Guild Wars 2

I was going to post this over on Guru but I figured I might as well address a larger audience even though I know most of the responses are probably going to be stupid as result. Nonetheless, here’s the issue:

Necros are crap in PvE.

There is an effective role for every other class in this game except for the necro. That doesn’t really help the necro’s desirability since there is basically nothing they can do any other class can’t do better:

1) Bad DPS. That’s both burst and sustained. Daggers + minions output okay DPS (slightly higher than warriors) on a single target but the conditions for reaching that damage are much more difficult to meet and due to minion AI and unsustainable cooldowns on summons (as opposed to mesmers who can just resummon phantasms quickly) there’s no way to necros to operate as an effective minion AI class. Well burst DPS is average at best and compared to other classes with much higher burst potential (thieves, guardians, warriors, eles) wells are nothing special especially given the severe sustained DPS loss after the initial burst.

2) Bad survivability. Despite having high health and the extra Death Shroud life pool, necros get screwed in a lot of “one shot kill” fights because they lack vigor or other defensive cooldowns. Necros are pretty much always the first down on a slow Alpha kill because they’re the only class that can’t avoid the spike burst more than three times in a row and Death Shroud isn’t enough to absorb all that damage. On top of that, being tanky doesn’t even help the group because you can’t hold aggro in this game.

3) Poor offensive support. Despite having a bunch of skills that allow the necro to buff itself (i.e. Blood is Power) the necro lacks ways to buff up other players. That means that all you’re doing is mitigating your own bad DPS at best, compared to the ranger and warrior. who also have relatively bad DPS but make up for it by boosting the rest of the team’s DPS significantly via area buffs like spirits, banners, and might/fury.

4) Poor defensive/utility support. Guardians, thieves and mesmers have, by default, tons of reflects, condition removal, block, blinds, stability, etc. to buff other party members, while engineers and elementalists pump out raw healing numbers like nothing, even on a full DPS spec. These aren’t always necessary (sometimes they are) but they certainly don’t hurt. By comparison, the necro has? A blind on long CD (readily accessible by many other classes), another long-CD one-shot AOE condition removal. A small, long-CD AOE heal? Is that it? I don’t even know.

And no, before anyone brings it up, Epidemic isn’t a useful skill in the PvE meta. Spreading a few conditions around to multiple targets doesn’t help when other classes can put all the conditions you want on all the targets by default and can do so much more reliably without relying on another player’s conditions.

So let’s talk gimmicks that can give this class a role that doesn’t make me automatically go “dude just take a mesmer/thief/engineer for that” when i hear it.

tl;dr I’m pretty sure this class is bad, prove me wrong.

I’m not gunna try to prove u wrong( cuz its true were not eh best for pve) but i will offer some usefullness of the necro. When you need to damage enemies that use reflects like in hotw p1 necros hav so much ranged stuff that isnt a projectile. Its really helpful to keep dealing damage. Their poison can also f up regen on enemies. I also find them to be really tanky even in full zerk if u spec into death shroud. Death preception is pretty fun to use for 100% crit chance in death shroud. You have a reliable 6-8k life blast and i enter death shroud to make my wells crit. Necros are also pro at taking out adds during boss fights. And condition necros offer long chills and weakness which is party support on the enemies it affects.

Wellcome Guang here!

Can you throw out actual numbers with the current meta builds, so the disbelievers actually can see how raw dps ranks amongst classes? Thanks!

If there’s a boss that absolutely forces ranged combat most of the time, the DS necro will probably out dps everything else (at 300-600 range, up to 1200 with lich)… Too bad there really aint bosses like that, and even if there is, then the DPS won’t probably be the party’s biggest worry.

Necromancer isn’t bad in PvE at all… it is the PvE that is bad…

Let me explain…
For example… warriors do more damage in melee range then necromancers do at range, because no one would ever play a warrior in melee, if there was another class that could do the same damage or more at range… especially since melee range doesn’t have the same DPS uptime as range does. Not having the same DPS uptime as range makes the meleers overall effectiveness as high as the range… as in they do more damage less often vs less damage more often.

Now… in this current “we do only CoF p1 fast run just warriors 10k achievement points or kick” stupid PvE system… melee classes are not punished enough for staying melee, so you can actually have 100% DPS uptime even in melee… and therefor warrior > necromancer.

They can’t increase necromancer damage to match warrior damage, because then no one would play warrior. They would do that if there were more necromancers then warriors, from a marketing point of view, but they aren’t…

So… now you have it. The only thing they can do is fix PvE, not chance the necromancer or any other sub par class, cause that would just place us further away from a good game.

In conclusion: Necromancers are fine… it’s the PvE that is broken.

Nemesis, take a look at rangers. Not the bearbow, the competitive sword/wh build.
It gives aoe dmg bonus from frost spirit, precision bonus and has nice dps. Oh and it has a reliable blast finisher with high uptime fury. Not mentioning the sword cleaves, has a built in evade and with off hand dagger it has another evade. Well, the auto attack root is stupid, but you can used to it. See? Tiny thing can make something viable. Necro got .. nothing. Necromancer is bad in the current PvE environment.

Nemesis.8593:

Necromancer isn’t bad in PvE at all… it is the PvE that is bad…

Let me explain…
For example… warriors do more damage in melee range then necromancers do at range, because no one would ever play a warrior in melee, if there was another class that could do the same damage or more at range… especially since melee range doesn’t have the same DPS uptime as range does. Not having the same DPS uptime as range makes the meleers overall effectiveness as high as the range… as in they do more damage less often vs less damage more often.

Now… in this current “we do only CoF p1 fast run just warriors 10k achievement points or kick” stupid PvE system… melee classes are not punished enough for staying melee, so you can actually have 100% DPS uptime even in melee… and therefor warrior > necromancer.

They can’t increase necromancer damage to match warrior damage, because then no one would play warrior. They would do that if there were more necromancers then warriors, from a marketing point of view, but they aren’t…

So… now you have it. The only thing they can do is fix PvE, not chance the necromancer or any other sub par class, cause that would just place us further away from a good game.

In conclusion: Necromancers are fine… it’s the PvE that is broken.

I usually agree with you, but for this, I do not.

It’s not the PVE mechanics that are bad, it’s the imbalance of warriors and guardians innate defense vs other classes.

They wear heavy armor, and they have some of the best group support. Guardians have the BEST group support, and can be very defensive without sacraficing a ton of damage. Warriors on the other hand, add alot of group support, shouts, banners etc; while wearing heavy armor getting that innate defense AND their damage scales off the charts compared to other classes.

Currently, there is no middle ground for plate wearers. No risk vs reward. If you want to do dmg, you should be squishy. If you want to be survivable you should do low dmg. That was their intended goal, but they don’t seem to have the right balance with warrior or guardian.

Here is how it should break down as far as damage goes

High dmg <————————————>Low dmg
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
High risk(squishy) <———————————-> Low risk(tanky)

The more squishy you become the more dmg you deal. Currently warriors don’t make a big enough sacrafice for the damage they do. Mostly because hundred blades and Axe auto attack scales too well with their traits and attack power.

Kahrgan.7401:

Nemesis.8593:

Necromancer isn’t bad in PvE at all… it is the PvE that is bad…

Let me explain…
For example… warriors do more damage in melee range then necromancers do at range, because no one would ever play a warrior in melee, if there was another class that could do the same damage or more at range… especially since melee range doesn’t have the same DPS uptime as range does. Not having the same DPS uptime as range makes the meleers overall effectiveness as high as the range… as in they do more damage less often vs less damage more often.

Now… in this current “we do only CoF p1 fast run just warriors 10k achievement points or kick” stupid PvE system… melee classes are not punished enough for staying melee, so you can actually have 100% DPS uptime even in melee… and therefor warrior > necromancer.

They can’t increase necromancer damage to match warrior damage, because then no one would play warrior. They would do that if there were more necromancers then warriors, from a marketing point of view, but they aren’t…

So… now you have it. The only thing they can do is fix PvE, not chance the necromancer or any other sub par class, cause that would just place us further away from a good game.

In conclusion: Necromancers are fine… it’s the PvE that is broken.

I usually agree with you, but for this, I do not.

It’s not the PVE mechanics that are bad, it’s the imbalance of warriors and guardians innate defense vs other classes.

They wear heavy armor, and they have some of the best group support. Guardians have the BEST group support, and can be very defensive without sacraficing a ton of damage. Warriors on the other hand, add alot of group support, shouts, banners etc; while wearing heavy armor getting that innate defense AND their damage scales off the charts compared to other classes.

Currently, there is no middle ground for plate wearers. No risk vs reward. If you want to do dmg, you should be squishy. If you want to be survivable you should do low dmg. That was their intended goal, but they don’t seem to have the right balance with warrior or guardian.

Here is how it should break down as far as damage goes

High dmg <————————————>Low dmg
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
High risk(squishy) <———————————-> Low risk(tanky)

The more squishy you become the more dmg you deal. Currently warriors don’t make a big enough sacrafice for the damage they do. Mostly because hundred blades and Axe auto attack scales too well with their traits and attack power.

Mobs move too fast, and deal too little damage… therefor in most cases there is absolutely no advantage for doing ranged damage. Warriors current state of “squishyness” would be just right if mobs would punish meleers more then they punish ranged classes. Therefor they won’t be able to land every 100B on CD… and ranged classes that do less damage would have a chance to catch up in DPS.

I either misunderstood what you just wrote, but it seems to me that you are agreeing with me, but from a different angle. I am not sure you got what i was saying…

The main idea is that… if necromancer at range would do as much damage as berserker warrior melee… no one would play warrior, not to mention what that would do to PvP.
They don’t do that much… because a warrior hits really hard, and is suppose to not land every 100B on CD, but they do…

Okay Nemesis, let me get this straight: Every class but Necromancer is usefull in PvE, therefore PvE is broken?

This makes no sense, sorry.

The fact that you can complete 80% (100% according to some) of the content in this game without the need of build diversity aka full berserker… is not broken ?

The fact that because of the above reason, in the current PvE diversity is not embraced but criticized… is not broken ?

The fact that 1 year into the game you can still do corner stacking (exploit ??) to favor the above two statements… is not broken ?

The fact that all of the above statements lead to people mindlessly doing only part of the overall content… over and over again… is not broken ?

The fact that in the current PvE being at range most of the time offers no benefit vs being in melee (that’s why they can go full berserker everywhere… ask spoj how he does fractals berserker melee necro… that’s what he said, so… if someone can do it, everyone can do it)… is not broken ?

The fact that in the current PvE system… tanking is not requied, neither is debuffing… or healing… which puts some classes that act as a debuffer at a heavy disadvantage (as in who would want a necromancer for chill, blind and weakness – those aren’t even considered group support, because they are not needed or equivalent to the warrior group support, which favors corner stacking full berserker steam roll)… this is not broken ?

Are we not playing the same game ? Or am i the only one that wants diversity… and content that demands diversity ?

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that you can complete 80% (100% according to some) of the content in this game without the need of build diversity aka full berserker… is not broken ?

The fact that because of the above reason, in the current PvE diversity is not embraced but criticized… is not broken ?

The fact that 1 year into the game you can still do corner stacking (exploit ??) to favor the above two statements… is not broken ?

The fact that all of the above statements lead to people mindlessly doing only part of the overall content… over and over again… is not broken ?

The fact that in the current PvE being at range most of the time offers no benefit vs being in melee (that’s why they can go full berserker everywhere… ask spoj how he does fractals berserker melee necro… that’s what he said, so… if someone can do it, everyone can do it)… is not broken ?

The fact that in the current PvE system… tanking is not requied, neither is debuffing… or healing… which puts some classes that act as a debuffer at a heavy disadvantage (as in who would want a necromancer for chill, blind and weakness – those aren’t even considered group support, because they are not needed or equivalent to the warrior group support, which favors corner stacking full berserker steam roll)… this is not broken ?

Are we not playing the same game ? Or am i the only one that wants diversity… and content that demands diversity ?

Now that I agree with.

Whether or not you like the full zerker melee meta, it’s a balanced meta that works for everyone except for necromancer because everyone except necro has options that make them useful in a DPS role. Warrior “hurr run in and mash HB” is the classic scapegoat but pretty much every class runs a full DPS melee zerk build well enough to be worth taking from a minmax perspective. For example:

- Elementalists are the kings of raw DPS. They also provide good might and fury stacking.
- Mesmers are tanky as hell, provide extremely high single-target DPS, and offer all sorts of defensive support like stability, reflects, condition cleanse, etc.
- Warriors are balanced, consistent DPS, provide good offensive support (shouts and banners), and are pretty easy to play all around.
- Engineers are kings of support of all kinds, being able to stack offensive buffs, defensive (de)buffs, and can even heal all on a full DPS spec.

That means that if you really want to minmax the hell out of the party, you take whoever offers what you need for a given dungeon. For example, in COE, you take a warrior and ranger each for support buffs (banners and spirits), a mesmer or guardian for reflects on the golem boss, and fill the rest out with raw DPS (usually elementalists). For something like Arah, you might want to bring a thief, mesmer, or engineer for stealth. And so on.

Meanwhile, there is literally NO content I can think of where you’d actually want an necromancer. If you want AOE blind or weakness, you bring a thief or engineer to spam Smoke Bombs. If condition damage is actually preferable, engineer. If you want minions for any reason to soak up hits (i.e. Lupicus), mesmer. There’s simply no demand for the role of “tanky low-DPS class that stacks a bunch of useless conditions no one needs and can’t sustain the ones we do need”.

Out of curiosity, what about Vulnerability stacking? I never theorycraft PvE, really, but I know Necros can keep up insane Vuln stacks really easily. Is there another class that fits that niche, or do people not care about Vulnerability because of reasons?

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that you can complete 80% (100% according to some) of the content in this game without the need of build diversity aka full berserker… is not broken ?

Im very happy that I don’t need to farm 15 different sets of armor.

The fact that because of the above reason, in the current PvE diversity is not embraced but criticized… is not broken ?

There aren’t many games where you have no meta. There will always be THE best.

The fact that 1 year into the game you can still do corner stacking (exploit ??) to favor the above two statements… is not broken ?

Why is cornerstacking an exploit? Because it is efficient? Is mightstacking an exploit? Im not talking about bugging mobs so they cant hit you, btw.

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that all of the above statements lead to people mindlessly doing only part of the overall content… over and over again… is not broken ?

What? People do almost every Dungeon, what do you mean by this? What you describe is grind. People grind because they want shinies. Not because PvE is broken.

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that in the current PvE being at range most of the time offers no benefit vs being in melee (that’s why they can go full berserker everywhere… ask spoj how he does fractals berserker melee necro… that’s what he said, so… if someone can do it, everyone can do it)… is not broken ?

Yes, but that has nothing to do with nero. Every class has a useless range weaponset.

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that in the current PvE system… tanking is not requied, neither is debuffing… or healing… which puts some classes that act as a debuffer at a heavy disadvantage (as in who would want a necromancer for chill, blind and weakness – those aren’t even considered group support, because they are not needed or equivalent to the warrior group support, which favors corner stacking full berserker steam roll)… this is not broken ?

Some classes? No. Just one.

I don’t say PvE is fine as it is, but it’s not that broken.

@OP: There are several parts where you undersell the necro:

#1: DPS. The power necro has high sustained base DPS, so much so that at full buffs the necromancer will outdamage warriors with jut their auto attack. The power necro is effective at stacking might on themselves, and have several lingering attacks that they can use to layer up multiple sources of damage at once. The real shame with necro DPS is that their only cleaves come from conditions and life blast, but regardless many people find the dagger quite useful against bosses.

#2: Survivability. Life Force is really easy to get in PVE due to waves of enemies that die quickly. This makes power builds extremely durable, since the majority of the time you’ll be life blasting multiple enemies in a row. Those enemies can only damage your LF pool while doing this, and then when you clean up with the dagger + focus later, you get your life force back. One added advantage to this is that a power necro, even a bad one, will have the effect from Scholar Runes on nearly 100% of the time. On a LF build you’ll have a bubble of 14k health that enemies have to go through before you receive real damage,, and this bubble resets really quickly.

#3: Group support. The necromancer is, at its heart, a debuffer, and is capable of applying plenty of weakness, chill, cripple, boon removal, vulnerability, and immobilization. The problem, of course, is that in PVE weakness, chill, cripple, and boon removal aren’t that useful. Now, for newbies who just run around ranging everything, having enemies who are constantly crippled/chilled and immobilized is a real bonus. But for those who melee enemies, this isn’t that useful. Weakness would be good, but against regular enemies it is far inferior to blind, and bosses have reduced weakness duration (just to spite us). Boon removal is situational and spotty, and Anet designs enemies with strong boons to constantly reapply those boons (just to spite us). So, in the end necromancers are left with mostly invulnerability, which they are decent at. If only death shiver was placed somewhere else…

As far as group buffing goes, the necro does have a few tools, but these tools tend to be scattered and hard to work into a DPS build. Ritual of Protection and Spectral wall provide group protection, with Ritual of Protection usually working when you need it, where you need it. The staff can provide close quarters permanent regen as well as occasional condi cleanse and blast finishers, and bone minions can provide further blast finishers. The focus also provides regen to allies it bounces to, and the Necro has a decent, low maintenance heal in Transfusion.

#4: Epidemic. Epidemic is one of the strongest skills in the game, since it is the only skill that is a force multiplier. It makes everyone’s conditions better and longer, and it makes them in a very large AoE, and it does this every 12 to 15 seconds. It is also important to note that epidemic spreads every condition, damaging and debuffing alike. Vulnerability, weakness, burning, blind, etc, all get spread en mass, doubling in intensity or in duration.

You also seem to be under a big misunderstanding with condi necros and epidemic. Condi necros can put all the conditions they want on all the targets already. Weakening shroud, enfeebling blood, grasping dead, mark of blood, tainted shackles, chillblains, unholy feast, corrosive poison cloud, well of suffering, well of corruption, well of darkness, locust swarm, Death Nova, Death Shiver… they all work in an AoE. What you are confusing is that epidemic is capable of spreading single target conditions, which have higher durations and shorter cooldowns than AoE conditions, and are assuming that all condi necros are doing is auto attacking then using epidemic a minute later. What epidemic really does is multiply all these AoE conditions, and it does this in a much larger AoE. And it does this to other classes conditions, again in a much larger AoE than they can provide. Also, other classes can’t “put all the conditions you want on all the targets”. The only class that comes close to this is the engineer, and they don’t do it in a 600 radius. The only thing the necro needs is burning, and since every other class does burning, and burning becomes redundant as soon as two or more people do it, and with so much ambient burning around (cough Guardians Eles), not having burning becomes a non issue in a team.

I’ve been reading about this heavy armor thing for awhile now, and it is far overrated. At level 80:

Light armor classes with exotic gear: 1836 armor.
Heavy armor classes with exotic gear: 2127 armor.

Heavy classes get a 15.8% reduction from incoming direct damage over light armor classes. Or, to put it in a better perspective, heavy classes take 86.4% of the damage that light armor classes do. Compared to HP tiers, this extra armor is nothing, and that is with berserker gear. If you run something like Soldier’s gear, then the armor differences are only 11.5%, or taking 89.7% of the usual damage.

Epidemic only spreads to 5 other enemies so at most youll have 6 with conditions on it. Also conditionmancers have a pretty big flaw in that single target their damage is very low as well as if anyone else is capable of putting bleeds or poison on the target and the bleeds stack over a certain ammount your damage is going to suffer making you even more lacking. Thats why people are taking beserker professions since the damage can only go up with vuln and might and no one interferes with anyone else bringing their damage down.

Right now im running a dagger/dagger axe/focus soldiers build with 17% base crit. With fury i think that is more than enough to do good damage since the dagger aa hits so hard and i have quite a bit of power. The only thing that is missing from melee necro that all other profs that have access to melee is aa cleave. Allow it to be a trait for all i care and i would even take a 5% to maybe a 10% hit in damage to cleave, and you can just swap the trait out at a boss fight if you want. When you play another prof that cleaves passively in melee range and then you play a melee necro with no melee cleave there is just something missing.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Out of curiosity, what about Vulnerability stacking? I never theorycraft PvE, really, but I know Necros can keep up insane Vuln stacks really easily. Is there another class that fits that niche, or do people not care about Vulnerability because of reasons?

Engineer does that way, way better; they can maintain 25 stacks on a boss even at range. Necro vuln stacking isn’t even that good, I think Rangers are better vuln stackers as well.

@ Blood Red Arachnid:

1) Necro DPS as a whole is not that good. Without minions, a direct DPS-specced necro is slightly behind an axe warrior and only slightly above with minions. However, the warrior also provides a net boost in total party DPS because they give AOE might and fury and also have banners.

2) Life Force isn’t helpful in a lot of dungeons because most bosses have 1-shot mechanics that will blow right through your Death Shroud. If you have enough health to tank through the OHKO move, yay for you. Dodging it is still better and pretty much every other class can dodge more than the necro.

3) So basically, you’re suggesting snares, vulnerability, and weakness. Snares and vulnerability engineers do better; engineers are the undisputed gods of vulnerability and when it comes to snares they have ridiculously high uptime on chill and immobilize, much more so than necromancers. That leaves weakness which you’ve correctly pointed out isn’t that useful. Even assuming you’d ever want a class just for its weakness-stacking ability, thieves, warriors and engineers probably do it better; the former two have autos that stack weakness in AOE and the latter two can blast their own poison fields for AOE weakness. By comparison the necro only really has Withering Precision which is much less useful due to the fact that they don’t have any cleaving attacks.

4) Epidemic is not that useful of a skill because it spreads conditions to everyone BUT the one who actually needs to be targeted. Your teammates will be targeting the boss/high priority mob and stacking conditions on it; if you cast Epidemic on it you’re putting those conditions on the targets that your team ISN’T attacking. That’s disregarding the fact that most mobs can be LOS’d to a single point so your team should be able to maintain max stacks on all targets at once anyway. Offhand I can think of very few situations where spreading conditions you already have to other targets is actually useful. I certainly wouldn’t waste a party slot on Epidemic when I could just put an Engineer or something in that slot and just output more raw conditions instead of trying to copy them around.

And that’s pretty much what it boils down to: why take necromancers when I could take engineers/mesmers/warriors/thieves etc.

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that 1 year into the game you can still do corner stacking (exploit ??) to favor the above two statements… is not broken ?

This is absolutely must go. Everytime I hear the word stacking in chat I wanna cry. You remove ranged combat, mobility, chill,criple,immobilize,dodges, etc from the fight, leaving only melee damage trading. It also makes the game boring since every fight is the same. But the designers aren’t the only one at fault we as players are as well: We do not have to stack. In competitive game play(pvp/wvw) I can understand this happens but in pve we have no excuses. Unfortunatly we still try to stack at all times example:
-In the fractal with may trin I heard someone comment that they STILL hadn’t found a place to stack during the bombardement.
-I was forced to stack in cof path 2 the room before the ritual room (protect mag while he places his kaboomium) while it can be easily done without.

Nemesis.8593:

The fact that in the current PvE being at range most of the time offers no benefit vs being in melee …

In pve you can even get punished for being ranged by the fact that an enemy leaves combat and regenerates after moving a certain amount from its starting location.

On top of that I see a problem with condition damage in general (no matter which class or game mode). You see when you place a damaging condition you are litterally investing damage. Now it is normal that when you invest something you want profit in return. After all you take a risk: you can die, the enemy can die before the condition expires , the enemy can get his conditions cleansed, the enemy can heal, etc. So it would be safe to assume that condition damage should be higher then normal damage but sadly it isn’t.

The only thing you can say is that most condition damage are aoe while most normal attacks aren’t but then again most non-aoe normal attacks cleave so again the advantage isn’t that good since aoe is limited to kittens and cleave to 3 hits. It doesn’t help that the more difficult fights consist of one big boss.

On top of that condition damage does not scale with the amount of players (maximum stack size) unlike normal damage which makes condition damage even less usefull.

If this problem with condition damage would be adressed then we can achieve a lot more as necromancers.

Im sure this whole stacking stuff is intended. For example we run CoE today and one of the Alpha figths is in a biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig room. And a big box is in the middle for no reason. I was like … “dude, why is it there?” “for stacking” “but thats just stupid” “yes, now grab that FGS and dps that kitten down”. Just sayin.

I was in a dungeon earlier today on my guardian, because, you know, I don’t exclusively play necromancers. And I was using my protective shields, knock backs and line of warding. you know what I found? They didn’t work 70% of the time! The enemies could fire right through my bubbles, walk right past my wards and could even hit me and my party through aegis. What does that tell you? Arena net doesn’t want you to use control, doesn’t want you to support, doesn’t want you to help your allies. You are playing next to people, not with people.

I just want to say my 2 cent about this.

4) Epidemic is not that useful of a skill because it spreads conditions to everyone BUT the one who actually needs to be targeted. Your teammates will be targeting the boss/high priority mob and stacking conditions on it; if you cast Epidemic on it you’re putting those conditions on the targets that your team ISN’T attacking. That’s disregarding the fact that most mobs can be LOS’d to a single point so your team should be able to maintain max stacks on all targets at once anyway. Offhand I can think of very few situations where spreading conditions you already have to other targets is actually useful. I certainly wouldn’t waste a party slot on Epidemic when I could just put an Engineer or something in that slot and just output more raw conditions instead of trying to copy them around.

Your’re thinking wrong about Epidemic. I agree that it’s not THE Necromancer’s skill. But it’s indeed strong and it’s unique for the way it works.

Of course, like many other skill of all classes, there are situation where you want it, some other where is not usefull. You made example where it’s not.

Epidemic is quite good in boss fight with spawning minion. The party can actually ignore them and let the necro spread all the conditions already applied. 1 or 2 random hit will finish.

With lots of mob, just spam your aoe skills (staff#2, scepter#2, dagger#5, DS#5) 2-3 hits on a mob you wish, and than epidemic =>Double up condition on all the others.

Anyway, the problem still is there. Necros doesn’t have lifesaving utility skill, just different ways to debuff, damage, and threaten mobs and bosse. While the real Top classes are those that can combine a Nice DPS with good ammount of support skill.

Warrior, guardians (surprised?), mesmer, sometimes elementalist, thief only for the stealth meccanic…..But the others? Don’t make mistakes, Necros are not the most ignored and kicked profession in dungeon. We’re not alone.
Engi? I think is the profession less used by players. Ranger??? Really guys? you think that rangers have an easier time than Necromancer?….No they don’t.

Zaganna.6034:

Warrior, guardians (surprised?), mesmer, sometimes elementalist, thief only for the stealth meccanic…..But the others? Don’t make mistakes, Necros are not the most ignored and kicked profession in dungeon. We’re not alone.
Engi? I think is the profession less used by players. Ranger??? Really guys? you think that rangers have an easier time than Necromancer?….No they don’t.

As above mentioned by a few times, engi and ranger has some usefull stuff in their pocket, but the players usually (!!!) plays them are bad. God bless the bearbow.

Tim.6450:

In pve you can even get punished for being ranged by the fact that an enemy leaves combat and regenerates after moving a certain amount from its starting location.

Imagine the problems this would create for level design, if mobs and bosses weren’t tethered at all. You think stacking/exploiting terrain and LOS is bad now?

I’m right there with you in terms of being annoyed and disappointed by players who insist on playing through content in this manner. All we can do is continue to do things legit and wait for the developers to figure out a way to eliminate or punish those tactics.

Moving on to conditions:

Vulnerability, IMO, is the only condition that warrants a cap. It baffles me that the bleed cap continues to exist, since there is literally no reason it should. Even when the 5 man party is a large as an instance group gets, when ONE PLAYER can maintain a full stack (or a near-full stack) of one condition by themselves, there is a design flaw somewhere. This has been repeated ad nauseam by countless players since launch but to no avail…

Condition damage should be totally personal so as not to limit anyone’s DPS. All damaging conditions should appear on the enemy nameplate for the person applying them, while debuffing conditions (i.e. blind, immobilize, weakness, etc.) should be globally visible.

Other thoughts for the OP:

Epidemic is wonderful at doing what it’s meant to, which is to make groups of trash and adds melt. Of course it’s not a boon to single target DPS – it isn’t supposed to be.

We have more access to weakness than a single Grandmaster trait. Problem is, the field from staff marks would actually require using staff, and while dagger #5 and CPC are good, they might not see much use outside of condition builds (unless power builds run with dagger offhand for condition removal…?). And then there’s Enfeeble. Lol.

I agree with the unifying theme of this thread (that we suffer in the current PvE meta). But I also agree with Nemesis to a certain extent that PvE dooms a lot of builds and playstyles to fail. Sadly, we are one of the professions that feels it the most.

PS Who was the kitten who said it’s easy for a full Berserker build to survive in PvE since Life Force generation isn’t a problem because stuff is constantly dying all the time? Do you black out during boss fights?

Dalanor.5387:

As above mentioned by a few times, engi and ranger has some usefull stuff in their pocket, but the players usually (!!!) plays them are bad. God bless the bearbow.

As well the necro has its own good skill & tricks.

We should stop to cry and think we’re alone and the most hated profession by the others…We’re not the only ones.

Zaganna.6034:

Dalanor.5387:

As above mentioned by a few times, engi and ranger has some usefull stuff in their pocket, but the players usually (!!!) plays them are bad. God bless the bearbow.

As well the necro has its own good skill & tricks.

We should stop to cry and think we’re alone and the most hated profession by the others…We’re not the only ones.

Can you tell me one which isnt nerfed to the ground or overshadowed by at least one other class or kitten by game design?

I heard they had permaweakness but that got nerfed.

I love my zerk necro. I love it to death. I’ve been playing it for over a year. The overall play style is just fun. But I just keep finding it harder and harder and harder to justify bringing it anywhere. I only ever use it in high level (if you can even count 40-50 lvl runs as high) fractals these days, and that’s because it fills a few niche rolls within my specific team to the point where its not a detriment. (Our group is a little unconventional, and we’ll never set speed records but we still blow through our daily runs.) For any other dungeon, except maybe a fun run through P1 in CoF or SE, I bring my warrior, guardian, or mesmer.

I’ve tried as hard as I can, changed and experimented endlessly, and can’t improve upon meta zerk gear and 30/25/0/0/15 for coordinated group DPS. Might stacking builds are useless in coordinated groups. DS oriented builds can’t match dagger auto and a proper rotation, and I fear there is nothing left without new weapons and serious re-balance or re-working of either the class, or the game. We do nothing useful better than any other class, and things we may do as well are overshadowed by our other shortcomings. That’s kinda all there is to it.

In random pugs with questionable players, yes we can succeed and seriously contribute. In organized, but not hardcore groups our shortcomings may be overlooked and proper play can compensate to not slow things down too much. However, in a truly organized high level group, we have nothing to offer except maybe a gimmicky niche roll in high level fractals (which really no longer exist due to the 50 cap). We don’t. Sorry guys. There’s no argument here.

You can blame the class, you can blame PvE and the way it was designed, you can blame the tactics that have been devised to quickly and efficiently deal with PvE content, but it doesn’t change the bottom line.

Guanglai I respect your efforts and will gladly help in any way I can, but I don’t see this leading anywhere productive.

The strange thing is that, as a grenadier engineer with 80% condition duration, I can’t provide 25 stacks of vulnerability on a champion. I can sustain maybe half of that amount. I wouldn’t count the necromancer’s vulnerability out, since he does have a couple of ways to provide it quite reliably. A lot of people underestimate reaper’s touch, well of suffering, and unyielding blast. And man do I wish Death Shiver was in another trait line… anyway I digress.

1) Unless something has changed recently, being “slightly behind” an axe warrior means it is still pretty good, since the axe warrior is the highest auto attack in the game. The necro has the advantage in that the dagger is quicker and not rear loaded, whereas the axe warrior will find its combo interrupted, losing 1/3rd of the auto attack damage due to having to dodge. The necro also increases team DPS because they provide vulnerability, as well as blast finishers in combo fields.

2)Most bosses in dungeons don’t have one shot mechanics. They have strong attacks, yes, but seldom are they straight up one shots (especially against a 30K health pool). It is also rare for these strong attacks to be so rapid that the necro actually runs out of both dodges and life force while fighting the boss. The only exception I can think of is the one you mentioned already: subject alpha, path 2/3.

3)You left out boon removal, protection, and regen. Engineers are decent at snares, however I couldn’t say they do them better than necromancers. With a condi necro, grasping dead can provide near permanent cripple alone, whereas the engi only makes patches with glue puddles and nails. The engi has a good AoE chill, but that is all that is notable. When it comes down to immobilize, while the engi has some (mostly net shot, net turret, and puddles), the necro also has some (tainted shackles, dark pact, rigor mortis). Of course, the best immobilizer is a ranger elite, so…

As for weakness, it is harder to apply than it looks, since most glasses have to severely kitten themselves to apply weakness for meaningful amounts. The warrior is good at it, however this requires running hammer or mace main-hand in PVE, which would mean having to leave either GS or Axe/Axe at home. Engineers apply weakness through tranquilizer dart, a skill which is pathetically bad compared to everything else. They can use poison fields, however that would require blowing their blast finishers and losing the heals and might stacks to do this. Thieves, again to apply in meaningful amounts, need to spam blast finishers in a poison field, and blow their entire initiative bar to do this. The weakness from crippling strike is nice, but it goes away the moment you have to do anything other than auto attack. Necromancers get their weakness in longer durations from single skills, such as enfeebling blood and corrosive poison cloud, and low maintenance application from enfeeble and withering precision. The necro also rarely loses anything by combining chillblains + putrid mark, or bone fiends + CPC.

But either way, the biggest flaw with necromancer support ATM is that, currently, the game is designed in such a way that necromancer support isn’t needed. There aren’t enemies that kite players while ranging, so there’s no reason to cripple/chill/immobilize in higher levels of play. Champions have a soft immunity to weakness, cutting the shorter durations in half, and also reduce the effectiveness of vulnerability by half. And, many of the troublesome mobs with boons (like dredge, for example), have no cooldown on applying boons, and as such repeated boon removal isn’t useful on them.

#4: ITT there is never more than one target. Also, engineers only output conditions slowly, whereas the necro can burst their conditions more rapidly. Most people have already commented on this one.

Now, the fact is that Necromancers are the weakest PVE class at the moment. However, they are not as bad as you make them out to be.

Dalanor.5387:

Can you tell me one which isnt nerfed to the ground or overshadowed by at least one other class or kitten by game design?

-Wells
-Blind Aoe
-Boon removal
-DS (which overall it’s a design of the necro to having a larger healthpool without the possibility to ‘avoid’ more attack than the other classes)
-Condition build (Some would say that engi are better. I say that engi condi build are just different from us. We don’t have confusion, but we got torment. And necro can stack more bleeding)

But I keep telling you…we’re not the only class with problems…People kick ranger too…I saw people kicking thiefs.
And why?
Because the only things that is important in dungeon are:
-DPS
-Aegis
-projectiles blocking

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

Cogbyrn.7283:

Out of curiosity, what about Vulnerability stacking? I never theorycraft PvE, really, but I know Necros can keep up insane Vuln stacks really easily. Is there another class that fits that niche, or do people not care about Vulnerability because of reasons?

Engineer does that way, way better; they can maintain 25 stacks on a boss even at range. Necro vuln stacking isn’t even that good, I think Rangers are better vuln stackers as well.

@ Blood Red Arachnid:

1) Necro DPS as a whole is not that good. Without minions, a direct DPS-specced necro is slightly behind an axe warrior and only slightly above with minions. However, the warrior also provides a net boost in total party DPS because they give AOE might and fury and also have banners.

2) Life Force isn’t helpful in a lot of dungeons because most bosses have 1-shot mechanics that will blow right through your Death Shroud. If you have enough health to tank through the OHKO move, yay for you. Dodging it is still better and pretty much every other class can dodge more than the necro.

3) So basically, you’re suggesting snares, vulnerability, and weakness. Snares and vulnerability engineers do better; engineers are the undisputed gods of vulnerability and when it comes to snares they have ridiculously high uptime on chill and immobilize, much more so than necromancers. That leaves weakness which you’ve correctly pointed out isn’t that useful. Even assuming you’d ever want a class just for its weakness-stacking ability, thieves, warriors and engineers probably do it better; the former two have autos that stack weakness in AOE and the latter two can blast their own poison fields for AOE weakness. By comparison the necro only really has Withering Precision which is much less useful due to the fact that they don’t have any cleaving attacks.

4) Epidemic is not that useful of a skill because it spreads conditions to everyone BUT the one who actually needs to be targeted. Your teammates will be targeting the boss/high priority mob and stacking conditions on it; if you cast Epidemic on it you’re putting those conditions on the targets that your team ISN’T attacking. That’s disregarding the fact that most mobs can be LOS’d to a single point so your team should be able to maintain max stacks on all targets at once anyway. Offhand I can think of very few situations where spreading conditions you already have to other targets is actually useful. I certainly wouldn’t waste a party slot on Epidemic when I could just put an Engineer or something in that slot and just output more raw conditions instead of trying to copy them around.

And that’s pretty much what it boils down to: why take necromancers when I could take engineers/mesmers/warriors/thieves etc.

1. Necro dps isn’t as bad as you’re making it out to be. Your standard 30/25/0/0/15 or 30/10/0/0/30 zerk/scholar build is about average in terms of dps.

2. The DS nerf hurt necro’s a lot, no questioning that and it’s the only class that doesn’t have some kind of invuln/vigor/block. You pretty much have to have an extra weapon with an energy sigil for some fights.

3. With Koi Cakes, Signet of Power, Corrosive Poison, Weakening Shroud, and dagger 4, a necro using just about any build can maintain 90-100% weakness uptime. Weakness is a nice thing to have in high level fractals with large trash pulls and doubly so in dredge where not only are there large trash pulls, but everything is immune to blind. Also, unlike a thief, a necro can do this without taking a huge dps hit.

4. Necro’s can easily stack up 40s worth of weakness on a target then spread it around with epidemic, it’s pretty situational, but it’s nice to have in your back pocket.

Obviously Necro’s have a ton of issues, I’m not disputing that. But it’s also not quite as dire as some people make it out to be.

Well ive been without power over xmas so ive come into this thread late. But guang you really need to recheck your numbers for necro. It should beat warrior without minions. Minions are a situational slight dps boost.

I assume you ignore certain things which result in a dps increase such as weakening shroud, reapers touch, traited locust swarm, well of suffering and tainted shackles.

Doesnt change that necros are a pretty poor choice in pve. But they do have their uses. They are a bit more useful in fractals and they are a good casual class (they provide a bit of vuln, blind, condi control, cc and good damage). They are just not a speedrun class.

spoj.9672:

Well ive been without power over xmas so ive come into this thread late. But guang you really need to recheck your numbers for necro. It should beat warrior without minions. Minions are a situational slight dps boost.

I assume you ignore certain things which result in a dps increase such as weakening shroud, reapers touch, traited locust swarm, well of suffering and tainted shackles.

Doesnt change that necros are a pretty poor choice in pve. But they do have their uses. They are a bit more useful in fractals and they are a good casual class (they provide a bit of vuln, blind, condi control, cc and good damage). They are just not a speedrun class.

It’s been a long time, admittedly, and I’m going off imperfect memory, but I seem to recall the optimal zerk dagger necro spec with Well of Suffering, Blood Fiend, Shadow Fiend, Bone Wurm (or whatever it’s called) and Flesh Golem being about 11k with about 1.5k of that coming from the minions. That’s compared to warriors being about 10k. I haven’t recalculated for ascended armor so it’s probably a bit higher now.

Being comparable to warriors isn’t bad per se, but when you consider that elementalists can get over 16k/s, or more than 50% more, and mesmers aren’t too far behind, you also see why necros (and warriors, too) need something other than DPS to keep them competitive. Warriors have banners and shouts for that. Necros don’t have much of anything.

I am wondering if necros can permachill. That might be nice since even engineers can’t do that.

I believe you can perma chill but you may sacrifice a fair amount of damage to do it. Ill have a look at how easy it is to perma chill with my build.

Perma chill is quite easy even with the standard DPS spread. A tiny bit harder with modified meta spread, but certainly doable. If you don’t want to take Hydromancy sigils, though, you’d be harder pressed to maintain it. I’ve stacked over a minute of chill on a target using Focus, Chill of Death, Dark Path, and Hydro sigils. With 100% Chill duration, it’s easy as all get out. Without, it’s still doable. Fun to hit an Epidemic on that one, too.

You can get perma chill with dark path, traited focus 5, traited spectral grasp and chillblains. Without chillblains its almost perma, for short fights its permanent. With longer fights you might have a few seconds downtime until the target hits below 50% hp.

You can get more chills with chilling darkness. But its not really needed and i think using the staff is kind of wasted aswell. Even with untraited spectral grasp the chill uptime is good.

So i would say with the meta build the unique ability necro provides is perma to near perma chill uptime on a single target.

^ With on-demand Weakness when needed. Unless by meta you’re meaning the old meta 30/25/0/0/15.

I tested chill uptime with 20/25 because it has the option to trait dark path, spectrals, chilling darkness, focus and chill of death. It lacks 10% condi duration but 24sec grasp cd compared to 30 secs is better for chill than 10% condi duration. I consider both builds to be meta as they are both very similar in damage output.

30/25 is still slightly better for dps but there are a lot of good reasons to go 20/25 now.

Ranger/Guard/Warrior/Engi are “balanced”. Ele DPS is sometimes to high (FGS is definitly op).
All this classes have some support, finishers, banners, traits (spotter), they can vulnerability or have things like reflection/blind (rangers have reflection, engineers a lot of blind).

Mesmers usually have the lowest dps of all classes but support that makes them viable sometimes. Necros have nothing.

Only bad offensive support (al little bit vulnerability, but not all the time more spikes), no might. No Fury, no unighe buffs (like banners/spotter/frostspirit).

They are slow (not charge/teleportskills).
DPS is…ok i think, but support is most times the problem.

The only other class with a similar problem is the thief. But thiefs can do the second/third best dps in game. And they can stack about 5+stacks vul all the time easily.

So usually u can create a mix out of warriors, guardians, eles, engineers and a ranger. And u will get a fine gruop. Mesmer is nice to have, thief too. But the necro will not be an improvement for any gruop composition.

And pls stop talking about these heavy amor bullkitten. These arguments are all foolish. Probably a warrior can make 1 or 2 mistakes more. But necros have DS and a lot of life too.
Play a 11,8k HP berserk guard (which they have with usefull builds) and a 18k+ berserk necro with DS and tell me which 1 can make more mistakes (sigil of energy allowed).

Would it be logical to raise the condition cap and adding a soft cap which just reduces the duration by a certain percentage like 50%? That would allow your auto attacks to maintain 25 stacks and your bigger attacks + traits that grant multiple stacks to still increase duration and stack intensity.

<= 25 stacks has no DR (diminishing return) on duration.
26 to 30 has a 25% DR
31 to 35 has a 50% DR
36 to 50 has a 75% DR

This would make duration stacking a more sought after stat instead of just stacking condition damage. The question is, how much is enough? <queue theorycrafters, go go!>

Wouldnt make a difference because condi damage is sub par. Its only useful for gimmicky things like condi bombing in fractals where direct damage would kill you (frac 43 & 44). It did have a decent use for frac 70+ dredge. But thats gone now.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

I was going to post this over on Guru but I figured I might as well address a larger audience even though I know most of the responses are probably going to be stupid as result.

doh

On a small sidenote about immobilise and how ensnare is the best of it,there is alternative we human necros can use to get access to it.
Avatar of melandru #5 is a longer casting version of it BUT with 1200 range.
Ah and it ignores LoS as well thus why i am using it on wvw to snare a thief or hit siege on walls etc etc etc.
For a conditionmancer it is an acceptable trade considering what it does vs plague.

Kahrgan.7401:

Nemesis.8593:

Necromancer isn’t bad in PvE at all… it is the PvE that is bad…

Let me explain…
For example… warriors do more damage in melee range then necromancers do at range, because no one would ever play a warrior in melee, if there was another class that could do the same damage or more at range… especially since melee range doesn’t have the same DPS uptime as range does. Not having the same DPS uptime as range makes the meleers overall effectiveness as high as the range… as in they do more damage less often vs less damage more often.

Now… in this current “we do only CoF p1 fast run just warriors 10k achievement points or kick” stupid PvE system… melee classes are not punished enough for staying melee, so you can actually have 100% DPS uptime even in melee… and therefor warrior > necromancer.

They can’t increase necromancer damage to match warrior damage, because then no one would play warrior. They would do that if there were more necromancers then warriors, from a marketing point of view, but they aren’t…

So… now you have it. The only thing they can do is fix PvE, not chance the necromancer or any other sub par class, cause that would just place us further away from a good game.

In conclusion: Necromancers are fine… it’s the PvE that is broken.

I usually agree with you, but for this, I do not.

It’s not the PVE mechanics that are bad, it’s the imbalance of warriors and guardians innate defense vs other classes.

They wear heavy armor, and they have some of the best group support. Guardians have the BEST group support, and can be very defensive without sacraficing a ton of damage. Warriors on the other hand, add alot of group support, shouts, banners etc; while wearing heavy armor getting that innate defense AND their damage scales off the charts compared to other classes.

Currently, there is no middle ground for plate wearers. No risk vs reward. If you want to do dmg, you should be squishy. If you want to be survivable you should do low dmg. That was their intended goal, but they don’t seem to have the right balance with warrior or guardian.

Here is how it should break down as far as damage goes

High dmg <————————————>Low dmg
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
High risk(squishy) <———————————-> Low risk(tanky)

The more squishy you become the more dmg you deal. Currently warriors don’t make a big enough sacrafice for the damage they do. Mostly because hundred blades and Axe auto attack scales too well with their traits and attack power.

I agree with you. Currently most squishy classes are elementalist and thief, yet a warrior can do a lot more dps with a gs without sacrificing anything. A berserker, full glass cannon warrior ~= tanky ele/thief in terms of survivability. You can do 30k damages with a low cooldown skill, plus you still have ~20k hp and ~2400-2600 armor. Then if a class is squishy, then they must have the ability to do such damage from long range, or much more damage from melee. If this isn’t possible, then they have to nerf classes doing good dps without any sacrifice.
Dps is the most important thing in gw2 pve players’ minds, they don’t care about team support, healing etc. Most players you find in the game only wants players with good dps in their parties. Then I won’t care about supporting ability buffs, give every class warrior dps in pve, or class system will stay broken. As long as they don’t do a dps like warrior, other classes will stay as unwanted classes. Anet has to balance squishiness / damage output ratio of classes. Both specs can’t be at top level.

A zerker warr wont have 2400+ armor, its slightly more than 2100, while light armor classes have ~1800 (plus a few from traits). But thats true, that they get less damage as a heavy, which is not a problem with guardian, since they have low health, but with warrior its over the top.
But a zerker necro currently dont put any points in death magic to get a bit of armor bonus so they eat the full hit. Getting a 20k hit means you are dead, a warrior still can survive it. So when you run out of dodges, you need to use your bugged DS and pray to the god of rng to not die. With 18k hp and 12k DS theoriticaly you can eat a 42k hit. In reality 30k kills you.

Zerker war has 18k hp. A 20k will kill it. It will not do more damage than thief/ele.
Other classes are wanted, just not necro.

Guanglai Kangyi.4318:

4) Poor defensive/utility support. Guardians, thieves and mesmers have, by default, tons of reflects, condition removal, block, blinds, stability, etc..

I don’t know what thief is doing in the above sentence. Thief is pro at blinding true, but reflect? stablity? Condition removal?!!!

All those 3 things come in shorter suply then love and peace in black citadel, and that’s for himself, not to mention others

Thief can stealth, give venoms, blind like mad, and be the best combo finisher provider given someone else drops a meaningful combo field. But certainly not reflects, condition removal or stability!

Thief has smoke screen (projectile block), stealth, blinds and very high single target damage. Its in a much better place than necro.

Umut.5471:

I agree with you. Currently most squishy classes are elementalist and thief, yet a warrior can do a lot more dps with a gs without sacrificing anything.

That´s crap, Elementalist´s are laughing about what warriors call “dmg”. And thiefs can do more dmg too.
Warrior dps is only average ~ on par with ranger/engineer/necro, a little bit more there, a bit more here. But they have good support and can stay alive easy. That´s why warriors are prefered.
And the fact that most people still think warrior dps>all.

because how dumb AI is → warrior dps > all