Guild Wars 2

So recently, thanks to the immense influx of cake-bribed Devs answering our question, we have gotten some insight on what the Necro is supposed to be in contrast to what he is now.
the most important Post was that of Jonathan Sharp in the “PHEW” Thread. Sadly I cant directly quote him

Game Designer

So, quickly, on the design philosophy at play here (you can feel free to disagree, but this is what I feel):

We want the Thief to be the class that most “slips through your fingers”. Other classes like the Ele and Mes have some of it too (and rightly so), but if anyone is escaping a fight, that should be a slippery Thief.

The Necro, on the other hand, should be the dude you CANNOT get away from. It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

So we don’t want that attrition class to also have great ways to escape. This used to be the case, and we felt the Necro was just too strong if it was great at attrition as well as movement/escape. We wanted the Necro to be more about attrition, and for other classes (Thief, Ele, Mes) to be more about escaping and mobility.

Hope that makes sense.

This is why I want to Propose a thread in which we collect all suggestions on how this could be achieved. And PLEASE with reasoning behind it, not just “Buff this cause it’s too weak”. I like the philosophy behind the Necro because I always liked attrition classes, outlasting the enemy, watching them die.

Examples of what I mean:
#A poster in the same thread already said, that this philosophy has a heavy dent, since a Necromancer enters the battle with empty LF when the enemy has all its skills ready to unleash the full fury, while the LF fills towards the end of the fight while the enemy really can’t do that much damage any more. I think signet of undeath is supposed to fill that gap, but is currently too weak to pull it off while at the same time having an outrageous cooldown. BiP used to be able to give us a decent 20% LF with a bit and Reaper’s touch also gives a good ammount of LF in a short time. But just because Signet of Undeath is so weak, I would propose a buff here. Or maybe a trait that allows for an instant gain of LF on certain conditions (like “Your first LF gain after entering combat grants you and additional 15%” similar to an opening shot, this would actually be way better than the currently defunct 5% extra LF gain in SR5)

#Another Player stated that most Mobility-focussed classes/builds can easily escape even Necros, because they are nearly always build around condition removal. Here I’d like to put forward an opposite example: The rangers AoE snare. You can’t get out of it without stopping to attack the Ranger and start attacking the kitten vines! It’s infurating. The Ranger is a Class hard to get away FROM while at the same time easy to get away AS! Meanwhile, the Necro doesn’t have any snare that isn’t a Condition. He has one daze (close Range) no Knockdowns or knockbacks, one utility Pull that’s bugged and one slow-moving, easy to dodge projectile Shadowstep. I as a Sylvari like to use the single target vines-spell that has the same functionality and also adds bleeding a bit. But for non-Sylvari and in sPvP it’s useless. Why can’t Necros have something similar. it could be worked into Grasping Dead (make it a targeted Spell with a vine-like effect on the main target and the usual effect as an AoE) or Dark Pact. Actually, I’d like to see Dark Pact to be a knockdown, maybe even with the condition that the target has to be moving to be knocked down, that would be cool: “Stay still and you can keep attacking me, but try to move and you’re on your face before me!” Sounds to me like proper Control-based gameplay.

#The fact that Necromancer is supposed to be a premier condition class while at the same time being unable to keep up with Rangers, thieves and Eles in terms of stacking-speed. Sure, he CONTROLS conditions better and the fact that I cheer everytime an enemy buffs itself to the brim with boons or unloads all sorts of COnditions onto me speaks for the Necros strange, twisted relation to sickness, death and injury, but in terms of gameplay, that just makes him on par with the other classes in terms of Conditions. I like the fact however, that through his Attribute-Trait-Allocations, he is capable of building for Conditions and still dish out respectable Direct Damage, i myself am driving a Power/Condition hybrid build and actually pretty good at switching between Condition- and DD Weapons. So stacking up Conditions faster shouldn’t be that big of a priority. The Curses25 is supposed to adress that issue I guess, don’t know how much it actually does, since it’s bugged, but would be interesting to see, another idea: add another, exclusive(!!!), condition: Curses, but that’s hard to implement and balance around for.

#Fear is lackluster and an insult to the Necro, we have 1 single target 1s fear, 1 AoE 1s fear, 1 Cone 12 Fear (underwater) and a single target 2s Fear (downed). All other classes that can fear, can fear LONGER and sometimes even longer AoE. Instead of giving the Necro a longer fear, how about giving him a 1s Fear on 25% of Critical hits? Could be Soul Reaping. Combined with “Fear does Damage” (for those unaware: Dmg=1.5Lvl+(15% CondDmg) while Bleeding=0.5Lvl+(5% CondDmg)+2.5). And it would fit nicely with the CritDmg in SR.

Those are all the basic suggestions I currently have, what about yours?