Guild Wars 2

Why should I mind? Besides, it might tickle Grenth’s… er… fancy, and anything that does that is a good thing in my book.

Grenth’s frigid cloaca, I clicked on its name and checked where it normally posts. I think I’ve seen it all: a THIEF on the necro forum QQing its eyes out: “Waaa I ran away from a necro and and and I dieded! I’m supposed to be able to run away from anything, I’m a button-mashing thief! Anything that prevents me from skilllessly running away MUST be OP!”

The only thing which any right-minded necromancer (or a wrong-minded one, for that matter — playing with dead bodies all day does that to you) can say is…

…wait for it…

“L2P.”

…which, in necrospeak, means “What? I killed you? YOU MUST REALLY SUCK!”

Only a necromancer will truly understand that death is like sex — it only really hurts the first time.

Axe:
— Overall damage of axe skills reduced by 10% to reflect necromancers’ flabby musculature, pale complexions, and aversion to coming out of their basement laboratories.
-- Rending Claws, Ghastly Claws, and Unholy Feast: Range reduced to 100 because axe is supposed to be a melee weapon. You can’t stab with an ax, so it is illogical for ax to have a longer range than a dagger. Since warriors would cry foul and fall on their greatswords at any hint of parity with ANet’s red-headed step-child, necromancers cannot be allowed to have the same range with an axe as warriors.

Jason King.2647:

We’re working on the minions’ behavior now and will be testing some changes to see how they work. Thank you for your patience, everyone!

I’ll believe it when I see it. The last time we were promised bug fixes we got underwater combat combo finishers.

You forgot “Minions will now actively attack the player instead of enemies, because the minions got sick of all the complaints about them not attacking properly.”

Squirry.6290:

I expect that they will do absolutely nothing, while repeating their delusional idea that necromancer is very good at attrition fights…

We’re still here, aren’t we, griping or no? If this hasn’t been a long, painful attrition fight, I don’t know what is. For all we know, it’s why they haven’t felt more inspired to fix necros. “Hey, they’re still at it! They’re obviously the perfect necromancer players. The class must be working as intended!”

(Oh, wow, two of my posts, one after the other. What happened here? Did someone’s post get deleted? Shame on you moderators and your ambiguous, arcane rules. Go ahead, keep stifling discourse. Soon enough you’ll run all of us off these forums because we’ve quit the game, and you won’t have to worry about us cluttering your stupid forums.)

You don’t understand, they haven’t figured out all of the issues yet. After all, it’s not like they can really pay attention to what’s happening with necromancers while playing their mesmers, warriors, and thieves. We need to be able to present the problem in a clear, concise, and complete manner so they can figure out how to change the tooltips involved and proudly proclaim, “problem solved!”

Remember when people complained about lich form and plague form unsummoning minions? They fixed the tooltip and voila! Problem solved! Working as intended!

That’s why it’s so hard to get any of our so-called bugs fixed. Minion AI? Working as intended! After all, can’t have nasty necromancer minions killing mesmers and warriors and thieves in PvP, right?

Everything else? Working as intended! It’s working, if badly, so that’s gotta be something, right? After all, we can’t really expect them to stop playing their mesmers, warriors, and thieves long enough to actually take a look at what might be wrong with necromancers.

lol well, that was a joke. They do say, however, that in every joke there is a kernel of truth.

Sometimes I wonder if what we need is a name change. If we were to successfully petition a class name change to “necromesmer” or “nwarriormancer” then maybe we’d get more attention.

HiSaZuL.2843:

I lost count of how many times they promised fixes and instead after few months of neglect we got nerfs.
I feel the love in the air here… or maybe its just getting dusty here?

It’s corpse dust, from all the failed, dead minions. Some of it is probably us, too, after the idiot flesh golem dragged us into yet another combat. :P

Sometimes I wonder if ANet spells fix “f-u-x.” It would explain all the “fixes” we get every time there’s an update. I can just imagine some dev somewhere grinning widely, wiping his hands and going, “Fuxed the necromancers, that should take care of all their whining. Now I can go back to my mesmer.”

I’ve been on hiatus from the game for about a month, and when I logged in today I got a featureless screen (gw144.jpg)

After running the repair, which didn’t work, I thought to check the graphics options, of which I was using the auto-detected settings (gw147.jpg)

Running through all the other options changed nothing, but I noticed that if I change the Render Sampling option to either Subsample or Supersample, the game world displays fine (albeit ugly in Subsample) (attachments gw149.jpg and gw150.jpg)

So what’s up with this? I have made no hardware or software changes to my system since before the 14 December update, so it seems obvious to me that the update borked something. Now I’m forced to run the game at a higher graphics setting than before (with the concomitant drop in performance) or to play it at ugly graphics settings.

As if I wasn’t already disappointed with this game and this company… >_>

I just logged in to Guild Wars 2 again today after about a month-long hiatus, and when I first log on to the game it takes a loooong time for my characters’ images to load on the character selection screen. That never used to happen before. (see attachment gw145.jpg)

The game takes forever to load, and when I do get in, all I see is a featureless view. (attachment gw143.jpg)

Game notifications appear as normal (attachment gw142.jpg)

I don’t always get a featureless purple view, though. Sometimes it’s teal. (attachment gw144.jpg)

I’d like to stress that the game was working fine a month ago, long before the 14 December patch. I’m inclined to believe that something in the patch broke my game.

Avigrus.2871:

Staff 1 is the worst… has to be the slowest moving projectile in the game.

Even a Dolyak could dodge it.

gasp Dolyaks can dodge?

Gryph.8237:

Seriously, wake up devs, your vision is faltering with this class, if a clear and concise vision ever existed.

/applause

Anchoku.8142:

Minions have their uses but Necromancer was not designed as a pet class.

^This. The fact that necromancers have one elite minion skill, and that it doesn’t work underwater, clearly shows that ANet does not consider minions to be an integral part of the necromancer concept. Hell, the idiot flesh golem dies if you even get your booties wet.

Tuccos.8592:

i am playing champions online atm, i am back to GW2 once the Patch notes say >>

“Necromancer class improved”
All Minions regen HP out of combat
AI/Pathing of Minions has been optimized they now all attack
Dagger now has a chance to hit additional targets and has its damage increased
Axe now attacks 3 targets like Ranger Axe 1 , increased damage
DS skills have faster cooldowns
DS UI removed
Fear duration increased , necro should have the best fear
Traits reworked, more logical chains that make sense

I remember hearing that they were going to roll all that out on December 22, but only if the Mayan Apocalypse had pushed through the day before. Since the world failed to end, they decided they didn’t need to work on necromancers anymore.

Tuccos.8592:

JonPeters.5630:

This is a great thread. Keep it up and we will use it t help figure out all of the issues.

Thanks,

Jon

yes do that……. 3 weeks ago he said that……. nothing else came from devs but this since then …… cool really ! Now we know you care about us necros …….

did he ever pass by here again after this ?

/ironic off

He’s either playing his mesmer, or trawling the mesmer boards. They get instant response to their whinging, after all.

Isn’t it ironic and significant that, despite all the posts about the bad minion AI, it’s still up to us to prove and supply the information about the bad AI? You’d think they’d be testing and debugging this themselves, but no, it’s up to the players to cough up the data. Shows just how much interest and investment they have in necromancers and necromancer issues.

Xsorus.2507:

…I think most Necro’s aren’t taking Advantage of their F2 ability…

(Emphasis mine)

What F2 ability?

Do you even play necromancer at all?

Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?

What F2 ability?

What are you, an idiot? What are you even doing on the necromancer forums when you obviously have no idea what necromancers are or do?

What F2 ability?

“It’s a necromancer! Quick, kill it!”

Excellent post, Aexrael. I’m hoping it makes a difference.

What makes me sad is that someone from Anet is going to see this vid and think “zomg necros aren’t kittened after all” and then they’re going to nerf us some more.

Ultimately for me, since I like the minion thing, the biggest disappointment is that flesh golem is the only necromancer-native elite skill that doesn’t kill your minions when you activate it. Plague and Lich both kill off any existing minions, which for me reduces them to “oh crap” skills that I use only when all my minions have died, instead of skills that I regularly use. I suppose you can always resort to racial elites — according to my cousin Reaper of Grenth doesn’t kill minions, so there have to be others out there — but those skills aren’t affected by your necromancer traits.

I am aware of similar posts already here, but I felt that all the problems with this specific skill, which is supposed to be an elite skill, merited a listing of all that’s wrong with it.

1. The flesh golem AI is buggy. More often than not, the flesh golem will aggressively attack everything in its (larger than normal) aggro range, either forcing the minion’s ‘master’ to run after the golem as it (effectively) dictates and initiates combat all over the place, or the character moves on, unaware of the fact that the golem has moved off, only to find out mid-fight that s/he is short a minion and possibly in a bad position, combat-wise. And if the golem just happened to aggro two or three or five mobs before dying, then the character is in for a lot of frustration fun, the way only a bad pull can make the game fun for someone, when those other mobs come calling.

Alternately, sometimes the flesh golem will just stand there and do nothing, even though the character is engaged in melee combat with something just an arm’s length away. Of course, one can always have the flesh golem charge the mobs, which often results in the golem bringing back other playmates, which brings me to the next item:

2. The flesh golem’s charge ability will cause nearby mobs to attack the golem. The knockdown effect of charge is very nice, and has often turned the tide for my character in a pitched fight. All too often, however, is has also caused me grief as the golem runs off while charging and aggros other mobs. Ultimately, this causes the player not only to be careful with the charge ability, but to hesitate to use it, because of the danger of increasing the number of enemies already engaged. Also, because of the long range of the charge, the golem is often absent from the fight for a time as it walks back, meaning that it (and, effectively, the player) are not as able to capitalize on the vulnerability of the enemy.

3. The flesh golem doesn’t work underwater. Not only is the golem the only elite minion skill, it is also the only minion skill that doesn’t work underwater. It might seem like a small thing, but for the golem to suddenly die because the character had to cross a small body of water is just frustrating. Suddenly, the character is one minion less (something that flesh golem users learn to live with, as per the first two points) and kittened to boot, because the skill is cooling down.

Conclusion: The flesh golem skill is fundamentally broken because it causes the player to hesitate even using it: In high-spawn (or high mob density) areas, the golem all too often becomes a liability because of its tendency to force the player into unwanted combat. The character, who is supposed to be a ‘scholar’ type, is forced into battle over and over again instead of being able to tactically assess his/her fights, because the golem is continually attacking everything in sight.

Further, even in areas with a lower spawn rate or mob density, the use of the charge ability is often contraindicated because of the chance that the golem will attract other mobs, resulting, again, in unplanned battles. Also, since the golem runs past (through?) the enemy it charges, the character is effectively unable to fully capitalize on the knocked-down enemy’s moment of vulnerability, simply because the golem is still running back. And that’s if it doesn’t get crippled by some intervening mob.

Lastly, water kills the golem. There’s always the chance that the character might have to run through some body of water, and if it just happens to dip a little, the golem is suddenly dead and the skill is cooling down. One less skill for 60 seconds. Same thing for when the character actually has to go underwater.

Most days I feel as if the 10 points I spent on the flesh golem skill were wasted. Skills, especially ‘elite’ skills, aren’t supposed to penalize and punish a character for spending on and slotting/using them, and that’s exactly what I feel about my golem a lot of the time. If the problem with the flesh golem is fundamental and something we’re unlikely to see changes to anytime soon, then it would be nice if we could get a refund for it. Sure, skill points are (effectively) a limitless resource, but it would still be nice to be able to get value for my expenditure. I’d hate to have to abandon my minion build, but if I do so, it would be nice not to have to keep seeing a broken skill in my list, one that I used a resource (and time and effort) on only to not get anything out of it.