I think no matter how well thought out the concept for the elite specs are the vanilla necro stuff is holding pretty much every current and potential new aspect back.
Our weapons lack a theme for the most part. We have no pure meele power or condition weapon set. We have no pure power or meele long ranged weapon set. Our weapon sets, for the most part lack an identity. Staff is used a lot across all builds because its the universal filler weapon. But our weapon sets dont give us reliable protection, no blocks, no good raw damage, no mobility. Focus doenst have a clear point, for power damage it’s too weak and gimmicky. Staff is a filler weapon. Dagger isn’t a dps weapon either. Scepter lacks a fitting offhand weapon thats good on its own, yes there is a small synergy with blood is power, but this added damage should come from the weapon skills. Utility skills should be just that – Utility, fine tuning your build with aspects you’re lacking, they shouldn’t make up for the lacking weapon damage or skills. We need more baseline weapons, with clear theme and synergy.
Our class mechanic is flawed in design. Lifeforce gain needs a revamp. We have way too many traits and utilities resolving around just getting shroud, a huge number of traits are centered around shroud, yet it feels more like an punishmen than a joy to build lifeforce up. The trait synergy with healing and life siphon needs to be normalized. We should have access to all skills and signet effects while being in shroud, baseline. The baseline shroud also feels like a knive in a gun fight, in the current state everything is faster, quicker, stronger, and we sit there, with an auto attack that takes 1,5 seconds total per shot while other classes, in the same time can burst and disengage. Our gap closer can be outrunned due to the sloppy projectile, fear in general is a bad CC effect. Lifeforce gain should mainly come from damage done, or hits done, not limited to certain skills or nearby deaths.
Our traits are bad. We lack the pure damage modifiers other classes get. We lack automated defenses. Our defensive line minors completly suck and 3 of our majors are centered around minions. No other class has 3 traits wasted for a single kind of utility skill. The effects of fear on CC and fear on down are bad, the cooldown is extreme, the effect most of the time doenst work thanks to the rising amount of stability, and resistance. We have traits for blind, fear and chill but not many skills that inflict these conditions. An absurd amount of traits are centered around deathshroud, affecting various aspects, without leaving us much of a choice if we dont build around that particular aspect. Curses, our “crit” line, has close to 0 synergy with power aspects, where as our “Spite” power line has no real power increase for our condition side, our Soul Reaping line feels like our defensive line, because our intended defensive line is basicly dead. And Blood Magic is basicly just there for the reduced well cooldown, it lacks any meaningful synergy for base necro, or reaper. Sure, its nice for Scourge, but it’s flawed in design. The siphon effects are abysmall low in scaling, even with heavy investment in healing power, likewise the damage aspect of these is equally bad.
Our Utility Skills are mostly on the long cooldown side. The entire minions are pretty bad unless you go strictly for a minion build, these dont give any utility at all. You cant pick Bone Fiend for a reliable root, because its not reliable, because it dies quick and the root is on a 50 second cooldown. The same thing is true for bone minions, these things should scale based on power of the necromancer. The well cooldowns are too high across the board. These are static in a very fluid and quick game. You don’t get the full effect out most of the times, yet the cooldown is incredibly high. The damage values are too low compared to similar skills, and the damage should in general come from our weapon skills. Epidemic got gutted and is essentially useless, by the time you stack enough condis to make it worth, the target is dead mid flight, causing no effect. And spectral skills have horribly high cooldowns and are attempting to fix our class resource problem, which shouldn’t be that much of a problem in the first place.
I think Anet really needs to take the time to revise the core class, because as it stands, no matter how cool or intuitive a elite spec is, there only is so much you can add for a single trait line, for a single set of utility skills and some weapon and profession skills. The core class is the fundament of every spec they build. All years of elite specialization work to come, won’t succeed if the core isn’t in a good state. Ele for example, as well as warriors, are in a very good state all the time, no matter what kind of elite spec they come up with, it will be good, and it will be worthwile. The necro specs aren’t any worse from the design or the idea behind them, its just the flawed base class that guts them.
