Guild Wars 2

Silver.4798:

@ Haligator
Signet of agility will replenish all your endurance on activation, I’m not sure if thats what you were asking though. The method you mentioned sounds… irritating. And not as fun as UNLOADING HOLY HELL and then pistol whipping them to the moon and back!!! It’s a little riskier if you are low on health but you should be perfectly ok if you’re at a reasonably high health.

Oh, I know. I wasn’t actually asking, but thank you. It suits me if I’ve come home from a 12 hour work day and just want to grind out a level. I’m using shortbow as my backup. Pistol for single target damage. Shortbow for groups that clump nicely.

I’ve been having a much easier time with this thief than I did with the Mesmer or Engineer. On my Necromancer, I used to just let my crazy minions decide which bad guys to attack and follow them around, keeping them alive. You can do that on a Necromancer if you just let go and go with the insanity. Thief seems pretty well-balanced, post-patch, though anything but p/p tends to die more often.

I’m NOT using stealth. I think it was Rift that taught me how to play a ‘rogue’ class without the crutch of stealth. In gw2, I’ve been aiming for a blinky, ranged thief, and gw2 has made the tools available to play one.

I just started leveling a thief, and I’m doing something very similar. I’m taking 30 in Critical Strikes to get both of the pistol traits and Signet Use. Next, I’m taking 20 in Acrobatics for Quick Recovery and Descent of Shadows (WvW). 10 points each of Shadow Arts and Trickery to get Slowed Pulse and Uncatchable. I’m looking for some evasion tankiness, in addition to burst.

I really love Pistol 4. That’s a mean skill if your timing is good. For solo pve, I can take on just about anything with Pistol five and Pistol 1 + a few dodges here and there. It is boring as hell, though. Still, this approach is excellent for keeping people alive. Using Pistol 3 and 4 is much more active, but entails bigger risk. Either way, I’ve found that I end up tanking in pve. Apparently, blinding and interrupting mobs gets you their attention.

I should add that I’m looking at the Signet that grants Endurance instead of the Power one.

People complain about Deathshroud being underpowered, but look at how this thief went nuts and started hallucinating bugs over Deathshroud absorbing his backstab. That must be worth something.

When my Engineer is in WvWvW, there is some serious cleansing action going on. I lather the battlefield with compressed shampoo foam. No filth or grime escapes the hose. I am the hose man. If you need a hosing, look no further. I hose down the battle as it is in progress, making you safe from infectious disease, rinsing the blood from open wounds, and putting out fires. Feeling a chill? Not after a warm, bubbly bath from my hose. My foamy spray leaves no soapy residue on the field of battle. Oh, no. Only a fresh, citrus scent. Now, with new outdoor scent.

Didn’t they just nerf a bunch of OP classes this week? To even the playing field. There was no reason to expect buffs or bug fixes galore this week. The attention was on nerfing other classes, for crying out loud.

Ghost-rage has it right. This forum is such a whine-fest. When I read forum posts, I imagine the voice of the writer in my head as I read. In my head, most of the Necromancers sound like whiny twelve-year old boys. I bet these posts sound the same way in the head’s of our illustrious game developers.

I like this, as well. This might fix a lot of the problems that people have been experiencing with the Necro class without disrupting the core design principles.

It may be enough to change only the effect of Life Blast based on the weapon equipped.

Number 2 is still very useful if you spec for DS, regardless of what your equipped weapon is, because you get in range for your Death Shiver. Enemies should be afraid of being close to DS. If the debuffs aren’t doing this, perhaps it needs passive AoE damage, as well? I’d ask for a passive 1 sec Chill per second, but…that would be overpowered. Number 3 is universal. Number 4, of course, helps if you are close, and people should fear being close when you are in DS.

In PVE, Vampire Precision is very effective. It represents more than enough heals when you are fitting a dagger. Dagger/Warhorn and Dagger/Focus are very strong.

The PVE AI tends to target your pets first. I’ve found that pets work best with a Staff build because you can drop Blood Marks on them. If you look, the tree that buffs staves also buffs minions. Design?

I have started experimenting with pets in my dagger/warhorn build, again. The Flesh Wurm survives multiple hits and attacks at 1200 range, so I have a better chance to keep mobs off of him. The Flesh Wurm and the dogs are best if you are quick to sacrifice them before they go down. The elite pet also is pretty hardy.

Pulling aggro from your pets is easier, though, if you are healing. Vampiric Precision seems to help me keep aggro.

Overall, I’ve found that the Spirit skills are best for tanking, and my hotbar is dominated by those, but there is room for a couple pets.

Bugs are the most important issue holding this class back, and until the bugs are fixed not one of us can speak to whether or not this class design works. Second, Poison and Bleeds may need some revision. The Condition damage coefficient for Burning is .25, while that for Poison is .1 and Bleeding is .05? Engineers, Elementalists, and Guardians benefit from the high damage coefficient for Burning.

I love this class. I’m having a lot of fun. I’m having fun because I feel successful. I’m not throwing myself into Bleeds and Poisons while ignoring Power. The math doesn’t work out for that approach, as far as I can see.

I’m not trying to force the class into some preconceived notion of what a Necromancer is supposed to be. The difference between Light, Medium, and Heavy armor is small in this game, your health pool is huge, the more conditions they throw on you the more powerful you become, and your class defining ability extends your health pool immensely. You are a tank.

A Mesmer is not a tank. If Mesmer abilities look so good, then you are hearing the call of the purple butterflies. Purple butterflies. Embrace them. Sing to them from behind your velvet mask. Be fabulous.

It’s hard to accept someone as an authority on something they can’t be bothered to spell correctly.

The Necromancer is not the only caster with a melee option…all of the Scholars can use melee, and I love it.

Now, the GW2 Necromancer is in line with real world historical antecedents. Also, since this IP is controlled by it’s creators (isn’t it?), we can hardly judge whether they’ve betrayed their own vision of the Necromancer.

Since necromancy’s original function was to speak to summoned spirits…the Shadow Fiend is quite faithful to the Necromancer tradition. Same for the Spirit skills.

Also, axes are a useful tool for dismembering bodies for reanimation experiments. Excellent choice of weapon.

I use D/W and this is my most valued ability. The 1 second cripple is reapplied every second of Swiftness. Brilliant! You only need to buff Boon duration through traits to get 13 seconds of Swiftness AND cripple. Condition duration bonuses should stack beyond 13 seconds. I haven’t tried that. Great ability! Priceless, if you use a dagger. Also, the damage is burst applied each second, so it scales with Power, ideal when gearing for Dagger. Leave this one alone, please.

Try this experiment: Engage a mix of ranged and melee NPCs. Target a ranged NPC from a distance and start swinging as the melee NPCs, who are not targeted, and watch your dagger cleave them.

Then find an actual bug to gripe about.

I’ve been torn between the Necromancer and the Engineer, and went with the Necromancer. Now, I’m hooked.

I believe John Peters. The original post in this thread supports the position that the Necromancer community is bringing a lot of preconceived notions to the class. That shouldn’t be used by him as an evasion regarding bug fixes, though.

The earliest references to Necromancy occur in the Odyssey. Odysseus practices Necromancy in order to find a way home. Necromancy is by definition magic used to contact and raise the dead, and evolved many times into other things such as prolonging life by becoming undead through magic. The GW2 Necromancer fits the description. I’m really enjoying mine.

Why would you play a class that you don’t enjoy?

I’ve noticed mine cleaving nearby enemies on many occasions. Maybe I’m crazy, but, like a fool, I try to TAB target the enemy in front of me and the wonky GW2 TAB target function will target a rabbit 40 yards away, instead. I have the rabbit targeted, but I’m swinging furiously and damaging the enemy in front of me. I only notice when I try to cast a ranged spell and it hits the rabbit. This has happened more times than I care to admit.

I’ve also seen it the dagger cleave enemies that are clumped near my proper target.

Could it be that the server actually checks to see if a collision has occurred in 3D space, just as it does with projectiles? Daggers aren’t very long, you know. They won’t cleave enemies unless they are very close together.

Please, no conditions on my daggers. That’s one more stat to gear for. Please, no.

….for supporting Mac gaming in a major way. My Mac client runs perfectly. I haven’t encountered a single glitch. Actually, certain graphical artifacts that exist in my Windows client don’t carry over to the Mac version.

I think the Mac version actually is running better than the Windows version on my machine. I have an i5 with 4 GB of ram and a ATI Radeon HD 5750 1024 MB.

This increase in duration to 9 seconds sounds like a bug. The duration increase to the other Spectral skills is tiny. Spectral armor goes from 6 to 8, for instance.

Dagger won’t scale with Condition Damage…at all; it needs Power or Precision, so Epidemic isn’t really synergistic.

Dagger does hit enemies other than the targeted enemy, just like a normal melee weapon, so if they are close together it is a form of AoE. Don’t assume that D/D is going to be the best combo. Try the other off-hand weapons. I like D/W.

I thought that Life Blast scaled with Life Force? Does it really scale with Power, too? If it does scale with Life Force, does it scale by percentage, or amount? Since total Life Force scales with Vitality, it makes a difference. The tooltip is ambiguous.

I followed that link. The Necromancer had more bug fixes than any other class in that patch.

We have a ton of health and Deathshroud, so being a glass cannon in this class is not really possible. An elementalist, a thief…they can be glass cannons with their low health pool. You won’t ever really be glass…or a cannon, as a Necromancer. That is by design.

I am really enjoying my Dagger/Warhorn necromancer. I’ve died once, even though I rush in to ridiculous numbers of baddies confident that I am going to tank them. If it doesn’t work out, I sprint for 30 seconds out of there.

Deathshroud is fun. Stack Vitality…you are a Necromancer. Even if you don’t stack Vitality, the class has a lot of health to start with. The purpose of Deathshroud is to extend your life until your heals come off cool down. It is very helpful and it works.

Having all of that health means that I can take on a lot of bad guys in PVE. I can even absorb a bunch of adds, such as when a group spawns on me. It is an aspect of the core Necromancer play style, being a high health class, and Deathshroud has synergy with that aspect of the class.

Isn’t there a trait that stacks Might in Deathshroud with the #1 ability? It’s in one of the damage trait lines, is it not?

Thanks for your attention to this problem, RobertWalter! However, the “Logging out to the Launcher” issue is not related to my problem. It was an all-of-the-time problem.

Today, I bought a gaming mouse—-the “DeathAdder 3.5G”, to be specific—-and the problem went away. So, it is an issue with the Wacom Bamboo Fun mouse, which, though not a gaming mouse, is super fast because its trackpad is only 3" by 5". I will miss it.

They can have my box copies of SWTOR and TSW if we get a sniper kit and a submarine kit.

I think you are generalizing a bit too much from your own experience, Brick. I’m having good experiences in PVE and WvWvW PVP with my Engineer.

“Dragging the mouse while holding down the left or right mouse buttons in order to change camera or character direction causes the mouse cursor to briefly appear in the middle of the screen.” —- quoted from the “Known Issues” thread.

This is an understatement. It makes the camera completely uncontrollable and the beta client unplayable in PVP and most PVE for me. I’m heavy on camera use.
It would be more accurate to say that dragging on the screen zooms the camera in as well as rotates it. Once it is zoomed completely in, the slightest move makes the entire screen image spin at blinding speed. Of course, only scrolling the wheel should zoom the camera, not dragging.

If you mess with it, you can get it to zoom way out and directly overhead of your character. Drag again and it zooms all the way in, again.

This issue has been an aspect of Wine ports for a long time.

I’m using a Wacom mouse and tablet.

This worked for me.

I am having the same problem with erratic camera behavior. If I attempt to move the camera manually, it either spins wildly around or zooms into my character’s body. It seems to ZOOM when I click and drag, which should not be happening. Only the mouse-wheel should zoom the camera.