Guild Wars 2

ANet needs to make fundamental changes to how Necromancer works, since they tried to port over mechanics from GW1 to GW2 while introducing far more direct counters without any benefits. The idea of “weakening” the enemy is cool, but it doesn’t work when so many things to counter conditions exist, which just wasn’t the case in GW1 when Necromancer’s theme worked.

The actual sad thing is that Necro has been in that same state since launch, and hilariously enough anyone could have called the uninspired changes in the last patch: “reduced the CD of wells”.

In a few more years wells won’t even have CDs anymore.

Only nerf was Lich change, otherwise seems like a few small but potentially noticeable buffs. Can’t complain too much.

Could just repost a thread from 3 years ago and it’d be pretty much the same issues. That’s what is wrong.

Don’t worry guys, by the time of the next expansion they’ll finally get time to give a meaninglessly small buff to Axe again. Maybe we’ll even get a few CD reductions randomly spattered on our skills again.

Sabre.8627:

Bhawb.7408:

2 Torment for roughly 8 seconds is the best solution imo. Torment has the best thematic fit, since Reaper is all about anti-movement, plus it allows for a bit of counterplay and thought behind either running and taking Torment or not moving and taking on Reaper in melee.

My only problem with this is that putting a sigil of earth and sigil of ice on a scepter makes your auto attack stupidly powerful. One single auto attack chain could result in 4 stacks of torment(2 AOE), 5 stacks of bleeding, AOE chill, poison, and a corrupted boon.
(counting barbed precision and chilling nova)

I like this suggestion but I feel like it would be too strong with the way everything else functions right now. It would be nearly as strong as before, probably even stronger since torment can stack. Could you imagine how ridiculous a fear chain would be?
(This is solely PvP perspective obviously)

Every interaction would be the same as before, but with Torment instead of chill or bleed. If the previous iterations didn’t break anything, its doubtful that this would.

Rio.4259:

Thanks a lot for the replies, I really appreciate it. Since it was suggested twice, I assume Axe+Dagger is the best weapon to use? I’ve also been using Bone Fiend instead of Shadow Fiend…oops. >.>

Axe/Dagger is a good weapon set to have appropriate ranges, since Axe doesn’t love to be in WH range. However if you don’t already have a WH slotted and don’t need the condi transfer, WH > dagger OH.

And no, Shadow Fiend is trash compared to Bone Fiend. His active is a significant DPS loss (3s cast time), compared to BF’s DPS gain and massive immob duration, he is melee (so dies) and loses out on 2x projectile finisher per attack, all while doing the same DPS and attacks per second.

It needs a lot of work. Compared to RS, DS has a:

• Clunky AA
• Generally low utility
• Bad synergy with itself
• Bad synergy with the rest of the profession

The AA is super long and clunky, without the benefit of projectile finishers. The 2 skill is really easy to miss and takes ages. 4/5 give very low utility compared to RS’s 4/5. Really only the 3 skills are well translated, RS gains the utility of AoE and some stab (to make up for range) but loses the instant, long fear.

But DS really needs a full rework.

Its just too much effort to try to fix DC that you end up losing out on a lot of stuff. Like taking Reaper runes and Shouts dumps on other important parts of the build.

Make it 2 torment (with balanced durations) and we have a deal.

All solid ideas. I don’t personally feel like any of these are the “big” issues that plague the profession, but they’re small ones that are relatively easy to do with some nice payoff.

Axe is okay, could use a little bit of love though. I think 3 is already overloaded as is, the only real problem is the 2 skill, and maybe the AAs speed. 2 just underperforms compared to other channels. Yes 2 is a bit more reliable than Rapid Fire, but it pays way too much for it.

Axe 2 compared to LB 2 gets you:
+Non-projectile
+Follows stealth(? assuming RF doesn’t, not sure of its mechanics)
+2s lower CD
-23% damage
-600 range
-Projectile Finishers
-10 Vuln stacks
-A bigger economic cost, since not AAing on axe = lost vuln stacks, whereas RF on LB is just strictly better than AAing

Now, I’m not going to argue it needs that full damage boost, because it IS more reliable, which warrants a decrease, especially in the damage department. But losing damage, finishers, utility, AND range, all on top of losing your stacked up AA vuln is too much. Range won’t be added, but if at the very least it didn’t cause you to lose vuln stacks and did a little bit more damage it’d be a bit better to use. And no, before anyone mentions it, gaining LF is not a utility, its a requirement for the class to function. At the very least, first add some vuln (say 1 vuln per hit) and that at least makes Axe less clunky to use, and is a buff.

2 Torment for roughly 8 seconds is the best solution imo. Torment has the best thematic fit, since Reaper is all about anti-movement, plus it allows for a bit of counterplay and thought behind either running and taking Torment or not moving and taking on Reaper in melee.

albarinos.6135:

This is not a simple transform we talk about, this is the core mecanic of the class where you can spend half a fight in.

Welcome to Necromancer bud, you’ll enjoy your stay proportionally with how much you hate yourself.

MM in PvE is basically just a power build with Death Magic and minions. So put on your favorite minions (don’t pick Shadow Fiend for my own sanity), pick up Death Magic, then with the rest of your build pick up the best DPS you can.

Just tells us what we always knew, that power necro is terrible. Thankfully, with the raid design and some new toys, Condi Necro is really solid, and even though you can’t “see” the utility, its fairly obvious the utility is strong enough to bring.

Yep, its always been a really strong interaction that makes Reaper pretty much mandatory for MM now.

I don’t get the point of those pictures. In the first two pictures you show that your build managed to kill someone in unranked. Cool, but totally meaningless balance wise. In the third/fourth you show that you can lose games and get mid-tier scores, but again nothing meaningful balance wise. Those aren’t proof of anything we’re talking about.

I used to win some 1v1s against top players with my MM build (pre a lot of buffs), does that mean my build was super amazing? No, it means I was a decent player with a build focused 100% on 1v1 that happened to win some 1v1s. They still would have mopped the floor with me in actual games (and often did).

Sun Lian.4075:

Because I imagine those players are like Brokensunday, giving up already after 1 day. It’s sad.

Necro players, especially the ones in the pro scene, are some of the most stubborn single-class players in the game. Very few of them swap classes, and when they do its because the profession has been so significantly nerfed that they simply can’t make it work and have to swap to not screw over their teammates.

Some of these effects already exist in the game and generally have trouble working. I think the primary problem is that while they work great in other games (see: Life Steal in League), in GW2 there are so many stall effects that any kind of windowed %damage to life is pretty easily dealt with. On the other hand, having non-windowed life steal could be too “win more” – if you’re able to hit enough to heal, you are dealing enough DPS to win anyway – or too much defense from offense.

Not that it is a bad idea, mind you. I think it would be really interesting to have. But I think it would probably have to be locked behind an Elite spec so that they have more control over the combinations it can have. For example, it could be good to have a “Vampire” shroud, that instead of giving you LF as HP, allowed you some kind of really heavy vamp state.

I do get your point though, even when strong, life steals don’t often feel amazing, especially the trait ones. They just kinda… happen.

Or they dodge once and that entire combo misses and you’re out two 30s CD skills and then you’ll never hit with 5 chills every 8-16s to keep up the same damage. Even if you play really well and land it, the damage you did in that clip was pitiful, 11 poison and 13 bleed is nothing for 6 seconds of work.

Note that the 5-6 have to all be from chill, any bleeds you do with anything that don’t involve chill are completely irrelevant to the DC change. You’re really stuck on that RS 5→4 combo, but not only is that a really specific and unrealistic combo, after it is done you still need to have 10-12 chills on your kit to sustain the damage until that combo is back up, which you can’t have.

@Sun Lian, because pre-nerf, ONE chill application gave full damage for its full duration. Now, you need to maintain at least 5 bleeds on the target from Deathly Chill to match the damage, meaning you are required to hit them with at least 5 chills every 8-16 seconds (depending on bleed durations). I think its pretty obvious that hitting people 5 times is harder than hitting them once or twice (since chills will probably be a bit shorter).

Ice Field + Soul Spiral is exactly what I mean by brain dead enemy. The first part has a 1.25s cast time, meaning you can easily avoid the effect and not be in the field. The second part has a 3s channel time, and relies on whirl finishers (extremely unreliable) to stack bleeds. For example, if the enemy isn’t standing in your field, they’ll only get 2-4 bleeds from that combo, which will take kitten and put two abilities on a 30s CD.

Or you could AA them with scepter and do more damage from 900 range.

The change might have been in part to alleviate that annoyance. It is absolutely possible that once they decided to nerf Deathly Chill due to PvP, they took that same time to also give it a slight rework so that it ends up with better usability for PvE (and general stacking). Wouldn’t be at all surprising, lumped changes is pretty common in games.

Still a really poor change that shows a lack of understanding of why Deathly Chill is so important, and why Deathly Chill was never used in early HoT betas until buffed, though. Burning, Bleed, Torment, and Confusion are all purely damage conditions, and even if we accept Burning and Confusion to not fit thematically, Torment fits perfectly (punishes running), and even a better Bleed set of numbers would have worked.

Also the reduced chill durations make relatively little sense at the same time, unless they were considered too strong on their own (which I don’t agree with, we had to increase them in beta). Same with double-nerfing stab.

And people make Challenger playing random kitten in League, like doing nothing but Teemo Jungle. All that says is that the average player is really bad at the game, and that non-build related input (map play) is more important than build. Give the same player a strong build though, and they would have made legend far more quickly.

ronpierce.2760:

If they’re willing to work with us and openly discuss it, we’ll get sorted out in no time. That’s better than I can say for some other classes/specs, at least.

Good point to bring up. Thankfully Reaper has a very solid base design, so bringing things back in line is relatively simple, requiring mostly small tuning, rather than a full rework.

Radu.1693:

Sorry 3.4k, with only 6 might using wanderer’s.

You got all 30 stacks of bleeding using just that trait alone?

Dreaming serpent.5197:

Dear Bawb, I’d like to present Rune of the reaper and shouts. This is turning out to be a buff

So you lose out on a ton of useful stats just to get one 8s (because no condition duration) bleed and short chill per person per shout? Don’t think its remotely worth it, you’re better off with a real rune set, and it definitely isn’t a buff compared to pre patch.

Its funny because their buffs to OH weapons were terrible too. Faster projectile but increased cast time, increased damage on a skill that takes half an eternity to cast, and still none of the improvements we really need like combo contributions and usability improvements (no I don’t count a speed buff and cast nerf as a QoL).

I think its pretty important that the trait contributes more to short duration/high intensity damage. That was a really key component, that the trait allowed condi builds to have a difficult to remove, but relatively middle level (compared to actual condi burst) damage output.

Voodoo Tina.4180:

I’m sure they tested it with more stacks and different conditions.

You must be new here.

Yep. Its not surprising that it needs changing for that reason (lol Terror), just bad implementation.

To clarify, it would take at least 4-5 bleeds to make up for the loss of the chill damage. Meaning unless you can apply 4-5 chills every 8-16s (depending on bleed duration), you are losing out on damage. Burning has 2.5x better condition damage scaling, and 6x higher base damage, so for a given condition damage you need roughly 3-4 bleeds to match burn damage.

I’ve long ago learned that asking “why” to ANet won’t satisfy anything. Even if they answer, its not like the change will suddenly make sense to you, or be any less bad.

+1, core Necromancer is almost unplayably clunky, and its the primary thing that keeps me from it. Even if it was stronger than Reaper, I would rather be weak than hate the gameplay and end up playing Reaper anyway.

I’d say give it 2 stacks of torment, and figure out a decent duration for them, probably 8s (since they don’t get a lot of +duration). Torment doesn’t exist on Reaper, enforces the anti-movement theme of Reaper and Chill, and diversifies our damage a little bit better, while still allowing stacking.

ronpierce.2760:

All that said, I think 2 stacks of torment for 8 seconds would be great or 2 bleed for 6 seconds.

Yep, either would have been pretty reasonable. I do understand wanting to get it off of chill (stacking and the old burning problem), just poorly executed.

Salamander.2504:

RS3 nerf is probably for the best. We were a class that thematically was weak to CC, and RS3 sent us in the other direction.

No, this is the opposite. We are a class that shouldn’t thematically be weak to CC, their theme since the beginning of time is that Necromancers would be “in fighters”, a combat style that wades into the thick of combat and trades blows while smartly using attrition mechanics to come out on top. Stability is one of THE most important factors of that, they just left it out of our base profession because they never took core necro out of beta testing. But it is not a purposeful weakness, it is a weakness due to mistakes in design.

Tim.6450:

Ddidn’t they lower the cd of all but the standard power necro wells?

Yes. At this rate in 3 more years we’ll have 5s CD wells.

Dead.5829:

I definitely disagree that condi bomber reaper was the only viable ranked build O_o.

Have you run the numbers on the new bleed per chill application? How do they compare as time and skill use continue?

I’d have to do math I don’t really feel like doing, but some rough napkin math and I think you need to sustain 4-5 bleeds from Deathly Chill the same amount as you maintained just chill pre-patch. So if you had 100% chill uptime, you now need to apply 4-5 chills every 8-16 seconds depending on bleed duration. I’d say with the exception of RS 5→4, this results in not just a pretty significant damage nerf, but a really suboptimal chill rotation to try to make up the damage. If you apply enough chills to keep up bleeds, then you run a huge risk of losing it all to a cleanse, whereas before you’d try to apply a new chill right before it expired.

Nah, the thing that made Reaper worthwhile is having a shroud that actually feels like a finished project. Even if this kills chill builds, I’d still use Reaper because core necromancer is god awful to use.

Radu.1693:

Rather than quoting everyone individually.

@Bleed damage.
Its not the application of a single bleed that hurts, it is the intensity stacking factor. The trait has no ICD. Using reaper 4 in a chill field now applies tons of bleeds off the whirl finisher. I wouldn’t call 3.2k bleed ticks from one reaper a slight breeze.

They nerfed both the whirl finisher and ice field. And a 3.2k bleed tick (I’ll ignore how ridiculous that number is) requiring someone to stand in melee range after 3+ seconds of you doing things on top of requiring two huge CDs AND a trait invested isn’t exactly amazing. You will need what, at least 4 bleeds to get the same damage as pre-nerf? And you need to sustain those 4 bleeds, all from chill, the same amount of time as you maintained just ONE chill before.

There is no way this isn’t a nerf.

If it was torment, no problem. If it didn’t require 4-5x the chill investment to get the same damage, might be okay. If they didn’t go and massively nerf our chill at the same time, probably fine. But none of those are true, and I’d be surprised if it isn’t really bad now.

Hasn’t this always been the case? Can’t say I ever used this terrible trait, but this is exactly how I thought it would work.

Nightshade.2570:

C. I am tired of the old death shroud but with our Stability getting slightly nerfed in reaper form I am trying to understand the point of taking reaper still? If chill is nerfed and turns out to be less effective then running a Vanilla necro

Because Reaper, even if weak, feels like a finished (or mostly) product, while the current base Necromancer would normally be inexcusable even in a beta.

Radu.1693:

You have a valid point about the damage becoming more concentrated in bleeds. On the plus side now every single time you apply chill you now apply two condis, making it that much easier to makes it easier to bury condis.

Covering conditions isn’t a thing, at least a significant number of removals are random, and any condi build already had both bleed and chill on the target. So the only time this matters is directly after conditions have been wiped, except at that point immediately applying a 600+ DPS condition is significantly better than applying two conditions, one of which applying the DPS of a slight breeze.

flow.6043:

Also, nothing is easier to cleanse now.

This just isn’t true. If the bleed stack is removed, your damage is gone completely, whereas before they needed to remove both chill and bleeds, and keeping chill off was fairly difficult which resulted in at least a decent way to sustain DPS. Condition damage builds that work in PvP settings have some mix of high burst condition damage and sustained threat through multiple sources of condition damage. Engis, for example, have traditionally done well (and out performed Necromancers pretty consistently) because their condition damage is spread out over nearly every damaging condition in the game on quick applications, making it very difficult to fully remove their threat.

flow.6043:

And let’s be honest, the strongest part about chilled wasn’t the damage anyway. It’s the movement impairment and the tripled cooldowns, which still works the same.

The entire point of the trait was to give old-burning like damage. We’ve always had issues with keeping up a constant condition damage threat due to all our damage being lumped onto low intensity high duration bleeds, and they replaced the one thing that meaningfully fixed this problem with a low intensity high duration bleed.

Did it need a nerf? Maybe, and if it did, its absolutely fine that it gets nerfed. But either hit its damage directly, or move it to one of the many damaging conditions we don’t have good access to. Like torment, remember that one condition we were supposed to get access to?

Ariurotl.3718:

My power Reaper got an almost pure buff, I’m not even joking.

The issue isn’t that we didn’t get some buffs, its that the changes make very little sense. They don’t really address the issues, they’re just haphazard changes to try to fix Reaper being at least perceived as OP (I’m not sure if it is or isn’t), and Core Necro being terrible.

Flumek.9043:

I have trouble with loading the patch notes, theres only a joke version where only well of power is a “maybe” while axe, focus, base etc and everything is clunky garbage.

Actually, you missed the best part of the patch for me:

Deathly Swarm: The missile velocity of this skill has been increased by 100%. The casting time of the projectile has increased by 0.2 seconds.

Hey guys, we increased the projectile speed of that insanely slow, non-projectile finisher projectile, but to compensate with that really necessary QoL we increased cast time.

Steelstickfig.9146:

But wells got their cooldown reduced slightly :^)

Anet’s through process for 1-2 years now has been:

Is Necromancer weak?
If yes, lower well CDs by 5s.
Still weak?
Wait 6 months and try again.

Would have been fine if they tried changing it to a stacking condition that wasn’t bleeding, but they went with the one condition that makes it pretty bad.

“Necromancer
Necromancers have been reaping their way across the game, far and wide. It’s been a glorious sight. With that being said, there are a few areas that we feel need to be balanced, specifically chill application and survivability. In this update we’ll be reducing the overall duration of chill that the necromancer can output by reducing it from their base abilities. Players will also see a reduction in the uptime of Infusing Terror, though the functionality will remain the same. Baseline necromancers will be seeing some off-hand weapon updates as well as well recharge reductions.

• Well of Corruption has undergone an audio rework to make it sound like it is bursting from the ground, better matching its visual effects.
• All Bone Fiend projectile skills have undergone an audio rework to make them sound more like projectiles.
• Lich Form—Mark of Horror: Added a strike to the area when this mark is triggered by an enemy.
• Spectral Wall: The number of times this skill can be used to attempt to apply fear to an enemy has been capped at 10.
• Reaper’s Touch: The recharge time of this skill has been reduced from 18 seconds to 15 seconds.
• Spinal Shivers: Increased the damage when removing two and three boons by 25% and 40% respectively.
• Deathly Swarm: The missile velocity of this skill has been increased by 100%. The casting time of the projectile has increased by 0.2 seconds.
• Well of Power: The recharge time of this skill has been reduced from 50 seconds to 40 seconds.
• Well of Darkness: The recharge time of this skill has been reduced from 50 seconds to 45 seconds.
• Well of Blood: The recharge time of this skill has been reduced from 40 seconds to 35 seconds.
• Ritual of Life: The cooldown of this trait has been reduced from 40 seconds to 35 seconds.
• Infusing Terror: Reduced the active duration of this skill from 8 seconds to 5 seconds. The recharge time has been increased from 20 seconds to 25 seconds.
• Unholy Sanctuary: Fixed a bug that caused this skill to go on cooldown even when the necromancer has less than 10% life force.
• Soul Spiral: Reduced the number of whirl combos during the course of the skill from 11 to 6.
• Executioner’s Scythe: Reduced the freezing field duration from 6 seconds to 4 seconds.
• “Chilled to the Bone!”: The chill duration from this skill has been reduced from 6 seconds to 4 seconds.
• Chilling Nova: The chill duration from this trait has been reduced from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds.
• Shivers of Dread: The chill duration from this trait has been reduced from 3 seconds to 2 seconds.
• Deathly Chill: This trait no longer causes chill to inflict damage but instead applies 8 seconds of bleeding each time you apply chill to an enemy."

Those are the relevant patch notes. I won’t argue that their direction is off, but it feels like once again they missed the point. Core Necromancer isn’t avoided just because it is weak, but because it is unbearably clunky to play with, and instead of that being addressed, we’re given some CD reductions. Deathly Chill is also pushing us back to our old spot, where we are either allowed to stack bleeds by idiots and deal mediocre damage, or our bleed stacks get removed during our 10 second “burst” rotation and we do nothing. Feels a lot like more of the same, where it is obvious what the problems are, but ANet either can’t see or won’t implement the obvious fixes. Also a bit worried by the double nerf to Chill, but I won’t pretend like I’ve put in enough time to know if its needed or not.

Though hey, we got new sounds, so that makes it all better right?