Guild Wars 2

Alex Shatter.7956:

Gretzel.6790:

Alex Shatter.7956:

I think the real problem with PvP is much more severe: the game is old and people are bored. This game released in 2012-ish and the adrenaline is gone. PvE is expected to age gracefully because it attracts long time fans and casuals, but PvP appeals to short term players who have by now discovered other, newer, better competitive games.

WoW released in 2004 and still has tons and tons of players. Many many more players than GW2 does.

WoW is also one of the most infamously popular video games of all time. That and Starcraft were the League of Legends of their day, and will always have fans. Gw2 never, ever had or was expected to gain that much momentum. All I’m saying is, it isn’t completely Anet’s fault PvP is dying. A lot of it is just natural death

Gw2 was seen as a wow-killer back in it’s dev days when they showed that the various walls and circles would not be crappy, tiny and ineffectual pre-built lines(much like Anet’s (un)balance team, but be able to be drawn with the mouse, because at that time, it had actual innovation, as opposed to what they released.

Its beyond just necro, and has been for about a year before HoT came out.

The balance team has fallen into the shiny toys trap that many game developers fall into. They see a new idea, introduce it. It then becomes the meta standard, and they then balance everyone to that new idea, hoping to get everyone to the meta.
When the meta gets stale, they introduce a newer, more powerful new idea, and repeat the process until you get roughly where we are now, where you are either invulnerable, or die, with no middle ground.

I don’t think Anet has the guts to do what needs to be done, and pull everyone back to the lowest DPS required for clearing raids, and re-specialize the classes to enforce teamwork. Its telling that Necro, arguably the only class remaining that benefits from teamwork, is now seen as a weak class because it relies on a team!

Lahmia.2193:

Crinn.7864:

Lahmia.2193:

I will say I am absolutely 100% dead against any kind of split second cooldown upon entering shroud. They already tried it with reapers shroud in beta and people hated it.

Not on entering shroud. On exiting shroud.

As in you enter shroud, but will not be able to exit for another 1/4th second after you entered.
I honestly cannot think of a situation where you would willingly want to enter and then exit shroud within a quarter of a second.

I say this because I’ve been told in the past that the bug is because the game will “queue” skills in order to making casting more fluid. However with instant no CD abilities like the enter-exit shroud the game will sometimes both activate the ability and queue it at the same time.

Yes that’s what I said. They added a cooldown, in beta, so you couldn’t doubled tap shroud. And people hated it, they they removed it.

As I recall, it was hated because the condi builds had no reason to stay in shroud, but benefited from the fury that entering shroud provided.

Now that condi builds have a reason to stay in shroud, that issue probably doesn’t exist for most builds.

I would take it back to what appears to be the original design, of a class that gets a strong, but infrequent and shorter-lived shroud, using the base water shroud and LF gain as starting points.

Base Necro in the water is quite a bit harder to gain LF, but the base underwater shroud is then allowed to be considerably more powerful, because you can’t burn through shroud, hit 2-3 buttons and be back up at full shroud again in 6-7 seconds.

Well, the question is: Do you really want to? I use the same three trees, but have stuck with Zerker.

Reaper’s Onslaught, and Vital Persistence really only shine when there are lots of mobs dying around you, ideally sequentially(like, say, solo, open world PvE or to a lesser degree, non-bossfights in dungeons, for any kind of bossfight you get the crappy half of Reaper’s Onslaught, meaning your dps isn’t quite as high as you’d like.

Also you don’t really need Unyielding Blast as your other sources of Vuln(like Bitter Chill or GS3) provide more than enough, and if there are other people involved, it just becomes overkill. If you’re going to stick with staff, best to drop down to Soul Marks anyways and make it slightly less unbearable.

I use Speed of Shadows and either:

• Foot in the Grave to get a reliable, short stunbreak, 3 sec stability and a nice movement speed boost in Shroud
• Dhuumfire for that relatively meaningless, but it still counts, fire damage, since you’re reliably high might it’s not completely useless, just almost entirely so.

Anyways, your choice, but going Valk means you do drop a good amount of DPS outside of shroud.

MethaneGas.8357:

They nerfed Dragonhunter though… what they did buff was base guardian virtues and staff skills. Let’s be real though, base guardian virtues are trash when compared to Dragonhunter and buffing them won’t really do much except maybe bring back a support guardian… and base guardians don’t even have the annoying traps… traps….. which now won’t even daze you now. Hallelujah.

I hope what this means is that they are looking at base specs so hopefully Deathshroud will receive buffs as well. Putting down a bet – if Deathshroud does get buffs next patch, I will give everyone on this forum 1000 gold.

(just kidding, maybe 1 copper?)

They’re slowly nerfing most OP things, which imo is a good thing. The process took a long @$$ time (1 year lmfao).

They’re just removing the ability to stack a long daze off a few chained hits. They did it to Scrapper, now they’re hitting DH.

Yeah, the Abom needs to be in the middle of a group of grubs, not on an edge, going with an AoE setup instead of a boss fight setup is probably the most important thing in that fight.

My hypothesis is that they do play the classes, but the almost* all of them don’t play them beyond a very beginner level, barely even understanding how to dodge at all(this is backed up because I know people in the video game industry, and they are immensely overworked, and so don’t get time to sit down and have fun.

At that level, the classes have a completely different balance than what veterans know is the real situation.
At that level,

• Ax auto is a god. No Projectile! Instant Hit!
• OMG Rise is OP! They get all these pets! AND damage reduction!
• What! the necro has a 2nd health bar!
• Lich form makes me so powerful!
• Epidemic? Oh I use it but it never seems to do anything(so yes, it does work both ways, which is why Ele is so consistently OP, Because they don’t know what they’re doing. )

Anchoku.8142:

Necromancer is a condition management class. Unfortunately, other professions do not need that skill.

Thanks to ridiculous continuous power creep, other classes do not need that skill anymore.

Remember when Guard and Necro, and sorta Mesmer, were the only classes that could clear condis, or at least return them to sender? When the greatest weakness of a warrior or an ele was a long duration condi that they had no way of clearing by themselves?

Its my favourite power build for open world, or if I’m going into new content and am unsure. Currently experimenting with a straight up shroud build of SR, DM and Reaper that uses chill for might gen and stays in shroud long, using reapers on-kill CD reduction.

Yeah, I’ve been using that build pretty much since Hot dropped for open world content, but I use focus instead of OH dagger and swap out the heal for CC as needed.

Its certainly survivable, and is easily great when you are going into a new zone and don’t know what you are going to find, the mindless condi clear is addictive.

That said, soul reaping does do more damage (mostly through greater trait synergy despite the reduced power, but also reduced CDs), but as you said, is squishier.

Main issue it has is that the power boost from toughness, might gen, vuln application and your condi-clear want you to stay in shroud as much as possible, but lack of soul reaping really hurts that.

Shrouded removal only needs a %LF gen every time it procs.

Looks like fun and I could see the well totally throwing people off guard. One thing I would try is swapping out well of suffering? Poison Cloud(CPC), or particularly well of corruption(you get protection, dark field and LF still, baddies now get de-booned?) CPC would let you swap to Martyr, which has it’s uses. (More before they nerfed it into the ground though)

I could be totally wrong though.

They’ve already said why they will never balance ax.

They place far too much importance in a range weapon that is unable to be reflected and has no travel time. This is why it’s damage is kitten, it has no combo finishers or fields, only gives a single vuln per attack and has an atrocious animation that only exists to be a giant telegraph that an attack is coming.

As for “balances”

Nerf to rise, most likely along the lines of removing the damage reduction completely(using the argument that Death Magic has added toughness and condition Xfer.)

Nerf to Sceptre, I’d expect them to remove the torment, and probably a longer autoattack chain.

Just because “necro is in the middle” has never been a reason for Anet to not nerf necros.

Foreword: I levelled necro at launch, when core necro was the closest it has ever been to being balanced. I’m also nervous about saying anything remotely good, since the “balance” team seems to take any positive statements from necros as necros being overpowered. This is also only my opinion on things.

Core weapon set, if you’re going power:
Staff – Best used for only a few purposes:
1) Use it for it’s condition transfer and blast finisher(less important than transfer)( #4) and Fear (#5) Both are on long cooldowns.
2) Swap to it just before you go into Death Shround(in a build based on that) because it provides the highest base damage
3) Use it to aggro things from 1200m before switching to a weapon that can actually hurt things. (Fire at target, run around corner, mob(s) come to you where you can dagger them.

Your mandatory skill tree is Spite. It’s the core of damage-dealing on Necro.

Your main weapon set should either be:
Dagger/Warhorn – More reliable for non-death-shroud, but you’re melee range. You do get a stun, an immobilize and decent swiftness and a steady, if slow, drip of life force. Dagger main hand auto attack is base necro’s highest damage skill.
→ If you go this , use Blood Magic for dagger and vampiric abilities that will help you survive out of death shroud. Can either go vampiric or well based builds in this tree.

The other choice for a power set is
Ax/Focus – Tends to be much more burst damage than dagger, although over time it is less. Ax has the advantage of range, and unlike staff, it’s auto attack cannot be reflected. Good for building up vulnerability and the combo of focus(4) and Ax(2) can give a very respectable portion of your life force bar quite quickly.
→ For this I actually like to go Death Magic. It gives you the option of a stronger and decently tankier Death Shroud, or gives you the option of running minion master.

Now, for your third choice you can either pick the other of the two(Death Magic or Blood Magic, respectively) which will make you tankier than you really need to be while levelling.

However the more reliable damage choice is to take Soul Reaping. Your first skill can be whatever you want, your 2nd pretty much has to be Vital Persistence, and your third is usually best served as the +50% crit boost while in Death Shroud.

If you want to run conditions, your main weapon set should be
Sceptre/Dagger(off hand), and you’ll want to run Spite+Curses+X(Where X is usually Blood Magic, but can be Soul Reaping.)

They’ve already admitted to be too incompetent to balance ax properly because they feel that it’s lack of travel time or ability to reflected(on any of it’s skills) is a “massive advantage.”

This is why
a) the damage sucks.
b) It has little synergy with other skills
c) all of the ax skills have huge, very easily spotted telegraphs and large lead-up times before the damage actually hits or is a channel).

If massive permanent reflect bubbles were present everywhere, then this would matter, and should be accommodated accordingly. As is, however, there is no reason ax shouldn’t be treated the same as a projectile weapon because of the massive lead-in animations.

What you are missing in your analysis, and the analysis of anyone who thinks this is at all a good change is that yes, they stack, but the point of the chill damage was to provide a bit of front loaded damage instead of damage that relies on the target not cleansing, blocking, dodging or dying for 8-16 seconds.

This change completely misses that point.

Also, yay. More. Bleed. Stacks. Never mind anything interesting like torment or hell, burning, (burning cold, it’s a rather common theme in fantasy).

Actually, yes, that screenshot does say that Necro is not OP.

It would say that Necro is SEEN as op, but is actually balanced. I mean, look at the scores. It suggests that the blue ranger and only one of the other necros worked very well together(just the two of them alone beat your team’s score), with the 2nd good necro helping out slightly better than you did.

My 2c:

In PvE, people hate(d) on Necro because it was, what I have seen referred to as a “debuff tank.” Through usage of boon denial and conversion, and some of the more debilitating conditions(fear, poison, weakness, cripple) we, in theory, could tank content in much the same way as a boon-reliant guardian, just we weaken the target instead of buffing the team. At least that was the theory.

In reality, the defiant boon rendered the entire concept behind the necromancer class all but useless for PvE, but they couldn’t rebalance our abilities around that because of the other side.

The other side: PvP. In PvP we were, and remain, a hard counter to the arguably most common(and most commonly referred to as OP) classes in the game. With boon conversion and condition-redirection we could turn the very power of their boon-reliant classes in a weakness. This is why the necro forum has, and will always get, tons of eles in here complaining that necro is “ridiculously OP” for the last 3 years.

<- Only PvE casual player(i.e. grain of salt, since I’m not doing anything hard).

Where do you find minions useful?
→ When the going gets tough as extra damage sponges, also as counter-condition.
Where do you find minions not useful?
→ Anything not specifically condition based damage.
Would you use a full set of minions without minion traits
→ No. The whole point of minions for me is to run a counter-condi build with crazy DS survivability(best I did was maintaining 35 stacks of poison(and not dying) during a Silverwastes middle path boss, DS was pulling them onto me and keeping me alive as fast as the minions were pulling them off me back onto the boss.) The LF gained from that was nerfed the week after I did that. That nerf is probably my fault, in all reality.
would you use one minion with minion traits
→ Flesh Golem.
would you use one minion without minion traits
→ Flesh Golem.
which gear sets would you use minions with?
Welp, only really have sets 1 + 2, and of those I stick to 2 for that.

Lily.1935:

All my testing says axe is bad at everything… I wouldn’t touch it for PvE except for those very fringe situations. I have a berserker’s axe and staff (ascended of course), and I’ve always come to the same conclusion. Its always I need more control, I need more aoe, I need more life force. Something that the staff provides more of in spades than the axe. Even when trying to strip boons the axe under preforms since it only corrupts one boon. Its better for you to just kill your foes flat out than play with boons in PvE.

And to me. Axe is just getting worse and worse. 900 range didn’t give it anything for me. Its still a garbage weapon. And now its a garbage weapon at 900 range and completely impossible to balance it properly because of its incredibly terrible design.

Yeah, for PvE Ax is total garbage compared to staff, I mean, none of the ax attacks can be reflected, compared to massive telegraphs for marks and a joke of an AA for staff. (This is precisely why the Ax auto was changed to drop the damage in the back half of the cast, Rob mentioned this)

You totally can’t get enough burst to kill normal anti-power mob in a few hits.

The idea of using it as an opener, as a way to stack chill, get 15-20+ stacks of vuln, build LF AND get retal on you before you either go to RS, D/Wh or GS? Preposterous!

The only thing to really note about the chill-based condi builds is that in group situations it only works if you are the only source of chill in the group. If anyone else overwrites your chill, it stops damaging.

If solo, the chill condi builds are fun and worthwhile. If in a group, don’t bother with chill damage, it will just get overwritten and then you’re out damage.

It functions nicely as a burst/support weapon. It’s not a main weapon, but if you’re power(and not overly worried about being swamped with condi), A/F provides a nice quick downtime.

Ax3+Ax2 also is a way to quickly kill a Chak Zapper if it has a shield up.

Exotic Sinister armor with Ascended half calv/half zerk accessories(curse/soul/reaper), seeing ~950dmg ticks before any might, seeing >600 ticks from dumbfire.

If I’m soloing, it’s a thing of beauty. There is the bug though that as soon as any other player applies a chill, they overwrite my damaging one.

As for Focus becoming a condi – Sadly nope, because with chilling darkness you’re better off with the condi xfer AND the chill.

Heaven forbid that the weapons on a class actually have niches that they work on!

To think, that the developers had the gall to not just give us 5 weapon skills, and whatever combination of weapons we equipped would be exactly those same 5 skills!

The shame of it all that there are mobs that actually require some planning and thought to approaching, and that just going 100% melee all the time against them may not be the best solution!

The horror of it all that they went out and gave PvE players a bone after nerfing PvE necro into the ground because PvP necro needed X or Y for 3 years.

GS is fine as is. It isn’t intended as a high level PvP weapon, and very clearly never was.

Truth be told, as having only played open world HoT in my scrapper thus far:
The function(rez) drone avoids all those massive AoE circles and definitely seems to help.

Medic Drone is all kinds of awesome for both toolkit and the healing itself.

Bulwark is very similar, it’s projectile reflect is awesome.

Stealth Drone is good, and would be used if it was at all feasible to melee in HoT.

Combat is too mobile for the shredder to be useful, and besides, for what it’s worth, hammer 2 beats it.

Condi drone would be useful without access to a light field, or MM Necros, who rely on other people having conditions.

Hammer I haven’t used for actual damage, used it mostly as extra utilities.

My theory as a developer myself is that the story marker isnt being placed in the Hot version of SW.

Lauren Kamieniecki.6245:

Cozza.2836:

Lauren Kamieniecki.6245:

LovingFaces.3658:

Yes i have purchased the HoT expansion. and no im not a complete idiot. I think.

Nobody thinks that

Any update? Since I am just sat here refreshing the forum every two minutes, waiting for a fix, instead of enjoying the game like everyone else has for the past 10 or so hours… :/

We have devs working on it and we have QA attacking it too. Testers are pretty down the workaround they thought of didn’t work.

We would like to know if switching your active story to a different one and back clears up anything.

I know you guys are really bummed, and trust me I would be out for blood too. Development is doing everything they can to resolve this as fast as possible and we’re trying to get them additional information to solve this as quickly as possible.

Tried that with switching to season 2. No luck. Wonder if possible to tp to a friend who hasnt started the prologue and is in SW to get to the previous version of SW with the story marker.

Samething happened with my main last night. Got to the cutscene, it hung, windows 10 shut it down, got back in and nothing. In the HoT version of SW with the rally area, with no way to restart story. I submitted a bug report last night.

Also used tp to a friend to do what your tester suggested before he came up with it. Even grouping with someone who hasnt done the prologue doesnt start anything,they just zone out with no message for me to follow them.

Not just you. Anyone who had any sort of connection issue or crash during any part of the prologue is completely locked out of HOT content. This is a serious issue, and that Anet is ignoring it, calling this a “perfect launch” is an insult.

Kotte.2460:

i like axe. axe is life axe is love

This. All 3 betas I used GS+A/F. A/F gave me a ranged burst and was usually enough to fill up enough LF as well as using spinal shivers/reaper’s touch as an opener to spread chill and get some vuln stacks going. Ax post buff makes that mix nicer, since I can start a bit farther away.

We know from the raid boss that they looked at health gating to break the zerker meta, and likely implemented it. It’s a common enough tactic, and worked very nicely in wow dungeons and raids to force dps and healers to not just go complete damage/healing stats, as well as provide a bit of an entry hurdle.

Health gating gives Necro a fairly sizeable bonus. It makes Necro more desirable, since our high base health and LF pool(in worst case scenarios) means that we can devote more stats towards zerker/sinister stats than an ele or engie.

This also brings up an experiment I am eager to see: how the minion change affects the health gating mechanic of the boss we saw.

Rym.1469:

Oh, quite nice touch with the name! I like it!

I’d love some Legendary with Lovecraftian name. Maybe Greatsword, considering Reaper is the only one getting it as new weapon?

Hastur maybe?

Now see, that makes me think of Good Omens and the late(and utterly phenominal) Sir Pratchett.

Sto-Helit perhaps, with flavour text of Non Temetis Messor? (Which would also require a Death of Rats minipet.)

The leap on RS2 seems to be spotty to land, but it may just be getting lost in Necro actually having some flashy graphics that I’m not used to.

The whirls on GS2 and RS4 make life very nice, and it feels great to finally be able to meaningfully contribute to the combo system.

Reaper GS feels much more at home on 2-3+ than on single mobs/bosses, and that is, from the content you’ve provided, precisely what was intended.

RS definitely feels more ambivalent about attacking a group, and doesn’t feel like a kitten against a big boss like the GS can.

That said:
Reaper GS just doesn’t work in single-mob raid units like we’ve seen so far. RS can survive nicely as it has slightly better range than GS, and traited to Death Magic gets that little bit more toughness. GS itself though is suicide, because of the shorter melee range, lack of mobility and mitigation. I wonder if changing the Beyond the Veil to be a 2-second Aegis would be a better solution(down from a 3 sec Protection).

GS5 still doesn’t work on slopes, and actually seems to be less reliable than the last weekend, it would:
- Not do anything at all because the mob was on a hill(I.E. the switchback paths). On hills, at least this 90% of the time, otherwise 50% of the time. It seems to have a max angle it works at, and that angle is less than the slopes on the hill.

When it did hit:
- Knock them over where they stood, 20% of the time
- Pull them halfway and knock them over, 50% of the time
- Pull them all the way and knock them over, but then offset them 300-500 either side of my stationary char. 15% of the time when it did work – This only happened on flat ground.
- Work as intended 20% of the time.

Tempest is, if anything, overpowered.

E.G. Today in verdant brink there was an ele running around 3-shotting the mounted veteran mordrem.

I have to say that for PVE, tempest is perfect and is precisely what Ele needs to be. It is a beautiful team class that as tempest drops down long-duration fields that can be repeatedly combo’ed

It provides great staying power and group utility, while not increasing the solo abilities of an already too-powerful class.

It should absolutely not get any more condi cleanse than it already has, as that would place it over the top.

He has a few points.

1) Ice bow is broken. In other news water is wet. Everyone except the developers has known this since even before the FGS nerf. (This also deflates the notion that the developers have some brilliant ‘master plan’)

2) Likewise, Reaper does great damage. This time it’s that ice is cold. ooh. So insightful. Such wow.

3) Saving time warp for at least sub 50%, and likely best case is 25%, just like Bloodlust back in Wow. This is logical and a great point that the mesmer community(and anyone else with group quickness) should definitely consider.

Now, for my issues with it:

He does a few obvious math tricks that he didn’t need to: Counting the pre-fight buffing in DPS calcs is arguably cherry-picking evidence, since he clearly swaps at least utilities, and probably traits before fights depending on adds or not. One can argue either way.

The other is in claiming that debuffs are just as valid as buffs. Vuln is important, and frankly it’s everywhere and everyone as a groups brings enough that it should never be an issue to max it out. That little defiance irritation though guts the important debuffs that necro brings, like reliable Weakness uptime and Chill that reduce their group viability, and by extension ours by a very large margin.

Lastly, he talks about sustained DPS while running one of the most burst-happy weapon groups, necro A/F, using some of the most burst-happy skills, wells/epidemic, and the most burst-happy elite, Lich.

Now, for the fun part. Deducing the Nosferatu spec:
Obviously:
Spite, 1/3/2. maxing A/F and not having a signet leaves no other choice, A/F with those traits also means you’re never using Ax1 for any period of time(which is what he does, only using it as filler between bigger skills.
Blood, 3,3,1, that much is obvious.
Now, the last one seems to be Curses(2/2/3) because of the fury when he pops DS, and makes the most sense for a hybrid build.

Gear seems to be a mix of celestial and zerker, ax and focus make sense to be zerker, s/w make most sense as sinister.
Just played around with what I had, kept zerker armor with strength, swapped out accessories and rings for rampager exotics, rampager WH and sinister Scepter. Worked very well.

Robert, please stop pretending like that is actually how it works, since a quick analysis proves that completely wrong.

You said: Mesmers and Necros are built to provide the fields for others to blast.

Why then, are most, if not all the fields on skills with very long cooldowns, when the classes that are supposed to be blasting the fields in your statement there have tons of short-CD fields that they can blast on their own?

Mesmer:
Traited for CD reductions and duration increases where possible:(Best case scenario!)
Focus 4 gets a 5 sec light field, 20 sec CD. 25% uptime.
Staff 5 has a 6 sec ethereal field, 35 sec CD. 17% uptime.

GS2: Projectile, 6.5 sec CD.
Pistol 4: projectile, 20% change, 16 sec CD.
Pistol 5: projectile, 25 sec CD.
Sword 5: Leap, 12 sec CD.
Focus 4: Blast, 30sec CD.

Utilities:
Feedback, 8 sec reflect and a 8 sec Ethereal field, 32 sec CD. 25% uptime
Null Field, 7 sec anti-boon/conti, 7 sec Ethereal field, 32 sec CD. 21.75% uptime
Veil, 8 sec light field + stealth 72 sec CD. 11% uptime.
Time Warp, 12 sec Ethereal field on a 3 min CD. 6.67% uptime.

Note that of the 8 fields, none of them have an uptime greater than 25%.
If you combine all the ethereal fields, you can get a max 60% uptime per 35 seconds, with a peak of 94% uptime in 35 seconds once every 3 minutes.

Ele.
Traited for CD reductions: (Best case scenario!)
Utility:
Tornado: 150sec CD, 15 sec lightning field and whirl finisher!

Fire:
Staff 2, 4 second fire field on 4 second CD. 100% uptime.
Staff 4, 6 second fire field on 13.5 sec CD. 44.4% uptime.
Focus 4, 8 second fire field on 13.5 sec CD. 59.26% uptime.

Sceptre 2, blast finisher, 4 sec CD.
Sceptre 3, blast finisher, 13.5 sec CD.

Water:
Staff 3: water field, 2 sec duration, 13.5 sec CD. 14.81% uptime
Staff 5: water field, 6 sec duration, 30.5 sec CD. 19.67% uptime

Dagger 3: blast, 10 sec CD.
Focus 5: Blast 16.75 sec CD.

Lightning:
Staff 5: lightning field, 4 sec CD, 26.75sec CD. 14.95% uptime

Earth:
Staff 1: Projectile, 100% chance. Has .75sec cast.
Staff 5: Projectile, 100% chance, 20 sec CD.

Staff 2: Blast, 4 sec CD.
Dagger 3: Projectile AND Leap, 8 sec CD.
Dagger 4: Blast, 30.25 sec CD.
Dagger 5: Blast, 20 sec CD, 3,25 sec cast.
sceptre 1: Projectile, 20% chance
Focus 4: Blast, 16.75 sec CD

So while Ele has fewer fields at 6, they have a number of fields with a 100% uptime! A staff ele can easily blast it’s self-produced fire fields 3 times in 35 seconds, and can projectile-finish another 3 fire fields in the same time.

If they just want to sit there and provide fields for Others to blast, in the same 35 sec CD, an ele using staff can provide 11 fire fields, 5 water fields, and 2 lightning fields.

This does not by any method approach what you said in “Mesmers and Necros provide fields for other to blast.” The reality is that Elementals provide fields for other Elementals(if they choose to not do it themselves!) to finish.

Things they can do to make it difficult but useful to necros:

Add singleton group buffing units that need to be periodically separate from the cluster, instantly TP back to group if immobilized or knocked down when out of cluster. Using fear/chill/cripple to keep them out while the McGuffin happens.

The boss gets a debuff that can only be cleared by laying down certain fields(E.G. Dark/Poison/Light) and and maybe combo-ing them.

That for once in gw2, stacking is inadvisable. (NOTE: This would require actual skill on the part of the AI team, and foresight from the element-err-balance team, so we may be out of luck there.)

It’s going to look a ton like my ele. Or possibly my Engi, if they actually come to their senses and balance ele at all.

Since the trait system rebuild, there is no difference at cap between an adept trait and a GM trait. You’re locked into the trait line any way you look at it.

As for weakness – Yeah, and engi elixir gun gets 100% weakness uptime. Honestly the game is fun, but horridly balanced, the balance devs seem to each go their own way and do 0 cross-team communication.(See Daredevil getting finishers on dodge and generally everywhere they can possibly fit the combo mechanic vs Necro and Mesmer…, who don’t get combos on weapons, only on utilities with very long CDs, and are best used for things other than a combo.)

Enemies like Husk Copper, the Thresher in Amber, and SW mid.

My experience is taking UM and one of Shrouded Removal/Necromantic Corruption. You provide massive support against condi-heavy bosses while in DS, clearing(or xferring) condis and allowing you to stay in DS for a very long time. Works far better than the reflects too, since it allows the rest of the group to focus on outright damage instead of stopping to build reflect walls. It is unfortunate that UM needs a 2nd whole trait line to be at all useful, but that is the incompetence of the necro development team for you.

Before it was nerfed to 7%, I was able to by-myself support an entire group on that boss, surviving with a standard 25+ stack of poison on me while in an MM build.

Ways to improve AI that would make necro better:
Get rid of the anti-cliff pull protection that all mobs enjoy. If you can pull a mob to it’s death, great.

Allow fear to work on bosses, at least as a stun.

Allow weakness to work on bosses. We have the same application rate of weakness as ele has, and unlike theirs, ours works at range(!Lightning Dagger 2) alongside our DPS. , and isn’t a massive Group DPS gimp(!Earth Staff 1).

Chill isn’t just for kiting. Remember that it also should affect all their skill cooldowns and attack speed, if that actually worked on bosses, necro would instantly gain a place in all groups, because less time spent dodging the big 1HKOs means more time spent dpsing.

Who said we bring blind? Eng brings blind by the truckload, and in more reliable forms than necro does. What necro brings is fear, chills, cripples, poison and weakness, not in any particular order; as well as second-to-none group condi management. Omitted vuln because while we’re good at it, so are most of the other classes, so it’s a moot point.

What we do bring to the table is a debuff tank. We have the large health pool and undervalued damage of a tank, but instead of buffs we have debuffs and anti-boon skills.

The issue isn’t quite what is wrong with necro, but rather what is wrong with the whole AI design of PvE. The first and foremost issue is defiance. It’s a horrid cop-out of a system. This is evident in the SW, as defiance doesn’t appear quite so much, tankier necro builds make a lot of the fights significantly easier.

WvW necro has been at least reliable for a while, and the blood magic/signet rework boosted us to the middle of the pack for PvP. The issue is that in PvE, mob AI leans too heavily on the crutch of defiance instead of actual AI.

ZDragon.3046:

spoj.9672:

Im against this. If they made it a breakbar they would slap a huge ICD on it. And FitG is a very good trait as it is right now because it has no ICD. Especially in CC heavy encounters in PvE (not so common right now but HoT has plenty by the looks of it). And fractals has a few places where it is really useful already.

So I say no to making FitG become a breakbar because that would be a nerf. Im all for us getting a breakbar elsewhere though.

You must be insane to be against it lol. Break bars come with a massive risk on using them if they get broken.
AND
DS already has a cd itself.
AND
If you can only get it while in DS and its only up while DS is up plus you have to give up a trait for it i think its totally fair for it not to have a ICD.
PLUS
Once the bar is broken its gone and the only way to get it back would be to re trigger DS which has a 10second cd.

And what are you some insane guy who uses foot in the grave as it is now. Be honest aside form the initial break stun that 3s stability stack is not doing anything for you lol.

I would note that a very good reason to be against it, is that against all odds and every piece of evidence, they actually think that Necro is one of the strongest classes in the game, not one of the weakest. Until they think otherwise(which, as the BWE shows, actually playing the class and looking at it’s results works!) Asking for things that the class needs to be relevant will be ignored or come with massive and punitive nerfs.

Atticus.7194:

jadaniel.4910:

Lol, idk 10 second insta stun breaker, auto leap into earther shaker, anti projectile with a kittening fist, personal fire field that follows you around…doesn’t sound like ele to me.

There’s a lot misrepresented in your comment I’m afraid.

• Um every stun break is instant*
  - What autoleap are you talking about? Earthshaker has always had a leap associated with it.
  - Our “anti projectile with a kittening fist” skill only reflects projectiles for 2… that’s right, 2 seconds so I wouldn’t get too overwhelmed.
  - You mean the personal fire field that lasts 5 seconds, applies 1 second burning (except for the final tick which is 5 seconds) and has a 25 second cooldown? Yea, that’s actually not that great, so again I wouldn’t get too excited.

People are going nuts about how supposedly OP Berserkers will be but once you get into the nitty gritty details they’re not actually that amazing so I wish everyone would calm down.

Play a Necro. Has stun breakers with cast time.

Lynnie.7213:

Ravezaar.4951:

The stability GM-trait is an insult and a slap in the face of Reaper, we got something ok with Enfuse Terror and thye get PERMA Stab, the also get a better Unholy Sanctory… that Master is imho the best Master Trait presented sofar.

Tho Warrior have already bin Necros hard counter this Elite Specc just widens the gap to Necro further, a gap we closed slightly due to Reaper Shroud being Melee based.

Strongest Elite Spez to date.

I think they want to make the specializations look so good in order to sell HoT, because let’s be fair, the price and what it offers so far is not that attractive., that they forgot about balance. This thing is just broken in so many ways.

It seems more like there are two teams doing the balancing with completely different thoughts on how to approach balance.

In base classes, you have revenant, necro, mesmer and increasingly thief who are balanced around the optimal potential ability, regardless of how ‘fun’ it feels.

On the other hand, you have most notably Ele and Warrior, who are balanced around average potential ability, and whether it feels ‘fun’. Opposite to thief, eng seems to be taking the opposite route, going from being balanced around optimal potential to average potential. In all of those cases they have gained new abilities and branched out to the point that their former weaknesses are now in cases their strongest suit, and have retained all previous abilities.

On the new specs you see the same thing happening.
Necro and Guardian, among others, are clearly balanced around an optimal potential, in addition to actually trading off some inherent ability for abilities in an area they were lacking before(for necro, it’s the ability to be competent at mid-range combat to gain point-blank AOE and 10-20sec ICDs on abilities that other classes get with half that ICD, if any at all).

But then you hit mesmer, ele and warrior specs, that are clearly balanced around an average and ability to have fun, and don’t trade anything away, but instead offer massive bonuses with no downside.

Like zerker, want perma burning with free condi-cleanse on a tiny CD, to the point that you’re immune to CDs? Sure! Want your condi traits and skills to be also make great power builds, sure, no problem! Oh, a class who has a core weakness of being vulnerable to kiting, well, that doesn’t sound like fun, so have perm stab.

Oh, a class that is intended to be a bunker and is defensive in nature has massive issues with kiting? you get 3 sec stab every 7 seconds, because it’s not fun to face perm stab.

Oh you already have a skill that transfers condis on AA, and have had it like that since launch, and we’ve never touched it(except to fix actual bugs on it)? And you also have a trait just recently added that will clear a condi every 3 seconds, meaning that switching out the trait to mirror the existing functionality of a core underwater skill is clearly not overpowered and you’re just talking out your kitten?

Take Chilling Force and Blighter’s boon. With those, Spite and Soul Reaping’s vital persistence, you’re looking at the ability to stay in RS under pressure quite easily.

Throw in suffer and weaklings in there, and you’re looking at quick LF refills.

My only issue is that Soul Reaping’s Vital Persistence trait is all but mandatory because of the LF decay reduction.

As someone who did play the BWE: Yes.
While it is a beautiful thing for AoE damage, things with anti-melee AOE fields(like threshers in SW for example) become absolutely brutal to attack. Because of the frequent short chills though, teragriffs became much easier.

One note: as was mentioned, GS was massively under-tuned and really wasn’t worth using in the BWE, as such, hopefully in the next BWE and in release, RS won’t be the only reliable source of damage for shroud knights, which should lessen the need for the soul reaping line.

You steer towards Soul Reaping and Spite for lines. You can’t get rid of soul reaping because:
a) Vital Persistence.
b) Vital Persistence.
c) Either a good, reliable source of extra vuln(and thus extra crit if you have decimate defences), or an excellent source of crit.
d) Vital Persistence.
Did I mention Vital Persistence? Realistically, half of VP’s LF decay reduction should be made baseline for RS, and VP updated to only provide half the decay reduction in RS, so that the skill is still useful, but not outright required for Reaper.

Equally, and particularly in a boon-base shroud knight, you are gimping yourself without might on RS-AA and might on signet use that spite provide.

Now, in a boon build I noticed that the LF gen is fast enough that you can swap out Vital Persistence for another line.

As for weapons, if you’re running GS, you’re not running dagger/WH unless you really like being a helpless pinball without any range ability at all.

Overall, if you like playing from range, or have to for certain bosses, you will not be using shroud knight.

To be entirely honest:

I actually liked ax/focus + GS for reaper(blighter’s boon based build), and I don’t think a complete rewrite of ax is necessary.

That said, the only purpose of ax/focus was to start with focus 5, get a focus 4 off(+ might and can rely on a crit from chilling nova for more might), get ax 2 off, and then switch to GS and either go into reaper or stay there(GS-3/4/2/2/2/…), since gravedigger only needs to hit one guy below 50% to get the CD reduction.

Ax 1 was only ever used when I screwed up and both swap and RS were on CD. Even then, it was only used if I thought it was going to die before anything worthwhile came off CD. Otherwise it is simply a better idea to run away and wait for something better.

Ax 3 was never used except to tag things.

Ax 1 should have greater range and more damage, not as high as dagger AA, enough that it should it preferred over simply running away and waiting for a better option.
I am aware that it’s ability to ignore reflects is considered OP in Anet.

Ax 2: Add a whirl finisher, but keep the non-AoE attack itself as is.

Ax 3: to a well or mark that positions on the initial player position and is a dark field. Add blind.

The reason why GS has such bad LF gen is because of two traits:
Chilling force and Blighter’s boon.
Combine those with two shouts, Suffer and Weaklings, and you can easily gain your LF back before F1 comes off cooldown.

With Vital Persistance and not using GS/shouts on single target it’s entirely possible to stay in shroud long enough for the shouts to come off CD.