Showing Posts For Dulon.9347:
If you take Vampiric Rituals, the Death Magic tree is interesting right away.
Since you are using wells, might as well let them grant protection.
If your build depends on on hit effects, increasing the number of hits makes sense as
well. Dagger2 and Axe2 are great for that. Then Dark Armor would be another
interesting Death Magic choice.
If Death Magic isn’t what you want and you’d rather do some more damage instead,
Spite and Soul Reaping can offer you almost permanent fury and more critical
damage.
In PvE, you can already heal yourself for 6-7k life every 8/12 seconds without ever
touching your healing skill. While having 3.4k armor during channels.
The second issue is reverse scaling where siphon traits get < 0 and start healing mobs.
That information is outdated, it was fixed in the November patch.
In PvE and WvW a life siphon build works fine.
Life leech runes/sigils, power/precision/toughness gear, omnomberry pies, axe/focus
and dagger/dagger as weapons.
sPvP is a different matter though, since you lack the food and knight’s gear has
vitality instead of toughness there.
I ended up explaining my build in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Power-and-Lifeleech-builds-in-Dungeons/first#post851400
If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
(If you get bad link on my build in the other thread, just copy the address directly and
input in your browser)
I don’t want to say Necros don’t have problems, but the forums are too negative.
The last time i saw something like this was on the ffxi dragoon forums.
And we successfully managed to damage our reputation in the game to the point
that when you entered a party, at least two people instantly left and just said “loldrg”
in party chat before doing so. Or they asked the leader to kick you.
The Necromancer isn’t perfect but it’s also not broken as badly as this forums wants you to believe.
If you overdo it, developers won’t listen to your justified complaints… and the community
in the game will shun you.
I enjoy the damage component of life leech right now and wouldn’t want to miss it.
That aside, if wells leeched 300 per tick it would be crazy in pve.
Sometimes you actually have 5 targets around you for the duration of a well.
Drop 4 wells and enjoy getting back 37.5k health without even considering the effects
those wells normally have.
That would probably be overpowered even if you did take away the damage
component of leech effects.
Maybe our life leech traits need a slight buff to the base amount they leech, but
anything drastic might be too harsh and break all balance.
Life leech damage has its place. It ignores the enemy’s toughness like a condition, yet
no kind of condition removal can lower its damage either since it causes damage
instantly.
The only way for an enemy to lower leech damage is to avoid the hit that would
trigger it. Of course it doesn’t do enough damage to kill something on its own, but
a nice extra component in your damage setup.
What do you think would be appropriate then?
Right now, i can do a combo of Ghastly Claws and Siphon Health that recovers 7k
health already. Depending on the skill i used last, the cd on that is 8/12 seconds.
Aside from what i already mentioned, you can further improve the life you gain by
choosing weapons that generate a lot of hits.
If we increase our vampiric traits to 100+ per hit (so 150 traited) like you see
demanded often because of a certain thief healing skill… then that combo would heal
for 10k… and would do 7.6k damage from life leech on hit effects alone.
Add to that 7-8k damage the two skills do on their own even in a tanky setup and you
have a combination, that could potentially deal 14-15k damage, give you 400 armor
while you channel it and heals you for 10k on a low cooldown.
Just to show that certain forum demands would make us overpowered in certain
builds.
Never forget the huge toughness/vitality boost.
You almost get +2748 toughness and +1832 vitality while you are in this form.
I think both skill 2 and 3 work very well together with this stat advantage.
Bloodthirst is probably supposed to be our way to increase the direct heal/damage of
lifeleech.
Depending on how good the scaling would be, you might be required to spend
hundreds of points of healing in order to get that same 50% anyway.
If bloodthirst isn’t enough, you can also get vampiric precision. At that point you get
more life leech by putting points into precision. After you did that, you might as well
take advantage of the life leech effects from sigils and food.
Just because you can’t mindlessly put points into healing to become unkillable doesn’t
mean there are no synergies when it comes to life leech.
I had a lot of fun finding and tuning my life leech build.
Even without heal scaling you can increase the amount of life you gain over time
with the proper traits, gear and skills.
I think one of the main problems is that a lot of necromancers are trapped in the
mindset that we are only a condition or pet class.
+healing was my first approach to a Life Siphon build as well.
I was very durable too.
By now i like to have gear without healing stats and get precision instead for on crit life leech effects.
But it’s probably a matter of personal preference.
If the max hp is an issue, guardian is disqualified too since it shares the lowest base
health pool with elementalist and thief.
Let’s compare Warrior and Necromancer since this topic is about Necromancers
being subpar.
They both have the same base health pool, Warrior has more armor because of
their armor class. Their profession mechanic however is primary offensive, while
DS is better as a defensive ability.
That helps to even it out.
But since you also consider Guardian good, it’s easy:
The difference between heavy and light armor is 291.
They difference between Guardian and Necromancer health pools is 7567.
In order to have the same armor as a Guardian, a Necro has to spend 291 extra
toughness.
If the Guardian wants to have the same health pool as a Necro, he has to spend extra 756 points in vitality.
Warrior seems to have the best of both worlds, but i think it’s lacking a bit on the
health regeneration department in return.
I think a lot of people still have a heavy vs. light armor mindset they got in other games
where the difference is something like 20% vs 50% basic damage reduction.
Here in GW2 it’s something like a difference of 200-300 armor in the end.
A saw warriors who honestly believed that when they go glasscannon, they still
can take more damage than any light armor class that gets toughness.
It’s simply not true.
How do you know you lose too much much damage?
And how can you compare it to the effectiveness of a guardian/warrior?
We simply lack the parsing tools to make any definite calls.
If i take life leech into account, my Ghastly Claws ends up doing 4.5-6k damage.
Considering the main focus of the build is survival, that should still be an acceptable
number.
I have damage variation of my life leech build that drops the death magic traits.
But i don’t feel it’s as strong as the build i posted.
If i really dropped the toughness on the gear and points in either death magic and/or
blood magic i’d definitiely feel too squishy and would probably reach glass cannon
levels when in melee.
(edited by Dulon.9347)
Concerning Vampiric Rituals:
Each well tick heals/damages for 80 hp.
Well of Blood gives 800 per target, all other wells 400.
If you are surrounded (when wells are in general most useful and you need them the
most) and you reach the target limit of 5, well of blood heals you for 4k, the other wells
for 2k on top what they already do.
Concerning Shrouded Removal:
Deathly Swarm has a 18 second cooldown and requires me to stay on Dagger. It also
requires a nearby enemy.
Well of Power has a 60 second cooldown.
Without the 10 second cd condition removal, it’s much more likely to sit on a
condition for 10+ seconds in battle. Or be poisoned for 30+ seconds after battle.
I don’t really want to give those up.
Focused Rituals is very pointless though, i want to be in the activation area because
of Ritual of Protection and i am in melee range anyway.
Spectral Attunement isn’t important to me as well, i mainly use spectral walk for
swiftness. But with full points in Death Magic and using Warhorn, that already
provides swiftness fulltime. I hardly ever use the other spectral skill in pve. So i also
don’t feel like needing the Warhorn trait.
The build doesn’t use staff in usual play so it is lacking a bit of aoe damage.
Aside from support and personal survival (vampiric rituals and ritual of protection)
wells also offer some aoe damage (not too much, but with retaliation and life transfer
it’s at an acceptable level) .
Depending on the situation, i sometimes switch out one or two wells.
For example, if your party puts 20+ bleeding stacks on some enemy, you could think
about adding epidemic to your bar.
If movement/speed is important, spectral walk and warhorn offer permament
swiftness.
In general, i feel wells add a lot though and i wouldn’t want to miss them.
In situations with multiple threats like that (like the dog groups in TA) plague form really shines.
In AC it’s enough most of the time to just save your DS fear. You can still use it while
knocked down if you happen to miss the dodge on the knockdown leap.
If you mean colossus rumblus, you can simply interrupt further rocks by switching
to DS and fearing him too. You can even interrupt kholer’s spin attack after he started
it. If you fear him during the pullback move, he’ll simply start spinning right away
though.
If you feel uncomfortable without a true stun breaker on your bar, you can replace
one of the utilities with a stun breaking one. I just removed the stun breaker because i
hardly ever used it in dungeons.
(edited by Dulon.9347)
Yes, mainly pve knight’s gear, only my offhand items have soldier’s stats.
With food and oil i have 3k Attack, 3k Armor (3.4k during channels), a 50% crit chance
and roughly 22.5k hp.
I can’t check ingame right now, but those are the figures from the top of my head.
My bad, those utilities are for underwater combat, i didn’t realize the skill builder
was replacing the utilities for normal combat too.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRAoY3djQaV6haea87JApHNjt1TP42bxjKUMA;TsAKnMOJcy6k0pFGDMOYsD5hxMEA
Those are the well utilities i set.
If you are fighting dredge, i’d use a setup like this because they are immune to blind:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBIhdu1IkWlemmnG/eCQ6RzYb90Du9W8oCFD;TsAKnMOJcy6k0pFGDMOYsD5hxMEA
The build makes you tanky, still does decent damage, let’s you lend some support
with wells and you have a few cripple/chill/fear effects for control.
A life leech build does work in dungeons.
That’s the one i use:
(edit: removed because i messed up something with the tool, i linked my build again
in a post below)
As food Omnomberry Pies are pretty much mandatory though.
If you have any questions about the build, feel free to ask.
(edited by Dulon.9347)
With new content i meant content yet to come. If it requires you to have the gear
from the current fractals, you can bet you will get easier access to the current ascended gear.
You have 3 choices in vertical progression games once you add a new tier:
a) make gear of old tier easily available so everyone can join the new one
b) don’t do that and leave some people behind. (at some point guilds will even start
to recruit players without the equip, but will hate the fact that they have to run
the old content again to equip them)
c) tune the difficulty of each new tier in a way to make it completely optional to
have the previous tier completed. That in return means since you also add
stronger items each time that every new tier will get easier and easier for a
progression guilds.
The first option is what most games follow i think.
Once you see that pattern, it’s obvious that vertical progression is either an illusion,
a tedious long process and/or pointless.
Each of these approaches has its own distinct disadvantage:
a) why bother grinding gear now when you get it almost for free in half a year?
b) with each tier, the pool of people with the required gear will shrink.
c) everyone can do the content, but it will be too easy for the “dedicated” players.
That’s why i preferred the rather easy to reach stat cap before the patch.
The change is a bad idea even if you don’t take broken promises into account.
(edited by Dulon.9347)
Somehow i like the idea of only being able to start story mode if you haven’t
completed it and hand out great rewards so people jump at the chance to do it.
The only problem i see is that the one starting the instance who wants the story done
will be urged to skip all story sequences…
Of course they will make the current ascended gear easily available if it is required to
do new content, that’s how vertical progression games work in order to keep casuals
and give a chance to catch up for those who took a break.
Silentstorm, that google example is flawed because the lack of horizontal progression
is an issue that only became relevant a week ago.
Another group of players has voiced their opinion on the matter of a lack of vertical
progression for months now.
That aside, no one here can claim they are part of the majority. All we can do is voice
our personal opinions about the matter of vertical/horizontal progression.
I see, instead of asking me how i do it you simply try to insult my intelligence and
imply i don’t realize i am completely worthless to my groups.
What did you do in order to come to your conclusion in this matter?
Theorycrafting? Did you at least try it ingame with gear and traits you found
appropiate?
I wouldn’t consider the presence of Necromancer a handicap.
Unless it’s a pure conditionmancer. Aside from the usual drawbacks of a pure
condition spec, necromancers also suffer from the fact that it renders Death Shroud
pretty much useless.
Scepter is one of the main weapon when it comes to conditions but even that has a
power based attack.
Don’t get me wrong, i think a pure condition spec can still work, but it requires the
party to sync up their abilities to ensure the bleed cap isn’t a problem. But in a pug
this can’t be taken for granted .
Unfortunately, a lot of necromancers consider some all out condition spec their only
option.
i’ve been exclusively playing Elementalist, Assassin, and Neecromancer in GW1, and these are the 3 most favorite classes for me.
since GW2 shifted things a little this is no longer the case, but the classes are still inspired by GW1, so i wanted to know, How does GW2 Necro feel compared to GW1 necro?, is it still possible to go all out lifesteal builds or builds similar to “hex” builds in GW1?, Assuming all the above is false, is it worth it to roll a Necro?
I am using a build that focuses heavily on life stealing and i am quite happy with it.
Actually, that was what drew me to the Necromancer here in GW2 in the first place.
I think it’s also a problem we bring upon ourselves to a certain degree.
If you go through the forums and claim we are the most bugged and useless
profession in the game, people might start to believe it.
We aren’t useless and the parties i have joined so far were happy to have me around.
I don’t think we should reduce the Necromancer to a class that can only apply conditions.
It’s not necessarily a class that excels in dot damage itself. It’s simply very adept at
manipulating conditions on the party and conditions/boons on the enemy.
If this was some optional cosmetic stuff it would be ok…
But like this?
I am not sure if i can keep up with that.
At some point there will be other players in the game that beat my character simply
because of some gear advantage.
I actually dread new content updates now since they might add more ascended gear and widen the gap.
If they offered a permanent transfer to some pre lost shore update server that won’t
get any content updates again ever, i would switch in a heartbeat.
I like DS the way it is mechanically, i simply want the ui changed.
It’s good to absorb some big hit if you are out of endurance or buy you some seconds
until other regenerative abilities aren’t on cooldown anymore. Skill 1 is alright under
those circumstances even untraited.
Skill 2, 3 and 4 all have their uses too.
The abilities only fall flat if you are conditionmancer and those have limited life force
generation as well.
With a power build, life siphon build and minion build i always found a reason to use
DS personally.
I bought Halloween stuff, but not because i really needed the items.
I simply wanted to support the game.
I actually planned to spend some more after the patch.
After i heard about the ascended items that ceased to be a viable option for me.
I might just keep playing, but only because an active player who doesn’t buy gems
costs them more money than someone who quits completely.
That’s how much i disapprove.
Now that thought about it, i think their main fault here is increasing the base stats of
ascended items, aside from that it could be a solution that would make everyone happy.
We have limited information about the system right now, but it could work like this:
You get 3 infusion slots on ascended gear and the NPC in the main hub can add/
replace infusion on your gear depending on your progress/farming there.
If you go deeper, you need more infusion. 24/7 gamers might reach level 100+ or
something. normal gamers possibly only 20+. But everyone saw every boss.
Then later they add a new dungeon like this with a new infusion type and 3 new items.
Progress in the old dungeon doesn’t matter, because of a new infusion type that is
easy to change in the main hub. You also have extra slots now, so you outclass the old
dungeon because you have extra slots, just how progress gamers want it.
It might not be what we will see in the game, but i guess something like that was the
basic idea of the whole thing. And then, somewhere, the idea of higher base stats for
these items slipped in.
Ascended gear really disappoints me too.
I was happy when i completed my exotic set since i was finally able to do what i feel
like doing at maximal efficiency.
Help someone with a story mode or some exploration path i don’t need anymore?
No problem.
But now i will have to log in and do that new dungeon in order to not fall behind.
That directly affects how often i have to log in and how i have to spent my time
ingame.
While writing this, i realized i now feel forced to do certain things. That in return really
dampens my excitement for the game.
Can people just stop complaining? Anet are busting their kitten giving us this great content and all you people do is moan, if you don’t like it play something else
A week ago this was unthinkable, but now i might just do that.
I can’t guarantee that enemies stay on me all the time.
But often enough, they do.
And if they decide to chase/attack someone else i have a root, chill effects, cripple,
fear and wells to help them survive.
I think it’s a balanced mix between damage, survival, support and control effects.
Although it favors the survival aspect a bit.
At the start of a fight, i run in and use Well of Darkness and Well of Suffering.
There’s hardly a reason to move at that point.
I save Well of Blood for emergencies or when a party member nearby needs some
health. Well of Power is used in a similar way.
I actually dropped Focused Rituals because i am near the enemy anyway and dropped
Ritual Mastery because Ritual of Blood is ready when i need it even without the
cooldown reduction.
I rarely have to pull back out of melee range, even with wells on cooldown.
It’s not like i only have 10 seconds of viability and then everything is on cooldown for 1 minute.
The wells are there since they support what i do, but they are not the sole reason that
lets me survive.
As far as i know, the thief signet heals on hit. So it doesn’t do any damage.
That’s a difference you need to take into account too.
I can’t vouch for the viability of a Life Siphon Necro in PvP because i don’t do enough
of it. But in PvE Dungeons it works very well for me.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRAoY3djQah6daWa87JAJFNj90Du9W8IFFfMA;TkAKnMOJcy6k0pFGDM2hMDB
That’s the skill setup i use.
I only get positive feedback ingame and it works well enough that people i partied
with seek me out again to join their group. Some even started Necromancer and
asked me how i do what i do dungeons. So at least something must be right.
It just seems a lot of people just theorycraft instead of trying it ingame with proper
skills, traits, stats and food.
I am using no Staff and favor Axe over it. I use Dark Armor. I use Bloodthirst and
Vampiric Precision. According to the general opinion on the forums i should be weak
beyond compare.
I just don’t see that effect while playing.
In return, channels counter dodges very well. No matter how you time it, you can’t evade life siphon completely with a single dodge.
And what do you expect? 10k Damage healed with an ability chain that is on a 8/12 second cooldown? With Abilities that also grant great life force regeneration?
Even a single Dagger1 Combo can heal you for 800-1000. Everything you do that does direct damage triggers life leech, not just the channels.
Dagger1, Axe2 and Focus4 are also great for gaining life force.
Maybe burst of other classes is the main problem here in PvP?
In PvE you might end up making us nigh unkillable.
I think if you go for a life leeching spec, it would make sense to also use sigils, runes and
food to gain additional life leech.
What you have access to assuming a 50% critical hit chance:
Vampiric: 38 per hit
Vampiric Precision : 155 on critical hit (average 78 per hit)
Superior Sigil of Blood: 30% chance to steal 450 health on critical (average 67 per hit)
Omnomberry Pie: 66% Chance to steal 300 health on critical (average 100 per hit)
That adds up to 250+ health/damage per hit. Much like conditions, toughness doesn’t
seem to effect the damage on the enemy.
Now you’d want to generate a lot of hits on the enemy.
Dagger is great for that with the fast skill 1 combo and the skill 2 channel that
generates 3 hits per second and even steals life on its own already.
Axe/Focus does well too, with skill 2 hitting 4 times per second, skill 1 still feels a bit
lackluster, but at least hits twice.
Both weapons are also good when it comes to life force generation.
There are some other life leech effects you can take advantage of:
Sigil of Superior Leeching: 975 on next attack after weapon swap
Superior Rune of Vampirism(2): 5% chance to steal life on next hit after being hit
Superior Rune of Vampirism(4): 975 on next attack after using your healing skill
If you combine all these effects, you can recover 4-5k life using Siphon Life followed by
Ghastly Claws and also cause that as extra damage. If you add what you’d recover
from Siphon Life anyway, you end up at 6-7k.
If you also take well utilities with Vampiric Rituals and have good toughness, power
and some vitality on your gear on top of the precision you need, then you can last
long, still do a decent amount of damage and support your group.
Something causes the npc to bug somehow, maybe just by entering the room.
There’s probably some kind of internal logic in place that tries to restore the npc into
a working state. If you skip stuff, it’s much more likely that that logic fails too.
It could just check for spider event, kholer and all other things that come after it in
the order you normally encounter them in the dungeon. Once one of those events
isn’t completed it stops further checks because the logic assumes that’s where you are
in the dungeon now.
This might not be the exact cause, but a possible scenario.
My point is:
There is some standard behavior and order of events that were expected by the
programmer and the farther away the state of your instance is from that behavior the
higher the risk of failing logic segments.
If you know the dungeon well, you know he is more likely to bug if you skip those
enemies.
Why take the extra risk of redoing the whole thing in order to save 1 minute?
So the bug has been in the game for at least a month and the dev team just learned about this?
That’s unlikely, unless no one reported the bug with the ingame bug report tool.
It probably means the CC has some way to tell the bug fix team about bugs currently discussed in the community and will use those means in order to raise additional awareness.
Like lettucemode, i have a necromancer life siphon build that works for me.
If thief and elementalists can do it noticably better, that’s nice for them, since they
should be pretty much unkillable in pve encounters at that point.
If we use everything available, what do you think should be the maximum of life per hit we should be able to leech?
I think you can average something like 150-220 right now.
So 400-500?
You could play a tank life siphon necro and simply use all available forms of life leech
and what improves it.
As in Vampiric, Vampiric Precision, Vampiric Rituals, Bloodthirst, Omnomberry Pies,
Sigil of Blood, Sigil of Leeching and Runes of Vampirism.
Get decent toughness, vitality, precision and power.
Use Weapons with a fast attack rate to take advantage of all those possible on hit /
weapon switch effects. (Dagger main hand and Axe main hand)
I can’t tell if it’s better than a thief or elementalist trying it, but it’s playable. And fun.
That’s another thing, it’s supposed to steal life. That would mean it does damage too
and the other classes simply heal on hit.
If that is indeed the case and it would scale, you’d have a healing effect that scales
with +power or damage that scales with +healing.
The Bloodthirst trait is probably supposed to make up for the fact that the
Necromancer’s passive life siphon doesn’t scale with anything.
You can’t compare them like that, both thieves and elementalists sacrifice their healing
utility slot in order to have on hit healing effects.
Necromancers get the effect by using minor/major traits.