Guild Wars 2

I hope it isn’t a bug. Finally I can have a normal view of my surroundings with an asura. Granted this might be a bit much, especially for pvp; but in my books quality of life wise this is a HUGE improvement.

Tim.6450:

Nyth.3492:

I personally never found damage meters to be a bad thing for WoW. With a trinity they generally give a clear overview of who’s performing well and who isn’t (mostly for dps, it’s a bit different for healers).
Gearscore / ilvl on the other hand, now THAT was the dumbest piece of BLEEP factor people ever judged on.

But isn’t in a trinity game dps a group effort (this is my first mmo)? I mean if the healers and tanks do a bad job will the overall dps decrease? I think it would be like tequatl : dps will drop if you have bad turreteers.

Yes it does work like that.
The thing with trinity MMOs is that people have set roles. In a 5 man party you generally have 1 tank, 1 healer and 3 dps. If people die because the tank doesn’t hold aggro, you blame the tank. If people die because they die from non-excessive damage you can blame the healer. If dps dies from standing in fire, or is clearly underperforming on the damage meters (which is where those come in), you can blame the dps.

Now, it’s not a blaming game (as that creates a toxic environment) but at least you can base your opinions on something solid.

In GW2 it’s a lot harder, because:
1) You have no set roles. Everyone needs to do top dps, but also needs to buff. And nobody knows how much those buffs add, or how much damage you can sacrifice for doing X and Y.
2) There is massive lack of factual data. Hardly anyone knows how much dps they do, nobody knows how much dps their might buffs really add. People base most of their opinions on guess work and on what they see.

People think necromancer is kitten, not because necromancer is kitten. But because a party with a guardian, warrior, mesmer and 2 elementalists made a video about how they killed a boss in 10 seconds flat. Using might stacking, time warp, banners, and ice bow.
Nobody even gives a kitten about why that is the case; nobody gives a kitten if banners didn’t contribute at all in that example. But that setup somehow performed a magic trick, SO WE MUST REPLICATE IT AT ALL COST.
LF SPEED RUN MESMER ELE WARRIOR ONLY !

Sometimes I think this game could benefit from damage meters, just so we can get rid of some of the most ridiculous misconceptions that this game contains.
If you’re in any way an experienced MMO player (and I would say I am with nearly 15 years on me), you know that mechanics are WAY more complex than most people assume. It’s like an iceberg, 90% is below the surface.

Obtena.7952:

Aenesthesia.1697:

SlyDevil.3952:

Where exactly is this exploit being used that you consider it the only thing holding necros back from being generally accepted as meta? Since you know, you’d have to compare the non-icebow dps of every other class to necros before deciding whether or not it was the best choice for the available dps slots.

Actually, the only thing that has put us in this stupid discriminating situation, is not the lack of offensive buffs, or the not so good dps, nor the linecasting icebow.

It’s the lack of a damage recount tool.

In all my years in wow i never saw such discrimination against a class. Why? because you had Recount to separate the real damage dealers vs the rest.

That kind of tool would be death for any in class in this game that wasn’t #1 because lacking trinity. The actual problem is WoW-type players who think that’s how performance is measured.

I think a recount (dps meter) would be a bad addition to GW2. But solely for the fact that 95% of the people have no clue how to interpret them in a non-trinity setting. They see the phalanx warrior doing 70% of the DPS of the others and don’t see past the fact that he’s using a sub optimal dps spec to buff the whole party for more overall damage.

But the problem in GW2 is, that people are still drawing the same conclusions. But instead of reading (and often misinterpreting) damage meters; people now base their opinions on “gutfeeling”, hearsay about “meta” and sites which proclaim which composition is optimal for their run.
Badly played elementalists are guaranteed spots even though they might be horrible; and well played necromancers are dismissed before even seeing combat.

I personally never found damage meters to be a bad thing for WoW. With a trinity they generally give a clear overview of who’s performing well and who isn’t (mostly for dps, it’s a bit different for healers).
Gearscore / ilvl on the other hand, now THAT was the dumbest piece of BLEEP factor people ever judged on.

They’re actually undead rats now.

I see what you did there Gee….

I think a better idea is to just let things play out for like 1-2 months and THEN intervene if any inbalances are detected.

The way I see it, necro’s need something big to pull them back up to par with the other classes.
And as the Reaper hype is wearing off a little bit; a lot of necromancers realize that although reaper is making us “more viable” for group PvE content, it’s still not making us WANTED for that content. We still don’t provide anything solid to the group that another class can’t do more and/or better. Reaper still isn’t top DPS and still doesn’t provide any kind of group synergy. So it’s largely going to depend if certain raid content is going to play into something that necromancer is good at.

For PvP the story is slightly different. Necromancer is decent in PvP and is likely to get better. However from what I’ve seen, it’s not overpowered strong. In fact, to go reaper you have to give up a lot of traits/abilties that make necro strong at the moment (some condition transfer / perma-weakness).

As for your suggestions.
The gravedigger change was something that was in game during BWE1 and it REALLY didn’t flow.
The problem with not having 100% recharge reduction is that the skill is too short. In the time left in that gap there is little to do (partially due to long after casts and stuff).

On top of that, as I mentioned before: Reaper is not by a long shot the best dps in the game. Gravedigger spam is pretty good dps (although I doubt even then we’re the strongest), but that’s only for 50% of the fight.

Should the reaper hypothetically be too strong. I don’t think traits is a good place to mess with it.
But it also depends a lot on WHAT makes reaper too strong.
Too much dps in raid PvE? Tone down Gravedigger slightly (preferably through numbers rather than cooldown)
Too much sustain? Look at where it’s coming from, maybe tweak LF generation or Blighter’s Boon.
Reaper can be tweaked pretty effectively, because it’s pve and pvp components are quite different. In PvE it’s mostly the greatsword that you can approach; in PvP it’s mostly the shroud you can tweak.

I hope they fix that for PvE, because it will hinder us a ton. Going into shroud only to see the druid toss out a ton of heals and not benefiting the slightest from it will be a major downfall for necro raiding viability.

I kinda agree with Bhawb and the others.
Corruptions themselves are simply not strong enough to provide the disadvantages they provide. And MoC just makes that even worse.
For a necromancer, corruption skills are among the best utility skills we have, which is why we’re putting up with it; but in the bigger picture these utilities are far from strong enough to warrant such a down side.

You could remove all of the self inflicted conditions and none of the corruption abilities would become overpowered.

The self inflicted stuff might be nice theme/lore wise, but it doesn’t really work well in how the game is currently designed.
I loved the self harm in GW1; but in GW1 you had completely different mechanics. You had MUCH more powerful buffs and debuffs relative to GW2; plus you had dedicated tanks and healers meaning that the downsides of the self sacrifice was often of much lesser impact, even in pvp.

Ragion.2831:

Bhawb the problem you are having isnt that Corruption design is bad its that you dont like the way Necro uses conditions to fight. There are so many things you can do with conditions on you that not only dont take away from a build but add to it.

I see where you’re coming from. But Bhawb is right in that no matter how you twist or turn it, you have to give up something to get those conditions transfered away.
It’s either traits, its either other utility skills, it could be a subpar offhand.

Hell even switching to staff to transfer it away is still forcing you to do something, that you might not even wanted to do, just so you can use your utility skill effectively.

You say these things add to builds; and I’ve thought something similar for quite a while. But if you realize that every use of corruption skills (even more so with MoC) simply has to be paired with a Plague signet / Staff #4 / Plague sending (if you meet the req.) it kinda turns a bit bland. Why handicap it that way around, when the stuff you get for it isn’t even all that strong.

Don’t get me wrong. The concept of self corruption and then being able to play with that self inflicted harm is great. It’s unique, it’s fun and it has great potential.
But that potential is completely unused in this game. There are little to no traits that play into this well. And the effects you get from corruption are FAR inferior to even warrant these downsides.

Go look at GW1, how powerful the enchantments and hexes were that forced you to sacrifice 10-20% HP. Let me just list a few:

- A 30 second long, 33% healing reduction recieved on a foe. For 17% of your HP.
- 20 second long weakness in an area around the target for 10% of your HP.
- BiP in GW1 costs you 33% of your HP and gave an ally +5 energy regen for 10 seconds. Elite skill without cooldown. That’s basically like giving alacrity to someone for 10 seconds at the cost of 33% of your HP (since in GW1 you were often energy capped rather than CD capped like in GW2).

Now of course it’s a completely different game. But in GW1 a necro had the unique ability to shift the pressure in a pvp game, or to increase party potential through burdening the healer.

E.g. you’re doing PvE and your healer is having an easy time. Necro could burden the healer more with self conditions in order to enhance his party or weaken the enemy. Awesome gameplay, that totally made sense.

E.g. 2: You’re doing PvP and your healer is having a hard time keeping up. At the cost of some of your own HP (which you could even handle yourself through vampiric abilities such as life siphon) you can burden the other healer a bit more through healing reduction on their team (forcing either expensive energy+GCD on condi cleanse; or simply increasing their healing load). OR you could give energy regen to your healer.

Not saying these were part of the meta builds, but it’s just an idea how how different GW1 necromancer corruption was compared to GW2. And how it makes so little sense in the current form.

Dadnir.5038:

Rending claw : enhancing it’s range will make it directly compete with the scepter, boosting it’s base damage would make it a threat to any close range build. It will make other profession jealous.

Why? Scepter is a condition weapon, axe is a power weapon.
Frankly I think Scepter needs a rework as well as it’s rather poor as a condition weapon.

The only reason a damage buff should be taken carefully, is because the axe might sideline the dagger. There is no other class that can objectively have any problem with necro damage as it’s already pretty low.

Ghastly claw : the suggestion make it totally OP in sustainability potential. To much LF and siphon may proc from that (not to mention offensive traits and whatever).

I think a big problem with axe #2 (and this goes for a lot of necro weapons), is that there is often very little reason to use anything but #1 spam, since weapon 1 spam is superior damage and the other skills don’t add enough to warrant their use.
Take Scepter #3, great ability by design, but the enemy needs a truckton of debuffs before this skill is worth its cast time over #1 spam.

In my experience other weapons/classes have this much less, because either:
a) The #2-#5 abilities do more damage
b) The #2-#5 abilities create a blast field or blast finisher
c) The #2-#5 abilities give debuffs that make them worth using on cooldown.

Foot in the grave : Actually it’s the best defensive option in this traitline and also pretty good for what it does. Adding boons to necromancer is impossible due to specific necromancer’s design philosophy.

Agreed it’s undervalued. The only thing i might like to see is it giving 1 extra stack, because 1 stack of stability is tough.
Definitely not pulsing stability like some people want though, that would make death shroud insane.

Dhumfire : traits need and will work the same whatever the shroud you have. If they start to introduce different effect per shroud it will become a gaz factory.

Dhuumfire post nerf is hardly ever taken anymore in anything but a weird condition builds. The skill got overnerfed real hard.
Why buff it, if reaper might make it viable? Because I strongly dislike GM traits that only work well if you invest massively in another traitline. That creates rigid and unoriginal builds. Dhuumfire needs a buff, they should be mindful enough to consider Reaper Shroud though.

Signet in Shroud : They allowed the effect of the signet of vampirism to pass through the shroud, so we know that it’s doable. However, due to the passive effect of some signets, this would cause imbalance. (Mainly an issue of sustainability while in shroud)

I appreciate your feedback, but you ought to read up on necromancer signets before you make this argument.
Our signets give us passively:
1) Healing when Struck (Vampirism)
2) Condition transfer from allies onto ourselves (Plague)
3) +Power (Spite)
4) +25% run speed (Locust)
5) Passive LF regen (Undeath)

None of these are particularly overpowered to be made functional in DS.

Signet of undead : 3 reasons here. The passive effect you want is totaly over the top, the necromancer’s design philosophy does not allow more boons to be given to the necromancer and (probably the most logical) each profession have to be plagued by at least 1 skill dedicated to the resurection of another player (beside the necromancer should probably be the more dedicated profession to this “resurection” thing)

I still kind of disagree that necromancers and boons don’t go together lorewise. Maybe not boon-sharing, but definitely buffing yourself.
Protection (like spectral armor) / Stability (we’re death incarnate, a slow unstoppable force) / Regeneration (through vampirism), for example.

But even disregarding that; there is a point where gameplay and balance > Lore and tradition.
I like the design philosophy for the necro from a lore point of view; but so far it’s failing hard in the game.
As for the at least 1 resurrection skill per class. I think resurrection would be ace for the necromancer, but again gameplay > lore; and as long as the skill remains buggy as it is, it’s hard to really make use of it.
Transfusion (GM in Blood Magic traitline) works much better in that regard.

All in all, none of these suggestion would “balance” or address the dire needs of the necromancer. The necromancer is bound to it’s own strict design philosophy and even if it mean improvement the dev won’t do anything that could go against this sacred philosophy. In fact, they did it when they introduced dhuumfire and they were forced to nerf everything around dhuumfire and then dhuumfire itself to keep their pride sound and safe while keeping the game balanced.

I don’t thing these suggestions would balance the necromancer either. But I do like some of them from a QoL point of view.
Because a lot of the problems stand:
1) Axe is kittenty
2) In lesser sence FitG, but mostly Dhuumfire is a bit “meh” compared to Death Perception.
3) DS locking us out of all our utilities is a trade off we’ll have to live with. But it’s going quite far. Signet passives are a lot worse for necromancer compared to other classes as their passive effects aren’t always available (and they aren’t even THAT strong to begin with).

Rising Dusk.2408:

Bosses are far easier to balance and far easier to make diverse and challenging when you don’t have to balance them under the presumption that they’ll be suffering 100% chill and weakness (which good organized groups would obviously take advantage of).

I want to quote this, because I don’t think this people realize the importance of this.

Leaving bosses open for soft CC can create a bunch of technical difficulties with encounter design.
I don’t think they offer as much dept as some people claim they do, because you either:

a) Design encounters with the idea they are always up. Make encounters tough and requiring a 100% uptime on chill / cripple and the like. This means that you NEED these things up all the time. It makes group composition a bit more rigid and makes encounters very binary in the sense that if you drop the soft CC, you’re going to lose.

Yes, this would possibly open up a slot for the necromancer, as we’re one of the few classes that can probably keep a 100% uptime on weakness and chill. But I don’t think it would improve PvE as a whole. And this game desperately needs to have it’s PvE sorted.

b) Design encounters with the idea that without them you’ll succeed as well, but with them it’ll be easier.
The problem with this design is that it leads to a LOT of exploiting and wonky mechanics.

Think about Cripple kiting a boss around.
Think about chilling a boss so it skips certain mechanics
(example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZP9z7MY8tw)
Think about a combination of protection + weakness allowing you to circumvent certain mechanics easily.
Etc.

I’m not saying the way they use soft CC as a Defiance DoT is the best solution. But I think people severely misjudge the “added dept” that soft CC would bring to raid boss fights. (Because we’re talking about end game content, which will be certain raid bosses I’d guess).

meow one twenty.4376:

I know this is the opposite of what most everyone else here is thinking but I have to say it. I support Moa destroying minions.

Here’s why…

*It discourages using 5 minion skills at once
– Most (all?) people just sit with all their minions out. This is hard for me to put down into words, so bear with me, please. Most every other build in the game requires timing for skills to be effective, MM with all minions does not.
- A skillbar completely filled with the same type should not be as effective as diversifying at least a little.

• Hardcounters aren’t necessarily bad
  – Sure, it sucks to be at the bad end of a hardcounter, but they help keep certain builds from being too powerful or common.
  – Mesmer has few other alternatives for killing MM’s. I remember people here telling others that MM was a hardcounter against the OP Mes builds post June 24, it might not be that lopsided but MM holds its own very well.

Feel free to flame.

I think most people dislike it, because it doesn’t just counter it. It kicks you when you’re already down.

When you get moa’ed you:
a) Lose your minions, which is a prime source of your damage.
b) Lose all benefits they give you (toughness, condi clear, death nova.etc)
c) Lose your utility skills / minions for a long while, even after you come out of moa.

Now I’m fine with moa countering point A. But a necro just gets punished too hard.
You lose all your utility skills for several seconds even after moa ended. Assume you got moa’ed on a point and you decide to disengage. Now you’re out of combat and you can do jack for the next 15-60 seconds.

As for your points:

- Most (all?) people just sit with all their minions out. This is hard for me to put down into words, so bear with me, please. Most every other build in the game requires timing for skills to be effective, MM with all minions does not.

That’s not how it works. Minions might to a lesser degree miss some timing based aspects (Although you still have minion abilities you need to time). But they make up for that in Minion Management.
You can’t just summon 5 minions and send them off to attack something and it’ll get destroyed. That’s maybe how MM works in solo PvE or in low MMR PvP, but not when things get a bit harder.
You need to be aware of their position; standing on top of your bone fiend will make sure your dps minion gets cleaved down in no time.
You need to be aware of their health. You are their master and their caretaker. A well timed transfusion can be the difference between losing 3 minions or not.

You see, where MM loses out on some “timing based skill” that other utilities bring, they have to make up for that in “pet management skills”.

You can’t NOT have your minions out when all the traits force you to have most of them out. You get your sustain through them being there (condi transfer / toughness / CC / etc).

- A skillbar completely filled with the same type should not be as effective as diversifying at least a little.

Normally I would agree with you. A build, especially in PvP, needs to think about hitting certain checkboxes to work well. You can’t just load up with 3 offensive utility skills and be done with it.

Minions are slightly different again.
First of all there is the trait synergy to think about. Every minion extra, is extra toughness for you, is extra condition transfer for you, is an extra death nova.
On top of that minions are soft of designed around having them out as they fulfill different roles by themselves.
You have an elite that can CC, you have minions that blow up for burst and debuffing, you have a fiend that snares people and deals good dps. A wurm that lets us teleport for increased mobility and disengage. Soon we will have a shout that doubles as a defensive cooldown.
Minions are designed to go all in on, more or less; although there are plenty of MM builds that sacrifice a minion slot for something more useful at that point in time.

I just had this bug as well.

When I did it for the 3rd time I noticed that the mobs have a determined buff if the group before that hasn’t been cleared yet. What bugged me the first time, were a bunch of risen that were dragged off to the side of the road. Normally you are inclined to skip those, but skipping those causes the other group to keep their determined buff.

So if you try it again, make sure you kill everything down the road in order. There might be some pesky risen fighting Vigil somewhere on the side of the road, don’t skip those.

I played with it a bit. It’s not bad bad, but it’s not very good to be frank.

1. skill is slow and really doesn’t do too much damage.
   The freezing is nice, but it’s really easy to dodge because the sword gets this IMPOSSIBLE TO MISS blue glow.

1. is a major let down to me so far. I had hoped this would be nice and bursty, but frankly it isn’t. And the precast/aftercast on it is a massive hindrance. I mean, I would probably be OK with it, if it wasn’t for the 1+ second cast time PLUS ANOTHER 1 second of aftercast. It’s massive for just a single big strike. It REALLY needs a reduction on cast times (both pre and after IMO).

1. Again with the MASSIVE cast time on a friggin melee ability. It just doesn’t flow well. The cone is quite long (which is good) but it’s really narrow. You can probably sidestep this once you know what to look for.
   Damage wise this ability feels solid though. Good damage, 12 stacks of vuln.

1. Pretty solid for what it does. Too bad again it takes forever to get this ability off. The cast time is only 1/4th of a second (great), but the effect itself takes time to spread out over the area.
   The animation is one of the best in the game though. Love it.

1. Not many issues with this ability. Bit of a long cooldown for our only gap closer on the weapon, but it’s ok. (Again great animation/visuals)

Frankly I think that #1 needs to just speed up slightly (only very little, you don’t want the GS to be doing more single target dps than the dagger, at best they should be equal.).

1. needs some work. I feel very locked in place when I’m casting it. Especially below 50% with the low cooldown.
   Also as far as the cooldown goes. I don’t really get the 80% reduction. The GS is so slow that the 1 second cooldown makes the rotation feel very clunky.

1. Cast time reduction would be nice. 3/4th or 1/2 of a second would be much better. The ability has a narrow cone so should be easy enough to get out of.

All that said. Reaper Shroud is great. It’s feels extremely good, because unlike GS it doesn’t have these massive cast times, making the flow feel great.

flow.6043:

Drazerg.8956:

Flumek.9043:

Yup, i really dont know why ot even has to exist.

Just yesterday my 2 supportbots blew 10k+ heals on me, but seems devs think that with 2k hp and under focus fire is wrong time to enter your only defense mechanic.

^This

In all seriousness, reduce heal receive effectiveness while In DS by 50% and it should be fine.

Why 50%? Guys, please stop suggesting that, it makes no sense at all. Any kind of reduced healing in Shroud is just as bad as having non at all.

Agreed. 50% is nonsense. Why should we suffer for using our class mechanic. We’re all talking about as if it’s OP, but it’s our class mechanic.

I think that the healing over time idea is the best idea I’ve seen floating around though. Getting full instantly applied healing while in DS can produce some balance issue (for PvP mostly).

Also healing life force is NOT what we want.

sniperman.1738:

idk why ppl say the reaper is bad honestly I haven’t had any issues with it, there is such a thing as you can’t learn how to play a class right away in just a couple of minutes or an hour, the reaper is a learning curve some catch on right away and know exactly how to use it and kick butt and have 0 issues with it. I know I don’t see any issue with the current Reaper to me it feels smooth and fine if you know how to use it right.

Reaper isn’t bad. The greatsword feels a bit clunky though. If you’ve played with other class’ greatsword the abilities generally either feel smooth, or they feel rewarding. For necro the GS seems to do neither.

1. leaving you static for like 2 seconds and doing ‘laughable’ damage (<- based on the fact this is suppose to be our big execution hit), was a letdown for me

I like the animations though, and not everything is bad about the GS. I do hope they polish it up.

I think updating LB to have the same cast time as PB would not only make DS more attractive, it would also increase it’s viability a lot for condition specs. Currently speccing into dhuumfire is all but pointless. If the cast time would increase than it gives conditionmancers better access to burning which would help their viability in various aspects of the game.

With Reapershroud coming, you get 2 shroud skills that both are very skewed towards powermancer builds. Tainted Shackles on DS is but a minor thing. So Dhuumfire could be used to make both shrouds a bit more attractive for condimancers by giving them some limited burn potential. RS does this quite okish with it’s fast attack speed and cleave, but DS could definitely improve. Faster attack speed = faster burn application.

I don’t even need the condition transfer, we have plenty of that already. Just the attack speed.

I hated that at first too. But after like 15 minutes I got the hang of the first 25-33% of the jumping puzzle and that’s where people start dropping fast.

I was playing as asura which is even worse, and it made me fall probably a dozen times due to not being able to judge distance all that well. But I see that as part of the trick of the first part of the tower… dealing with the mass.

I really have my doubts how good of an addition a necromancer (reaper or otherwise) will be.

DAMAGE:
We already know we lack this. Reaper makes up for this a little bit with big gravedigger crits sub-50%, which does us a little bit of favor.
Another thing we might have going, is that unlike some other classes; on harder fights we might be able to keep rocking high damage gear when others have to switch to more tanky gear. And due to traits we can swap out some precision anyway.

That said, damage wise; it’s still not anywhere near what a lot of other classes pump out. If anything that’s what team compositions in the short raid phase told me. There were very little groups that took reapers. And a lot of groups that stacked Heralds/Engineers/Elementalists.

CONTROL:
We mostly have soft-CC. And I strongly have my doubts how effective that’s going to be.
The only thing we would be really good at would be chill. But chill is easily accessable for other classes as well (condi engineers / elementalists / ranger pets), plus you just stack some humans with reaper of grenth elite and you’d have perma chill right there. No necro needed.

Boon corruption if that becomes a thing might be worth bringing a reaper for. But who knows how few fights will involve that.

SUPPORT:
What support do we bring that is either unique (think timewarp; think druid healing) or simply warranted.
Nothing really. Necro has from the get go been an extremely selfish class when it comes to support.
We can keep up 25 vuln easily; but we’ve already seen that a lot of guilds are going to stack condi engineers, because they do that + great DPS + great control.

The way I see it there are two ways of looking at it:

Top end PvE
Does necro/reaper bring something that warrants a valuable raid slot?
That question kind of splits up into two parts, you either have to:
a) Bring something unique (Mesmer brings unique abilities for example; druid brings a very unique playstyle/support)
b) Excel at something. Are you really good at one of the things. Do you have a lot of CC to help with adds / breakbars? Do you have condition spec that does top of the line dps? Do you provide a constant stream of boons to the raid? Do you provide a specific cooldown that at some part in the fight ends up being a huge help?

I think for necromancer, both boxes tick off as “no”.

More casual

With more casual the restrictions are a lot more relaxed.
The only perk generally is: Do you slow us down?

Think about necromancer in current PvE content. You provide maybe 2/3rd or 1/2 the dps that other classes potentially bring. You provide little hard CC or support.
A necromancer in current PvE is a liability unless it’s played better than another class.

Reaper changes that a bit as we gain access to pretty solid damage sub-50% HP. But it’s still not fixing the support and the control part of things very much.
And the damage, as seen over the entirety of the fight is not extraordinary enough; which means again that you have to play at 110% when other classes can play at <100%.

Don’t guardians lose their default F-skills as well ?

Personally, I think it’s fine.
The only thing I hope is that DS gets a bit of love so that it’s not by default much weaker than reaper shroud. It doesn’t have to be equal, a bit weaker is fine with me; it’s a safer choice and you get it without having to spec into the Reaper traitline.

I think jagged horrors themselves need a bit of an overhaul.

An idea I played with after doing the Karka Queen event the other day, was to make Horrors more like undead Karka hatchlings. That attach to your body and explode after a duration.

ronpierce.2760:

draugris.9872:

pierwola.9602:

On the other hand, Necro should be the dude you CANNOT get away from.

The problem is, what would you give up to be this dude. You can´t expect to do crazy damage in melee range, having a second life pool AND being unkiteable.

If give up all of Necromancers high mobility, blocks, evades, invulnerabilities and instant burst skills. Maybe even some of our reflects and excess stability.

Are you mad?! No class would function without those things. /s

Not enough would be my answer.

Sub 50% we’re actually not doing bad. But that’s only 50% of the fight (duh).
If we do 18k dps sub-50% and 10k dps above 50%. Our total dps would still only be like 13k dps (assuming the sub-50% portion of the fight lasts shorter since everyone’s dps is higher due to cooldowns and execute phases).

13k DPS would be about 2/3rd of the top DPS classes.

If you figure that on top of that DPS they also bring boons, support, control and other stuff to the raid; where a necromancer really brings nothing out of the ordinary (other than maybe Vampiric Aura as Onerios mentioned).
Ye I’m not too optimistic yet.

The problem here is obviously with the core of necromancer. We shouldn’t buff reaper shroud or greatsword, because that would just funnel everything into reaper more so than already happens.

GS got a ton more enjoyable in BWE#2 compared to the first.
Much less rooted in place, and the risk/reward ratio feels much much better now.

I just hope they make the auto attack a bit less backloaded (all LF gen and the chill are backloaded on the chain); increase the range of #3 a bit; and they fix the #5 skill as it doesn’t work most of the time.

Can’t believe how toxic this thread is over nothing really.

What’s even more stupid is how many people are replying without either listening to or even watching the video.

Can we please stop trying to turn a discussion about the message into a flame topic about the messenger ?
Because that’s what happens every time that Nemesis makes a video and the 13 year-olds come out to defend their precious honor and then the trolls smell blood and mingle and it all just turns to hell, on what was known as one of the friendliest and well behaved MMO class forums.

One of the first things he stated is that he was simply called out for trying, by some nobody who was offended by his previous video. He simply did it, as requested; and his time was even sufficiently interesting to open up a discussion for necromancers in the future, where pure berserker might not be an option.
Because the way I see it, this is extremely hard (if not practically impossible) to do for a squishy glass cannon. Which begs the discussion how necromancers would fare in a hypothetical raid setting where this kind of damage was more or less the norm.

Furthermore he mentions that the whole fight and time set was completely pointless as it doesn’t hold any value.
That’s what makes me facepalm so hard at some of the people here, because they get on their high horses over nothing. All this proves is that necromancer have good sustain, no big news there, and nothing else really. As a solo fight doesn’t really mean anything.

Which is a good point to make. Because in his last video where he raised some good points.
(In particular I liked his point about the futility of pre-stacking buffs for 10-20 seconds, so a boss fight goes 5-10 seconds faster.)
And the general reaction on that was along the lines was: “OH YEA?!?! Well… well…. YOU CAN’T SOLO MOSSMAN IN UNDER 10 MINUTES, BECAUSE YOU SUCK !!!”

I’m not trying to defend Nemesis here; but ad hominem are the highway to pointless and screwed up discussions.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

PS: please don’t say rezzing, if you need to be rezzed then you have done something wrong, not right. That is not a role.

Funny you say that. Because in WoW back in the days, you needed at least 2-3 druids because they had a combat rez.
It’s not about doing something wrong, it’s about being flexible enough to recover. Everyone makes mistakes and if the raids are truly hard, people WILL go down.
Hell maybe there are even mechanics that require people to go down or certain mechanics that can be circumvented by having someone go down.

That said. I don’t think necro’s currently, with the current knowledge and tools, bring enough to warrant a spot in an optimal setup. Of course every class can be taken to a raid and you’ll be able to finish it; but we all know meta/optimal setups are ultimately going to be much more common.

However, things might change.
The encounter might require people to prop up their defensive to stay alive, the necro might benefit here.
They talked about changing boss encounters to react on more debuffs, and certain encounters might allow for boon corruption; another pro for the necro.
Maybe there are encounters with timed add spawns that need bursting down. If adds spawn every 40 seconds in an encounter and they can be grouped up; well bombing could become a thing for a certain encounter.

Too soon to tell. Only thing I fear is that so far ANet has been disgustingly poor at reacting to imbalances. Certain classes have been top of the food-chain for the past 3 years, and other classes (including necro) at the bottom. And there has hardly been a serious attempt at fixing that.

People just need to learn to deal with reaper. But reaper has some big innate weaknesses that people will learn to deal with soon enough.

1) Reaper, though less so than normal necro, is still an attrition class. The reaper isn’t killing you with pure extreme damage, as much as it’s killing you by outlasting you with 2 life bars. I’ve seen most people die thinking they would burst me down. And then realizing their on 30% HP by the time they got rid of shroud.

2) Reaper is real melee class. Just like you don’t let a ranger sit and snipe you from 1200 range without countering. Just like you don’t just dance around in melee range of a Hammer/GS warrior you have to play in on their weakness.
Necro’s really don’t have that much for range. The staff seems to do a lot of damage, but it’s sporadic. And necro’s pretty much gave up their main range nuke (Life Blast from Death Shroud) when they picked up reaper shroud.

3) Necromancers are still pretty vulnerable for hard CC as we have no active defenses. Reaper has stability, but only in shroud form and that is counterable as well (outlast it, or land 2 hard CCs at once as it’s only 1 stack).

Bhawb.7408:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

“We recognize that this change really hurts Necromancers and are looking into ways to compensate them.”

Compensation: reduced Chill uptime from initial preview by a massive amount. Increased pull recharge from preview.

While hilarious, those changes happened on June 23rd, and we know the beta we played on was locked at least a month before it went out, which means there was only a week or two at most to adjust for the chill changes. That just isn’t enough time.

This.

One of the big disclaimer notes was that the beta build we played was a pretty old one. Because they have to make sure that the build we test is one that is stable.

I’m tired of the “injustice” that necro’s face in certain aspects of the game as well. But we need to stay civil and honest.

In the end I enjoyed reaper a lot, and I’ll play the heck out of it no doubt. IMO the new reaper shroud is one of the most fluent and fun aspects the necro will have post-HoT. And the RS and GS have some of the best animations in the game, which is really awesome.

I think too many people hoped that reaper would be “our salvation” and are disappointed it’s just another (slightly above) average necro aspect.
On one hand that disappoints me as well; on the other, I would be quite annoyed if we had like 1 extremely strong aspect and the rest of the kit remained weak. If they can bring the rest of the kit up to the level of our best necro tools; and then apply a 20-30% global buff (seeing as we’re like 50% behind a lot of other professions at the moment), it would be better than reaper/GS being just super amaze-balls.

Reaper shroud is awesome. Really like it. Not sure yet how the balance is, but the cleave damage on the #1 is just sweet.

GS feels lacking.
IMO #4 and #5 look and feel quite good.

1. feels a bit mediocre either the attacks are too slow or the damage is too low.
   Gotta be careful to keep it balanced since it cleaves 3 people, but this feels “decent” in the cleave and “meh” vs 1 target.
   Also the big glow on the Chilling Scythe makes it really easy to avoid tbh.

1. is just poor. The damage is lacking. It has a huge cast time and aftercast. This ability needs to do MORE damage and a reduction to the cast/aftercast, because it feels extremely clunky atm. You’re very immobile when using it, especially below 50%. Also the 80% cooldown reduction feels a bit…. odd… as well, the GS is too slow to get an extra auto attack in in between gravediggers, and the cooldown of 1 sec is too long to make it flow well. Please look into this.

1. isn’t too bad. But I find the cone to be a bit small. Making it easy to sidestep.
   The damage on this is ok, given that it also gives LF and vuln.

I haven’t checked yet. But reddit seems to be full of necro’s who say that minions finally respond properly.
They attack, they move as a group and when you swap target, they swap target as well (not always what you want, but it’s an improvement either way).

Again though, haven’t checked yet. Mostly hearsay.

Thanks for answering Robert Gee

Robert Gee.9246:

Having condition transfer on shroud was something I was playing with when doing the trait revamp. Plague Sending originally used shroud 1 as its trigger condition rather than critical hit. I ended up changing it because shroud 1 already had several traits that affected it and I didn’t want to overload it, plus the curses line had several traits that affected shroud in some way already. I think it would be a bit overpowered though if Life Blast could transfer conditions on every hit though.

I think most necro’s actually agree with this. Condition transfer on AA without some kind of massive ICD or big downside is way too strong.
I also don’t think a lot of necromancers really want this; I’m not even sure why there is so much discussion about this, as it’s clearly unrealistic.

What many Necro’s do want however is faster cast time on Life Blast. That’s why Plague blast is often mentioned.

Robert Gee.9246:

On the topic of increasing the cast speed of Life Blast: I think we would need to lower the damage multiplier if we wanted to increase the cast speed. The damage per second on that skill at its current cast time is already about as high as we are comfortable with. It’s a tricky skill to balance because we’d need to also look at adjusting all the traits that affect it.

I’m quite surprised to hear the stance of ANet on LB DPS is that it is as high as it can go currently.
Mostly because it doesn’t really compete with other classes their dps; you lose all your skills while using it; it’s on a limited resource; etc.
I can understand that you don’t want Deathshroud to become the only way for necro to dps though (though frankly that has more to do with the lackluster dps of our general weapon skills).

That said, lets get to the point. A faster cast speed would improve DS a lot; even if you lower the damage so the direct DPS doesn’t increase.
The current Lifeblast is really slow and predictable and is unattractive for condimancers.

Increasing the cast speed would allow Dhuumfire condimancers to see some more play. The only concern might be the increased ease at which we can stack might and vulnerability through traits; but I’m not sure if it’s unfair to just see that as a buff to the class.

spoj.9672:

mistsim.2748:

Robert Gee.9246:

Lich and Plague form was more of a clear cut issue of “hey, let’s not punish minion masters for pressing their elite”.

this is reasonable.

Surely this same notion should be applied to corruption skills.

“Corruption Skills no longer destroy pets!”

The buffs just keep on coming !

My guess is that with the 900 range they didn’t want to buff it too much in one go without seeing the effects first.

The axe can see some more play now on bosses where staying in melee is really hard to pull off well without disengaging a lot (think Tequatl, as there will be more of those fights in HoT). The 900 range turned axe from “still being kinda in melee range” to “just enough so that I have the space to move a bit without losing uptime”.

One of the problems though, is that the axe stacks vulnerability. Which in a vacuum is the strongest dps increasing condition in the game. (Stronger then most if not all boons as well).
However there is so much of that already going around, that it feels really unnecessary. That is what makes Axe 1 feel so lackluster.

An idea is to center the vulnerability and LF generation a bit more on the #2 skill and turn the auto into a solid dps ability.
The problem with that though, is that it becomes a rather dull auto attack weapon, just like the dagger.
Alternatively, and maybe better, is to put LF generation on the auto attack and turn the #2 into a serious burst ability. That way the axe becomes a good shotgun weapon.

The axe still is a bit “meh”, but at least the range made it useful in a couple of fights.

leman.7682:

It’s because necro’s design is largely incompatibile with the dynamics of the game’s combat system. I’m beginning to understand that most of the balance suggestions are pointless because they are never going to fix that problem and a full rework of some weapons/mechanics is needed.

This so much.

The necromancer’s kit is lacking in a lot of ways and needs some revision; but I think the biggest issue is that most of the combat systems and encounters are just completely anti-necro by design.

Anchoku.8142:

Arenanet likes to be cautious on adjustments and will probably creep up on a satisfying balance rather than turning the amp up to eleven and making Necromancer better than Elementalist.

They must be playing the slow game to the extremes then.
Because we’ve been down here for 3 years now and we’ve yet to pull along other classes; let alone outshine them for once.

I dont know. I agree with a lot of what he says, but disagree with a lot of other things as well.

I agree with how Ice Bow ruins the game (and has done so since pretty much forever) and I also agree that people overestimate the benefit of buffs and underestimate the benefit of debuffs.
I agree with him that dagger isn’t always the best option, and that it’s very fight dependent.
Also agree that time warp is awfully misused most of the time.

I disagree with a few fundamental things as well.
First of all, removing Ice Bow won’t suddenly wipe clean the meta slate. The top classes aren’t just top because of ice bow. There are significant other benefits they bring.
On top of that he’s talking like our ability to bring certain debuffs to a group is unique, when that’s far from.

Secondly, he talks about the difference between burst and sustained dps. And yet he kind of makes the same mistakes when he starts with full LF and brings a lich to a 25 second boss kill.
Dont get me wrong, that’s fine with current fights as most bosses don’t last longer anyway. But with upcoming raids, your dps will be a lot lower since you don’t have a high% uptime on that lich, not as high % uptime of that death shroud, etc.

Third. He tries to sell the axe and the scepter as weapons. Which I’m fine with, but he’s using them solely for the axe #2 / scepter #2 / scepter #3 abilities by the looks of it.
That stuff is fine, since he spends the rest of his time in death shroud, where he basically uses DS #1 as his auto attack.
So far so good, the problem arises more when for some reason you:
a) Get hit and take a good chunk of LF damage
b) Flunk a skill like Axe #2 or Focus #4 and you’re low on LF generation.
Suddenly you’ll have to make due with scepter or axe auto attack, which are both embarrassingly bad dps wise.
This doesn’t invalidate his build, but it has a few drawbacks that he seems to glance over.

That all said. I usually quite like his videos.
He’s a bit annoying at times; like when he killed all the mobs with his scepter #2 and wells. I was like: “Dude, if you just let them come to the group you would’ve killed them much faster. You’re now just crippling them so it takes longer to get to the rest of your party .”

I found it best to just play around with all weapons and see which fit my playstyle best at that point.

To be frank though, while leveling I found power builds to generally be much more efficient. For necro I found dagger/warhorn to be very nice whilst leveling. Staff as your secondary weapon is generally a good idea, it gives you utility, some ranged power and a nice burst of aoe chill and weakness (staff #3 into staff #4) for the bigger packs you want to engage.

Alternatively the axe is a decent weapon for leveling, as it has the range. You can often down a mob with the axe before you’d get in range with a dagger. Personally though I preferred the dagger, mostly for the fast LF generation and the 2 target cleave.

As far as utilities go. I started out with death magic and minions on my last necro; they are pretty decent at earlier levels (assuming they actually attack).
But later switched to wells. Once you can get the CDR (Vampiric Rituals) in the blood traitline, they start to shine quite well. Especially Well of Suffering is a beast.

Staff has a bad image with non-necromancer players. The image is created, because:
a) It is very often used by necromancers as their secondary weapon
b) It does a lot of bursty damage

This has given it the illusion of being good, when it’s really mediocre at best.
The reason it’s used a lot is because necromancers don’t have a real good ranged alternative and there is much less synergy between weapons than other classes have.
And the bursty nature is mostly an illusion as the skills have a 20 second cooldown, and if you burst them you forfeit all utility on them (chill / condi transfer / CC)

Frankly I think the marks are mostly fine; but I would really love if we could indeed trigger them manually. It would give the staff a lot more options without really giving much more direct power:
- We’d get an on demand blast finisher so we might finally contribute a bit more to out of combat blasting.
- Staff #2 would get a lot more interesting as you can either put it on the opponent for bleeds or on yourself for regen.
- Staff doesn’t become utterly useless vs structures and downed players.
All good things.

Staff #1 is one of the most boring auto attacks in the game. It’s low on damage and it’s low on entertainment factor. Maybe a chain would make it more fun.

Mega Skeleton.8259:

Not enough players pay attention to it. People need to l2p. More people need to stress vuln’s importance and shut up about defiance stacks a little bit.

I totally agree; but this doesn’t make the axe better.

Just because a group is bad at keeping vulnerability up, doesn’t turn the axe from a bad weapon into a good weapon. Which is at the core of the discussion here.

Personally I feel like the axe is still missing a little something something. But I can’t really put my finger on it.
- The auto attack isn’t too exciting, the vulnerability is ok but not a real asset by itself.
- Ghastly Claws isn’t bad; but really needs Unholy Fervor to feel good tbh.
- Unholy Feast never really got me excited, but I can see its uses. This ability still screams to have a blast finisher though. It’s still unbelievable how most other classes get at least 2-4 combo fields/finishers per weapon set and necro barely has anything.

I personally think the range increase did it good. It gave the axe a bit more of a niche and with bosses being more unforgiving I could see it becoming a decent secondary weapon when we can’t get close.
But it’s not quite there yet IMO. It lacks either solid damage (I know Gee is afraid of giving it more due to the nature of it’s attacks; but it’s also single target and other classes DO seem to get a good ranged power option like that).
Or it needs to do something more with conditions/boons.

What could make the axe a bit better also, is the upcoming reaper spec.
Maybe axe would make a good secondary for greatsword. Where the former gives you ranged abilities; decent LF generation between Ghostly Claws and Unholy Feast + Blighter’s Boon; and a way to maintain 25 vuln stack together with reaper shroud (which as we know from BWE is really good at that).

skarpak.8594:

yeah, and nemisis missed (or ignored completly in full consciousness!) the point that he got fully buffed by everyone else in that group setting (especially by that warrior) and compared his dps to that of a phalax warrior…a support setting!

I think he could have been clearer. But I think his approach was not to say necromancer is better than warrior. Because I think most of us agree it still isn’t.
I think he’s merely trying to prove (whether that succeeds or not) that even though a necromancer doesn’t bring buffs, it brings dps that is at the very least not WORSE than a support clas.
Silly as it might be, that this is about not being worse dps than a buff bot (and that is extremely silly balance wise); there are many who claim we are both worse dps and worse teamplayers than just about any class setup.

But if we can bring other good stuff; which might require some changing to the vulnerability of bosses to certain debuffs, like weakness and chill; and still do dps that at least challanges another support class like Phalanx Warrior. Then we might have an entry into at the very least being taken seriously.

That said. A 90% lich uptime is not DPS. It’s burst. It’s quite literally what he stated at the start of his video.
And even though you can probably have high lich uptime in every current content fight. I think it’s much better to focus on 3+ minute fights to get a more fair picture with the upcoming raids and all.

Khristophoros.7194:

Necro staff is so insanely good in WvW they can’t buff it. And reaper is adding another AoE chill to staff.

It’s also decent outside of WvW because every skill hits 5 targets, and it is good at kiting with the regen spam and CC.

If you’re confused about the role staff has, think deeper than power vs condi vs defense. Think gameplay. Staff is primarily for kiting and CC with some AoE damage. The AoE works well because it allows you to kite and CC multiple enemies while wearing them down.

Staff doesn’t need any real buffs for most part. Maybe the #2 could use a nice buff. The bleeding is pretty “meh” for condition specs, the direct damage is also really meh for power.

Making the marks manually triggerable though would be a really solid change that’s not a direct buff to it’s potential; but makes the weapon more versatile in a lot of situations.

Also #1 is just not quite there yet. It’s not about doing a lot of damage. It’s just very dull and easily one of the least inspired abilities in our kit. It doesn’t do burst, it doesn’t do anything special, it’s slow attack speed and slow travel time make it really easy to dodge.

AI fix is the best solution to minions.
On top of that they should have a good look at cast times (both for summons as for minions actives), so that the spec feels a bit snappier. 1.5 seconds for summon and 2-3 seconds for ability activation is ridiculous in a dynamic fast paced game like GW2.

It would probably put MM back on track, without the need for any bandaid fixes to the minions and whatnot.