Guild Wars 2

4. Stability, Vigor, Stunbreakers: Where are they?
I have to spend 30 points in a trait line to get acess to 3 seconds of stabilty in death shroud. 30 points is a build-defining amount. I have to spend 3/7 of my points to basically get 3 seconds of stability in a tree where the first choice of 10 point traits are super, super lackluster. I want stability in utilities or somewhere else that is more accessible and practical. We have..no vigor anywhere. Why? Our stunbreakers are bad and can’t be used because our other utilities are too needed by our team, so we have no place to put them. SIMPLE solution that would help necromancers everywhere: Make our deathshroud activation be a stunbreaker with a 30-45 second internal cooldown. Clean, simple solution that would help EVERY single necromancer build.

5. Area damage pressure:
Another class I can’t help but look at when I think of marks and even wells look at the rate at which engineer’s with their grenade kit can impose condition AND direct damage presence in a fight? Their cooldowns are much lower (granted nades are harder to land), but they can sustain a barrage of AE conditions on a point much better than we can on staff. Or a trap ranger..Their traps are on much lower cooldowns and they PULSE their effects. These classes completely outshine our AE damage presence on a point. If someone dodge rolls through my mark it is gone. If you dodge roll through a ranger trap and stay there for a second, you will be hit by the conditions. We need reduced cooldown on at least chillbain’s, and possibly reaper’s by 10-20%. I think putrid mark is fine. I don’t think wells are effective enough either. It is extremely hard to keep someone trapped in your well for its full duration. The “payoff” for doing so is not big enough. Classes have too many escapes or damage avoidance abilities to make them effective. Let’s say you CC someone and get them “trapped” in your wells. You are using anywhere from 2-3 of your utility wells now that all have cooldowns in the 40ish sec+ range. Other classes just have too many escapes to get out of them…Ele (mistform,lightning flash), Mesmer(staff, blink), ranger (protect me), guardian (renewed focus) or (insert class here with condition cleanse/stunbreak/dodge roll out).You use 2-3 big cooldown utilities to attempt that and they used 1 utility that could be on a same or shorter cooldown as yours to completely negate your well rotation. Our cost to attempt this versus their cost to escape is disproportional and unbalanced. The cooldowns should be shorter(with wells possibly having less damage) or the “payoff” should be much bigger with escalating damage with each second spent in a well to the point of significant health loss.

6. Bad traits and fragmentation of trait lines
We have bad, fragmented traits all over the place..In our power tree, our 25 point minor trait is gain might when hit and your health reaches 25%…Why on earth would I want might when MY health reaches 25% health? Let alone one measly stack of it. This should be something like you gain 3-5 stacks of might when your opponent’s health reaches 25% health. That would make a lot more sense. We have a 25 minor trait in the curse(condition) tree that gives us 2% more direct damage for each conditon applied. This only helps out power builds/hybrid builds. This along with scepter 3 needs to get looked at/reworked to be effective in helping/augmenting various builds including condition ones especially since scepter/curse tree are condition genre.

We have our traits spread across all over the place. For example, we have 4 traits that effect staff: Marks deal more damage, Marks are unblockable and bigger, reduced CDs on staff, and marks generate lifeforce on trigger..These 4 traits are spread across THREE different trees, and the marks deal more damage and lifeforce trigger require 20 point investments just to access those! Why is that? Was there deliberate, thoughtful planning and vision when this was done or was this slapped together in about 5 minutes becasue the necromancer class designer has a deadline to make? Compare this to say the Alchemy tree of Engineers. They have ALL things pertaining to their elixirs all neatly packed in one tree, tic tac toe. AND passive boon duration too, so that when they make their HGH builds they get their might stacks/other boons to last longer. to make it such a great tree/set of traits that synergizes with so many options in various builds they have.. How convenient for them! Again, a huge glaring disparity in build potential we have there versus other classes.

Or how about our wells? We have wells are ground targetted as a 20 point trait in the curse tree and reduced cooldowns 20 points into the blood magic tree. Look at ranger traps. They have both traits that affect their traps neatly packed together in the same trait line. Why is that? Who bumbled their way through our terrible class design?

I came across a couple of brilliant posts made by Zzod in the structured pvp forum section, and I believe they deserve a thread of their own, especially in the necro forums.

Enjoy the ride.

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Just off the top of my head:
1. Poor mobility: We have no teleport/leap type moves to gain ground with. In terms of weapons, we only have swiftness on warhorn, which is a weapon you can really only run with a mainhand dagger or axe. Impractical and very limiting. Oh, we also have swiftness on spectral walk, which is a utility that we don’t really have room for on our bar because other more important utilities take it up such as rez signet, movement speed signet, corrupt boon, epidemic, wells, etc.

2. Bad weapon sets: Axe is laughably bad. It doesn’t know what it’s trying to be. The 600 range on it is a very awkard range as its basically pushing you to be in melee range and its really only useable at all as you are gap closing to get into melee dagger range because auto attack on dagger will outdamage the axe. I will talk about its number 2 attack in the channelled attacks section.

Staff: Yes, staff. You can’t really “fight” in staff after you go through your intial rotation of marks. Basically, the cooldowns are too long on the marks, EVEN, with the reduced cooldown trait. At some point, early in the rotation, you will have chillbain’s, Putrid Mark, and Fear Mark on cooldown. The moment that happens you are left with a completely useless autoattack and a mark of blood. You can no longer effectively fight in staff once this happens and you are forced to switch. In fact, I don’t even think the reduced cooldown trait is very valuable because you will still hit the bottleneck scenario of 3,4,5 being on cooldown and then you switch to your other weapon set. You then fight in that other weaponset for enough time that when you switch back to staff, chillbain’s and putrid will be off of cooldown and reaper’s will be coming back within 5-6 seconds. You aren’t really increasing your “effective” uptime of marks because you can’t/don’t spend prolonged periods of time in staff actually fighting with an autoattack and mark of blood. Futhermore, compare this MISERABLE auto attack to a Mesmer Greatsword autoattack that hits like a mack truck and the farther away you are..the harder you hit. It is just cranking out significant damage at 1200 range and it plenty strong enough to stay in this weapon set until the other weapon skill cooldowns are back. It is not even close to the case with necromancer. It makes no sense. At max range, you are reducing your exposure to damage because you aren’t susceptible to other player’s attacks that don’t have the same weapon range as you and yet that is the range in which their weapon hits hardest..Shouldn’t reward (damage) come with risk? (closer distance) and not the other way around? Did the same person/team really design a mesmer GS autoattack and necro staff autoattack? I feel like it is two different games when I look at the huge disparity in effectiveness.

Scepter: The auto attack on scepter is just OK. The poison on it should last longer and/or be applied earlier in the chain. I even think the attack speed could be raised 10-15%. I think number 2 grasping dead should have a 2 stack of bleed on it and not 1. Number 3 is only valuable in a hybrid/power based build. This needs to get reworked to benefit condition users.

Main hand Dagger: Basically, with this build you are trying to be a “melee burst class” that uses various CC options to keep people rooted and trapped while you spam auto attack with our dagger. Cool. Except, a thief does the role of a “melee burst class” with more damage and more mobility and with access to stealth. So, why would you take a spot on a team to do this when a thief can just do it better? You have to evaluate all these builds that people call “viable” in terms of the opportunity cost of what you are giving up to bring this build into a match.

3. Chanelled attacks:
Another issue with two of our attacks is the axe 2 chanelled ability and number 4 death shroud. It is VERY hard to get the full duration out on them because you have to be closer to your targets and we are the class that is the most susceptible to CC because we have no stability. You start the attack and there is a huge chance in the thick of a fight SOMETHING happens that causes you to get interuppted. Touch a elementalist shocking aura, Boom..cancelled. Or get hit by their updraft or earthquake..cancelled. Touch a guardian ring of warding…Boom cancelled…or get knocked down by their hammer, pulled by their greatsword, knocked down by shield bubble or bump a sanctuary as you are strafing..cancelled..Get stunned/dazed by a ranger/thief/mesmer, etc..cancelled. Oh, but zzod you can get stability in death shroud!..for a whole 3 seconds! Yes, I can…Yes, I can…which brings me to my next point.