Guild Wars 2

From the in-game description, you need a war room to buy badge of tribute. However, you need badge of tributes to get a war room. I’ve searched through WvW NPCs and I cant find a way to buy them. Is this a bug, causing the war room to be impossible to buy? Or is there an NPC I can use to buy them in WvW?

Does anybody know? This will be required for some of the WvW missions, so it would be pretty nice to get the War Room upgraded. If there is nowhere else to get them, it’s an impossible upgrade.

The war room for the Guild Hall requires Badges of Tribute to build, but the description says that you buy them FROM the war room, which is impossible since you cant build the war room without them.

Is there a separate merchant in one of the borderlands that sells them? Where is he located?

The war room for the Guild Hall requires Badges of Tribute to build, but the description says that you buy them FROM the war room, which is impossible since you cant build the war room without them.

Is there a separate merchant in one of the borderlands that sells them? Where is he located?

Sigmoid.7082:

Also think out focus #4 should have the same homing as guardian focus #4 because at the moment its not very reliable at all.

I’d rather they just dont have homing abilities – you should be able to dodge a projectile by juking it. Our focus is working correctly – the guardian’s should be changed.

Corruptions
The problem with corruptions is that they have the downside of applying conditions, but they dont gain any upside to go with it. The Mallyx Revenant utilities are a perfect example – they apply conditions to the revenant but are very strong because they have very low cooldowns (no cooldowns, in fact, but they’re gated by energy so we’ll go with it). Update the corruptions to have a more powerful downside, but to have a better benefit as a result. This fits the sac theme from GW1 better as well.

Consume Conditions
Lower the cooldown to 20 seconds (balance the healing values accordingly), and apply 3 stacks of vulnerability for 10 seconds /for each unique condition removed/. This keeps this heal as a good balanced heal for PvE where you occassionally use it for condi removal, but normally just want a reliable heal, while preventing it from being the hilariously strong anti-condition it was in PvP previously. Use it to remove a huge stack of conditions? You’ll be in a lot of pain for a while unless you can remove the vuln.

Blood is Power
This is actually the best balanced corruption right now, but the might from it is worse than a blast finisher. Drop the cooldown to 20, and increase the might duration to 15. Increase the self-bleed to 4 stacks. This gives the necro a reliable AoE might that isn’t actively worse than a blast finisher. Lowering the cooldown and adjusting the effects will be a staple in corruptions. Making the conditions they apply actually meaningful will be key to keeping that balanced.

Epidemic
This is balanced by the downside of having to stack conditions on your enemy first. No change needed. You could potentially decrease cast to .25 to make it easier to use, but you’d have to increase the vuln I think.

Corrupt Boon
Meant to be burst condition removal, but hilariously outweighed by Banish Enchantment, path of corruption, spinal shivers, etc. Make it more reliable to use, and give the necro easier access. It needs to do its job WELL. Reduce the cooldown to 15-20 seconds, update the condition to torment, and make it apply enough torment to hurt unless transferred.

Corrosive Poison Cloud
As other users have mentioned, this is ripe with potential for making it a support utility. Make it destroy projectiles, and keep it the way it is.

Minions
Impossible to balance until the AI is fixed. That’s the first priority.

People have some great ideas around utilities here, but it’s important again to remember that each utility set has a theme, and something it’s supposed to excel at. Maintaining a consistent theme and feel is key to making a set feel good. Look at the necro signets – they are each good in practice, but not many necros will run a signet build because the signets have no theme. This is why wells and spectral feel the best – they have the most consistent theme. Here is how I would look at re-balancing the utilities:

Signets
P: Inconsistent active/passive bonuses mean that the signets are rarely juggled (I.e., kept for both their passive and actives). The key here is to ensure that the actives and passives both follow the same these, and benefit from the same stat.

Signet of Locust
Taken primarily for the move speed buff, almost never triggered for its active. The active is a heal with middling damage, so this makes sense. Add a powerful snare (chill? immob?) to its active. This makes it so people use the signet to catch up, then activate the signet to keep someone in place. This will make the signet see more use on power builds since the melee focuses on keeping targets in place.

Signet of Spite
Power necros use the passive, condi necros use the active. Update the passive to be condition focused instead of power. This could be done by swapping power to condi damage, but it might be more fun to do something along the lines of “When applying a condition to an enemy, deal a small amount of direct damage”.

Plague Signet
This signet’s active is good, but the passive is horrible. You cant control which condition is stripped or from which ally… you could pull 1 stack of vuln off your closest ally when the second closest ally is riddled with bleeding and torment. With things like pure of voice, wells, and mantras, we’ve seen that party-wide condition removal isn’t really that imbalanced. Buff the passive to draw 1 condition from 5 allies each proc (and potentially update the proc to 5 seconds instead of 3). This is slightly more powerful of a removal than the previously mentioned abilities, but it doesn’t /remove/ the conditions, it just moves them.

Signet of Undeath
Unloved because of its active, which has a very long cast time (you can usually stomp someone before it gets off unless the necro pre-casts it), this signet needs a re-work of its active. If it stays as a rez, drop the cast to 1.5 or 2 seconds so you can rez someone before they’re stomped. Otherwise, make it focus on life force maintenance to match its passive. Others have mentioned making this signet our active defense by forcing the necro into shroud, and buffing shroud to not take damage for 5 seconds, and that would be amazing.

Signet of Vampirim
This is doing ok, but the passive is very medicre. It’s literally impossible for it to ever heal as much as something like healing sig, or pretty much any of the other signet heals as long as the character is actively in combat. That’s ok, but it needs a secondary affect on the passive to make up for it. I’d recommend making the passive steal health instead of just heal to make up for it. This makes the signet a weak retaliation with a 1 sec ICD. Either that, or remove the ICD on the signet and nerf the passive heal.

Silverkey.2078:

I think there are nice suggestions in this thread but maybe we should condense them in some way and make sure we agree on them. If an organized constructive feedback is given, it may be heard, contrary to 100 messages in a thread with people disagreeing.

Unfortunately, a forum isn’t the best place to get this kind of a list, since people dont have a way to vote or show agreement on changes (in a way that would actually change the visibility of a post) :-/

There is also no way to float anything to the top unless the first person is reading the whole thread and editing their post.

Staff
P: As others have mentioned, staff is an area control weapon that doesn’t really fit with any good role the necro has. It’s reasonable for everything, and is often used just because of its ranged AoE because we have no other long-ranged option. It suffers from the same problem DS does, which is that it’s trying to cater to both power and conditions, and thus caters to neither well. In addition, the AA is extremely lacking. Slow velocity projectiles at long range just dont work, because people dont rarely run in a straight line, and the damage/effect of the skill isn’t great enough to warrant the penalty of frequently missing your intended target.

S:: Increase the velocity of the AA ability. This is similar to things like ranger LB and Guardian scepter and engie grenades, which has all seen velocity improvements. Up the cast time to 1s, and add a condition to the AA (weakness? multiple vuln stacks?). Make every mark a blast finisher, but they only proc the finisher when they pop. This makes the blast potential very strong when you’re actively in combat, but makes them much harder to control since you must have an enemy IN YOUR FIELD to blast it, which fits with the necros theme of controlling an enemy. Increase the power damage from mark of blood slightly. Increase the power damage of chilblain slightly. Remove the poison field from Chilblains- there is no “over time” effect for Chilblains, so there is no point in leaving a field, and the poison field is very lackluster. Either that, or make the field pulse poison so the field makes sense. Putrid mark should remove a condition from nearby allies, but not transfer it. That nerf was unnecessary, especially given the strength of party condition removal added since then (such as martyr).

Focus
P: Cast time and boons. Spinal shivers is very powerful, and extremely easy to dodge. Reapers touch is an odd dichotomy. You dont ever really want it to hit your allies due to regen being underwhelming, and its function changes from defensive to offensive depending on whether you hit an ally or enemy.

S:: Tone down the power of Spinal Shivers and tone down the cast and cooldown to match. It would be nice to see the damage portion toned down (since that’s at best the secondary purpose of the skill, if not the tertiary) and then see the cooldown toned to something like 10 seconds. Change the boon applied by Reapers touch to be offensive (might stacks? Fury?) instead, so that it increases damage whether you hit an enemy or ally (similar to mesmer staff, for example). Make Reapers touch a projectile finisher.

Warhorn
P: Actually a really nicely balanced defensive weapon. Undervalued due to Wail of Doom not having a very noticeable effect in larger battles where warhorn shines. It’s an odd skill that you’ll only use on one person to interrupt a key skill, yet it’s AoE.

S:: Update Wail of Doom to have a more powerful effect on successful interrupt. Confusion or Torment would make warhorn see more play in condition sets, boon strip may be interesting for large group play.

OH Dagger
P: Nothing. It’s a solid OH used by every condition necro. Just touch it up to give it some finishers.

S:: Make deathly swarm a projectile finisher. Make enfeebling blood a blast finisher. This would also be a buff to curses Weakening Shroud

Once you have a good set of balanced weapons, then you can examine utilities and traits in light of the weapons. For example – are Spiteful Spirit and Weakening Shroud still underbalanced now that they have a blast finisher associated? Does Chill of Death need to change in light of focus changes? etc.

Interesting thread, with some interesting ideas. In the spirit of iteration and gradually balancing necro instead of trying to change everything and getting it hilariously wrong the first time (which would definitely happen if you tried to balance traits/utilities/weapons all at once), you should focus on updating one thing at a time and gradually building on the changes of each. As many have mentioned, necro lacks a couple things that I’d like to see improved: Team interaction (not necessarily even support, but interaction at all), Reliable scaling damage mitigation, and good sustain. Addressing each of these will be a multi-step process.

First round – Weapons
You’d want to balance weapons to feel good and perform well first, since they are core to the experience of the necromancer. Touching up weapons would likely look like this:

Dagger
P: Dagger #1 is the highest damage the necro has, which is odd since it’s an AA. Most other classes rely on cooldowns to get their highest damage. This makes the necro feel really boring to play in comparison (because every moment you aren’t auto attacking is a moment you’re lowering your DPS). By comparison, #2 is very lackluster (comparing only when you measure health differential) and thus only used really when closing a gap. #3 is a good mixture of utility and damage, and should be left alone.

S:: Slightly decrease the damage of the AA (very very slightly to bring it in line with other classes). Make the third attack steal health instead of dealing damage to fit the theme of the dagger as a siphon weapon. There are two S:s for how to deal with life siphon, both with pros and cons. One is to half the cast, and cut the damage by 25%. This keeps the damage over time relatively consistent with only a slight buff, and makes the skill feel better to cast. The second is to decrease the damage by 50%, and make the siphon AoE to give the dagger a better way to deal with larger groups of people in melee.

Axe
P: #1 and #2 are extremely similar, and neither of them really feels fun to use. It suffers from the same issue ranger longbow #1 and #2 did before the hilarious buff to rapid fire, but Axe was never touched. The third skill is good, but odd that it grants retaliation when you’re supposed to be in range with the axe and therefore being hit less.

S:: Move the life force generation to the auto attack of the axe, and increase damage on the axe AA slightly. Remove #2 and replace it with a new skill (not overly sure what you’d put in its place, but there are a lot more creative options than just to hit faster and do slightly more damage). Either that, or add an effect-per-hit to the #2 to give it at least a legit feeling to hitting faster. #3 is a shoe-in for a fast finisher, and it’s baffling that this hasn’t happened yet. This would be a buff to the spiteful spirit trait as well, giving necros a blast on shrouding which would be a neat combo.

Scepter
P: Scepter is an obvious condition weapon that hasn’t really kept up with condition creep. Warrior, ranger, mesmer, and engineer can all apply conditions better than you can as a necro with less investment in precisely the correct weapons and traits. In addition, it has the odd #3 skill that doesn’t benefit from condition damage at all – the stat you’ll be using if you’re going to equip the weapon. Compare the AA from scepter to the AA from mesmer staff, and you’ll notice the AA from staff on the mesmer does almost 50% more damage from conditions, and its AoE.

S:: Comparing it to other weapons, we can bring the condition damage on scepter slightly back up to where its been in the past. Increase the AA bleed from 5s to 8s. This makes up for the loss of condition duration from the spec rebalance, and brings it closer in line with other condition weapons. #2 is often used just to apply AoE bleeds, and is fine. Change #3 to have an actual condition effect that benefits from condition stacking (which is its current role). We could go two ways with this: you could either do something like removing a boon per condition on the enemy (which would require a cooldown re-balance) or you could apply conditions based on existing condition thresholds: something like “If your target has 2 or more conditions, apply poison. If your target has 3 or more conditions, apply torment. If your target has 4 or more conditions, apply confusion.” That really forces you to stack conditions then “unload” on an enemy to hurt them.

I’m stuck at 9/10 as well, and all 10 aren’t available for interaction.

If it helps find the bug, the one that didn’t seem to update was done within a second or two of the crystal event completing, and it didn’t trigger the channel.

AivenPrimus.9184:

These are my thoughts about ‘’How it was developed’’
First and most important is Death Shroud… which completely spits in your face as ‘’Class Mechanism’’,
It is just illusion to all kitten behind it…

While it gives you extra healthpool and devastating abilities, you sacrifice ALL of Necro Specific abilities – Mainly Siphoning, and then signets and other

Necromancer is strong, I dont disagree, but DS needs a change,
What I expect to see,
Necromancer should retain Siphoning/Signet Passives while in Death Shroud
and that is all what I expect from Anet…

Since cooldowns on Necromancer ’’other’’ defensive boons(Protection/Stability) are way too long, and sustaining damage with healing is all what Necro has.

Well, defensive cooldowns aren’t horrible. As I mentioned in the first post, we have some of the easiest access to protection. Ele and Guardian have slightly better, but they are boon machines. Spectral wall is an amazing defensive skill, as is spectral armor.

Death Shroud isn’t a horrible mechanic, It’s basically a third weapon set we always carry that has limited availability. The limited availability allows the devs to tie traits and effects to it to enhance it. The problem is that so much of our class synergy outside of DS is lost when we enter it, which causes is to actually because less survivable while it’s up. I’d really like to see more of our survivability tied to “while in death shroud” or “on entering death shroud” traits to encourage the use of it as a protective skill, but we really need to fix these synergies first.

Updated the main post after feedback from guildies.

Iavra.8510:

Area fear would most likely be too strong considering that necros have what i would call the best #1 downed ability and win almost any downed vs downed fight (except against warrior). I always thought thaat the fear works on their target, but if it doesn’t, it should be fixed.

It does indeed work on your target with no projectile. I expect OP is simply complaining that it only interrupts the first person, making Necro the easiest class to finish off since the #3 skill doesn’t prevent us from being finished. Of the three classes with single target interrupts (Warrior, Engineer, Necromancer), Necromancer is the only class where the #3 doesn’t prevent finishing.

ensoriki.5789:

-snip-
SoM ~ Successful attacks reward health
SoR – Using a skill gives health
HS – Existing gives health.

This is the problem, the passive is so good, and so passive that the active would have to do something completely different to justify it’s use (Ala, remove all damaging conditions or some such). The problem with HS is you can put it on then just ignore healing.

The active would have a much better place if the passive wasn’t so strong. I’d like to see the warrior passive changed to something along the lines of “Heal for X when you take damage”. The warrior already has mending for condition removal, adrenal for offensive healing, and stance for burst damage prevention. HS fills the role of brute force heal, so unless the desire is to change that, you cant add too many new effects to the active. That leaves tweaking the numbers and the passive’s effect.

A.E.D. Suffers from being sub-par unless you trait for all other gadget traits, which then limits your choice of utility skills to at least 1 or 2 more gadgets. This means that it’s only likely to see play when you’re already using gadget AND it fits your builds playstyle.

It, along with a lot of the new heals, really highlights a problem with -%cooldown traits. They need to go, then the cooldown of the heals can be re-balanced to be where they need to be.

Lets look at the new heals, and what traits you Need for them to be competative:
Guardian – Needs heal on meditation and meditation cooldown
Necro – Needs signet cooldown
Engineers – Needs gadget cooldown
Thief – Needs Venoms steal life, venoms apply one more hit, and venom cooldown (many would argue also venom sharing)
Ranger – Needs Spirit’s follow you and Spirits have more HP
Warrior – Needs Stance duration
Elementalist – None, the blast finisher makes it strong enough to justify. However, Arcane cooldown is often used.
Mesmer – None, the passive is often strong enough to justify it in PvE.

It’s no surprise that the only 2 new healing skills you see being used with any regularity are Elementalist and Mesmer. The meditation skills are common enough that guardian is probably the next most likely.

Once the cooldown reduction traits go (and they should be removed for every utility skill category, then the skill can be balanced to have a good cooldown because it wont be able to be traited to have a ridiculous cooldown.

Keep in mind an instant-cast on demand blind means a guaranteed finish on 5/8 professions (Necro, Guard, Ranger, Warrior, Engie). I actually pack flamethrower for that, the pushback (interrupting rezzing or stomping), and the toolkit skill.

Changing this to a blind field would facilitate that functionality a lot more (ala Black Powder on Thief pistol), but I disagree it needs a stun break to be viable, it’s already a very situationally powerful skill.

What I’d like to see on the flamethrower is the auto attack reworked just a touch to do scaling damage based on how many conditions are on your target. The #1 as it stands is a power based attack on a heavily condition dependent weapon (used mainly for burning). While 1 and 2 can do some heavy damage on power builds, grenades do superior damage on every throw, so there is no place for the thrower. Changing it around to a more condition oriented weapon would place it in an interesting place.

Lily.1935:

AngelicLoki.1625:

Lily.1935:

-snip-

Necromancer doesn’t have easy access to vigor or stability, no blocking abilities, very few movement abilities, no aegis, no invulnerability, no stealth and much of their methods for defense are conditions. Life stealing cannot be considered a viable option for defense. Death shroud is supposed to replace vigor, stability, blocking, escaping, invulnerability and even self healing all in one package. And I have news for you. It doesn’t make the cut.

Extra health, as proven in GW1 is not a sufficient replacement for real defensive abilities. Imbagon, Prot spirits(ST), 55, perma, all these builds, although sometimes game breaking, proved that self and party protection was far more powerful then an extra 60% health.

I would definitely like to see more options for /active/ defense on the necro, including things such as aegis while in death shroud, extra toughness while in shroud, etc. I like the concept of shroud acting as our defensive mechanism so we are basically much harder to kill while in shroud, but I also understand that might get a bit over the top if we also maintain the amount of HP we have.

The three things I propose here would be first steps. Until we fix healing in shroud, signets in shroud, and shroud stomping, we have a whole set of builds and traits that are completely unexplored.

As you say though, we need more active defense mechanisms once these three things are fixed. Most other classes have an “osh” button (Elixer, Distortion or Blurred, renewed, berserker or endure, mist form, etc), and necros could benefit from something similar. I know that Spectral armor + shroud are supposed to serve this role (since the 8% healing / second can essentially make you close to invulnerable if only 4-5 people are hitting you), but I’d like to see it gain stability as well. Especially in WvW, the lack of stability really stops us from being able to “hold” a target like we’re supposed to. How can we lock someone down if they can always control us better than we can control them?

That being said, again, I’d really like to see these three things fixed first. The dev’s prefer gradual change and it’s a good way of moving imo.

I personally think that giving us access to our utility, allowing us to stomp, heal and revive while in death shroud would go a very long way to our defenses. My personal opinion on that matter is to do this first. Give us this first before we decide to grant more defensive abilities. But perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. What I meant when I said Death shroud doesn’t cut it was that in its current form it doesn’t. I can only speculate about how it might with these few changes.

Agreed. A lot of the necro threads are asking for sweeping changes that would fundamentally alter the way a necro survives or plays. I’m not interested in doing that, I really like the idea of a slow attrition class whose support role in a group is to reduce your enemy instead of build up your party. I would like to see some tweaks to the necro’s healing and sustain in order to make that happen though.

After the above changes (and I dont think I’ve heard anyone disagree with them yet, which speaks volumes), then I’d like to look at some of the traits and skills we have to help us in situations where there are a larger number of enemies on the field. One vs One we’re good, but in smaller groups where we have two or three enemies attacking us.

Conditions in general suffer from scaling, and before they are overly nerfed or buffed, you have to balance the whole system. Let me explain:

As a single attack, almost every condition attack deals less damage than a critical hit with a power attack, this is as designed since conditions ignore armor, protection, and evades. This is a relevant comparison, since you can fairly easily get over 40% crit on a power specced toon.

In addition, conditions can be removed through condition removal skills. In this way, you have skills that can reduce condition damage by over 50%. However, as many people have noted here, in return you get damage that is virtually unavoidable.

The problem comes from the fact that conditions need to be balanced throughout the game. Many people complaining about them here are running either small ops WvW or SPvP I’d assert. In these situations, removing any active or passive block can remove a significant amount of DR, since smaller ops groups reply on personal skill and mitigation to survive.

However, when you enter larger scale play, conditions are hilariously underpowered. This is due to the vast amount of condition removal play available through well of power, pure of voice, soldier runes, shake it off, and other such party condition removals. In a larger scale fight, conditions are removed within seconds.

So how do you balance the two scenarios? If you grant a new boon for anti-condition duration, you’re encouraging passive play which most people don’t want. If you grant a new boon for anti-condition damage, you’re removing the point of conditions. If you buff condition removal you widen the gap I just described, causing them to be less useful in larger battles, and you also increase the reliance on said condition removal skills.

IF people agree that this is a problem, and IF we want the fix it in a fair and balanced manner, the only way to do so in a reliable manner is to reduce the rate at which conditions are applied, and simultaneously nerf most party condition removal.

The above solution reduces the reliance on condition removal, while making individual condition removals stronger. Nerfing party based removal narrows the gap between the two play styles and encourages more combo play (ala light fields, for example).

grave of hearts.7830:

The idea of necrotic traversal beeing our personal escape ticket would be pretty much nice in the current way things are.
Personaly i would preffer the range somewhere between 5 and 10k and yes ignoring the “height” issue would be nice.

If it remains the way it is now, I’d like to see the summon time cut way down. You can run almost half the distance in the time it takes to summon it, and the cast time being as it is makes it only really valuable to prep before a fight. Not only that, necrotic is trash other than the stun break. The poison is laughably bad for the conditions it takes to actually apply it, and the worm itself does meager damage. If the worm applied weakness to defend itself, and necrotic applied a boon to the necromancer, it would be far more useable for reasons other than the stun or teleport.

I really think it would be a neat mechanic to give us a self portal. It would allow us to chase off towers more easily, or return to a defending point in PvP far more easily, giving us some very interesting pre-planned mobility.

grave of hearts.7830:

I can argue that while 1v1 necro has good access to chill and criple,in wvw situations its one of the most useless on applying it and systain it.
Mark chill is really short compared to engi mortar chill which is a field that pulses thus stacking the effect or ele.
Caltrops is on the same skill set and both are at 1500 range traited.
Then there are the cooldowns on well of darkness along with the trait and distance.
When you try to drop a well that has 900 range on the enemy zergs one of the two senarios will happen.
If you wait to fire it at the first people of the enemy blob,you get hit by a static field and then the hammer warriors roll over you.
If you prefire it perhaps you wont die because of a static field but you will lose a lot of its effect since the enemy will turn to avoid it and as well when it ticks for 6 seconds and you just wasted 3 seconds of it prefiring it leaves only 3 ticks for those who didnt see it.
No matter how you see it the class falls short of everything except of beeing a ping pong ball.
Least you can put on your 55k ehp gear and tank the auto attackers,but that does mean you get not rewarded for it.

Well, whether you’re the worst at applying and sustaining depends on how you spec. Traited spinal is very potent at catching enemies because it both chills and strips 3 boons (often catching swiftness). spectral grasp is… ok for catching enemies. The travel time and the fact it’s a projectile makes it a bit worse than magnet.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say it falls short at everything. It can pump out massive AoE damage with conditions (epi) or wells (perception). I would however say it falls short of it’s original goal which was an attrition based class. We can only really attrition in 1v1 situations, and that’s mostly due to the LF buff we got. LF as it stands right now is far too… passive. You either have a ton of it when facing 1 target, or not nearly enough when facing multiple. That’s the problem with scaling healing instead of damage reduction. Since healing remains static no matter how many enemies you’re fighting, any class or mechanic that relies on healing to stay alive will not last versus multiple targets well, because their survival mechanic doesn’t scale. This is why guardians are so loved in WvW, good armor, good prot availability and stability, and you can get healing from ele’s, rangers, and the guard itself. Plainly put, their survival mechanic scales.

Necromancer’s doesn’t. In fact, necromancer’s actively doesn’t scale. That might not be a problem, but it’s certainly not pleasant in WvW.

Lily.1935:

-snip-

Necromancer doesn’t have easy access to vigor or stability, no blocking abilities, very few movement abilities, no aegis, no invulnerability, no stealth and much of their methods for defense are conditions. Life stealing cannot be considered a viable option for defense. Death shroud is supposed to replace vigor, stability, blocking, escaping, invulnerability and even self healing all in one package. And I have news for you. It doesn’t make the cut.

Extra health, as proven in GW1 is not a sufficient replacement for real defensive abilities. Imbagon, Prot spirits(ST), 55, perma, all these builds, although sometimes game breaking, proved that self and party protection was far more powerful then an extra 60% health.

I would definitely like to see more options for /active/ defense on the necro, including things such as aegis while in death shroud, extra toughness while in shroud, etc. I like the concept of shroud acting as our defensive mechanism so we are basically much harder to kill while in shroud, but I also understand that might get a bit over the top if we also maintain the amount of HP we have. Most other classes have an “osh” button (Elixer, Distortion or Blurred, renewed, berserker or endure, mist form, etc), and necros could benefit from something similar. I know that Spectral armor + shroud are supposed to serve this role (since the 8% healing / second can essentially make you close to invulnerable if only 4-5 people are hitting you), but I’d like to see it gain stability as well. Especially in WvW, the lack of stability really stops us from being able to “hold” a target like we’re supposed to. How can we lock someone down if they can always control us better than we can control them?

The three things I propose here would be first steps. Until we fix healing in shroud, signets in shroud, and shroud stomping, we have a whole set of builds and traits that are completely unexplored.

As for group synergy, I think we really need to focus on combo finishers. Necro has some of the weakest access to finishers (ranger is probably second, followed by engie), which makes it really hard to play in group. Past that I’d like to see some updates to signets and a couple DS traits to better help the group. There is some strong potential for self-sacrificing support in the class (think of a death grandmaster that absorbs 10% of incoming damage to the necro while in deathshroud), but it’s all missing right now.

killahmayne.9518:

I think Necro’s should be able to heal in Death Shroud from other sources of healing besides their utility.

As in, we cant heal ourselves but others can? I’m not sure that would be a great solution, since it’s basically still handicapping a lot of our own builds.

Kravick.4906:

Life Leech in general is a bad mechanic the way its been implimented. ANet has, unfortunately, backed themselves into a corner regarding this mechanic. The healing side of it, unfortunately, is just not enough to sustain anything. When you’re taking damage in excess of 4k, and you are only siphoning 37 per attack, its not even a drop in a bucket at that point. Its more like a drop in an ocean.

ANet can’t buff siphoning without unbalancing the amount of damage a necromancer can out put. Until they detach the amount healed from the damage it does, and they seem very unwilling to do this, siphoning will forever be in a bad place.

They actually already do detach it in some cases. See life siphon on the dagger for example, and Life Transfer in DS. Both deal far more damage than they heal for (I know, in the opposite direction of what you’re arguing, but still an example)

I’d be very happy to have the same thing happen on reverse as well if that would balance out siphon, but I think the point is to get a lot of TINY sources. That plus DS gain adds up to a lot of healing, but since you cant use DS while using siphons right now, it’s very hard to see that. You’d need to make it so you can heal in DS before a siphon build will see any real play I think.

Forsaker.9213:

Signet mastery – Reduces recharge on signets. Activating a signet grants might. // I would add here , pasive affect us in DS but only 50% of it. Why 50%? Becouse i think 100% would make vamp signet to strong and 50% feel ok.

I disagree with the vamp signet being too powerful. The internal cooldown on it makes it easily balanced. In fact, I’d rather they cut it down significantly and remove the ICD so that it’s more like a permanent very weak retal.

Forsaker.9213:

Siphoned Power – Gain might when your health falls below the 25% threshold. // I would change it to 33% threshold

This trait needs a complete change. Necros have almost no way of coming back from that type of HP, and we cant survive long enough in DS to make use of 25 stacks of might, it’s maybe 1 or 2 attacks. Again, this trait needs a complete rework.

Forsaker.9213:

Reanimator – Yeah i know we all love this trait // I would move this trait into Death Nova trait and give us here 2s of protecion when going DS

While protection on entering DS would be interesting, for a GM it would have to be better than 2 seconds. If you fully spec boon duration, and go 20 points into spectral, and use DS on cooldown, you could potentially get perma prot, but there are enough boon rips at this point to deal with that small scenario. You would want it to be useful without fully speccing into it.

Forsaker.9213:

Dark Armor – Gain toughness while channeling. // I would add here block effect when we channel but also move this trait into Master line and move Death Shiver trait to adept.

Protection of the Horde – Gain toughness for each minion you control. // i would change it to gaing 20 toughnes for each condi on us , we have enough minion traits in this line

Forsaker.9213:

Well of Power – Target area pulses, converting conditions on allies into boons and gain 1s stability. // I would change into gain 1s stability every pulse

would be a much needed source of stability.

Forsaker.9213:

Flesh Wurm -> Necrotic Traversal – Sacrifice your flesh wurm, teleport to it, and poison foes Range: 1,200 // i would change the rane to 3000 , why? Becouse its still easy to counter , just kill the wurm , mesmers have thier portals and thief shadow traps witch are uncounterable.

[/quote]

I’d like to see this become similar to a personal portal. Lose the range, you now summon it at your feet, but Necrotic Traversal ignores height restrictions.

Kahrgan.7401:

Retooling life leeches to work while in DS and boosting life leeches would move us more towards an attrition class than what we currently have, that’s for sure.

The only other problem we have past anti-synergy, is group viability, but thats another thread.

Yeah, I know people focus a lot on the fact that we cant put out a lot of boons which means we dont synergize with other classes nearly as much as ele or guardian builds do. I think some of that is that the corresponding conditions are vastly weaker (I.e., weakness vs protection, vuln vs might).

I’m not really sure other than that how you would improve group viability. What are your thoughts on that?

Rym.1469:

You can stomp and you can revive in DS. It’s just about timing and it wasn’t intended.
I think that at least healing effects “healing” your Life Force pool when in DS would be an option

I know you can shroud stomp, but it has to be precisely timed, sometimes doesn’t work, and definitely isn’t intended. The difficulties in doing so (and the fact that you cant deliver the final downing blow to a target, then finish him off without leaving shroud) make it enough of a point to include on the list.

I think that fixing this issue would open up “Foot in the grave” as a trait finally worth having as a grandmaster, because you could basically guarantee a finish every 10 seconds. Things like that are why I mentioned fixing these things should be priority over re-balancing traits. If we re-balance traits before, we might find they are far too powerful after.

Tim.6450:

you’re forgetting that we can’t revive or stomp during death shroud which is stupid.

Darn, I knew I was forgetting something when I hit post. I’ll add that to the post.

Proven.2854:

Not being able to heal at all while in Death Shroud is the big clincher for me. It’s the primary reason why Life Leech is horrible outside of MM and regeneration is the crappiest boon for Necros despite having easy access to permanent regeneration.

Not to mention water fields plus blast finishers are a huge part of WvW, or the number of times a PvE guardian uses Light of Deliverance only to have me eat the 100% heal inside death shroud. Healing in general is a fairly large part of providing support to allies, but it just doesn’t work on necromancers a good chunk of the time

It’s very disappointing considering the focus on on healing in the blood magic line can make sure a very fun “bunker” necro.

There have been a lot of thread about the necro already, but I really want to put this one out there because I feel it’s something that needs to be fixed before we can even start to look at traits that are underwhelming.

The necromancer, as a class, as a lot of different ways to survive:
- Some of the highest life leech in the game
- Death Shroud
- Easy access to Cripple, Chill, and Weakness
- Relatively easy access to protection (Spectral Wall/Armor, Adept trait plus wells)

In addition, some of the recent buffs to life force generation have made the necromancer very powerful in 1v1 situations. However, death shroud as a mechanic is hurting the necromancer. The loss of utility skills means we cannot use any of our protection skills while we are in death shroud. Since we are supposed to use it to mitigate burst damage, needing to leave it and incur a cooldown to use those skills is painful. The argument could be made that this is part of the skill of using death shroud, and I agree. However, there are other anti-synergy elements as well that don’t have a question of skill.

1.) Signets:
Why do all signets disappear when we enter deathshroud? I’m sure it’s because death shroud is treated as a transformation technically (and thus “locks” signets, which puts them on cooldown), but that’s not really an acceptable reason. Signets are supposed to give passive skills when they aren’t actively being used. Denying us potentially strong effects while we are in death shroud makes signets much less useful to necromancers, and makes signet builds almost worthless since we wouldn’t get our signet buffs a significant percent of the time.

2.)Life Leech and passive healing:
We have a whole trait line dedicated almost solely to regenerating life through leeching and regen. And yet, none of it works in death shroud. Why? Would it be too powerful to allow us to heal in Death Shroud? Why? People can heal while in transformations, and that’s much the same situation. It actually makes me less useful in groups too, since guardian healing, warrior shout healing and other passive effects actually count me as a target and give me zero healing. This could be fixed either by making healing count towards the necromancer’s health pool while in DS, or by making it regenerate life force.

3.)Finishers:
While most classes can employ their class mechanics to aid them in finishing or resurrecting an ally (Distortion, Aegis, Stealth, Elixer S, Pet abilities), the necromancer has no such options. While we can use wells and blinds to help us finish someone, we cannot “interact” while in death shroud. I suspect this is also a result of DS being treated as a “transformation”, but I’d prefer death shroud in a slightly different incarnation if we could prevent crippling ourselves while in death shroud.

4.)Life Force Gain
It seems odd to say that the act of gaining life force is an anti-synergy, but it’s worth noting you cannot gain life force while in death shroud other than through life transfer. Reaper’s Precision, for example, will not yield life force on crit while in death shroud. People dying nearby also do not yield life force. Why? It punishes us for remaining in death shroud, through removing one of our main sources of sustain. This is very similar to life force gain, but another area where death shroud could see welcome improvement.

An argument could be made that minions intentionally cripple themselves as well due to the fact that we have 12 traits to buff them. Why so many? Reduce the overall number of traits and then increase the strength of base minions. I understand we dont want them to be overpowered base, but it would be nice to have a reason to use a minion other than “well, nothing better to have in this slot” (Blood Fiend and Golem in PvE).

Once death shroud is fixed to not actively work against the class, then I think we’ll start seeing interesting blood and signet builds, and we can finally see what traits really need reworking, and which traits have simply been handicapped by the fact that death shroud makes them not work over half the time.

DarcShriek.5829:

Swagger.1459:

snip

So many skills on the skill bar make my head swim. GW1 only had 8 skills on it’s skill bar. It’s not the number of skills on the skill bar that make variety but how many different ways the skill bar can be loaded.

This is very true. Adding more options for buttons just makes the learning curve steeper, and the button bindings more complex. Games that allow you to have all your skills at once remove build diversity and cheapen skill design because there is no reason to take a skill that does two things decently over two skills that do each thing excellently. That means that you have a skill for each situation, and you may as well create a bot to write “encounter situation > use skill”.

Skill diversity is needed, and trait diversity is needed to fix the current feeling of “sameness” from builds, not more buttons.

In general, character progression feels a bit shallow in GW2 for a couple reasons:

Lack of build variety-
One of the developers mentioned early on that GW1’s system of builds failed because it was difficult to balance and that billions of build choices didn’t matter if only 5 were viable. This same statement holds true for GW2. Having a bunch of trait slots with 4 -12 choices per slot is a complete illusion of choice if there are only 5 viable builds per profession. On top of that, the traits that affect utility slots make your choices even lower. The trait system as it currently stands is handicapping your build diversity because of traits that affect only 1 category of utility skills or 1 weapon. While having some options in that regard isn’t horrible, there are far too many. This causes you to pigeonhole builds into categories such as “Power / Well” or “Power / Spectral” (examples for Necro).

Armor Stat Progression

Build diversity would help character progression a lot more if you had more build options, and this includes gear as other people have mentioned in the thread. The real area where vertical progression is hurting the game isn’t the time it takes to get one set. If ascended could switch stats like legendaries can, that would be amazing, because it would mean I could only pay for it once. The real problem with vertical progression is that you have to do it 3 times to have build diversity. Once for a power set, once for a condition set, and once for a support set. When you multiple the time and effort it takes to get 3 full sets, it suddenly becomes a lot more daunting.

Crafting progression -

One area that people don’t like progression wise is crafting. The ascended grind to 500 feels painful in part because the progress to 400 is painful. You’re crafting a ton of junk to get up to 400. You end up forging your junk items or salvaging them back to get your materials. There is almost no purpose to having a 400 craft past cooking because it’s very time consuming to make a profit. While time gating has been added to try and fix that problem, another option is to provide more useful consumables at 400 for each crafting tier. Why do we have party based food (feasts), but no party based sharpening stones? Why could you not craft siege weapons given the proper materials? You could also add an artificial time-gate to crafting by adding crystals and alchemy stones as ingredients for recipes. This is still a time gate since players have to spend the time to get the skill points, but it’s not a forced one. For example, what if lump of mithrillium required 50 alchemy stones (5 skill points) to craft? These things would help make crafting a bit more profitable, which would make their progression feel more meaningful. Crafting also feels shallow because there is only a single skin available for the armor. Why cant we add rare materials to create better skins? We have had a ton of skins come in through the gem store, yet none added to the game normally which really short-circuits the horizontal progression feel. Why cant we craft exalted armor + 10 molten lodestones to get flame kissed exalted armor? exalted + 10 glacial lodestones to get ice kissed? This seems like a great way to add more customization to the base game, and your armor team already has the skins and mesh as a base to start with. I doubt anyone here would complain if they spent some time adding craftable variants to the game instead of a gem store armor. More armors in the base game would greatly help the feel of customization as opposed to more gem store armors, and crafting them would make crafting feel like more progression over grind as well.

There are a lot of people who are giving Devon a lot of crap in this thread for saying they chose to not make the change earlier, but you have to remember that character bound vs account bound changes based on the intention of the system. I also prefer account bound, but I’m not going to slander them simply because they changed their direction with the system.

Character bound is perfectly fine if you can get maximum benefit with only a small amount of effort, the ramp up is needed to learn the system, and the masteries are different enough to justify a different set on each toon. This may have been their initial intention with the system. As they progressed and added new masteries though, they realized the system was getting too long to have it bound to a character. Once they decided they liked the direction of the system, and wanted to keep extending it, the choice was made to make it “officially” account bound. Now that it’s account bound instead of character bound, they are free to pursue new options that may not have been feasible prior.

While transferring skill points would be awesome, I think I’d rather see them add crystals and stones to crafting recipes. Example: use 10 crystals to craft an exotic instead of ecto. That gives end game crafting a “profit”, since you convert your skill points to gold, and it gives people a skill point sink.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

AngelicLoki.1625:

Without PvE, you wouldn’t have towers, gates, keeps, etc.

Towers, gates and Keeps are lootbag magnets. Without them we would be reduced to roaming only. I wouldn’t enjoy that at all.

My other points still stand. Achievement point hunters recently made WvW unplayable for many of us, and we don’t need more of it.

Right, PvE acts as focal points similar to capture points in SPvP. They are areas where you find fights. More areas mean more smaller fights, as opposed to fewer areas which mean more really big fights. Nothing wrong with a bit of both.

I don’t necessarily disagree that the season achievements added a lot of people to WvW who don’t understand the mechanics and taxed the system. You can easily add more to WvW though without achieving similar results. For example, permanent achievements will not cause the same influx of players. They will be prioritized under existing LS achievements in the minds of ’chiev hunters, since the LS achievements have a limited window in which to obtain them. That, or simply add repeatable achievements instead of one-time achievements. Or, lastly, just dont add new achievements.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Pink Ninja Man.4375:

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

If there was ever a post that needed a -1 button….

Any particular reason why? Just saying things suck isn’t helping anything, if there is a valid reason behind it, the ‘downvote’ is much more powerful.

I guess you haven’t been paying attention to the complaints about Toxic mobs in WvW for the last couple of weeks?

Players don’t want them there, and for the most part we have ignored them. The only time players deal with the Toxic mobs is when they are a threat to the yaks, and that is precisely why players don’t want more NPC mobs in WvW. It’s already hard enough to deal with player yak-snipers without having to deal with NPC yak-snipers too.

Whether anyone likes it or not, WvW is a player vs player game and we sure as the hell don’t need more PvE. The leagues and the achievements hunters have strained the game beyond its capacity and more PvE will not help.

Besides that there are far better ways to break up the zerging karma trains. Better rewards for defense would be a good start.

People ignored the toxic mobs because killing them did nothing to aid in the war effort. They were sitting in the middle of mercenary camps, yet didn’t contribute to the camp they were in, and the pollen locked you in an unremovable combat for 10-15 seconds unless you slotted a specific healing skill.

These reasons are why people hated them, not because they were PvE. WvW is a PvP game certainly, but it’s not solely about killing people. It’s about using PvE elements to impact an overarching war. Without PvE, you wouldn’t have towers, gates, keeps, etc. If your argument rang true, nobody would do Hyleks or Ogres either, yet they flip almost on cooldown (and did before the league too). Adding PvE to WvW that meaningfully impacts the PvP elements would be an excellent change to WvW. The trick is making sure the impacts are meaningful enough to make sure people do them.

JonathanSharp.7094:

Some great ideas in here. We’ve talked about moving Dhuumfire up to Grandmaster in the Curses line, and moving Terror as well.

We also like the idea of making Terror scale with # of conditions on your target, so there’s more “play” to trying to load your target up with a lot of condies before you hit them with Fear. Your opponent can try to keep condies low, so that Terror won’t hurt as much.

Dhuumfire moving would also open up a gap for a new GM trait in Spite, so we’d need to figure that out as well.

Great suggestions!

Just let me put this thought in your head:

Fragility from GW1 would be a great trait if it did low damage, scaled slowly with power, and only did the damage while applying a condition (not on removal). This would allow for hybrid builds where the weapon applied conditions along with dealing damage. The numbers would have to be a bit low otherwise you’d risk Axe auto attack builds, but I think it has really good synergy with withering precision (assuming no rework), bleed on crit, the vulnerability on life blast, etc. Throwing random numbers against the wall, I’m thinking scaling from 150 damage per condition at low power to 300 damage per condition at really high power.

Edit: I just realized fragility is AoE in GW1 now. To clarify, this damage would be single target. Since you can apply conditions in AoE (either on crit, with tainted, or with staff), you would absolutely not want an AoE component no matter how small.

Necromancers:

I’ve played necromancer as a main for almost the whole game, and I find the statement in the December 10th patch notes to be slightly odd. Specifically the one about relying on death shroud and life siphoning to survive.

The problem we have right now with that is that with the most recent round of life force buffs, we’re really strong in small fights where we can survive long enough to get multiple attacks off, because it allows us to “heal” a lot of life force over time.

The moment you are dealing with 3 or 4 people though, we have very few tools to deal with that. Spectral Armor is an option, but it has less than 1/10th uptime and the protection can be stripped. Not only that, but it’s main mitigation comes from combining it with death shroud, meaning that you cant heal while it’s up, or use weapon or other utility skills to further aid in survival. All in all, it makes for a remarkably squishy scholar in confrontations that are are greater than 4-5 people.

As we taper off some of the damage options necro has (and I fully agree with the bleed updates expressed in the patch), I’d like to see some survivability increases coming not from increases our effective healing through siphon and death shroud, but from increasing our mitigation abilities while in DS. This scales well to many sources of incoming damage, while still not being overwhelmingly powerful when in small fights. It might also be nice (and I know Anet has mentioned they were looking into it) if we could receive heals in DS. As it stands, we lose a lot of support from guards, and our own regen and life siphons even, because we cant heal in DS. No other class has two mechanics (shroud and siphon) that so actively work against each other.

To be clear, I’m not asking for “always on” mitigation traits, I’d like some more interesting trait choices with death shroud to allow us this survivability. Something along the lines of “Gain X toughness while in death shroud, lose X power and condition damage”; or “Reduce Condition duration by 20% while in death shroud”. There are a lot of sub-par traits in death magic that could be bent to this purpose (think unholy armor or shrouded removal).

I’d also like to see some condensing of minion traits. In order to make minions really effective, you have to slot a lot of traits. We have extra damage, extra life, lower cooldown, poison explosions, boon removal, and life leech. I’m sure some of these traits are causing the developers issues with balancing minions (“If we increase their health, look what that trait does to their HP! We cant do that with that trait there!”, similar to how you mentioned you have to balance around the 15p crit strikes thief trait), and you simply have to take too many of them to make minions effective. I’d like to see some of them go the way of the dodo or just be merged in with the minions base functionality to make room for more interesting death shroud traits. As minions stand right now, there is no reason to take them without any traits, and the traits are too much of an investment to make unless you’ll go for many of them; making minions an “all or none” proposition; not very interesting for build choices.

It would be nice if the borderlands had more options for NPCs other than the quaggans. The only problem I see is the skill points, but since the camps are so far to the north, a server likely wont have a problem controlling their own camps.

The problem with the NPCs isn’t that they dont capture the camps in my opinion though, it’s that they are so /weak/. There is no way they will even threaten a camp, let alone capture it. The only reason they exist is to show swords, which dont matter because often the yaks dont move making it a telltale sign that the camp is fine. The NPCs need to be stronger, then we can worry about whether they can capture camps.