Guild Wars 2

Will using Epidemic on a target successfully transfer the conditions to another enemy player even if that player is already stealthed?

It seems like it would, kind of like how DS4 and 5 do, but I just wanted to see if anyone had verified it.

Scepter/Dagger and Staff are the way to go.

Personally I recommend full Rabid gear. The precision will help you with bleeds immensely, in addition to dhuumfire procs. I sit around 50% crit with that and though I’ve considered swapping some Dire gear in for the added survivability, I’m pretty comfortable with what I’m using now. Personal preference and all…

We have a lot of utilities and there’s plenty of good arguments for using X over Y or Z, but as a small group roamer this is what I’ve settled on.
Consume Conditions – Don’t think there’s much to argue with here… just use it.
Signet of the Locust – I use this to give me some run speed but the first thing I do as soon as I think we’re going to be into combat is switch it to…

Signet of Spite – The passive is useless but the active is awesome. I usually use it in one of two ways. (1) Use it to draw out the opponents condition cleanse. SOS doesn’t do much damage itself, but a lot of time people panic when they see the mass of conditions piled up on their bar and use their cleanses to remove them, allowing you to do your damage with ease. (2) The other way I use it is after a corrupt boon, then follow with Epidemic. More on this later.

Corrupt Boon – Awesome skill. I can’t imagine playing any necro spec without this on my bar. The big thing to look for is Stability. As a Terrormancer, Stability is your nemesis. Make sure to wait until the enemy has a number of boons up for maximum effect.

Epidemic – This skill can turn the entire fight if you’re fighting more than 1 person. It has a 1200 range so it’s pretty well guaranteed to spread the pain to the all of your targets’ allies. (Up to 5 of course). If you’re roaming with another condition class make sure you’re both targeting the same person. Use Corrupt boon if they have a number of boons, then SOS to add some more condi’s, then Epidemic to spread the pain. A well timed use of this skill can really turn a fight.

Flesh Golem – While I like Plague for large combat/zerging, in my opinion Flesh Golem can’t be beat for small group roaming. The power of this spec lies in the CC you have available through fear. Load them up and then fear them so they’re forced to watch as your condi’s do their damage. The Flesh Golems’ knockdown ability in effect gives you an additional fear.

Scepter/Dagger is where you’ll do most of your damage while Staff is a great utility weapon.

The only other thing I’d add is to make sure you save your condi transfers for when you actually have condi’s to give back. It’s pretty easy to remember because regardless of what weapon set you have equipped, the transfer is on the #4 skill.

Good luck!

Well see, they had to give Warrior the additional mobility to compensate them for their poor damage, low armor, poor healing and small health pools.

Who the heck balances this stuff?

Overkillengine.6084:

In short:
Stop nerfing Staff. We use it because of lack of options. Your metrics are flawed when it comes to actual play.
Death is too minion focused, and it sucks.
Blood sucks. No really. It does.
Deathshroud is blatantly inferior as a defensive option compared to other mechanics in any non sPvP cagematch format. Double whammy when it comes to having little useful mobility as well within the class.

You want us to be about sustain; yet the above issues that would actually enable that paradigm are either getting nerfed, ignored, or shelved indeterminately as too much work to fix.

These complaints did not arise from a vacuum. They are the results of thousands of combined hours of play amongst us.

So please forgive us for being a bit hostile when giving this feedback and often the best we get is platitudes, metrics, and barely hidden “L2P”.

THIS. ALL OF THIS. Especially the last paragraph.

I applaud you good sir.

The way I see it, if an issue has been around this long with no fix, it must be working as intended. Exploit away.

I know most people prefer going power or minion master for necro leveling, but I enjoyed using conditions, though that may be due to the way I play. I just can’t level a class that focuses on single target damage… too slow for my liking. I tried MM but found they’re just too stupid and don’t do groups very well. Consequently my Necro languished until I found the beauty and awe that is Epidemic. Round up a group of mobs, fill one up with condi’s and then Epidemic.

For PVE leveling I’d go mainly curses and bloodmagic using scepter/dagger and staff.

I think the people suggesting that we just ignore the ppt in these blowouts are missing the problem entirely. I don’t give a kitten about the score, however the score conveys a lot of information. For example, if I log in and see that my server is getting blownout out in ppt by 300% I don’t even bother trying to WvW and just log back out. Not because I care about ppt per se, but because such a blowout indicates the types of fights I will be seeing. In the above example I can be sure that I’ll rarely find a fight where we aren’t outnumbered by a 2-1 margin. That type of fight isn’t fun. The game at that point simply isn’t entertaining.

And being on the other side of the equation isn’t any better. When we are the server blowing out the competition we get all the fair weathers coming out of the woodwork. Consequently what might start out as a fairly even fight usually ends when our zerg comes rolling in squash the enemy.

Either way, these blowout matches aren’t fun. The ppt is not a problem, merely a symptom.

I was playing GW2 everyday, mainly WvW. I haven’t logged in in 3 days now. My matchup is a blowout as expected when you’re paired with a server 5 ranks higher. They also always have 2-3 stacks of bloodlust. Previously, we might have had a blowout, but I could at least have some fun trying to do some small man roaming and avoiding the enemy zerg as best as possible. Now, however, the fights are too unbalanced. I’ve lost all interest in even attempting it.
Without WvW, I have no interest in doing the daily chore, or throwing my body against Teq in the hopes one day we’ll get him down below 80% and I can get that blue and green item I’ve always wanted.
I suppose it’s possible I’d comeback after they revert the bloodlust changes and stop the madness that is the leagues… but I doubt it. Fact of the matter is they’ve already demonstrated the complete and utter lack of respect for their own community. Doesn’t exactly make me eager to boot your game back up again.

Soja.5918:

Zerkers can go to turret defense. If they don’t want to, rebuild. Don’t want the expense? Your call but don’t blame others for your decisions. Leave the frontlines to the ones that can take a hit.

So you justify this ridiculous design by saying that all the zerkers and condition classes need to go play at the back of the bus? You confident you have enough dps with (let’s just say) 30% of the players all defending turrets?

How bout we just force Anet to get their act together instead?

NornBearPig.9814:

Oozo.7856:

Food, stacks, and gear I view differently since they are things you can have if you put the effort into it.

Now you are picking and choosing which artificial advantages you like and don’t like in a game mode that is imbalanced from the start. You’re accepting the possibility that he may have outplayed you but you won because of Bloodlust, but the exact same can be said about gear/food. Unless you consider out-grinding someone = out-playing them, in which case I have nothing else to say.

Nope, not the same.

1. Food/nourishment and such is not an artificial advantage but part of character design and customization. There is a strategy to choose one food over another, or Melandru runes over Soldier’s. Maybe you use Koi Cakes, so I use some lemon grass. Or maybe some poultry to try and burn you down fast. Swap a trait or two and some food buffs and you suddenly have different way of playing a character. That type of diversity is incredibly important to GW2.

The bloodlust debacle is different because it’s not dependent on character design/strategy but on server numbers. There is no thought behind how you design your character to counter that advantage. There is no grand strategy beyond more people. That’s poor design.

Anet’s distinct lack of match making competency makes it all worse. The bloodlust buff MIGHT be an interesting mechanic in a well balanced matchup. However those seem to be few and far between. I can’t think of a single matchup we’ve had in the past month where there wasn’t one server completely blowing out the other 2. My server has certainly been on both sides of that equation, but one things for sure; it’s never been close to balanced. Introducing that buff in this context means that the strong get massively stronger.

Before it didn’t matter to me nearly as much when we were massively outnumbered because it was still possible to go roaming and find some good fights. Now even IF I happen across a small group (which in my experience has become less often since the patch went live) they greatly out power us due to their +150pt buff. It throws any pretense of balance out the window.

2. Outgrinding = outplaying??? I’m sorry but maybe we haven’t been playing the same game. The GW2 I’ve been playing has introduced the insane farming arena known as the Pavillion, the crazy profitable farming events some call Scarlet Briar and buffed Champ drops to where Champ farming in FSG is a regular occurrence. There are no shortage of ways to make significant amounts of gold in a short amount of time.

If you’re suggesting that players shouldn’t have to do anything to get their gear, not even the incredibly simple and easy farming events throughout the world, then might I suggest you go into The Heart of the Mists and do some PvP? Sounds right up your alley.

Having said that, I do believe you could have a point on this matter where ascended gear is concerned. Crafting up to 500 can cost a fortune not even including the time/gold required to actually make your weapon/s. But it doesn’t appear that was the argument you were making.

TLDR: A guy on the internets was wrong. I had to correct.

Agree with Caine’s entire post. I’d also add that you should make sure that either your opponent does not have stability up, or that you use corrupt boon to remove it before using your fear to ensure you get the hit.

I agree with everything posted here. Our small man group is normally 5-10 people but it’s dropped dramatically since the buffs were introduced. In fact, there was only 1 other person in our roaming group that was even online and he was in WvW, though I wasn’t interested. It appears that, at least for our group, ~90% have stopped WvW with ~80% moving on to things other than GW2.

Further, due to Anet’s exquisite powers of match making, while we were losing our matchup by almost 2-1 before the patch, it’s now nearly 3-1 as the dominate server is even stronger now as they’re better able to maintain all three buffs.

Doubtful this is something that many would be willing to test. Here’s a bump in hopes you get a dev response.

In fairness, it’s not just new content. We’re pretty useless on the older world bosses as well. Also if there’s another condi spec in your dungeon group.

It didn’t matter as much before, but now with the event timers it means that high DPS must be maintained in order to succeed. This makes it so bringing a condi class to an event not only is inefficient, but is actually hurting your server due to overflow and the fact that you’re taking a spot that another class that actually does damage could fill.

It’s particularly appalling given that Anet is well aware of their condition cap limitation, and yet refuses to take that into account when designing a new encounter.

It’s a pretty great slap in the face, eh?

Doing insignificant damage during world events as a condition spec before sucked but it wasn’t that big of a deal. The bosses still died and we still got our chests. However now, with the timers for all world bosses, you’ve made it so that condition classes are actually a detriment to event completion.

I was fighting Teq yesterday and, as normal, couldn’t do any decent damage against the dragon due to condi caps. I could barely tickle the fingers. Same with the bone wall. That’s when I realized that, due to server overflow and the event timer, my presence in the event was actually hurting my server. I doubt that was your intention, but it’s not debatable that this is the effect.

I understand you have technical limitations regarding condition caps. The problem here is that you designed a new event without regard for your own, known, limitations. There is simply no excuse for such terrible design.

Yeah that’s a matchup that simply never should have happened. We’re in a similar situation over on HoD where we’re fighting DH for second place against a larger IoJ force. Anet’s terrible matchup system is bad enough, but adding the bloodlust buff just makes it way worse.

Our guild group is used to fighting larger numbers; fighting 2-1 is expected. But fighting 2-1 where they ALSO get 100-150 more stats? Not even interested in playing the game at that point.

You mean they created a buff that allows the already dominating server to gain even more of an advantage?

WHAT CRAZY VODOO COULD HAVE FORSEEN THIS?

There’s no point in continuing to complain about it. It’s not like they’re unaware….
Either go Power or play something else.

I find myself doing more of the latter.

Our roaming group only had half the normal amount of people playing that we usually have. And a few of us left early because it’s simply not entertaining getting farmed.

Who would have thought that combing terrible match making with a mechanic that allows the strongest server to become even stronger still would be bad for the game?

WHO COULD HAVE FORSEEN THAT?

I do not support Anet adding new spells to the game until they fix the numerous bugs in the present abilities.

Don’t attribute to malice what could easily be explained by incompetence.

I find Necro Condi PVE to be either extremely good or completely terrible depending on the circumstances with very little middle ground. Any encounter with a lot of adds are fantastic as Epidemic melts the screen. However, running a dungeon with another bleed applying class or, heaven forbid, fighting a world boss just sucks. Those situations have me feeling completely useless.

It’s all feast or famine.

The Hybrid build seems like it would be fantastic in PVE, but due to the gear requirements I wouldn’t go anywhere near WvW/PvP with that spec.

Edit:
To better answer your question, how do you prefer to level? Burning down single targets, or gathering a group of mobs and melting them? Both are viable approaches, though if you choose to go condition spec, I wouldn’t go terrormancer in PvE. The traditional conditionmancer build would probably work better for you as fear isn’t nearly as useful in PVE as it is in WvW/PvP.

IMO Elementalists are extremely squishy yet they don’t have the high dmg potential to make up for it. I used to main a D/D Ele, and I truly enjoy the play style the most out of all the GW2 classes, but its output I found to be very subpar.

Warriors are solid and can bring a lot to a fight in multiple builds. The popular stun-lock build is devastating if you get caught up in it.

Guardians are also solid and again bring a whole lot to the table. Our roaming group almost always has a support Guardian with us and you can certainly feel the difference when he’s not around

Rangers are alright. Spirit Ranger’s can be difficult to deal with, though I haven’t fought one since their recent nerf. The best Ranger’s I’ve come across make good use of the sword auto-attack. Or at least turning off auto attack and handling it manually.

Mesmer’s seem in a tough place. Squishy and with poor condi removal I don’t see too many of them anymore. I’d say they could use a buff.

I also rarely see any ele’s outside of the support staff Elementalists. D/D got nerf’d away although I’ll occasionally see a S/D Ele out and about. Also a class that could use some dev love.

Thief depends. A well played S/D thief can tear up a small group. D/D thieves are dangerous in their scavenger role. And of course the most broken build in the game, D/P thieves. Curious when Anet is going to fix that.

Necro’s have a decent amount of build diversity. Mostly see condi/terrormancer’s but the occasional Axe build is pretty lethal too. Don’t see MM too much.

And I don’t even know about Engineer. I’m not scared of them, and fights either end in their death or their running away. I simply don’t know much about the class.

This guy was in the Necro forums not long ago posting untested build after untested build and received hell for it. Looks like he’s moved on to the Mesmer forums.

Apologies…

I just don’t see Staff viable as a primary weapon for us due to the combination of poor auto attack and long cooldowns. That being said, I never leave home without it for its incredible utility.

DevonCarver.5370:

Bailey.6892:

Sadly my money is that they will be a large advantage. This is based on how anet has handled things in the past (poorly). Being forced to pve to enjoy wvw is a bad idea.

My goal is to eliminate the latter scenario. And I promise to do as much as I can to meet that.

Actions > Words

Sounds gimicky.

No thank you. In WvW I like that enemies can’t easily identify what mark I just placed and have to guess whether or not they should try to continue through it or go around.

Excellent, thank you very much!

“Inscribe a mark that transfers conditions from allies to foes when they trigger it”

Who is “they”? Do enemies trigger it or allies? Can I cast it on myself for condi removal? Or does it transfer conditions from allies to enemies as long as they are all inside the mark?

Heya all, I’ve got a warrior I leveled to 80 a while ago and never touched again. Thought it may be entertaining to take him into some WvW but I’m fairly unfamiliar with using the class in WvW and all the builds I can find are pretty outdated. Some advice would be greatly appreciated!

A couple notes:
> The character would be mostly used in a small group/roaming capacity
> Not really interested in a Glass Cannon approach. A decent balance between damage and survivability is what I’m hoping for.

Thanks in advance

From the OP:
“Yes, I know that they have to sacrifice a substantial amount of survivability to have such high burst damage, and that would be perfectly fine, if I could attack them. "

This times 1000.

I also ignore thieves, not because I’m afraid of getting killed, but because I know they’re going to stealth and disappear when they get low. There’s no point in wasting 5 min dorking around with a thief when really all we’re doing is waiting for a random zerg to appear and finish things one way or the other.

Perma stealth has gotta go.

As an Ele, I completely support nerfing downed Mist Form so it cannot pass through doors… as long as the perma-stealth Thief build is also removed from game.
Otherwise, suck it up.

I’m confused. My AoE looting also does not seem to be working. I get that it isn’t supposed to work when there is an “interact” dialogue box up, but that does not include the “loot” interaction box, right? I’d assume that the AoE looting should work when there is only a loot dialogue box up. If that is how it’s designed, then it’s bugged for me as well.