Guild Wars 2

So.. I know I’ve been posting alot lately. I think this will be my last topic for a bit.

Imagine you are in a team with a mesmer a thief a warrior a guardian whatever…

Who’s going to get the focus fire?

Not the mesmer, too much time wasting on clones and invis…
Not the thief, too many invis dodges to bother with…
Not the war he has too much stability and mobility
Not the guardian, that’s like saying “focus the tank”. Too much sustain.

So who’s left? You. The big fat necro waiting to get pounded on. “the necro is the most dangerous if he’s left alone too long” NO freaking duh. Anyone is. Anyone who is not being attacked and is left to constantly do damage will be the one dealing most the damage… makes sense.

So I know even playing against any necro that thats the person to hit first. Why? Because he’s the EASIEST target. Not because im afraid of his damage. Or his aoe’s, which btw are constantly useless because my team is cleansing like crazy.

So when you say “gotta focus dat necro or else..” It’s not because of any or else… It’s because hes the easiest target of the bunch. He/she is the easiest one to kill. For all the health and all the blah blah, the necro is the one that will die first. Because he has nowhere to go and no way to defend himself properly.

This is just a simple truth. Right now there is an insane amount of condition cleansing. So most players go MM. Minionmancers are the only safe route to surviving a decent period of time. But you will still die first. You can only dodge twice… Your blinds are limited and not so life-saving.

Thing about our blinds. They are in the form of WoD, Dagger 5, Shadow fiend… And I think thats about it XD Which can all be dodged or maybe blocked aside from WoD which only lasts for 5 seconds every maybe 40 seconds. So blinds are not that reliable.

They’re now wanting to reduce the amount of weakness we can produce so there goes another hit to our defense. Our DS is near-useless unless you just spec all LF and just want to be present at the team fight for a while.

SO… yeah. There it is. Share your thoughts about it all even though we’ve been through it all many times before. XD

When you really just look at the necro they probably have the lowest sustain potential of any class in the game. Maybe they have the highest aoe potential but thats only if your enemies are like blunt objects, moving nowhere and picking their noses. Our aoe is incredibly easy to escape and all on high cooldowns.

The real theme here I want to relay the most is WHO ELSE? Who else are they going to focus? They cant land a successful hit on the rest of your team let alone see them. So who’s it gonna be. Oh, yes. The big doofus standing there all by his lonesome.

Our dps is good, but compaired to other classes its terribad. Our aoe is good but has so many counters its almost a blessing from grenth himself that they actually did what they are intended for. Our sustain is ok.. but lets face it; It’s also the worst in the game. Our mobility is the worst. Our cc is the worst. Our blah blah blah XD

I’m just ranting now I’m sure. But there you have it. Nailed to the ground as another post described.

And to say one more thing.. I get it. We can do well.. IF. And it’s a very big if. We don’t have an all-purpose build like every other class where you feel really safe whatever is thrown your way that you can handle it. No. Any build you choose there will be a very common counter (not a specific build or anything). But like I said, something like a mobile ranged dps, or a hard ccer, or a bunker, or another necro lol.

TheDevice.2751:

Oh, yes. The big doofus standing there all by his lonesome.

Hahaha for some reason this line brought a huge smile to my face

Yeah its becoming more apparent to people to just kill the necro. Sure if you build a bunker condition spec you can hang in a zerg and hurt people. Outside of that we are very limited. You are easy to CC, wear paper armor and have no way to stop a burst.

had a static discharge engi and a d/d thief focus me over and over tonight. Sure they where glassy, so what didn’t matter, engi could go immune to damage and thief could disappear. Even seeing it coming not much I could do about it.

spec for survival and tickle them.to death. Nope they will just walk away. Spec for burst? Can’t live thru a focus fire.

death shroud used to be the way to survive, let them burst it down and not have the damage roll over. But that was to powerful I guess you know it was like we could go immune to damage Like warriors, engi, ele and guardian.

Generally speaking in PvP or WvW the Necro is the best to focus because they fulfill every single qualification:
High damage threat (can easily wipe your team if allowed to free cast)
Only one effective way to deal with concentrated focus for any period of time (Plague) and only melee at that. No escapes, invulnerabilities, etc.
Most builds are very squishy

That said, a friend and I were doing 5v5s in WvW a few days back, and the other team had a Necro, two Guardians, an Ele, and a Warrior. Obviously knowing that Necros are #1 priority almost all the time, I called target on him the first time. He didn’t go down. Not only did he not go down, even being focused by a whole group of 5 he never got below half, just with a little “peeling” in the form of protection and healing from the guardians, and Spectral Armor into DS. He was unkillable, and we got wiped before we could down him.

Next round, we focused the ele. A tanky support D/D ele. He dropped like a rock. It took a little bit of time because he mist formed and tried to heal, but we just trained the hell out of him. Now, unfortunately we kept losing (we essentially threw together a random comp of 5, no prep or anything, just kind of winged it, and couldn’t secure stomps at all), and every time we lost we’d try a new target. And every single target, even the guardians, were easier to kill.

Not to say our defense still doesn’t need help, but just blanket saying “always focus the Necro” can and will get you destroyed in a fight, because quite a few are playing off that idea, and going full Soldier’s, which can destroy people.

Well i’ll admit that it’s not all bad Bhawb like you say. And peeling does go a long way for a necro. But I tend to go lone ranger while hotjoined so what can I expect. It’s a good thing to be reminded for sure.

The few problems that I focus on does not completely destroy the class but does require the player to be a bit more on their toes imo. The good things about the necro I should also be more verbal about XD tbf.

The only problem I see (for defensive builds), is that in general a fully defensive Necro doesn’t offer what a Guardian would. A fully defensive Guardian is just straight up unkillable. But a Guardian that is as difficult to kill as a fully defensive necro still brings tons of support, way better than the Necro does. That’s the problem for me; fully defensive Necros are totally selfish.

Same with the general glass cannon build. Sure we can do massive damage, but its also because we have no reasonable middle ground. There is no way to decide “you know, I feel like I’m not living long enough, I’ll swap in a defensive utility/trait/weapon at the cost of damage”. But there is no such choice. You have Spectral Armor, thats basically it.

(Ignoring MM)
We can only get reliable defense right now through one trait essentially, 15 in SR, or utility skills. We don’t have good defensive weapons, our two defensive trees are subpar, and even within our utility skills we have very few options.

What we need are more options.

Personally I find that if I have a high armor rating I can survive a very long time against multiple foes…

But man does it get annoying being knocked down every 2 seconds by those kitten warriors and guardians(who also have very high uptime on stability btw!).

Luckily for me, I am getting better at using Foot in the grave.

I tired running spectral armour in deathshroud recently and it is pretty kitten good for staying alive.

I’m almost tempted to run this full time over corrupt boon.

Ya, SA is amazing.

Agreed with the OP..
Necro is getting boring..
I actually had to swap out my powerbuild in pvp for mm to sustain….
kittens getting really old really fast.. so fast that i actuallly did the living story… because.. kitten it..

In a recent 15v15 GVG best of 5 first round I managed to avoid being on the radar, our second Necro bore the brunt of the attack. Round 2 & 3 I was focused consistently, followed by our second Necro. Round 4 & 5 I alternated between pushing with the melee train using Plague early and disrupting their backline.

We also alternated our group strategy between pressuring their melee train and backline but the consistent thread was we had two players dedicated to constantly harassing the enemy Necros.

I’ve recently started playing my Necro and the lack of self-sustainable stability and slow movement without travellers runes, spectral walk or locust signet is incredibly frustrating at times!

In recent times Flesh wurm + SW seem to be the way to go utilities in PvP. They incorporate every defensive tool the class otherwise lacks(mobility) and are especially useful in the control heavy meta even if their use is bound to gimmicky mechanics.
ATM i am just hoping for FW and SW to become mandatory in PvP so devs might want to take a second look at all those mobility concerns which have been raised since day 1. Hur hur…

Bhawb.7408:

Generally speaking in PvP or WvW the Necro is the best to focus because they fulfill every single qualification:
High damage threat (can easily wipe your team if allowed to free cast)
Only one effective way to deal with concentrated focus for any period of time (Plague) and only melee at that. No escapes, invulnerabilities, etc.
Most builds are very squishy

That said, a friend and I were doing 5v5s in WvW a few days back, and the other team had a Necro, two Guardians, an Ele, and a Warrior. Obviously knowing that Necros are #1 priority almost all the time, I called target on him the first time. He didn’t go down. Not only did he not go down, even being focused by a whole group of 5 he never got below half, just with a little “peeling” in the form of protection and healing from the guardians, and Spectral Armor into DS. He was unkillable, and we got wiped before we could down him.

Next round, we focused the ele. A tanky support D/D ele. He dropped like a rock. It took a little bit of time because he mist formed and tried to heal, but we just trained the hell out of him. Now, unfortunately we kept losing (we essentially threw together a random comp of 5, no prep or anything, just kind of winged it, and couldn’t secure stomps at all), and every time we lost we’d try a new target. And every single target, even the guardians, were easier to kill.

Not to say our defense still doesn’t need help, but just blanket saying “always focus the Necro” can and will get you destroyed in a fight, because quite a few are playing off that idea, and going full Soldier’s, which can destroy people.

I don’t think the problem was your FF target as much as lack of class synergy in your party. They had near permanent stability, most likely hammer staff guards and a hammer bow warrior, healing from ele and the necro was most likely a dire gear Condi necro.

like a said dire Condi is great in group play and does well in the current wvw meta, yet even in that meta fighting a similar group he would be a priority target. My gripe is that why does that have to be the way you need to spec? They other classes at least have other specs that can be viable in the meta we really don’t. (arguably Ele also has it pretty rough too)

I’m a Necro and I always target the Necro’s first. Easiest kill on the field.

Can use it to your advantage and go completely defensive to allow you to survive long enough for your comrads to kill them.

The main problem I run into (Condimancer, currently using a Melandru set because I’m trying to gear up) is the lack of stability in my normal form. I can go lich or Plague to gain stab, but if I want to actually use my character against any size of group I will get ping-ponged around until dead. I will literally get grabbed, knocked down, and flung, unable to cast at all until I’m downed.

Even dying quickly at least would allow me to pull a “blow the cooldowns and take ’em out” sort of thing, but being flung around like a beach ball is boring and not fun .

TheDevice.2751:

[snip]

^ Quoted for truth.

When roaming with my guildies in WvWvW and coming upon an enemy group, the first thing said in voice chat is always, “Target called on the necro. Get ’im!”

Outside of a very organized group building specifically to take advantage of the fact that the necro will be focused first (as Bhawb described), that necro is going down. Even when they do build specifically for that purpose, more times than not the necro is still going down.

ArenaNet has a very unconventional definition of attrition and sustain.

Sad really…

This entire thread can be summed up to points that have been made over and over: The Necro class needs more stability and/or all professions need less hard CC.

necros get focused down with stuns or other disabling skills whatever since you’re quaranteed to go down and you bring out world of hurt if they don’t.

sometimes you can surprise people by going extreme tank so it takes longer to kill you but i am pretty sure it doesn’t work well for long run when they notice you don’t do much dmg.

I really do like how necros don’t have stability and I think it should stay that way. There’s only this little problem with not being able to take bursts at all or evade or block and all defensive skills like weakness are just being nerfed to ground or given insane icd’s to make them useless. blind is very situtational and lasts only for one hit. Again only helps against people who are really clueless how blind works against their class. I am pretty sure it will be less useless in future.

We would need a Tantrum type of skill. When used, we root ourselves in a bacon dance animation, but AoE-strip stability and push back (or fear) all foes around us. Tainted shackles, while being a good skill, is not really that scary for melee train to keep on hitting.

alanis.6094:

This entire thread can be summed up to points that have been made over and over: The Necro class needs more stability and/or all professions need less hard CC.

Yep. Given they have yet to make any substantive improvements to this situation, we need to keep making these points over and over until it sinks in with the devs. My challenge to them is go out and play something other than condimancer for a change. It will give them a whole new perspective on necromancers and the challenges we face.

Shade

Dalanor.5387:

Shade

More and more I feel like Shade would make a lot of sense

Bhawb.7408:

Dalanor.5387:

Shade

More and more I feel like Shade would make a lot of sense

And again i feel Near to Death is what holds the developers back with this old trait … But seriously, we need something against CC which isnt stability.

If they want Death Shroud to be our defense, then something like Shade would solve a lot of the constant CC problems. Because right now DS is simply not cutting it against focused fire. Not even for a split second.

Dalanor.5387:

And again i feel Near to Death is what holds the developers back with this old trait … But seriously, we need something against CC which isnt stability.

Near to Death really wouldn’t do anything problematic with Shade, in the same way no one considers NtD too strong when combined with the offensive 30 SR trait. You still need to sit in DS to have the effect.

With our improved LF generation its has a potentially 100% uptime. On paper. In a magic world. If you know what i mean.
And btw its true no one complains about Deathly Perception, but on the other hand there is Foot in the Grave …

Dalanor.5387:

With our improved LF generation its has a potentially 100% uptime. On paper. In a magic world. If you know what i mean.
And btw its true no one complains about Deathly Perception, but on the other hand there is Foot in the Grave …

Foot in the Grave was kind of the obvious replacement… Shade would replace FitG, which was only implemented to be a nerfed Shade.

And no, there would be no way to have 100% uptime, which is why this is balanced. Shade gives you CC immunity while in DS, and unlike way back when Shade was still around, DS cannot be permanent (not remotely so) anymore.

I wouldn’t mind a GM trait that made it so we regenerated health well in DS. Short of like how thiefs can regen well in stealth. Or even if it was a gm trait in blood magic that allowed syphons to heal us well in Ds.

I don’t want a trait which solves a core problem of the necro.

A trait to let siphons heal us in Death Shroud is not the answer. That should just happen by default. I could see it being potentially problematic if our siphon numbers were larger and we were in an ideal situation (lots of enemies, but not many incoming attacks), but as we currently are, no.