Greetings, after the recent changes and since anet stated they’ll release a balance patch every week or two, i’ve decided to start this thread to constructively talk about necromancer’s balance.
Here i’ll leave a few points i feel important regarding the current balance of the necromancer and a few of my suggestions to get the discussion going, i’ll try to keep the suggestions as close as possible to being made (such as changing stats instead of editing a behaviour) .
What the necromancer is missing
- Projectile reflects, blocks
- Mobility
- Reliable access to stability
- Forms of team support
Issues regarding weapon sets
- Axe damage feels underwhelming
- Staff applies too little damaging conditions and the auto attack feels clunky, this turns this weapon as an utility set rather than a proper tool, due to this we also lack a reliable long range option to hurt our opponents
- Scepter’s life force generation is low and tied to a single hitting ability
- Focus is rarely used in any pvp scenario as warhorn and dagger are usually better
Issues regarding traits
- Spiteful spirit feels underwhelming, both due the ICD and the “meh” effect, it’ll never compete with the other two GMs as it is
- Lingering curse isn’t worth a GM
- Dhuumfire’s effect is not good enough, either make it apply two stacks or increase the duration by alot
- Of course, chilling darkness.
My suggestions
- Axe
Increase the damage of axe 1 and axe 2, make axe 1 deal AoE damage around the target hitting up to 3 enemies (aka cleave) or improve the debuffs/damage further, axe 3 should be a blast finisher - Staff
Improve staff 1 cast speed and projectile speed, but increase the aftercast a little (so that the projectile is shot faster but we still have to wait the same time to shoot another), improve mark of blood’s bleeds. - Focus
Decrease cast times - Scepter
Make scepter 3 attack hit twice almost immediatly, the first strike deals close to no damage, while the second is the same as now and becomes unblockable.
This means that while the scepter will still be the slowest life force generation weapon, we can do it reliably through blinds and blocks. - Curses
Swap master of corruption and lingering curse. MoC gives heavy debuffs to us and applies 3 or 4 seconds of resistance, while the basic debuffs are low.
For example, the traited Blood Is Power gives us 2 stacks of bleeding and torment for 10 seconds.
The new trait could make it give us something like 5 stacks of torment and 5 stacks of bleeding for 10s instead, plus the resistance.
This allows us to pick both terror and MoC, while creating a new and unique gameplay which mirrors the devs’ idea of the profession, this way we can finally condi spike through inflicting debuffs on ourselves. - Spite
Spiteful spirit is underwhelming, the easiest fix is to give it no icd as it’s tied to DS.
However, many things can be done with this trait, for example:
When you corrupt a boon grant that boon to all nearby allies, with the same stacks and duration. Suddently we have a decent team support option which fits our theme!
or
Reflect/block projectiles (for X seconds?) while in death shroud and briefly while exiting. Maybe add a special condition such as making it active as long as you have a condition on you. - Soul reaping
Change dhuumfire to: Life blast becomes plague blast (with the ranged fixed to 1200)!
Is it good for power builds? Heck yeah, half cast time+condi transfer while losing the close range bonus is good.
Is it good for condition builds? Heck yeah, if we spec for condi damage this trait would allow us to retain the king of condition title which we long lost.
Is it good for hybrid builds? Absolutely, especially with path of corruption + MoC.
Can it be countered? Any power build counters this as a downside, which is perfectly fine as we can remedy that ourselves at a big cost.
Plus plague blast is already in the game, it requires little effort.
…Or just make dhuumfire apply 2 stacks or apply twice the duration.
Also make unyielding blast baseline, at least the pierce, then just improve the vuln stacking a little.
Regarding stability, reflects and mobility
- Corrosive poison cloud should block projectiles (corrodes em!
) - Spectral walk and Spectral armor are perfect targets for some stability
- Spectral wall should reflect projectiles
- Well of darkness and well of power should do damage,maybe 5 seconds reduced cd?
- Well of power should pulse stability
- Blood fiend should heal us through shroud (926 heal every 3 seconds if it doesn’t bug at all) as it’s a very underused heal.
- Oh yeah, make chilling darkness’ icd apply to once per target, we won’t be able to pulse chill but we’ll be able to chill everyone once. That’d be fine already.
- Plague and signet of undeath’s active become shadowsteps! 120s+ cooldowns rarely used turned into REAL panic buttons.
