the only minion that works properly most of the time is the Flesh Wurm, which does pretty good damage actually and survives a lot…, we actually need HP regeneration for outside of combat for all, not just Golem.

3rd issue: Minion cooldown reduction by 20% not affecting their respective minion skills, and also some of those skills are at most situational (Flesh Wurm’s teleport, I’d rather be able to pick it up just like an engie’s turrets), and the healing minion not scaling with +Healing at all.

My issues were centered around minions because I love playing my Staff Minionmancer pretty much, but I hope they fix the issues adressed above because in key points of the game our reliability is lackluster, and when all minions die in miliseconds after summoning makes me wonder if we have a diversity of minions or if they basically are all Jagged Horrors with different skin-models…

PD: Don’t make basic traits minion-forced also, it limits build choices a lot. And don’t force players to play with Death Shroud to be reliable.
A neat idea would be to feed Life Force to minions so they get buffs, protection, or healing.

Also, Flesh Golem can’t swim…

1. Minions ai
2. Lack of viable builds. In spvp power/minon/life stealing builds are not viable. In pve we have inferior dmg and subpar utilities in a group compared to guardians/many other classes.
3. 25 stacks of bleed cap. Limits condition build in teams/events.
4. Underwater utility skill limitations. Can only use plague elite under water.

Death shroud is not that bad imo. I would agree that close to death shouldn’t be a gm trait.

Most glaring issue for me is the unreliability of our short ranged channel skills: dagger#2, 3 and axe #2. These skills cast bars break anytime I try to kite people, I literally have to stand still and let my character auto face the target for them to be reliable. There are even times the skills will fire but be put on full cooldown instantly because they ate so finicky.

1. The Necro community
-far too many threads like these, and not enough playstyle threads.
-Necro is very viable endgame. It’s other classes’ perception of us that is wrong.

2.Minion AI
-It’s dumb.
-Would an attack button make MM too powerful though?

3.Forced to take staff
-How many builds dont use staff?
-I like the other weapons, but they are not quite as good.

1. Cast Times
PVE: Our DPS is subpar anyway, is it really necessary to lower it further with these excessive cast times.
PVP: Some professions like a thief can literally burst down the majority of our health bar in the time it takes us to cast a single spell.
A: Easy fix here, lower our cast times.

2. Trait Lines:
See Sethren’s post above on this issue as it is both comprehensive and eloquently written.

3. Minion AI
I don’t use minions and have no desire to as I find them amateurish in both artistic design and function. However, many Necromancers do and they should be viable.
A: I would assume, based on their current dismal state, that programming the AI of Minons/Pets is extremely difficult. However, this issue is shared with Rangers and deserves the extra bit of attention to get it fixed.

4. Condition Damage
Due to the cap limit placed on conditions and the inate ability of most professions to apply them, the Necro is at a disadvantage due to our weak direct damage capabilities.
A: Increase the direct damage portion of our abilities and/or give Necro’s an inherant condiotion. I read a post were someone already suggested this and called the condition “Necrosis.”

1. Communication
HONEST communication about issues is NEEDED. The constant stonewalling just inflames issues and polarises the playerbase.
{We went for hundreds and hundreds of posts about issues, genuine, gamebreaking issues for the necro and never got one response. This is just like the tactics Blizz uses hoping “it will all die down”. This is how Blizz lost me and ANet is rapidly approaching that threshhold.} Your playerbase can see right through the thinly veiled “spin”.

2. Intentionally broken traits/abilities and trait structures.
If traits/abilities are too powerful then be HONEST and tone them down….don’t “futz” it by splitting the over totally unsynergistic rows or intentionally leaving them broken and ignoring the player complaints.
{add 178987] broken necro traits/abilities here}

3. Respect your clients and you will get HEAPS more respect back
{comments by someone famous like L2P Death Shroud (in its delivered context) are trolling at its most basic and not appropriate, showing only contempt and disdain for the playerbase}

I felt this was a really good thred

and summed up many of the problems of the necro

ALL these points are valid exept the person who said necros are just whining on forums

after switching from a necro to a warrior, i now have 2x the survivability and 4x the dammage, and im running a healing build

i am 10 times more benfiical to the party in both pve and pvp

1. Minion AI. Pretty much already gone over in depth
2. Jagged horrors: again, discussed to death
3. blood fiend siphon: seriously, I don’t understand how they screwed up a flat numbers buff. It’s still the old value despite being being buffed.

1. Deathsrhoud issues: there is not enough benefit to actually go in and stay in deathshroud outside of soaking some damage or using 1-2 skill presses. In condition spec all you have is the bleeds on teleport which is fairly impractical since u might not want to teleport on top of an already snared target. Otherwise you are losing dps by staying in deathshroud so if u pve u basically pop into it for a few seconds and then don’t use it most of the time… whole mechanic not use.. boring. In power spec the #1 skill does less damage than autoattack if you drop below 50%. It halves or something. It needs to do high damage all the time, or the first 50% LF is useless for me.

2. Minions. AI doesn’t work. Designers, from their comments (Ive forgotten the guy’s name, Jon someone), apparently aren’t even aware of how they work. They simply won’t attack your target a lot of the time. Flesh golem still goes off and attacks kitten on his own.

I’ll throw in life siphoning here as another spec which just does not work, even for pve.

3. Molasses slow gameplay. Long cast times. Slow projectile speed. Lack of burst damage. Lack of teleports, leaps, charges. Lack of hard cc. Low dps compared to other classes. Lack of power aoe (on a reaonsable cd→pve issue. actually the kitten long cooldowns of many skills in this game make pve boring, so this is non necro specific).

Crap dmge and group support via boons= main dungeon issue for me.
lack of build variety = main pvp issue.
lack of mobility and escapes = main wvw issue.

striker.3704:

1. Minion AI. Pretty much already gone over in depth
2. Jagged horrors: again, discussed to death
3. blood fiend siphon: seriously, I don’t understand how they screwed up a flat numbers buff. It’s still the old value despite being being buffed.

Maybe it’s one of those changes where they changed it in spvp only, ie the change doesn’t get implemented in zones outside of mists, or only gets implemented in some zones. Have heard ppl mention stuff like this.

1. Traits by and large are quite underwhelming and all over the place making the creation of a decent synergistic build hard. I often look at them and pick the one that looks least useless when I’m making a build. And don’t make me take two minion specific traits to get my staff boost (greater marks/staff mastery) when a lot of the time I don’t want to run with minions at all, especially when one of those traits is Reanimator.
2. No way to damage structures/dragons/event bosses/downed players etc reliably in a condition spec. I did my first dragon event the other day and was expecting something awesome, instead I largely stood there pew pew pewing away with the staff auto as nothing else I did seemed to have an effect. Sigh. Similarly the bleed cap makes it difficult to do anything of note in a big world event like the Lost Shores as a condition spec as there is little direct damage output. Finally conditions don’t damage downed players so if I can’t stomp (I’m defending a wall for example) it’s hard to finish them off.
3. Minion AI is broken, no more to say.

I’m sure some of this will be L2P on my part but I’ve managed to muddle through to 80 with this character so I must have a basic idea of what I’m doing by now?

1. Mobility… it’s incredibly hard to catch players running away from you and next to impossible to get away from someone unless you have a large headstart.

2. Minions – they are rubbish and they don’t work.

3. Condition Damage – this wouldn’t be an issue if there was a viable power/burst build, but there really isn’t unless you want to go face to face with warriors/theives with your dagger spec.

I’ve now rolled a Mesmer to 80… the difference in ability to kill and utility is astounding. About the only thing that i miss on the Necro is the heal that consumes conditions – that is a keeper.

3: Pet AI

2: Direct damage builds > Condition damage builds

1: Profession role: Everything that the necro can do, another profession can do better, or can do the same for a lesser cost, making them more versatile.
Engineer might not be able to as much damage, utility or something else as other classes, but they can do alot of it at the same time.
Necros that focus on damage will, beside being on the lower end of the damage scale, have less access to meaningfull utilities. That goes for both Direct and Condition builds.
Necros that focus on defense will lose out on a lot of their abilities due to the heavy investment in Death Shroud(only have 4 abilities in DS). Furthermore their lifesteal potential is either easily interupted(Dagger, Signet of Locust or DS) due to cast times and lack of stability and the others are so low even with investment, that most of the other professions have better passive regens when performing a defensive role:
- Warriors can heal about 3-400 per second, without regeneration boon, due to Adrenaline trait and Signet.
- Elementalist in water att. with Signet
- Thieves with Signet and healing venoms
- Engineers with healing bombs and traited passive regen

Ofc you have a lot of healing(life siphoning) potential as the necromancer(using a dagger main hand and wells), but it is very restrictive(short range, needs to hit stuff, danger of being interupted, 30 bloodmagic required).

The same for control builds. We have about 3 fear abilites and can get 1 or 2 more through other means(traits and items). All have low duration(compared to the standard 2-3 sec knockdowns or blowouts), low application ability and long cooldowns(not counting water).
Reaper mark: AoE, 40 second CD, 1 second duration
DS Doom: single target 20 sec CD, 1 sec duration, requires DS form
Fear: single target, 10 sec CD, 2 sec duration, requires Downed state
Even massive traited, you only improve 1 control ability, and it will not help your overall damage or defense much.
- Warriors have an up to 3 second, AoE fear(on long cooldown, granted) that also can remove condition and heal allies, if traited.
- Thieves can steal a 3 second fear.
- Ranger Pets with fear abilities

The other decent control is Chill, but both Engineers and Elementalist(even thieves) can get similar amounts of effective chill effects, while having eaiser way to apply them(grenades can with apply 6-8 second of chill every 20 seconds to an area, elementalist can apply chill in some form every 4-5 seconds, some of it being AoE).

The Necromancer just dont feel very unique, and the few things that should define its playstyle can be done in similar ways by other professions.

Have posted this before but ill jump on the train
1- scepter damage
especially walls / burrows etc the wet noodle effect is long past a joke and staff auto could use a upgrade aswell
2- runes not working on world bosses
3 elites
are so strong tied to spec eg lich only beneficial to strength builds urgh
plague to condition when its really only situational at best compared to other profs like thief could use some love aswell
this one is pretty major considering staff is our longest dps range weapon and to have all of the effects bar auto is bewildering, what kind of design flaw is that

this post should be sticky and replace the one about bugs.
All these issues are what we need to be fixed ASAP.

Also, we need an answer from Devs to our problems. We are players and customers. We deserve the attention that other clases obtain.

1. Damage output is low
2. Damage output is low
3. Damage output is low

1. Minions

(I would humbly suggest 2 changes

A. All Summoned Creatures (Necromancer Minions, Ranger Pets, Etc…)
receive an increase to their stats in proportion to how many points their master allocates to a certain line
(e.g. death magic increases toughness, blood magic increase health pools etc…)
This could be customized for each line in each profession the same as Healing Power etc… is customized to each skill.

B. Give the Necromancer an F2 Function that allows them to sacrifice some of their Life Force to heal all their minions (Like a GW1 “Blood of the Master” or Verata’s Sacrifice)

2.Slow Attack/Long Recharge/Low Damage
In My mind these are all related to Anet (Specifically Jon Peters) being deathly afraid of Necromancers being even remotely close to any other class in terms of Damage, since if they ever got around to actually fixing the class, there is the remote possibility necromancers might have more survivability than other classes when using certain builds, and maybe even be… shudders …overpowered, until they ran an update to nerf the overpowered skills within those builds.

No Fancy Suggestions here, Fix the bugs, fix Minions, Fix Life-Steal etc… preferably with a 2 week turnaround on iterations instead of a 1-3 month turnaround.

3. Significantly Better Communication
(less Vagueness, and more Communication in General) Seriously add an Asterisk or something to the bottom of all your posts if you must…

(e.g. *Note any and all comments in this post are the current momentary crazy sleep deprived, rantings of this single solitary Arenanet Employee at this time,
They do not necessarily reflect the current direction Anet wishes to take or will take,
and are subject to change {or iteration} at any moment,
and do not necessarily reflect what Changes or Actions Anet as a whole will or won’t make ever.
Any and All Decisions, Judgements, Actions, and Thoughts you make, or do not make in relation to this post are taken at your own risk of disappointment, sorrow, anger, happiness, ecstasy, or spontaneous fits of dancing.
Anet will not be held responsible or liable for,
or even acknowledge anything including but not limited to…
a gained sense of Grief, Anger, Loss, Resentment, or Entitlement,
Loss of Hair, Sleep, Income, Employement, or Sexual Relations.
In relation to anything Anet Employees have Done, Not Done, Said, Not Said, Known About, or Did Not Know About.)

In conjunction with better communication,
Faster Turnaround from Anet in regards to Skill & Trait Balancing and Fixing, right now this is Abysmally slow!
If they need more Dev’s or Testers on this team to speed things up, then hire them!

UndeadPriest.8632:

B. Give the Necromancer an F2 Function that allows them to sacrifice some of their Life Force to heal all their minions (Like a GW1 “Blood of the Master” or Verata’s Sacrifice)

Great post, this bit especially, I have said something similar in previous posts, this is exactly what we need, give heath and take health from our minions.. F2 and F3.

This would make life force more useful, it would allow people to play the class truly how they want to.

Issue #1 Damage

• Our direct damage is low, and we do not have a reliable way of doing long range direct damage. If our life siphoning skills were repaired, I do believe dagger would be good for melee combat.

..but I feel like the axe is just plain worthless.

• Our condition damage is unreliable. Event bosses have a full stack of bleeds with us being there, and far too many normal bosses don’t trigger our marks, like all of the tree bosses in TA.

Issue #2 Condition removal

• Seems like every class has passive ways to remove conditions, except necromancers. I know I love dropping Mark of Blood and watching a permanent stealth thief trip it, only for said thief to ignore me because stealth cures conditions… wtf.

• And we can forget about easily removing conditions on us. My favorite way to die, is dropping our healing well and spamming staff #1, seeing “condition removed” over my head repeatedly, and still dying from poison. Is poison not a condition?

Issue #3 Minions

• It’s not just the broken UI, or that they die in 3 hits, it’s that they aren’t very good.

• Pet regen, or a pet healing skill please. Also, can we fix the worm, trying to unsummon and resummon that thing is piles of “this sucks”

Ezeriel.9574:

• Our condition damage is unreliable. Event bosses have a full stack of bleeds with us being there, and far too many normal bosses don’t trigger our marks, like all of the tree bosses in TA.

so much this.

• And we can forget about easily removing conditions on us. My favorite way to die, is dropping our healing well and spamming staff #1, seeing “condition removed” over my head repeatedly, and still dying from poison. Is poison not a condition?

Auto-attacks tend to have only a 20% chance to activate combo fields.
Besides that, you can trait your DS to clean a condition.
My only issue with condition removal is the cast time tho. Staff-skills are slow as kitten and CC needs 1+ secs to cast aswell.