Guild Wars 2

1) Reanimator to do something useful towards our survivability that doesn’t coerce us into Minion-centric builds. “Inevitability of Death” – you gain 1 point of toughness per 2% of Life Force.

2) Better scaling on our life-stealing traits/utilities, and maybe a broad buff to the coefficient for Regeneration.

3) Greathammer weapon option focused on close/ranged control through cripple, chill, and immobilize.

4) Better trait support per tree for Death Shroud. Currently Power-builds are best supported due to Reaper’s Might, Unyielding Blast etc. How about a Curses trait that makes your Life Blast poison your target? Death Magic – when you use Dark Path, all allies within 500 range of your target are granted 3secs of Protection? Allies are healed for 10% of the damage of Life Blast, range 300.

Naturally, just spitballin’ when it comes to the examples.

You know you could make an argument for Necromancer using a Torch off-hand. Center it around the idea of the Will-o’-the-Wisp: a ghostly light seen by travellers at night, especially over bogs, swamps or marshes. It resembles a flickering lamp and is said to recede if approached, drawing travellers from the safe paths. In European folklore, these lights are held to be either mischievous spirits of the dead, or other supernatural beings or spirits such as fairies, attempting to lead travellers astray.

Sorry for the wiki-dump, but hey, it could work, right? You could have a single-target, long-duration burn and a multi-target, short-duration burn that bounces between enemies like Focus 4 (Reaper’s Touch) does. Make it ghostly blue and hey presto.

PinCushion.7390:

Weakness: Endurance regen decreased by 50%; Does other stuff nobody cares about

In other words, it’s better for small fights where dodging really matters. You put it on people to soak up their Endurance. It’s an offensive skill more than a defensive one, even though the name would suggest otherwise.

Chill is the condition that wrecks damage output. Skill recharge reduced by 2/3. Ouch!

You know what the worst part of it is? In a small engagement, if you use Corrosive Poison Cloud you basically screw yourself over too. Odds are you’ll be fighting someone with more/better escapes than you, and hey guess what – CPC applies weakness to you too! Might as well go Chilblains > Putrid Mark, or Enfeebling Blood, since that doesn’t also screw up your energy regeneration for those precious, precious dodges.

I think this is something that ArenaNet could have really learnt from the Halloween event we just had:

It was amazing to have so many players crowded around the fountain for the inevitable moment Mad King Thorn decided to bust through the fountain and open up a portal to his realm of pants-on-head craziness, but boy did it take ages to get into Lion’s Arch, people in groups got lost due to the overflow, and it became a complete higgledy-piggledy.

Less than a 2-minute run from that fountain are portals to every major capital city in the game. It struck me as truly bizarre why they didn’t just decide to spread the load across the other cities – even one other capital city, and put portals to the Mad King’s dungeon area in each capital city, or even just a few. That way more people could’ve enjoyed it.

But yes, in general, more stuff in capital cities please – some of them are incredibly beautiful and obviously had a hell of a lotta time and effort put into making them. Currently they’re ghost towns.

I don’t get the fuss over Corrosive Poison Cloud (coming from a strictly WvW and not sPvP viewpoint). Just about every Necro I know is rolling with a Staff as one of their weapon options, which gives you access to a poison. Then you can Epidemic to spread it to other people.

Weakness sucks, but I could in theory see how Corrosive Poison Cloud could be a nice area of denial skill. It’s just a bummer that it comes with the added caveat of self-weakness, which, arguably isn’t too bad because oh yeah weakness sucks.

NatashaK.9418:

So you run Earth on a scepter and build up bleed stacks and spread them with epidemic as appropriate.
On the staff, do you use fire, since it’s all AoE anyway?
And the OH dagger could have cond damage stacking, bleed duration, 5% precision, AoE bleed on weapon swap, etc.

I’m sure some folks have their own ideas of what they put on the Staff.

Me? I put on Superior Sigil of Energy because we don’t have a reliable way to get Vigor. Every 10 seconds, you get a free dodge.

Barbed Precision is not good (if it procs, it’s a 1-second bleed so you get one tick). Superior Sigil of Earth is just that good.

Bleeds stack to 25, and each stack deals 1 tick of damage every second. Superior Sigil of Earth gives you a 60% chance on crit to inflict a 5-second bleed, on a 2-second internal cooldown. Now I don’t have full exotics (missing exotic dagger – it’s a Masterwork from the Frostgorge Sound Kodan vendors. Level 80 Rabid Dagger, and my Staff off-hand is a rare Carrion, and my Jewelery is Power/Precision/Condition Damage) but my bleeds tend to hit for 125-130 damage a tick, so Superior Sigil of Geomancy bleed will give me 625-650 damage whenever it procs, over the next five seconds.

It’s not about the direct damage. Forget the damage the crit itself is actually doing. It isn’t important. The idea is that you wear the enemy down with high condition damage and being able to so much as fart and there’s a half-dozen extra bleeds on your target while at the same time havin high toughness to whether blows and jumping in and out of Death Shroud, or using Plague to mitigate damage.

There’s something brilliant about those rare times when you rally and the male Asura says words to the effect of:

“Look who’s back – it’s ME, by the way.”

Baaaadassssss.

I disagree I don’t think healing should be strong as it’s unfun for a game to have unkillable self-healing classes, I’d prefer healing as a sort of alternate tough/HP, it extends your effective health and time to kill but doesn’t actually replenish HP at a rate higher than damage.

I think we just need to have effective damage capable of making use of the extra time it buys us. We currently do not.

I agree, nobody wants unkillable healers. It’s un-fun and it sucks from both ends of the perspective – the healing party doesn’t want to end up as little more than some unkillable piñata who doesn’t have any wiggle-room for tactics beyond “Soak up damage and pray backup comes along”, and the damaging party gets frustrated because they’re tied up in combat against something they can’t feasibly kill without back-up. Nobody comes out of that scenario having had a particularly fun experience. Furthermore it’s contrary to the action-based, Neverwinter Nights-esque combat the game is built on.

Which is why I wasn’t advocating that Healing Power become some sort of god stat that scales as well as Prowess. What I would rather see is pretty much exactly what you said – healing as an alternative to stacking Toughness or Vitality, or something that’s beneficial to grab while grabbing a bit of Toughness or Vitality on the side. In an ideal situation, Healing Power, along with some Toughness or Vitality, and grabbing siphoning traits/skills, and regeneration scaling better than it currently does, should be a viable form of damage mitigation. Not enough to turn you into an unkillable beast, but enough to draw out the fight. Currently this is not the case – far from it, because of how poorly Healing Power scales as a stat in comparison to others.

As for effective damage, to requote Johnathan Sharp from the OP quote:

It’s an attrition based class, so the idea is that if you lock horns w/ a necro, know what you’re getting into: you’re fighting a class that’s built for attrition. It can dot you, dps you, rip your boons, and severely hinder your movement. AND it also has the ability to soak up a lot of damage. So the longer the fight goes, the stronger the Necro should get. That’s the idea behind Death Shroud, but little escape ability.

To me this says that direct damage or, dare I say burst, isn’t something the developers particularly have in mind for this profession in regards to the design philosophy. At least at this stage of the game – who knows what’ll happen a few months, maybe years down the road? As it stands our axe could certainly use a booster in the old damage department mostly stemming from how poor Rending Claws’ Vulnerability lasts. I for one would welcome swapping the functionality of Rending Claws and Ghastly Claws so that the latter applies Vulnerability that sticks around a little longer, and the former is a simple hack n slash that builds Life Force. But I digress!

Asura with a Greatsword/Hammer is hilarious. They look like they can barely hold it up.

Asura Guardian’s using Staff 4 (Empower) is the cutest thing ever. Just plant the pole and start swinging around mid-combat. Don’t mind me, guys!

Asura are tiny, and all things tiny are awesome.

I’m not a developer, and feel free to tell me to shut up and go away (although I warn you, I will grumble!) but the Life-Leeching complaints are symptomatic of a much larger problem.

That problem being: We, or the other professions in the game, or perhaps healing mechanics entirely, scale poorly with Healing Power compared to some other stats. Not all stats are created equally!

Allow me to provide an example in the form of a stat called Prowess, also known more commonly as Critical Damage. In Guild Wars 2, all Critical Hits have a base damage of 150%. So a 3000 damage sword swing from a Warrior clocks a 4500 critical hit. According to the wiki, 1 point of Prowess equates to an extra 1% on top of the baseline 150%. So, with 30 points in Soul Reaping, your prowess is 180%, your crit does 180% damage (in the Warrior example this makes the crit 5400 damage).

Healing Power on the other hand scales linearly and rather feebly at that. Regeneration is a common boon for us to throw out – it comes from Staff 2, Focus 4, and the 5-point minor in Blood. Regeneration scales at a rate of 1 point adding 0.125 health to a Rejuvenation tick.

To provide a more anecdotal example, by kitting myself out entirely in Exotic Clerics’ armour with 6/6 Superior runes of water, and rare Cleric’s Axe/Focus and Staff, as well as full exotic Sapphire Jewelery and 20 points down Blood Magic for good measure, I clocked in at nearly 1800 Healing Power.

My Regeneration still healed for less than 300 a tick out of a 20-21000 health pool.

If Life Leech and siphoning do indeed scale off of Healing Power (and we have no reason not to believe this) then their weak performance are part of the problem that is Healing Power as a stat scales horribly. Professions such as Guardians make it through by simply having a large pool of on-demand burst healing skills – it’s the sheer high base numbers given to them and the multitude of them that makes them effective healers. For everyone else with low initial values, even a significant chunk of Healing Power won’t do much to budge your healing up.

The optimist in me would love to see a build focused around Life-Leeching. Really, I would. The realist in me says: If the developers can figure out how strongly they want Healing Power to impact the metagame of PvP without it spiralling out of control, then we might be able to make some progress with a Life-Leeching build.

As it stands, Healing Power is woefully underscaled for the concerns of level 80 PvP, and life leeching ends up falling under this category.

It’s late. I’m tired. So I’m going to be unreasonable about this.

Reanimator is probably the worst trait, minor or major, in the entire game.

1) Reanimator benefits none, nada, zilch, of the builds available to the Necromancer. The minion’s either weak as a kitten due to lack of trait support for condition/power/support builds, or doesn’t last long enough to help out in combat for a Minion Master.

2) Reanimator, while fitting the theme of Death Magic being centered around minions, does absolutely nothing for anyone who wants to dip into Death Magic for a little extra toughness/boon duration, staff efficiency, or protective wells. As such it has abolsutely no place being the first minor trait in the Necromancer toughness tree when compared to other professions, as I shall do so now:

Warrior: Extra armour when health is above 90%
Guardian: Gain Aegis when you reach 50% health
Ranger: Increases Endurance regeneration by 50%
Thief: Use Blinding Powder when your health reaches 25% (90 second cooldown)
Engineer: Gain Regeneration for 10 seconds when you are attacked while under 25% health
Elementalist: Gain 1 toughness per level while attuned to Earth
Mesmer: Gain 10 seconds of regeneration when you are uner 75% health (30 second cooldown)

If you have the 5 points to spare in any other professions’ toughness tree, they are universally useful towards the professions’ survivability. Reanimator is not.

EDIT: It’s actually really interesting to see this play out. Initially I was perplexed as to why the Mesmer regeneration kicked in sooner than the Engineer regeneration. The only conclusion I can draw from this is because Engineers have better defense stat because they wear a higher grade of armour. This also accounts for just how good that Elementalist minor is, and is even more condemning that the Necromancer got lumped with something functionally useless to the profession. Could we chalk this up to another “lolDeathshroud”? Possibly.

3) Reanimator has synergy with Protection of the Horde. Unfortunately it’s a paltry extra 20 Toughness for 8 seconds, right where the toughness is least useful – at the end of a fight when you’ve killed your enemy, severely hampering the pathetic window the summoned Jagged Horror has to do anything, even passively boosting your toughness.

4) Reanimator keeps you in combat after the Jagged Horror has bled to death, delaying the regeneration of health, and waypointing.

So, here I am with a couple of suggestions, which I’ll arbitrarily switch to lettering instead of numbering because it’s late:

A) Provide a cap on Reanimator at say, 3-4 Jagged Horrors. Give it a 30-second cooldown and remove the self-bleed-to-death so you can at least get a pack of the little critters going.

B) Make Reanimator summon a Blood Fiend instead that you can’t sacrifice to put it roughly on par with Engineer/Mesmer getting Regeneration.

C) (The idea I’m most biased towards) switch Reanimator with Deadly Strength and make Reanimator summon something more noticeably useful. Which at this point barring just a 4-5 strong squad of suicide horrors or a temp flesh golem, is going to require more forethought.

D) Swap Reanimator with Shrouded Removal. It’s probably the most noteworthy Major Trait in the Adept stage of the tree that could be made into a good Minor. The only other real option option that fits the criteria of “universally useful” is Dark Armour, but Dark Armour is reviled for being terrible due to its’ lack of ability coverage (Two channels exist on our weapons, both of them on main-hand weapons, and one for Life Transfer. Whoppee), so let’s go with something that’s actually passable as a trait.

So if you have a warhorn equipped with spectral walk, you’re always running fast?

Gotta go fast!

I’d keep the Flesh Golem as is, but give it a Ranger-pet bar. It is elite after all. It deserves the smallest bit of competance.

For the rest? I’d rather they be targettable spells. So instead of summoning Jagged Horrors straight out of the dirt by my feet, I’d rather do it just like the Lich does – drop a mark at my enemy’s feet, out pop Horrors to claw and tear at its’ face for a few seconds, with the option to detonate them. Copy and paste idea across all minions.

Chuiu makes a good point – Zhaitan’s the kinda whole-sale Necromancer-creature. He goes to the supermarket, sees “Undead minions – Raise 2000, get 1000 free!” and he’s all like I’LL TAKE TEN THOUSAND.

We, on the other hand, are more like Dr. Frankenstein. Except obviously when we made our Bone Minion’s, we never got beyond “The leg bone’s connected to the…”

Trahearne likes to bend the laws of the universe to his own will. I’ve seen him use the abilities of a Necromancer, Guardian, and I think Mesmer?

Trahearne does what the plot demands him to do.

barti.7685:

FalconFighter.9628:

when you trigger this (revive ally), do you get the initial self-heal of well of blood? or do you only get the aoe tick and combo field?

its the whole well so the initial + the ticks its pretty important for a support necro to take that trait it also triggers on signet of undeath. it still doesnt warrent taking runes f mercy tho imo..

It’s a really good trait for a Support Necro. It’s a kitten shame it’s on the same tier as Life Transfer healing allies because in my current gear set-up (Full Cleric exotics except the weapons which are rares with 6/6 Runes of Water) that’s nearly a 3000 HP heal to allies in the area every 32 seconds (Took Path of Midnight for my support build as well for this reason). That’s nothing to sneeze at.

So I guess you have to use your head on this one somewhat and think: do you want more active healing at your command, or do you want an extra safety net upon rallying allies?

Necromancers are still workable and very fun. Make no mistake that they do have bugs and general weirdness about traits, utilities, and weapon skills, but keep in mind:

A) Just about every other profession has these.
B) It’s so much easier to fixate on the bad than it is to praise the good, and the former will happen ten times over the latter.

If you’re willing the take the good with the bad and remember that in due time things will be fixed and/or figured out (I mean come on the game’s only been out just over two months) then the Necromancer is a solid, challenging experience which equates to fun. Least it was for me anyway.

There’s something almost sadistically grin-worthy about loading up a target with conditions, hitting Epidemic, going into Death Shroud and popping Life Transfer and watching you screen explode in numbers. The grins, guys, they just won’t stop!

Spectral Grasp is very nice on the Lover’s fight in Ascalonian Catacombs, or so I hear.

I like Spectral Wall not so much for the effect of it but for the Ethereal Combo field. Confusion and Chaos Armour can be very, very nice to have especially if you’re not grouping with a Mesmer.

To be perfectly honest when it comes to weapons, I think the Mace would be a great fit if you think about it. We, as Necromancers, are essentially priests or clerics of darker powers over life and death. I like that we can use daggers, for example, which have long been instruments important in rituals, especially sacrifices, throughout history. A Mace/Hammer wielding “dark priest/cleric” seems rather fitting in a peverse way, since it feeds into the popular belief that during medieval battles, clergy used maces in warfare to avoid bloodshed (this is of course questionable as the evidence is sparse, as stated in the wiki page for Mace (club):

As it stands, only two professions make use of the Mace – Warriors and Guardians. Don’t get me wrong, that’s fitting, but the mace in and of itself throughout history holds significance as a symbol of authority and has ritualistic applications. As such I think it would be pretty awesome for us to utilise Maces.

… And Hammers. But seriously that’s just me. I don’t like Greatswords, I like giant Hammers.

I play thief in wvw and you can chase pretty much everything down, it is kittening awesome. And flipside?oh there is trouble? I can get out in seconds. Can’t speak for spvp but i think theyre fairly hard to kite there too.

This is the problem inherent of the duality of the mobility versus bulkiness/snaring framework. A profession with high mobility over high bulkiness and snaring can escape from combat with impunity, and can also engage/chase with impunity. Which, in and of itself isn’t a bad idea. The bad idea comes when you have a profession that has incredible mobility and it has incredible burst as its’ archetype.

In contrast with the bulky snarer the Necromancer is idealised to be, he has trouble catching up to the fight… Lots of trouble escaping the fight… And not much success in keeping glued to its’ target. And when you get right down to it, the reason is, I think, that the methods of keeping someone close to you stem entirely from conditions save for two abilities – Dark Path and Spectral Grasp. Considering that packing a heavy dose of Condition removal is pretty much the standard in a PvP environment, if you want the Necromancer to succeed in its’ intended design philosophy, you need to do one of two things:

1) Strengthen movement-impairing conditions.
2) Create utilities and abilities for the Necromancer that can keep them in range of the target, but don’t rely on movement-impairing conditions.

Really there’s nothing wrong with copying other professions’ abilities to help mold that design philosophy. Ring of Warding on Guardians, for example. You could spruce up a Necromancer version of that:

Well of Shadows:
Create a shadowy dome that foes cannot cross. Trapped enemies cannot exit the ring while it is active. (1sec castime. 60 sec cooldown. 5sec duration. Combo Field – Dark).

Or if you don’t like that idea, how about something a little more unique?

Necrotic Tether:
Create a Necrotic Tether between yourself and your target. If the target breaks the tether by moving more than 900 range away from you, you teleport to them and immobilise them for 3 seconds. (3/4 second Cast time. 600 Range. 40 second cooldown).

I’m just spitballing here, I don’t expect the ideas of a random forum-goer to be taken on-board, but I love this profession and believe that if you want to follow through with the design philosophy of the Necromancer being someone you don’t escape from, you’re going to need to come up with something better than movement-impairing conditions that are easily cleansed.

Mr. Sharp, I don’t know if you’re still reading this thread and in a position to reply. I hope you are, because there are some very valid points being raised here. Granted there are some better for another topic, another time, but folks like Sheobix, Knote, Death By Chickens, gamefreak, alanis, they all raise some very valid points.

At the end of the day, from my perspective, mobility will always outweigh durability. You can either stand in the fire and soak the damage by relying on your bulk to see you through, or you can dodge it to avoid it completely. Durability will only get you so far and while the idea of fighting a Necromancer being a long, arduous slog is a pretty cool idea, combat is heavily based around maneuverability in this game and as such, my bulk feels inferior to professions that have solid, reliable escapes and disengages to make up for their lack of bulk. It doesn’t help matters that my bulk is tied to a seperate resource mechanic which, while not taking an inexcusable amount of time to build up, needs to be built up by using specific abilities in combat, killing things or having things die around me.

I’m going to bold this bit so it stands out the most because it’s the point I want to make the most:

In PvP I feel I am balanced around the extra bulk and options granted to me by Death Shroud. Since I start on 0 Life Force I don’t have this bulk where I need it the most – at the start of a fight where my opponents’ abilities are ready for use and I need something to mitigate their front-loaded damage. Thus my bulk becomes less relevant the more a fight drags on – I have access to my mitigation later in the fight when my opponent has more than likely used several of his/her most damaging cooldowns. This is a fundamentally flawed problem – If I’m supposed to be a bulky, tanky caster with limited movement options as the drawback to my mitigation, why don’t I have my mitigation when I need it the most?

(Meanwhile the Thief/Mesmer/Elementalist has gotten away because Dark Path was too slow getting to them, Spectral Grasp was obstructed by a nearby shrub, and my Flesh Golem went charging in the opposite direction. :P)

Same issue – 4/5 Emissary of the Mad King. Adding my hat into the fray here:

Part 1 of the event: 100 Trick or Treat bags opened.
Part 2 of the event: 150 Halloween-themed enemies killed, 10/10 Halloween events completed, 4/4 areas of the Mad King’s realm explored.
Part 3 of the event: 150 Pumpkins Carved.
Part 4 of the event: 1/1 Attended the party.

Things I would love to see:

1) Another look given to traits, specifically the Death Magic tree. If you look at any other profession’s toughness-centric trait tree (with the exception of Elementalists – sorry guys but you get suckered here with all your minors enforcing Earth attunement) then you’ll notice none of them* enforce a particular playstyle. For us however? We’re forced to use Minions. Especially if you don’t want to miss out on up to 100 extra toughness.

It absolutely sucks that when it comes to my minor for Death Magic, two of them I have to use Minions or just forget they’re even there. I know you want Death Magic to be the minion tree but look at it this way: Engineer’s Inventions tree focuses heavily on turrets. Yet none of the minor traits have anything to do with Turrets. It’s simple, and it works. You can go up the tree and avoid can avoid picking up turret-traits if you want. With Death Magic I feel like I’m missing out on benefit of my minors just for not picking up Minions, but wanting excellent traits like Greater Marks, Staff Mastery, Rituals of Protection, etc.

So yes, a rethink of those minors would be wonderful.

2) Another look and perhaps retuning of the coefficients of life-leeching skills. I dunno about other Necromancers, but I for one would love to play some sort of life-leeching build. Unfortunately the amounts of life leeched are lacklustre, to say the least. Things like Life Siphon, Signet of the Locust active, Vampiric Minor Trait, and the following major traits: Bloodthirst, Vampiric Precision, Vampiric Master, Vampiric Rituals.

That’s all I got for now.

Also stuck on 4/5 now that I have attended the party and got that achievement. So now I’m sat on all of the achievements done except for the Clock Tower jumping puzzle. I’ve tried relogging since I got to 4/5, I’ve tried restarting my client, I’ve tried switching characters, I’ve tried everything I can think of and still I sit here on 4/5.

Can we get a red post on this issue please? Some of us really busted our humps to go after this title and we just want the proper credit for it.

Didn’t a red post say they wanted to work on a solution that made condition builds more viable when targetting destructible objects, but it was going to be hard work? I can’t remember or find it. Then again I am pre-coffee right now. :P

As for how I take them down these days, since I also run a condition-based build with some power out in the world, if I can I will lure an enemy over to the structure and use my staff marks. The marks themselves cannot be set off by destructible objects, but a mark detonating will damage the structure. So, generally I grab a mob to help speed up the process.

Punk Rogue’s achievement score looks just like mine, but here it is for posterity.

Hope nothing stops us from getting our titles…

Having never played GW1 I wouldn’t know if these traits were in that game, but everything on the Guildhead site is tailored towards Guild Wars 2 – Trait Calculators, item searching, the map function, all of it.

Hello beta testers (and people who just like nosing at this sort of thing).

I was trailing through Guildhead, the WoWhead equivalent for Guild Wars 2 (which still needs a lot of help in terms of filling up the database with items. Yeesh this thing is empty in some aspects) to investigate Runes of the Lich. Well, imagine my surprise when I came across this:

http://www.guildhead.com/trait/720/improved-lich-form Looks like a trait to improve Lich Form, a major trait (listed under Toughness, so death magic).

Then I used a bit of intuition and found these two:

http://www.guildhead.com/trait/685/improved-plague A minor trait in the vitality (Blood Magic) tree to improve Plague.
http://www.guildhead.com/trait/683/improved-flesh-golem A minor trait in the vitality (Blood Magic) tree to improve Flesh Golem.

So here’s my question to people who beta tested this profession – did you ever see these traits pop up during beta testing? Were they removed? If so, why? (Well it’s obvious for the Lich one that it practically offers 30sec invincibility if you can keep the enemy away from your Phylactery which’d be disgusting in PvP situations. Then again it is a major trait). Were they culled early on? I don’t see a whole lot of classes with traits that specifically buff their elite utility skills – only Engineer and Guardian spring to mind because they’re the only other classes I’ve really invested in.

Still, interesting stuff there. As a warning I don’t believe for one second they’re datamined evidence of what the Necromancer profession will end up getting. They may even be a hoax. But still, if any beta testers can talk about these three traits I’d be interested to know. I kinda have a love for information on beta stages of games.

Thanks all, have a good morning/day/night!

Hey all.

I was browsing the trading post when I came across a Prec/Toughness/Condition damage Scepter by the name of “The Lidless Eye”. Since I play a Condition-specced Necromancer, I set it as a goal. After some browsing around, the closest I came to for a “recipe” for it is:

250 Vials of Powerful Blood
1 Giant Eye
1 Eldritch Scroll
50 Mystic Coins.

However, I’ve heard conflicting reports from other players, and other forums, that sometimes throwing these items into the Mystic Forge nets you a Lidless Eye, sometimes it nets you a Wall of the Mists.

What I’m asking is: Does anyone know a cast-iron, guaranteed recipe for the Lidless Eye? I’d hate to pour all these mats into the Mystic Forge and not come out with the item I thought I’d get. Yes I’m aware that the Mystic Forge is inherently risk-reward in its’ nature, but if anyone can help clear this up for me I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks for reading, have a good one!

Reanimator looks like a skill based on trying to either eliminate downtime or give you an edge in combat. Here’s my suggestion for Reanimator:

“When you lose a minion in combat, it is instantly resummoned. This effect cannot occur more than once every 30 seconds”.

While we’re on the subject what about the weakness proc in tier 3 curses? Does that last long enough to weigh in the favor of precision? Chance is pretty low, think I’ll check it out in the mists…

Not really any point, since if you’re running Sceptre you want to be running Dagger off-hand and Dagger off-hand has an AoE Bleed/Weaken. It’s called Enfeebling Blood. You can also get AoE weakness out of Staff 3 (Chillblains) and any blast finisher – for example, Staff 4 (Putrid Mark), so go ahead and grab something like Lingering Curse.

Yeah, you only have to go ahead and look at the minor traits of other professions’ toughness-centric trait lines to see that the majority don’t really pidgeon-hole you:

• Elementalists’ Earth Magic line has a 1 toughness per level when attuned to earth, and cripple + damage foes with you attune to earth, which I guess puts them in kinda the same boat.
• Warriors’ Defense line has nothing in their minor traits that pidgeon-hole them. The majors give options of maces, shields and great hammers.
• Guardians’ Valor line, once again, universally useful stuff there. Plus it helps that their toughness line is also where their critical damage passive boost lies.
• Engineers’ Inventions line benefits self-regeneration and healing. There are major traits for the shield and some for turrets, but nothing in the minors that’d force you into a certain playstyle.
• Ranger is an interesting one, since there’s two minor traits that support and encourage dodging. That’d probably key you into a more melee-centric, or certainly short-range attack build, but with just how much long-range AoE this game has in PvP and PvE, you’re going to dodge even at long range, so those minor traits are going to be useful.
• Thief toughness tree is Shadow Arts. Not much to say on that – there’s a lot of very cool stealth abilities they have at their disposal, so you’ll probably end up using at least one in a build. As a result you can enjoy a minor stealth duration increase and a stack of might.
• Mesmer. Oh look, some nice synergy – the first trait gives you regeneration at 75% health, the second trait gives you protection for 2 seconds when you gain regeneration, and the last one is the ever-nice, flat % of stat A converted into stat B.

Conclusion: The Necromancer, the Elementalist, and perhaps the Thief too, are the only professions in the game that do not have universally useful minors for their toughness trait lines. They focus on too narrow a subsection of possible specs to be really desirable unless you’re playing a specific spec. A minor trait should, in some way, be appealing to the overall stats offered by investing trait points without enforcing playstyle on the player.

If you do this, you limit choices for the player to make, and hurt the potential for spec creation. It’s the difference between swapping out an Engineer’s second minor trait in the Inventions line “Automated Medical Response” (Healing skill cooldowns are refreshed when you reach 25% health. 90 second cooldown) with the major trait “Reinforced Shield” (Gain 90 Toughness when using a shield, and all shield skills recharge 20% faster). A change like that would make a lot of Engineers believe that the Inventions line is only for if you want to use a pistol/shield combo, and not universally appealing for the bonus 300 toughness. It is flexible. Death Magic, in its’ current incarnation, is not.

TL;DR: Wah wah it’s not fair that to get +300 toughness from a trait line I have to either go for one specific build or else have two wasted minors.

I always thought Dagger 4’s tooltip wording was simply incorrect, and the intention was the projectile bounces between enemies, transferring one condition to each enemy per bounce.

So say you have 3 enemies and you have Poison/Weakness/Crippled. Enemy 1 gets Poison, enemy 2 gets Weakness, enemy 3 gets Cripple.

It’s just an all-round very bizarre ability in terms of functionality and I’m glad I only use it to bounce an extra two stacks of bleed to a target from Blood Is Power or the Vulnerability from Epidemic.

Actually, signet of spite got fixed too, but they put that note in the guardian listings.

Hit refresh, suddenly it’s in the Necromancer listing. It’s magic.

Still, a bugfix on Greater Marks is nice. Signet of Spite being castable on the move is nice, but lawlSignetofSpitesucksanyway.

Yeah I agree with this. It’s ludicrous when you compare the Toughness tree minors to other professions: Inventions trait line for Engineers favours a shield, sure, but it’s not necessary – there’s other stuff in the major traits that back it up and none of the minors reflect a bias towards shields, turrets etc. Thief Shadow Arts is the same, Mesmer Chaos trait line… I could go on.

Reanimator just needs to go. I want Protection of the Horde buffed and shifted to a major, swapping places with something lacklustre (Here’s an idea – drop Dark Armor to +50-100 toughness and make the condition something more feasible, like bonus Toughness per condition on you. I dunno what exactly but heck it’s just an example, work with me here. Just make it a minor).

This is our Toughness/Boon Duration tree. We’re not exactly swimming in boons as a profession so there should be more focus on utilities generating bonus boons, crits/heals generating boons, and so on. Traits like Death Shiver don’t feel like they belong in Death Magic, while other trees have traits that feel like they would belong in Death Magic – Spiteful Removal, Spiteful Spirit, Decaying Swarm are ones I could see working in the tree.

If there’s anything I’d want changed it’d be just the removal/changing of Reanimator and Protection of the Horde. We shouldn’t be pidgeon-holed into using minions just to use our Toughness/Boon Duration tree.

Whether I like the change or not is irrelevant. I just don’t see why this change is here in the first place.

It’s not a bugfix. We don’t need abitrary tooling around with abilities and changing the effects and benefits of them, we need bugfixes. You can’t seriously balance a profession without weeding out as many bugs as possible. Do we work? Yes, we do. But come on – 90-100 bugs that still need squashing. Takes time, too. Time and hard work. So why are we getting ability changes beforehand?

Still, great job giving the Necromancer car a new paint job while it has a flat tyre.

Minions I could take ‘em or leave ’em. I’d like to try them someday if and when they become more viable via their A.I. getting a swift kick up the backside, but I hate minions for a bigger reason – minion usage dominates the Toughness tree. If I want survivability I have to put up with minions. Two out of three minor traits are dedicated to minions or the usage thereof. The third one (5% Toughness into Power) is directly benefitted from by it’s predecessor Protection of the Horde. This is again confusing because out of the 12 Major Trait choices in Death Magic only four of them actually bolster minions. The rest of the minion traits lie all over the place – Spite and Blood Magic trees.

I don’t like being pidgeon-holed into a certain build just because I want to grab some Toughness. Compare with Guardian for example and their trait line Valor – sure it’s beneficial to grab a shield but it’s not necessary – none of the minor traits punish you for not going sword and board, and it’s generally a broad enough choice in major traits to make it a beneficial line to go down. Death Magic isn’t that – it’s minions or go home.

Hey everyone.

I’ve been level 80 on my little Asura Necromancer for about a week now. I love playing the guy (despite the problems, but this topic isn’t about that right now). I play a Condition-based Necromancer focusing my stats in Precision, Toughness and Condition Damage.

Way, way, waaaaay back in what I believe was my level 20-30 I chose my Order based on who I felt fit my character best, and I chose the Durmond Priory. It was a choice between the Durmond Priory and the Order of Whispers for me (I didn’t fancy the Vigil on this character), and in the end it came down to the Durmond Priory. I mean the Necromancer is a scholar profession right? And the Durmond Priory is essentially Indianna Jones meets a bunch of wizards. I enjoyed my personal story quests with these guys and I leant on following Durmond Priory missions in Orr when we were flying the flag of the Pact.

Then I discovered that each Order has its’ own set of armour you can buy for gold. Gold! Armour sets you can purchase at level 80! Fantastic! I love this! Let me go see what they have.

Huh. It’s all Precision/Vitality/Healing Power. Well that’s no good for me. I wondered if that was the case for The Vigil. The Vigil armour set is Power/Toughness/Vitality. Well it’s a step in the right direction.

Imagine my surprise when I found out the Order of Whispers armour set has exactly the stats I am looking for – Precision, Toughness, and Condition damage. Armour that I don’t have access to, based on a decision I made 54 levels ago that wasn’t even alluded to.

Guys, I understand that you shouldn’t be dangling carrots in front of the player when it comes to how they form their characters. But at the same time information that big and potentially useful being hidden away isn’t particularly fair or warranted. I feel like I have been punished for choosing the “wrong” Order because I can’t have access to equipment that is most beneficial to me. Now I’m at the mercy of dropping a whopping 42,000 karma per piece for armour that in the end measure a mere 10 stat points different than Order armour, or I’m at the mercy of the crafting system in order to make equivalent armour.

This becomes even more absurd as the Personal Story continues, the Orders unite under the banner of the Pact, you get promoted to being a Commander of the Pact, everyone’s pouring every resource they can into the battle against the Risen and Zhaitan, and yet I still can’t access this armour.

In short, here’s my problem: Orders sell armour with a certain trend of stat bonuses attached to them. This is in no way indicated until you have signed on with an Order and checked it for yourself. If you don’t choose the Order that sells the armour most beneficial to your profession/build, you’re stuck grinding out 252,000 karma for a full set of armour in Orr, or you have to trudge your way up to 400 crafting of a profession and grind up the mats to make the necessary armour. Or you can spend 8 gold 88 silver for an entire rare set that is only a handful of stat points weaker than the karma set if you picked the “right” Order.

Suggestion: Flesh out the information given when choosing an Order, including this information about armour and weapons available. Maybe include a brief instanced section where you visit each Order base for a tour before you choose who to sign on with, which includes being able to view this armour.

OR

When the personal story progresses to the formation of the Pact, either allow players access to the armour of all Orders, or include some sort of side-story allowing you access to different Orders caches’ upon completion.

Thanks for reading this long. I’d just like to end by making one comparison:

Back when World of Warcraft launched The Burning Crusade, the city of Shattrath housed two competing factions: The Aldor and the Scryers. You had to choose early on whether you wished to side with the Aldor or the Scryers, but before making that choice you were free to visit their quartermasters and view what potential rewards they were offering. Furthermore through a repeatable hand-in quest you were able to change your alleigance from one faction to the other.

I understand given how intrinsically tied to your personal story, changing Orders is probably off the table. I accept that, that’s absolutely fine – everyone should be able to choose their Order on their own terms.

Choosing your Order at level 26 with no information as to the benefits of doing so like this isn’t an informed choice.

Nemesis, thank you for the videos. I hadn’t actually considered Axe/Focus with Dagger/Warhorn as a back-up weapon kit until you took us back to school on the basics of gap-closing. The videos were clear, concise, gave good examples and were well explained and presented.

Really we should get these videos stickied or something because they’re just that beneficial.

You know what the biggest problem with Death Shroud really is?

You’ve nailed it on the head – Death Shroud, compared to almost all the other profession-defining mechanics occupying the F1-4 keys, is dull and straightforward but above all it is inflexible. It completely goes against the apparent ethos set out as a standard by other professions. There’s no compelling choice other than when to use Death Shroud, and it lacks the tactical depth other professions benefit from. Observe:

A Guardian is allowed to choose between 3 Virtues: Courage (Block next attack, can only happen every 40 seconds, or active component grants it instantly), Justice (Every 5th attack burns, or active to guarantee next attack burns), and Resolve (Passive healing over time, or active component heals you and nearby allies). This is and interesting and fun mechanic because it lets you pick and choose when and where each Virtue’s active will be most useful, and when you can spare the cooldowns.

Rangers have a plethora of interesting passive skills based on their pets – even different breeds of pets from the same family usually offer different functions or conditions/boons.

Heck, Elementalists gain completely different 1-5 key based on what attunement they currently have active. It’s dizzying simply how many choices they have.

Death Shroud? Death Shroud is an adequate idea wrapped in clumsy mechanics. You can’t see your boons or conditions while in Death Shroud (apparently a bug set to be fixed, har har har) and you’re limited to four attacks. All bar one of these have a pretty lengthy cooldown – if you’re not actively being attacked and haven’t gone down the trait line you might be able to fire off Dark Path and Doom twice before your Life Force runs out and you go back to your regular toolkit. And Life Transfer? Forget about it – if you so much as get sneezed on by CC effects then it goes onto cooldown and that’s it – it’s gone for 40 seconds (unsupported by traits). I actively lament having a full Death Shroud bar when I’m out in the world during PvE because it means that I should probably switch into a mode that restricts me to four buttons, none of them particularly compelling outside of Life Transfer after I’ve applied a buttload of conditions and spread them with Epidemic.

But my biggest gripe is that when looking at the traits that do support Death Shroud, it’s like Death Shroud exists for a specific build of Necromancer that hasn’t been fully realised or simply doesn’t exist. To me it shouldn’t just feel just like a second life-bar. I want going into Death Shroud to mean I’m about to get serious and unload a whole bunch of pain on someone’s face. But with slow cast-times on Life Blast and Life Transfer, coupled with cooldowns just a little too long to make use of them more than once per Death Shroud.

Sorry I didn’t mean to potentially hijack the thread, but I needed to get that off my chest. Something. Anything done to Death Shroud to make it more interesting would be greatly appreciated, and at least this is an idea.

Calysto.7469:

I was looking to do dagger/focus also for my weapon setup. And what’s the deal with the starting heal ability? Is it really as crappy as it seems and I should just unlock a new one? Having a low hp, high aggro pet that attacks very slowly for my “passive” healing", no pet hp bar to watch, and losing the heal altogether if the pet dies, seems bad.

Blood Fiend is pretty bad. Well, not bad per say, it’s just outshined by the other two healing spells because of the added utility they bring to the table (Condition cleansing and bonus heal when cleansing those conditions, or an AoE HoT well). Plus, it’s a Necromancer minion, so it’s going to be made of paper and have terrible A.I. Minion Masters might disagree with me on this, but I’ve never played a Minion Master build before so I can’t really comment too much on it.

On the whole, despite the abundant flaws and bugs this profession has, I too would be really interested in seeing what everyone else is rocking in terms of weapon setups, healing/utility/elite skills, and trait lines + which major traits people are grabbing. There is an incredible amount of negativity on this sub-forum at the moment, and with good reason, but for the time being, we should probably work with what we have and open up a discussion regarding builds, preferably without just reverting to “Oh I use the Wellomancer build” or “Condimancer” – you know, like in maths classes: Show your working!

With that in mind, here’s what I’m currently rocking for PvE stuff.

I like this build a whole lot when I’m out in the world. It’s also got some nice advantages in WvWvW due to having two ways to cleans conditions from yourself, and cleansing conditions is vital in that aspect of the game. It’s also got a nice snare, a blind, and a great means to spread diseases which makes it great for holding choke-points on the map or defending a point. The only real change in the build for PvP is I grab Plague instead of Lich Form – Lich Form I use more for PvE champion mobs during events to help burst things down, apply vulnerability, remove boons/conditions etc.

I open with Blood is Power, then pop Deathly Swarm on my dagger. Afterwards I land Grasping Dead and Enfeebling Blood. At this point I pop into Death Shroud and fire off Dark Path to get another stack of bleed going. Leave Death Shroud, let a three-hit combo from my 1-key finish and end with Feast of Corruption. That’s for single target. Because Blood is Power is such a great life force generator, and thanks to the Master of Corruption trait keeping it ready almost every fight, life force builds up quickly, and when my life force is full I pop it, and go all out with Life Blast to build stacks of might as quickly as possible, finishing with a Life Transfer. By that point when I come out of Death Shroud I’ve got a lot of stacks of might to do the job!

It sounds complicated, but when it comes down to what I’m actually pressing it’s 7, 4, 2, 5, F1, 2, F1, 1, 3.

When I’m multi-targeting it’s exactly the same but I delay the Death Shroud. Instead, I switch to my Staff and lay down all my marks, from 2 through to 5. Then I use Epidemic to spread my conditions, go into Death Shroud, and use Life Transfer to do some pretty good AoE damage.