Guild Wars 2

I kept getting 0 as well until I understood how the game works

As other posters have mentioned, you have to wait until the note is in the center blue circle… basically you play the note when it’s on top of your character and not before.

I kept playing the notes when it entered the white wooden platform on which you stand, which is WRONG and I scored 0 every time

I don’t know how showstopper bugs like this can slip through any sort of QA testing?

Maybe I am being optimistic and in reality no testing was done at all?

My group ran into the non-stop respawning mobs, not to mention the fact that the boss seems to do AoE agony at a much higher rate than before

Eventually, we won only because someone accidently aoe’d the seal and we realized it was bugged again and suseptible to attacks … so we’re back to square one

Daokitten618:

I would like to add that i’m on day 9 of no rings on 10/20/30 dailies. That is in fact 27 runs of not having a ring drop. I’m pretty disgusted at this fact. I am in the dungeons for the rings, and not a single one, no matter how poorly the stats are allocated has dropped.

Same here, I never get a ring drop.

On the bright side, I for one thank anet for exposing how unlucky I am

I plan on avoiding casinos and lottery tickets and McDonald’s monopoly like the plague

The real question is: why doesn’t condition damage scale as well? It makes me feel useless

Trammel, the original game killer

… although I have to admit I did love designing and decorating custom houses :X

If one person makes it through, you can reset at the jellyfish boss. I always go back though and rez fallen teammates

NO DOLPHIN LEFT BEHIND

The dredge power suit is not hard, it is just tedious.

In an already long fractal, you have one of the most time consuming bosses, where if you mess up just once, he can potentially heal to full. The fight feels like it takes an hour especially if you have professions with a lack of reliable ranged dazes or players who have built heavy condition damage (dots don’t do more damage in this fight)

In lower difficulty levels, you risk having people who cannot kite, cannot dodge the bombs for whatever reason (lag, incompetence, whatever), or rangers that won’t set their pet to passive.

And if you do it in a higher difficulty level with skilled people who CAN dodge the bombs consistently, you then have to deal with the agony and ground pounds that hit like a truck.

All in all, the dredge power suit is another boss in the line of Anet’s : “Okay, you’ve learned the mechanics, you’ve got the lava spill timed correctly, you have people consistently interrupting the heals, you know how to dodge the bombs correctly, everything’s going great and nobody is dying… now repeat for 30 minutes”

tldr; I prefer the ice elemental

The swamp fractal is IMO the easiest and shortest one, even for pugs, but then again I play dungeons on my elementalist. I take the wisp furthest away, and so long as I have two other competent people who know what stability and/or condition cleanse is, then it’s np.

Of course, that’s about a 50/50 chance. I am finding out that most people have no idea what their abilities do. I hate the Underground fractal the most, because trying to coordinate with 3 randoms to kite and position the boss, while interrupting the heals immediately from range, while another random guy hits the switches is a nightmare

Yeah, currently it is poorly thought out

The further players get spread out in level, the harder and harder it is to find a group… until people stop trying

I’m already at a point where it’s not worth it to sit in Lion’s Arch for hours at off peak time spamming LFG… and I’m only on fractal lvl 4~!

What class do I see the least? That depends

tPvP? Rangers

sPvP? Engi’s or Necro’s

WvW? Thieves, cause they’re perma invisible

And it’s hard to get a fractal group because one guy’s LFG lvl 3, the other 5, and another 8…

It’s definitely beatable in a pug as I have done it, but I suppose it it depends on the group’s class composition

As an ele, I have a boat load of cleanses / swiftness spells so I carry the one furthest away

As for the mossman… I didn’t know you could even kill him o_O

Dispari.3980:

The bone minion combo is a bit buggy too. I had to stop and test it for a while. When you blow them up in a combo field things around you do get weakness, but it doesn’t show up as a combo icon when they do it, and it’s delayed by a couple seconds for some reason. It still works, if you watch the debuff icons on enemies. Just a bit wonky.

Upon further testing, it seems there was an undocumented change in the patch, and by change I mean stealth nerf. They corrected the bone minion blast finisher. It used to do 2 blasts per bone minion, meaning you could get upwards of 12s aoe retaliation when both were exploded in a well of blood

Now, they removed the 1st blast finisher, and only the 2nd counts. I’m disappointed, but I doubt it was working as intended previously

wiazabi.2549:

Did actually notice this but the dummy in mist did seem to continue taking dmg even though the dmg numbers stopped showing.

As for the combofield i havent been able to get em to use the death nova fields as combofield.

Ah yep, you are correct. It still continues to do damage, but the damage isn’t reported.

As for the combo field, it explodes once for me into the death nova puddle, then again a moment later for the aoe weakness (although this isn’t repoted either… the weakness condition simply shows up on the golem)

Hi,

I decided to test out the new Death Nova and see if it was worth using, when I noticed something strange about it. Here’s what the patch notes say:

“Death Nova: This skill now properly activates when using Taste of Death and Putrid Explosion. The internal cooldown has been removed. This skill’s field duration is now 4 seconds, and the rate it pulses has been increased to every 2 seconds. Its poison duration is 5 seconds per pulse.”

I took that to mean 15s full poison duration, 5s when you explode the bone minion and the initial field appears, then 5s more for each additional tick they stay in it. Unfortunately, the dmg portion of the dot only lasts 10s. The poison icon stays on the golem for 15s total, but the last 5s doesn’t seem to do anything, resulting in a loss of ~750 dmg

Test it out for yourself and see

PS: Because bone minions do 2 blast finishers, it actually combos with itself for an aoe poison field weakness, lol

edit: nm, it is a display error. It continues to do dmg, but it isn’t reported

It’s just a tool-tip update, as much as I would have loved this to be true

It means that it bounces 5 times total (3 on the enemy, 2 on allies)

It’s disappointing because some classes like the necro have a crippling number of bugs, some of them from as early as beta, that have yet to be fixed

At this rate, even with 2 hardworking and extremely dedicated employees, how can I expect the game to ever be balanced when most of my minor traits don’t even work correctly yet or are so bad I’d prefer nothing (Reanimator, Gluttony)?

I am at least happy that one of the trait tree bonuses that formely did nothing has been fixed 2 months in though

Dibrom.6408:

It’s 20%. I believe you see the combo effect every time even if it doesn’t happen.

If that’s the case, it’s not a bug unique to necros. I want to say it happens to every class when you shoot into a combo field

I noticed it when I laid a lightning field down on my ele. When someone shot into it, the Vulnerability symbol would flash on every shot… but the stack of vulnerability on the mob was much lower than it should have been

Gluttony offers some fierce competition, I would say

edit: actually, almost every necro minor trait is horrible, especially when compared to some of the stuff the other professions get

Ah, I get it now. I just learned that they have only 2 devs working on all balance changes for all professions, and this explains a lot. Really, I have to applaud their efforts and it’s obvious they put a lot of heart and soul into fixing the bugs, but I would say they’re a bit understaffed. I no longer have any expectations that there will be any balance adjustments, skill modifications, or better traits (Reanimator, Gluttony) coming our way anytime soon.

So to the people who are deeply disappointed with the necro in its current state, I’d say maybe try out a different profession as it won’t be changing anytime soon.

To the people who are okay with the necro and just would like the more glaring bugs fixed (me), I guess we’ll keep holding on.

To the people who currently love their necro… well, I am jealous of your enthusiasm.

But… this isn’t overpowered at all? It’s basically a condition build with stability

I sometimes wonder if people who make threads like this have played other classes. The nice thing about GW 2 is you can roll any profession to level 2 and mess around with them in the mists. I have done so for thief, mesmer, warrior, etc. and I recommend you try the cookie cutter FoTM builds if you haven’t. Rolling around as a D/D thief in sPvP makes me feel dirty

Also, it makes a big difference whether you’re talking about WvW or tPvP with threads like this. I can 1v1 baddies on my naked lvl 50 elementalist in WvW, so what might seem “overpowered” there will fall apart in a more competitive environment (although this build doesn’t seem so bad for tPvP — that was more a general statement)

Anyway, I like the build. Ditching Curses for the DS stability isn’t a bad choice, as all you’re losing really is +200 condition dmg. How do you build up your life force reliably without the 3% life force per mark?

Hello,

I just finished a run of CM path 2, and the end boss Turmaine’s red circles of death are almost impossible for me to see given the choice of color palette that they are laid on top of (brownish green grass). I sometimes experience a similar problem in AC, but there it’s not quite so bad because there are rocks and other gray tones to break it up

I don’t want to suggest avoiding that color combination altogether, but in GW 2, not dodging out of red circles on a boss is very unforgiving to say the least. Could we have an option please to change the red AoE indicator to an alternative color, such as orange, to make it easier in these specific situations?

I hope I’m not the only one with this issue! I can feel my teammates ire rising as I eat the dirt over and over

The problem I have with backstab is that even if you dodge or mitigate the initial burst, a good thief will just restealth and open up on you again albeit minus the Steal

This is why it will always be better than 100b. If the glass cannon warrior misses his combo, he might as well get up and go grab a drink or something because he’s going to be waiting for the respawn timer

PS: For a 10pt trait, mug is insanely good. To put it in comparision, the necro equivalent, a 10pt trait called Terror that makes fear do damage hits for about drumroll 500 hp

I would also like DPS meters and Deadly boss mod pls

samo.1054:

People will get bored of TDM even faster than conquest. Afterall 8v8 hotjoin atm works exactly as TDM would, so…

We just need some variety

If you get bored of conquest, play TDM
If you get bored of TDM, play CTF
If you get bored of CTF, then switch to Huttball (hey, one can dream)

etc.

Lifelike.5862:

Here’s an idea – instead of using bone minions, why don’t you try Spectral Grasp instead? that way you can pull opponents into your wells if they try to escape.

For me, spectral grasp seems to work roughly 25% of the time, and then only if I’m standing on top of the enemy :x

I have almost given up on that skill

Lifelike.5862:

Also, consider using staff in your offhand. Positioning the fear mark behind an immobile/chilled opponent and then going into DS to fear them into the mark can cause them to run away from you, then back towards you again if done properly. The staff also comes with a blast finisher and a chill/poison to help keep foes inside your DPS zone and discourage heal tanking.

Staff is not a bad choice, but I feel like you lose too much auto-attack damage when you swap to it because the #1 is… slow

(I lag a lot too, so without the traited marks I personally never hit anything, lol)

Also, another option is to get Mark of Evasion in Blood Magic, equip the focus as an off-hand, and then use the Cleric’s Amulet. Between #2 from staff and rolls along with focus #4 and the well siphons, you’ll have perma regen

Only downside is +heal doesn’t scale very well for necro as we all know

Hi,

I like the build and ran similar in the past, only I used the axe instead of the scepter for aoe retaliation.

I would also like to add that if you explode bone minions in Well of Blood, it can potentially grant your entire team 11-12s of retaliation (each bone minion explosion = 2 blast finishes for some reason)

edit: And putrid mark adds another 3s of aoe retal, if you want to place it down in the Well of Blood, too

Right now it is more the Holy Singularity of guardians, both in dungeons and tPvP

Strong: Mesmer, Guardian, Thief, Bunker Ele

Okay: Necro, Engi, Warrior

Weak: Ranger, non-condition Necro, non-bunker Ele, non-bunker Engi

I think most would agree?

Andele.1306:

Ok so either you are:
A) you are lucky
B) exploiting the fact that the first 1/4 second in a channel, actions dont interrupt (reason why thiefs can exploint the cloak and dagger stealth from afar while stealing).

Shroudstomping (pressing stomp and F1 together) is less an exploit and more a bug that stomping doesn’t work while in death shroud. At least… I would hope that is the case considering the following:

A) Thieves can stomp while stealthed
B) Elementalists can stomp while in mist form
C) Rangers / Warriors can stomp while invulnerable

But maybe it is a necro tax

Berullos.6928:

The only place it might have worth use in is as a dagger necro meleeing. Use hufflepuff’s build that hits like a truck coupled with the quickness sigil and you’ll pretty much destroy anyone who gets stuck in it.

Yeah, the combination of wells + locust swarm + auto attack + focus #4 makes the quickness almost a guaranteed proc, and it is amusing to gib somebody like that. I stopped using it though because it would proc at the worst times like when I crit the dagger #3 immobilize

Other than that, I feel the proc chance is too low and the cooldown too high. You’re better off going with the bleed if condition spec or air/fire if power spec

I agree with the poster who said this thread was totally novel, haha

Basically, vampirism (the trait) doesn’t heal enough to be effective in pvp. Healing for 28 per hit is nothing compared to the burst in this game. It should be made to scale somehow, preferably with +heal, so vamp bunker necros become a viable spec. To get +heal, you have to sacrifice both offense and defense, so I feel this is fair

Life Siphon does okay damage as the vid above demonstrates, but most of the time it’s better to just auto attack. You’ll hit harder with dagger #1, and you don’t have to worry about the channel getting interrupted (which happens all the time against real players)

Rangers have a similar problem with their short bow. You COULD use buttons 2-5, but most of the time it’s better to just auto attack

edit: Most of the traits in Blood Magic are underwhelming. They could all use a buff. I would rather play a lifesteal dagger necro than a power/crit necro but currently I cannot because it’s not worth it to take a significant drop in DPS for very mediocre healing returns

Are you confusing it for the 5 pt minor in Curses?

That is a bleed for 1 sec 1 tick

Rage quitting to the mists is the best defense against a backstab thief

I haven’t done Arah yet, but ironically the toughest dungeon I ever completed in this game was AC story.

It was a mess of dying over and over and over, due to the mix of inexperienced players running the dungeon and the fact that most of the bosses one shot you with their special moves.

This does not encourage people to attempt other dungeons. AC explorable, for instance, is easier than story mode if you do path 1 and 2

TakaEagle.9486:

I realised when playing my mesmer (as a male) that we look quite feminine with the purple/butterflies and thought how much better it would look if i was playing a female.

What!?

How dare you say that about my charr mesmer!

Real legionnaires wear purple, and butterfly collecting is super manly

Acelerion.6820:

I do not think that any mmo will ever again have effective crowd control and a strong interrupt system. People want to pew pew too much and wont stand for it.

DAoC was fun and all, but you could CC people into next week and if I remember correctly there was no defense against it until they added the realm abilities.

Nobody likes to spectate a fight, no matter how much “skill” chain mezzing might add

Speaking as a power necro, in WvW you can be a surprisingly effective roamer because with Spectral Walk + Locust Swarm (#5 warhorn) you get perma swiftness. That, combined with the ganking power of the golem + dagger root, lets you hit the unsuspecting straggler like a freight train… but good luck escaping from the zerg if it catches you

And yeah, so long as you have life force, necros can survive and beat most thieves 1v1 unless they gib you with a ridiculous backstab crit

I sure as hello kitty island adventure hope they fix that in the upcoming patch, along with the rendering bug

Since somewhere around lvl 15, when I realized Signet of the Locust doesn’t stack with swiftness, I haven’t found a use for them. Am I alone in this? Does anyone out there find the signets useful?

Plague Signet: Used to be a good “get out of jail free card” before the patch, but no longer. The condition transfer from allies is still broken, so at best you’re spending a precious utility slot on an extra staff / dagger #4 with a longer cooldown

Signet of the Locust: The passive 10% speed boost doesn’t stack with swiftness or the dagger +movement speed, so you’d be using this for the mediocre AoE heal. Not worth the long cooldown, I don’t think

Signet of Undeath: 1% life force every 3s is okay, I guess, and the active effect not bad if I was on a tourny team. But again, 3min cool down?

Signet of Spite: Passive effect is a solid +power boost, and the active effect stamps a foe with every condition in the game which theoretically could work well with epidemic, but again — 90s cool down? Personally I never take skills just to sit on my bar

Okay, my main problem it seems has to do with the super long cooldowns on all of them. I know there are traits in the Spite line that reduce that, and also grant might on usage, but I feel like there’s always a better option

Does anybody out there use signets?

Thresher.3049:

Where am I going with this? As a business case as most things are including games, you have to look after your regular customers and most popular product lines first because they’re the earners so to speak.

They’ll fix the more glaring bugs, it’s only a matter of time.

As for sweeping balance changes and/or trait shake-ups… yeah, you’re right. I wouldn’t hold my breath. That will come with an expansion, if anything. Stuff like Reanimator and the Signets and the poor returns on Vampirism won’t get changed anytime soon IMO.

The question you have to ask yourself is: if all the bugs were ironed out and the traits were working as intended, would the necro in its current form be a fun class to play?

For me, that answer is yes so I’ll stick with it (though I have made a thief, just in case)

Keep in mind, guys, that I didn’t post this to say “Look! Necros are fine in tPvP! L2P!”

I was just trying to make a case for power builds — that you can in fact do pretty decent burst damage, and it’s an alternative to loading up dots on the enemy.

Now, the combo IS easily dodged and I’ve had it backfire on me plenty of times. Against good opponents with stun breakers it takes the sun and the moon and the stars to align to stick your opponent inside the wells for the full duration. And if you so happen to miss, the cooldowns on the utility skills are very long

For this reason, I consider it an acceptable risk vs. reward scenario, and I wish more burst builds on the other professions were balanced similarly to this

Next up, I am trying to design a viable build for myself for the axe in pvp.
/cue Mission Impossible theme song

Mianhae.5138:

Ask me anything related to Ele gameplay or matching dyes while afking in the mists.

What cheap dye do you find most effective at achieving a stylized light-dark color contrast?

Personally I use either Winter Breeze or Frost for the lighter shade, and then mix it with Iron for a luscious looking yet surprisingly affordable combination, but I’m open to suggestions for my ele alt. I wish I could get my hands on Celestial because that’d be outright fabulous as it has the soft glow silhouette, but thus far no luck with the random bottle lottery

Ascii.9726:

For the amended question Death into Life (Spite 15 trait.) Even fully speced out for healing & life siphoning with daggers and wells, the health recovery makes me want to cry compared to a healing speced Elementalist healing 500+ per spell.

This trait makes sense if Vampirism scaled with +healing because then you could go dagger power build

But it doesn’t scale… so yeah

Schnitter.9857:

I can be wrong, but necro is intentionally slow, a turtle gameplay like for example. In theory, necros are slow but deadliest if they caught enemies, but just in theory…

You can’t run away from a necro, mate

They are focusing more on the new Thanksgiving content, I believe.

I expect one or two tooltip corrections

lettucemode.3789:

I think that Reaper’s Precision is the most useless – 33% chance to gain 1% life force on crit. Whoop de kitten doo.

Runners up are Terror, Dark Armor, and Siphoned Power (it seems bad on paper to me, could be good in practice, haven’t tried it).

Actually, if you dance in and out of DS a lot, both Reaper’s Precision and Siphoned Power are quite nice.

Reaper’s Precision helps with the LF gain, and Siphoned Power grants you might when you take dmg in DS (though I think there’s an internal cooldown, I forget). Not the best trait, but certainly not the worst.

For the worst… well, I can’t pick just one.

I’ll only do major traits, because the minors are 80% bugged or broken

Spiteful Removal: When you’ve killed a foe, you’ve won the fight. Losing one condition isn’t going to help.

Terror: As mentioned above, it hits for almost nothing. It’s especially disheartening when you contrast it to the thief trait that makes Steal do damage. You know, when they crit you for 5k+

Necromantic Corruption: 10% chance to remove a boon when minions attack. Nuff said

Death Nova: Doesn’t do enough dmg for a 30 pt grandmaster trait

And finally: Everything in the blood magic line except for Mark of Evasion and Ritual Mastery

Berullos.6928:

Ya I know what the combo finisher and the lack of a cast, however what bothered me the most with them is they’re not always ‘there’ next to the target for the splosion.

Haha yeah, it does happen, and I think every necro on this forum can commiserate with you about the faulty minion AI

Berullos.6928:

And if you use spectral walk do you take the cd reduction or just leave it at base? Cause if you use it for the swiftness during maps the 60 CD is going to suck. Whenever I take spectral I almost have to take the recharge.

By using untraited wells for so long, I’ve gotten used to using utility skills that take months to come off cooldown

Since most of the traits in Soul Reaping are pretty lackluster though, you can grab the 20% faster Spectral recharge and not miss much

Berullos.6928:

I’ve tried running power builds but they always end up feeling subpar. It did involve well bombing however, I never thought to use the bone minions cause you’re lacking a stun breaker.

Also the bone minions are reallly really unreliable, I don’t know how you can work with them, they don’t run to the target to explode they just explode where they stand.

I usually use Spectral Walk for the swiftness + stun breaker, but for the purposes of maximum DPS in the vid I switched to the bone minions.

The nice thing about the explosion though is that like Doom it is a free action meaning you can activate while casting other abilities

And blowing them up inside a well is a blast combo finisher for aoe blind

Dibrom.6408:

You’re blowing 3 utilities and an elite…

Yep, it takes a lot of utility skills to pull off, not to mention that with a lucky / well-timed dodge roll, you can negate the entire combo, which is why I am not going around proclaiming how OP power necros are

This build, with all its damage, pales in comparison to a thief that can drop people using 3 buttons (Steal, C&D, backstab) and a mesmer 2 (phantasmal zerker/duelist)

Still, I enjoy it more than spamming conditions, but that is personal preference