Guild Wars 2

Drayos.8759:

U guys are acting as if this has Completely rendered the Reaper Useless…

That’s not really it. A lot of people realize that blighter’s boon was a bit out of control.

The problem is more that the necromancer itself really doesn’t have that many ways to make use of this trait.
Before the nerf the necromancer benefited enormously from this because classes like guardians/warriors/elementalists/revenants can toss insane quantities of boons too allies.

But necromancers don’t have that kind of boon supply. The only kind of consistent boon we can apply to ourselves is 1 stack of might every auto attack in shroud. With the healing from BB (even after the increase post change) it’ll do very very little in terms of healing.
Outside of shroud it’s even worse; because what made this trait great in WvW and PvP was mostly the LF generation. Necromancers have very little boon generation outside of shroud, especially bursty boons. The only things we really have is YAAW! and BiP.

I think the nerf was needed.
My concern is just that the effectiveness of this trait basically goes down by like 80% considering how little necromancer revolves around boon application compared to other classes. And the adjusted scaling to the heal and no change to the LF generation might be really drag this GM trait down.

spoj.9672:

As far as i can tell its to do with the aftercast. Ive been experiencing the issue all day. But im still not 100% sure on the exact cause. My general impression is that if you get CC’d, dodge or cast a skill right after you hit and while the aftercast is still in effect. It will self interrupt the aftercast and prevent the 100% cooldown reduction from procing even though you successfully hit the target below 50%. Its very frustrating and has been annoying me all day.

Maybe this bug is a good enough reason to get the aftercast reduced?

Very annoying indeed.

I have this happen really often (almost 1/3rd to 1/4th of the time), because of a dodge roll or cast right after I see the damage land. It’s highly annoying.

I haven’t been playing too much yet.
But I’ve had a few builds in mind that I have to test.

One of the ones I would probably use for sPvP is a build that uses the old celestial signet necro as base and then adds some useful reaper stuff on top.
What you get is something like this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vRAQNBmQD7kGRodTsyGwzGgeTsgLYxVxvYYkKN0GeWQXtAwCA-TZBGwAIuIAJeAAh2fAwRAgZZAA

Alternative: Swap YAAW! back out for something like Spectral Armor (higher LF generation and good defense) and drop Augury of Death trait for Relentless Pursuit.

Alternative: Instead of Celestial Amulet, take something like Marauder amulet. Reaper packs quite a punch, so you can drop some healing power and condi damage from transfers for some more personal damage.

Basically this provides most of the benefit you have with cele signet.
The changes are:
- Spectral Armor to YAAW! With this you keep the stun break; you gain some weakness back (which you lost from Weakening Shroud in the curses traitline), and some might right from the get go. Biggest downside is that the skill itself is pretty offensive, except for the stunbreak on it. So unless they come charging in with big CC, it might not be the best choice.
Rise! would be great if it had some kind of stunbreak attached.

- Plague for CttB! is a pretty solid change IMO. Both great offensive and defensive.

- Hydromancy sigil instead of Geomancy. Since chill gives you some solid benefits as reaper and you actually use sigils when you swap into shroud now. I never really liked the geomancy anyway.

Other build I’m eager to try is a condimancer/hybrid build that uses Dhuumfire. You can stack it fast and it deals high pressure. Also hard to cleanse or transfer due to their short duration.

That’s a bit of shame to be honest. There was some nice skill depth through smart use of your heals to keep them alive.
I understand the massive army thing was too much, but the ability to keep them up for 40 seconds through transfusion/regen/vampiric/etc did add a skill layer :S

Bubi.5237:

As the update says:
“Death Shroud: Shroud now counts as a weapon swap for the purposes of sigil upgrades that activate when swapping weapons.”

It is not true with Superior Sigil of Speed, you’ll not get swiftness/quickness in DS but can see f.e. the stacks from Intelligence.

Isn’t Sigil of Speed “on kill” ?

I’m not really sure why shroud needs to count as a weapon swap or rather why shroud and it’s abilities should be tied to a weapon in the first place.
This all seems like a bit of dodgy design.

Personally I think i’ll benefit from this design, because:
a) I didn’t always swap to a 2H before entering shroud
b) I’m not heavy into the sigil proc timing, so extra procs generally benefit me.

But I can see how this is a bummer for some people. No longer can you judge your sigil cooldowns by watching your weapon swap cooldown.

Corrosive Poison Cloud: Fixed an issue that allowed this ability to block unblockable attacks.

Well so much for CPC being unique :P
Saw this one coming though.

Reknarok.7582:

With HoT coming out, I’m going Reaper, ofc.

My build is Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper for PvE with Berserker stats.

Considering the survivability boost for minions coming out with HoT, I was wondering whether it would be worth it to run with minions in some of my skill slots but here’s my issue.

Their damage does not scale off player stats.
Most of them don’t have decent utility on bosses, with the exception of the Flesh Wurm teleport and Bone Minions for blast finishers.
I don’t want to go into Death Magic.

So are they worth using without Necromantic Corruption? I know the 25% damage increase is big, but I feel like I lose too much replacing Spite or Soul Reaping with Death Magic in this build.

I see little reason to pick up minions without going into Death Magic, if it’s purely for the sake of having a minion. Minions in my eyes are generally kind of “all in” builds, where you either take a lot of minions or take none.
The few exceptions I can see are:

1) Bone minions blast finisher – Mostly for group PvE. But the cooldown is short so you can just:
a) Blast your bone minions and swap out the skill when the cooldown is gone
b) Blast a single bone minion and swap the skill right away
There is little reason to keep bone minions in fights, other skills have a bigger impact. They’re purely for certain pre-fight blasts or blasting stealth or whatever.

2) Flesh wurm teleport – For PvE these uses are limited and you can just swap it in if the situation screams for it (e.g. in the swamp fractal you can just swap in your flesh wurm quickly if you want to run a wisp fast)

3) Rise! for defense – Which shouldn’t be needed much for PvE in your current build, Necro has enough innate defense for the basic stuff and IMO there are better defensive skills than Rise! with your build (e.g. Spectral Armor).

4) Flesh Golem for high uptime elite with a knockdown – This is really the only minion you want to have hanging around. Elite golem is actually pretty good for casual PvE as it’s a constant damage source and a nice medium cooldown on demand knockdown.

Daniel Handler.4816:

Are the corruption side effects that much of an issue, even with the trait?

• Consume conditions removes all conditions, and doesn’t put damaging conditions on you.
• BiP doesn’t hurt physical dps
• CPC doesn’t stop you from bunkering.
• Corrupt Boon is not damaged functionally.
• Epidemic doesn’t hurt condi dps.
• Plague damages you in ways you can’t feel.

The skills are more powerful than any similar skills in other professions, the corruption are sides effects to balance how powerful the skills are. And you can mitigate the side effects.

For great justice or BiP? Shield of avenger or CPC?

I beg to differ.

Our corruptions are really potent, but frankly they are not in the order of magnitudes strong that they need such a downside. Especially not with MoC on top.
Personally I’m fine with the self bleed on some of these abilities. It’s mostly the other conditions that annoy me. Weakness on CPC and Epidemic. Cripple on CPC. Blind on our heal.

I mean, Consume conditions is really strong for example. But it comes with significant downsides already, like a really long cast time and a significant cooldown. Does it really need the vulnerability (+ blind) on top of that ?
Other classes also have plenty strong heals.

Mitigating the side effects is part of the issue. I basically need to use an extra utility skill, waste a weapon swap to staff, use my heal. JUST so I can use my “slightly stronger utility skill” without shooting myself in the foot.

Corruptions with self harm made great sense in GW1, because the game design was there to build around it. You had cleansers, you had healers, you had the ability to shift pressure, and hexes were FAR more flexible than the staple conditions we have now allowing for more intricate balance and more unique skills.
Corruptions with self harm in GW2 are just tacked on for the sake of nostalgia and symbolism and serve little purpose otherwise.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big sucker for lore and self harm makes good sense on a class like a necro. But then at least build something around it. Synergize with them through traits or something; make it so they are enhanced when we transfer them; make the abilities to such an extend where you have to decide whether you want to pay the price for the benefit of a great utility.

I’m changing mine for sure before launch. I plan on getting Twilight eventually.

Currently mine looks like this, so it’ll probably be how she goes into HoT. But I like to mix and mash things up now and then.

Halcyon.5340:

Nyth.3492:

And you base that on 3 beta weekend events ?
Sorry but we’re going to have to see how this plays out first.
A lot of the reaper hype is due to the stark contrast to vanilla necromancer.

One beta weekend, and I’m keen enough to know that Sentinel Reaper is capable of effectively contesting a point against a Cele-Elementalist in sPvP. Anyone worth his own salt will know what I mean.

Funny you say that. Because I was watching Noscoc and Phantaram duel it out during BWE3 and basically with Tempest Phantaram lost most duels from Noscoc as reaper, but with traditional cele d/d spec Phantaram won just about every duel.

Thing is with reaper: You lose a TON of boon hate and condi transfer.
You have to give up the curses traitline, which includes: Plague sending; path of corruption and perma weakness.

I’m psyched for reaper and I think we’ll see it a lot in PvP with success. But I wouldn’t even be surprised if at the top tier of things some necro’s will go back to the old Spite/Curses/Soul Reaping setup, because it gives them everything they need.

Halcyon.5340:

Nyth.3492:

You can’t just take these talents in a void. That’s not how balancing works. You can’t say THIS TALENT IS TOO STRONG, without seeing the bigger picture.
Necro’s could have 100% extra crit and +50% damage for free; as long as our base damage isn’t high enough to be competetive that is all irrelevant, whether you have those benefits or not.

Halcyon.5340:

As it is now, we have two choices – a subtle nerf now or a BIG hammer nerf in the future. Pick your poison.

I can, and I will voice my concern when I feel an aspect of a class is too strong (isn’t that the point of the beta weekends?). I will even take kittens for it. Decimate Defense needs to be moved up into grandmaster-tier or see its effects reduced by half. +50% critical hit chance while OUTSIDE and inside Reaper Shroud is too strong. Death Perception only gives +50% critical hit chance while IN Reaper Shroud, AND it is a Grandmaster trait. Also, please don’t tell me that stacking Vulnerability on a Necro is difficult. It’s not.

Stacking vulnerability is easy as pie. But it takes a bit of time, which is what the trait is balanced around.
In PvE it means you’ll only see +50% crit chance vs anything staying up for more than say 10-15 seconds. Which means veterans and higher.
In PvP condi cleanse and the fact it takes a bit to stack this will result in you never really recieving the full benefit, unlike Death Perception which is instant full effect when you swap into shroud.

THAT itself is the balance that ANet had in mind with this trait. If they want to adjust it, fine. But claiming that it’s OP by default is, once again, looking at the trait in a vaccuum and not seeing how it’s playing out in practice.
This trait is meant to have full effect in a raid setting, without giving the reaper instant full power in shorter term fights.

Halcyon.5340:

Necromancers may not have access to some +10% damage modifiers that other classes have access to, but they have Might generation. I would gladly take 25 stacks of Might over a missing 15% damage modifier. Might generation also synergizes very well with Blighter’s Boon.

I love my self sustained 25 might stacks; it’s complete boss, especially with reaper.
But an extra 15% flat damage modifier would make us actually viable in a ton of group content where we’re currently excluded from. Especially in situations where might is being handed out like candy anyway.

Halcyon.5340:

With that said, I do agree with OP that Reaper needs a slight nerf.

And you base that on 3 beta weekend events ?
Sorry but we’re going to have to see how this plays out first.
A lot of the reaper hype is due to the stark contrast to vanilla necromancer.

Halcyon.5340:

Kulvar.1239:

Major Master Trait: Decimate Defenses
Increase Critical Chance by 1% per stack of Vulnerability (downed from 2%)

2% critical chance per stack of Vulnerability is actually too much for a master-tier trait. When coupled with Death Perception, it gives Reapers up to 100% critical chance with NO precision gears. Reapers have so many methods to apply Vulnerability – 100% critical hit chance is pretty much a given. When geared in full Valkyrie body armors and Cavalier trinkets, Reapers gained “zerker status” at no cost to survivability.

Is the trait strong? yes

But you’re acting like we’re the only class to have these kind of mechanics.
Other classes tend to have a lot of damage multipliers that we lack. Those damage multipliers also make their gear stronger than it really is.

If some other class has say +20% extra damage that a necro doesn’t have. It means they can take 2-4 pieces of gear and change that to a survivability set and still be equal with a necromancer.

You can’t just take these talents in a void. That’s not how balancing works. You can’t say THIS TALENT IS TOO STRONG, without seeing the bigger picture.
Necro’s could have 100% extra crit and +50% damage for free; as long as our base damage isn’t high enough to be competetive that is all irrelevant, whether you have those benefits or not.

Halcyon.5340:

As it is now, we have two choices – a subtle nerf now or a BIG hammer nerf in the future. Pick your poison.

How about an effective nerf to the classes that deserve it once we know the state of the game?
How about we NOT nerf stuff before it’s even been released. The reaper has seen what, 8 days of gameplay?
The moment you nerf reapers and it turns out we’re actually still not that good; it’ll be an impossible feat to get necromancers buffed again.

IF ANYTHING, the last 3 years of GW2 has proven how obstinate the GW2 development team can be when it comes to class balance.
So let’s PLEASE not nerf stuff before it’s even out.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

<snip>

This is good feedback, agree with just about everything here.

Build and weapons will also largely depend on the type of content. I don’t think suffer’s condi transfer is needed that much. Taking something like BiP would be nice in some cases.

Also kinda hoping they will add ascended Giver weapons. The 20% condi duration is going to be far better than the condi damage.

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.

I think devs are a bit scared to give us easy access to burning, because of some secondary aspects.

e.g. innate tankiness which would be further enhanced by condition specs lesser requirement for stats (e.g. power needs precision and ferocity, there is just condition damage and condition duration, and the latter isn’t on armor)
Our condition transfers probably play into that as well. If you can cause a ton of burn stacks and are able to redirect even more condi damage, that’s a potentially scary combo.

Personally I find the scepter change to be a bit boring as well. I had hoped for more, but I’m also thinking they might want to see how reaper plays into things first before they buff stuff.

If anything though, what necromancers lack currently with conditions is mostly a lack of applying a lot of condi’s fast.
Nearly all condition specs, be it condi engis; elementalists; condi mesmers; condi rangers; they all share an advantage that necro’s dont have (besides burning) and that is that they can apply their conditions really fast. Their ramp up time is but a fraction of ours, and that hurts us more than most other things.

Anchoku.8142:

Scepter could use more life force. A condition damage build only really has scepter to support it.

Greatsword can support condition damage with deathly chill but chill has nothing to do with bleeding or poison. Reaper and scepter do not have synergy.

Scepter works a little with corruption skills but not nearly as well as other professions and their condition damage builds having trait lines supporting weapons and utilities for a toward a common condition.

There are no off hand or alternative main hand weapons that bleed. Only staff and upgrades bleed so there is nothing to switch to.

First of all. I see what you mean with reaper and scepter not sharing synergy; but I don’t think they have to. Reapershroud has some really good condition potential with the tons of poisons, good access to chill and dhuumfire.
The scepter plays into that well as a condition weapon. The scepter itself might still be weak, but you can weave the scepter #2 and #3 pretty well in between staff attacks and reapershroud abilities.
Dagger offhand causes bleeds and weakness from range. And the focus might have some potential with reapers reliance on chill, but that’s probably not going to work great due to Spinal Shiver’s long cast time

I could see a Curses/Soul Reaping/Reaper build with Scepter/x + Staff work very well though.

WereDragon.6083:

Bhawb.7408:

Khristophoros.7194:

What’s the DPS of a minion master? Anyone got the numbers?

Minion – Base – Vampiric – Vampiric Aura
Blood Fiend – 80 – 114 – 127
Bone Fiend – 191 – 259 – 285
Bone Minions (each) – 53(attack)/86(if summoned/blown up immediately) – 86/88 – 99/89
Flesh Wurm – 238 – 267 – 277
Shadow Fiend – 233 – 300 – 326
Flesh Golem – 589 – 673 – 705
That’s baseline with no crits. Base 4% crit chance, 150% crit damage. They’d also get 25% from the trait, then master DPS, fury, might, etc. all add too.

Don’t forget “Rise” if it’s taken. I was playing a funky clerics MM in BW3 that could consistently keep 20+ minions up, that damage, vampiric and lifesteal add up including supliment damage from the MM himself. It’s certainly no icebow/staff ele but it’s ALOT of incoming damage.

A lot of numbers doesn’t equal a lot of dps. I know the static amount from vampiric adds quite a bit, but for the personal damage you give up it’s not even close to making up for it.
The rise minions themselves also do really low damage, their only strong point dps-wise is that getting killed leaves a death nova, which will not take even longer.

I’m pretty sure that MM is FAR FAR from meta from a DPS standpoint. You could easily take 1 or 2 wells and have more damage potential than a full bar of minions. Especially considering you’ll have to spec fully into death magic to even make minions worthwhile, which means losing spite and soul reaping if you’re a reaper.

I like the change, it’s a huge QoL increase. I’m a longtime minionmancer fan; but I’m also a realist, and this isn’t making MM anything near meta.

Kulvar.1239:

@Nyth
Unfortunately, I wasn’t there during BWE1, I missed all but one beta weekend.
So, I wasn’t able to test the not spammable version of Gravedigger.

Back then it was 80%, which was even more awkward as you were left with 1s gaps between gravediggers in which you could quite literally do nothing at all (even an autoattack swing took longer).

50% might seem better; but you have to realize that the greatsword really isn’t a great weapon.
The ONLY saving grace it has, is that spamming grave digger sub-50% is the highest dps move we have.
If we remove that, everyone will just go back to dagger/X auto attack.

People think 30k gravediggers are the bomb. But those high hits are somewhat exceptional. Since gravedigger takes about 2s for a complete cast, the dps isn’t even all that high. Even assuming you have 100% crit chance (which you might not have if you pick up Death Perception), that’s still “only” 15k dps if you spam it.
If you make the cooldown 50%, you’ll cut that dps by half if not more. And dagger/X is far better dps at that point.

Dadnir.5038:

Well, Decimate defense is somewhat ok.

Honestly, I feel that Gravedigger is the real threat to the overall balance of the reaper. So simply, let it do less instant damage but make it faster in compensation so that the overall damage per second end up being the same. It wouldn’t one shot foes anymore and the “above 50%” damage per second would definitely goes down but a faster gravedigger would allow more room to use active defense when used on foe under 50%.

I’m willing to sacrifice some gravedigger DPS on foes above 50% health point for QoL and an healthier PvP.

Greatsword in PvP is more a liability than an advantage.
Gravedigger is balanced for pvp in the sense that you give up a ton of sustain by not picking up either:
a) A staff, which includes ranged damage, pre-fight marks, a very solid AoE chill, a very good condi transfer and an AoE fear. All unblockable as well.
b) Dagger/Warhorn which means you lose out on great sustained high damage, great LF generation, an extra heal and an interrupt.

Picking up GS might give you some nice bursty damage, but you’ll lose so much more. I don’t think i’ve seen the top PvP necro’s play with GS for very long in sPvP.

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.

ImdA.4701:

Am I the only one who finds this staff super awful ? xD

Probably not.

I’m a bit on the fence personally. On one hand I quite like it, but there are a few things that I would have done differently.

First of all the staff is a bit too bulky.
They shouldn’t have added the “double helix”-esque base of the staff. The top of the staff with the bird and all the branches already provides a ton of detail. The base of the staff should’ve been more simplistic.
Now it’s losing some identity as a staff and looks slightly more like a side-of-the-road-branch.

Second all the blue stuff thrown on it. One part of me likes it, the other thinks it’s ruining the eerie feeling of the staff.
It’s a trend with legendaries apparently to make them look cute. IMO the blue wings and staff projectile animations, though nicely done, take away from the sinister style that the sheeted staff has.

In the end i’ll probably still get it. I love the raven style, I love the name; and it’s truly unique. Plus it’s miles and leaps better than Bifrost.

Lily.1935:

Its not crows. Its ravens.

If we’re being real technical. A raven is massive (as in like 1 foot / 30 cm tall); the bird in the staff is a crow at best.
That said, that’s just being nitpicky; as the staff clearly has the raven vibe with everything else.

DarthInvadeHer.9861:

Warscythes.9307:

Viable, not optimal.

Go for it

But viable to the point where people have no issues with playing alongside a necro?
Also, any chance someone can tell me what the current meta is? Still full zerk teams? and what classes?

IMO the people that decline a necro are either:
a) Ignorant elitists
b) Misinformed
c) Willing to wait 20 minutes in a queue for a 15 minute run; instead of 5 minutes in queue for a 20 minute run.

Which unfortunately seems to include a majority of the PUG community.
The meta for dungeons/fractals is still full zerg, and there is little chance (or reason) to change that.

For raids things might shift a bit; but we’ll see.
I still have the vain hope that due to our class mechanic we’ll be able to push more aggressive gear without dying constantly. But if the rest of the raids is like the one we’ve seen in beta; I fear that won’t hold true.

For a build. I think both a power oriented build and a minion oriented build works great for leveling.

Personally, whichever you chose. I would probably go into blood magic first. Reason for that is that the adept tier gives you 25% run speed while wielding a dagger. And, although dagger might be boring, its really fast at killing stuff with the auto attack.
Movement speed is a huge QoL and leveling speed increase if you’re doing open world PvE.

If you aim for a power build, you should probably continue in blood magic to reach the grandmaster tier, this gives you shorter duration on wells.
Run with Well of Suffering and Well of Corruption, your 3rd utility skill can be anything. I prefer Spectral Walk for some extra swiftness.
For your weapons; I would either go with D/W + Staff or D/F + Staff. The former gives you better AoE/Swiftness and an Interrupt. The latter gives Reaper’s Touch, which gives nice burst. I prefer the former myself. If you take Warhorn, the master trait for horn is probably better than the vampiric presence in most cases. Staff is great for opening from range, and you do more damage in shroud with staff; but you can go D/W+D/F as well; or mix in an axe.

After that I would probably go into Soul Reaping first. Unyielding Blast is great if you line 2+ opponents up in DS. Vital Persistence gives shroud a ton of sustain, enough that you can kill multiple groups while staying in shroud. Death Perception gives your shroud a ton of dps at lower level as well.

After that Spite is a good one for more damage. 5% more damage on targets without boon (= everything pretty much, your Well of Corruption takes care of those with boons); Spinal Shivers at 50% is a pretty big burst at lower level and last 20% extra damage below 50%.

For a minion build, it’s a toss up between Death magic and Blood Magic first. I’d probably take the former for the damage.
But dipping into Blood Magic first for the dagger run speed isn’t a bad idea. Like I said before, the QoL of constant 25% run speed is massive.

Either way, take the other next. And I would probably go into Soul Reaping last. SR is just a great way to make you both beefy and incredibly strong while in open world PvE. The potential to solo veterans with ease, elites and even solo some champions is massive due to shroud.

For weapons with minions. I’m still a big fan of getting a staff. It allows you to open up from range with a high damage AoE combo (2→3→4→2); staff gives a ton of life force and synergises pretty well with minions.
Axe / Focus is a pretty good combo as well, especially with minions since the focus #4 can bounce off them. And both Axe and Focus stack a lot of vulnerability, which is basically the best/only way to make your minions more powerful.
In the end I generally end up with Dagger/WH or Dagger/Focus though, since the run speed increase is too good and I don’t really want to run with a Signet of the Locust in PvE.

MeveM.7913:

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

Try asking this on his channel instead of the forum? Believe it or not, not everyone here like him so me, for example, consider this spam and free promotion.

Why should I try his channel? This is about GW2. This is the official GW2 forum. Just because you disagree with him doesn’t mean his content isn’t about GW2. Part 2 is about Necromancer and last time I checked this was the necromancer forum.

Why do people that dislike him bother to write? Just go away and write in topics you enjoy. Don’t need to take a dump on everyone else’s parade.

Still they are right, in that this is not the best place to ask this.
The only one that really knows is Nemesis or those close to him, and they’re more likely to lurk around on his youtube channel or maybe even his old reddit post or something.

That said, besides real life and the fact calculating purely on logs takes ages; my best guess would be that he had to adjust his entire video and script, because he made the video around the time the last balance patch came around. And that changed a few things about ice bow and also some things for necro balance (scepter changes / axe changes / etc).

Personally I’m not a huge fan of him, but I don’t hate him either. He makes some decent video’s; but it would be tons better without the attitude and inflated ego. But I guess that’s way of pumping up views.
However he raised some interesting and valid issues in the first video (e.g. , so I’m interested to see the second video if that ever comes out.

Onerios.4962:

While we could do with some more condition modifiers to give us a good pve condition spec, I don’t think spite is the right place for it. The line is already mandatory for all physical specs, and kind of still feels that way even for condition builds, probably should be looking at moving stuff out of spite into other trees before adding more damage modifiers in.

Kinda agree with this.

If you allow damage modifiers to work on conditions (not considering the power/condition balance ramifications for a second), it would make spite required for condimancers and would make their builds very rigid.

I’d rather they spice up some of the other trees a bit more. I feel like some of the other trait lines miss a bit of spice.

The way I see it, for corruptions to have the rather significant impact they have now on the necromancer himself; they would have to be among the best utility spells in the game, which they simply are not.

Would the skills be unbalanced if you removed the self-inflicted conditions? Hardly.

The effect is there just for “nostalgic / lore” reasons and it’s pretty bad for gameplay. Heck self harming spells in GW1 mostly went about stealing health or just placing a bleed on yourself. And back then the spells were ACTUALLY powerful, plus you generally had a healer which could cover for the self-harm with heals or regen abilities.

Don’t get me wrong though. I love most of the corruption spells, they’re among my favorites in the game. I just think they need a rework, because the current mechanic is an annoyance factor rather than a balance factor.

If they want to keep the nostalgic “sacrifice” characteristics in, plus want those to synergize well with our condition transfers. I’d make more sense to just stack a long duration bleed (1 stack for 20 seconds or something), on ourselves so that at least using a transfer on it is semi-worthwhile, yet not doing anything about it isn’t debilitating us to the point of being flat out annoying.

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.

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%.

Blaine Tog.8304:

As near as I can tell, the Greatsword and Reaper’s Shroud have pretty much the same set of skills except RS is a) quicker and b) mandatory. That is, you can’t have access to either of them unless you go Reaper, but if you go Reaper, why would you want to carry a Greatsword when you’re already forced to take basically the same skills as your profession mechanic?

Both have AoE damage.

Both have a strong defensive skill.

Both have a gap-closer.

Both have an execute.

Both have Chill.

Both have CC.

They each emphasize these slightly differently but you’re still using them for fundamentally the same things. It just has me scratching my head over why I should want to bring the Greatsword over Dagger/Warhorn to diversify my toolset, and when I do take the Greatsword, I never have the slightest idea of when I should be using Greatsword and when I should be using RS.

Thoughts? Suggestions? Rabid flaming?

I think you’re being too general.

1) Both have AoE damage
Agreed

2) They both have very defensive skills.
Yes, under a big nominator they both have very defensive skills.
But that’s to general like I said. The difference between a pulsing blind field and a pulsing stability ability are quite large. You use them for different purposes.

3) Both have a gap closer.
IMO the gap closer from reaper shroud is better. But again here, the difference between a dash and a pull is significant when it comes to application and execution IMO.

4) Both have executes.
Somewhat, but they’re still both very different. Gravedigger is solid sub-50% execute as it is spammable. Executioner’s Scythe does a truckload of damage, but it’s utility (ice field and stun) also make it more than JUST and execute.
IMO they are both great finishers, but also both serve a different purpose. IMO Gravedigger is PvE wise amazeballs; whereas executioner’s scythe is nice but mostly there for the field. In PvP it’s almost the opposite.

5) Both have chill
True, but it’s a bit of the trademark of the whole traitline, which GS is a part of.

6) Both have CC
Mje… Wouldn’t really say the GS has proper CC myself.

So that’s being very general; like I said, the nominator might have the 2 things share a lot of perks, but the execution and application of those are completely different.
On top of that, they’re not mutually exclusive. Having a GS doesn’t overlap with having RS since you can’t use weapons in RS.
It’s not like you don’t need the execute in RS because you already have it on GS. You don’t always have the liberty to swap in and out of RS to access tools, as you might with weapons.

But you do raise somewhat of a good point. There ARE situations where bringing the GS is not all that smart.
I don’t really understand why ANet thought it was a good idea to force both reaper shroud and GS by going into a traitline.
That goes for all classes to be frank. I don’t see why the weapon and/or new class mechanic should be tied to a traitline, it really lowers the skill ceiling and dept of the game; plus it allows developpers to get away with weak/sloppy design in either of the 3 (mechanic / weapon / traits) without being forced to fix it since people still want to benefit from one of those 3 things.

Ruderasta.7809:

How are you guys sticking to anyone in pvp? I can prepare a thanksgiving meal in between the second and third sword swings, and thats the one that applies our most reliable slow as this spec?

GS isn’t the best for PvP. You can make it work, but you’ll be very dependent on your secondary weapon set.

Other than that, nothing much changed. Necro’s are still horrible mobility wise; but instead of just being a bit tanky, we can now also brawl quite well in close range.

I don’t see why.

Cele sig reaper has plenty of counters; some which are already known, others which will be formed soon enough once people get some expirimenting in.

I was watching Phantaram streaming some elementalist in beta. And apparently Cele D/D ele is quite good vs reaper builds, because necromancers lose a lot of condi transfer when they swap to reaper.

And I’ll say what I’ve always said (and I know there are others who agree with this):
I don’t see why necro shouldn’t be (one of) the best 1v1 class.
We quite literally have no way to catch up to people or disengage. We have no enormous utility outside of plague form tanking.
If all we can do is stand there and exchange punches, why shouldn’t we be able to be good at just that ?

For easy PvE I would definitely go with full Sinister.

If you get harder content, I would mix in a bit of Carrion as that gives you some HP.

Dire is really defensive (Condi dmg / Vit / Tough), which is more suited for more tanky roles. Maybe in group PvE fights like raids, or for certain pvp builds.

akaCryptic.2389:

I think a cheap solution would be to make pets and minions evade whenever their master executes a dodge roll.

Maybe, but that would mean necro has to dodge both melee AoE and ranged stuff while already having the least amount of dodge in the game.

I’d prefer minions just having 90% damage reduction from AoE in PvE only. That way at least you have to make smart use of your healing abilities as a MM (Mark of Blood / Transfusion / etc).

They’re actually undead rats now.

I see what you did there Gee….

I loved necromancer in GW1 (and Morrowind before that); kinda stuck with it. It’s very different, but still my favored class.

Things I like about GW2 necro are:
1) Bruiser playstyle. I love how tanky the necromancer is, yet still able to dish out surprising damage. People always seem to overestimate themselves when going 1v1 with a necro.
2) Great visuals. IMO The necromancer has gotten some of the best visuals in the game; and reaper continues that trend.
3) Underdog. I kinda like playing the underdog; i’ve noticed in the past I tend to gravitate towards the class that can be unexpected good in the hands of an experienced player.
4) Lore. To be frank, necromancy style characters have always really been interesting to me in RPGs. The ability to summon an undead army to do your bidding and being this anti-hero that is disliked, yet awesome. Diablo, Elder Scrolls, Warcraft and Guild Wars; in all of those there is some kind of character alike the necromancer and i’ve always been a big fan of those.
5) Minions. I tend to gravitate towards minion classes. If there is anything I find disappointing in the GW2 necro, it’s that the minions are a bit of a side project. Tacked on because of their status in GW1. IMO the minions in GW1 were near perfect, the only downside being that the corpse requirement made it too harsh in pvp and certain pve fights.

A few things I picked up so far, which might help you:

Main hand

Dagger – High DPS, High LF generation; but low range. For roaming the latter can often be an issue. This weapon is mostly for sPvP (where you can force people to fight on points) and PvE.

Axe – Used to be “meh” before; but now that it has 900 range, I find that it’s uses have multiplied. In cases where you need that extra range that dagger doesn’t provide, the axe fills the job pretty decently.

Scepter – Haven’t played around with it yet since the changes. I know a lot of people liked to play with this while roaming, because it gives you the flexibility that daggers don’t give. They pushed it more towards the condition side of things. So this will mostly be your weapon of choice if you want to go condimancer.

Staff – All around great secondary weapon. It gives you range, it gives you utility (chill / condi transfer / AoE fear) and great LF generation; in turn you sacrifice damage. But that’s what generally makes it a good secondary.

Offhands

Warhorn – Warhorn is a really good offhand; giving you a good daze, LF generation and one of few good sources for swiftness.
Biggest downside is that all it’s abilities are practically melee range. However it’s still very good despite that. A melee range daze and a reliable source for swiftness are great even for people who like to stay at range.

Focus – Focus is a bit more damage oriented compared to the other offhands. It has really long range.
Biggest downside is that with Spinal Shivers a lot of the damage is dependent on the amount of boons the opponent has. (Can do up to 3x more damage on an opponent with 3 boons vs an opponent with 0 boons)

Dagger – Very defensive offhand. Allows you to transfer conditions and apply weakness. Really good if your build lacks that, but generally considered a “weak offhand” unless your build really lacks that.

Combinations:

Dagger / Warhorn – Both melee range; this is probably considered the best combo that necro’s have in general. They synergize well together.

Dagger / Focus – Used a lot in PvE as the second set, that way you can alternate between locust swarm and reaper’s touch for high dps.

Axe / Focus – The focus plays well into the extended range that axe has. Downside of this combo is that it lacks utility in favor for more damage and range. So you either have to make up for that with a secondary weapon (e.g. staff) and/or utilities.

Scepter / Dagger – Dagger is a decent addition for scepter usually. But mostly because the others aren’t always as useful (Focus is very power oriented / Warhorn’s melee range might not be what you seek). Benefit of this, is that you can build a pretty tanky, attrition based spec.

Scepter / Warhorn – As said in the warhorn section; the fact it lacks range doesn’t make it useless. Swiftness is great for roaming; and a melee range daze is excellent for people who want to stay at range.

Your secondary weapon is generally staff. It combines good range with utility. A ranged AoE chill, a ranged AoE blast finisher and condition transfer, ranged AoE CC and it builds life force really fast from range.
Now that the axe has it’s range extended to 900, we might see Axe/X take the secondary spot a little bit more for people who want a ranged weapon with a bit more ‘umph’.

This happens to me as well once in a while.

Thing is, I don’t blame the game, I tend to blame myself for being kitten enough to double tap.

Look, I personally wouldn’t mind having a short GCD-esque thing on shrouds, as I hardly ever flash DS; but I don’t think making skills less skillful and less responsive is a good thing for the game.

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).

caelaran.6250:

Just poking my head in after almost a year away – did the AI for minions get fixed so they are actually useful now? When I bailed they would stand in one place and hit air half the time….

Yea they fixed that in a previous build (few weeks back) already. Minions are performing pretty well now, they always attack the target you’re attacking.
That said, they’re still not all that good for anything but PvP and solo play.

I still think the whole DS damage based on weapon equipped is a really stupid mechanic. I know it’s probably not even intentional / a (very low priority) bug, but a 10% damage penalty because I couldn’t/forgot to swap to my staff is redonculous of course.

Dadnir.5038:

Maybe because :
- faster auto attack
- less clunky animation
- better cripple uptime
- Poison (anti regen tool)
- used to be way better at LF generation (Now the 2 are just bad)
- No easily interruptible channeled skill

Well, I find this way enough to prefer scepter to axe.

NB.: See? the lobby answered you.

I get where you’re coming from, and I totally support a hybrid weapon.

But not when there isn’t a feasible condition weapon out there.
Staff already has decent hybrid potential if you’re desperately looking for a weapon that fits your demands. Scepter was hybrid and that was standing in the way of unlocking a good chunk of class potential.

So now we have:

- Dagger: 1H Melee cleave power weapon
- Axe: Ranged power weapon
- Scepter: Condi weapon
- Staff: Utility / Hybrid weapon
and soon
- Greatsword: 1H Melee cleave power weapon

Having the scepter being a hybrid weapon, or rather a “master of nothing”-weapon; was really hurting the necromancer. If anything we’re still short on having proper condi weapons and frankly the change to scepter isn’t all that great, especially not with the nerf from Lingering Curse on top. (Might as well just make it baseline if you’re gonna kick that trait into the dirt)

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.

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 !

spoj.9672:

Im sorry are we listening to the same commentary? Nemesis is always quick to insult and spew cringe worthy ego comments. He also has a very abrasive tone in most of his videos which just irritates a lot of people. Honestly i feel his tone reminds me more of a child than many of the insults provoked against him. Maybe thats just me?

Im pretty sure he continues to do a lot of these things because it gets him exposure and views. I personally could never bring myself to say such cringe worthy things and embarrass myself like that though. Props to him for having no shame in that department.

Point is, you cant really blame people for not properly listening to him. When often times it makes you want to drink a bottle of bleach and scrape out your eardrums with a rusty needle. Also along with his sometimes valid points you get a load of contradictory bullkitten which makes no sense or is just flat out incorrect, irrelevant or just a pointless bash the meta comment thrown in. So its difficult to take him seriously. “DPS uptime” anyone?

I don’t disagree with you. Nemesis’ attitude is annoying to say the least.
But do we really need to have 10 page threads about that instead of the actual thing said in the videos?

So yes, I do blame people for not listening to him when they come into the threads just to troll and flame regarding him.

The way I see it. He raises some good points (e.g. Icebow even though that’s just a minor thing in the whole thing; pre-fight buffing instead of just in-fight buffing). And he made some dumb/stupid remarks. Talking about how we shouldn’t look at short burst moves for DPS and then follows that up by using his Lich form burst in his DPS calculations for necro, etc.

Thing is, discuss those things and form an opinion and arguments based on that stuff.

Yet instead we see people:
- Simply flaming him / discarding anything he says because he’s kicking the shins of their favorite Twitch streamer
- Simply ignoring every point he makes, because one of the things he stated makes no sense. “So the rest is probably bullkitten as well”-attitudes.
- Praising him into high heaven, when he clearly is doing some stuff wrong as well. (Because IMO this goes both ways).
Or worse yet, saying necromancer is fine because “The nemesis” did 40k kitten dps.

Too many fallacy’s and toxicity are used in any discussion regarding him and his videos.

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.

nekretaal.6485:

The big picture is that the reaper is coming out and doesn’t have necromancer death shroud skills (ranged DPS), and doesn’t have a kiting Playstyle and so needs defensive abilities similar to what warriors have.

Let’s preview the changes:

Yikes!

These are the tweaked axe and scepter (and focus) changes!

First of all, no changes to focus, which is still bottom tier.

Focus is one of the main weapons for PvE. I agree it needs tweaks, but you make it sound extremely dire.

Second, anet basically listened to the wrong people for axe and scepter changes.

Axe didn’t need a range increase to make it a cruddy warrior rifle… It needed damage or utility. It still has neither. The range increase was especially horrible because the animations aren’t super telegraphed and look silly the longer range you go.

I disagree. IMO the range increase is a good first change. (I hope more follow tuesday). The axe with 600 range is in direct competition with not only the dagger, but also with the upcoming greatsword for a close range power weapon. Extending the range and giving access to maybe our first ranged power weapon is the best thing they could have done with it. (Actually I still think that the dagger should be better off as a 900 range weapon, so we don’t have 2 melee cleave weapons, but that’s too many changes for a balance patch.)
Does it need more than just a range increase? Yes, most definitely. But this is a step in the right direction IMO.

Scepter needed its condition damage back & to keep up with condition power creep in the game. The scaling changes and poison no longer duration stacking removed most of the power of the weapon. Scepter still has neither good scaling condition or power damage. If they had to put a condition on scepter 3, torment is the wrong one.

*Torment might be the wrong one; I don’t know. Also depends a lot on the duration. The good thing is, that the scepter is finally getting a bit more identity, instead of being this semi-condi / semi-power weapon that it’s been so far. Yes it needs more dps and more LF generation badly. But without lingering curse in mind, the scepter got a pretty solid base increase to condition damage potential.

Both weapons are still single target & the worst main hands overall for damage or utility.

Agreed, they need more dps. But single target isn’t a bad thing. I’m frankly getting a bit tired of every weapon being a cleave weapon these days. If anything we need less cleave in this game, not more

Both weapons still nerf death shroud.

Both weapons still generate life force poorly.

Axe frankly isn’t too bad, it’s biggest downfall is the fact it’s channeled; meaning every dodge or interrupt will kill your LF generation completely. Scepter is horrible yes. Again though, still hoping a bit that there will be more tweaks. This seems kinda bleak when Robert Gee was talking about “exciting upcoming changes to axe and scepter”.

Reaper is going to be a near gimmick because its fun to play, but the profession will quickly find itself bottom tier (another 3 years of bottom tier incoming) without ways to handle skirmishers.

• Blablabla <insert obligatory whine about content you don’t even know yet here> blabla*

As for the other changes, at least the minion master elites were buffed (do plague and still remove spectrals?), but anet put the projectile block on literally the worst utility skill in the necromancer skillset and then nerfed that skill.

Minion master elites weren’t buffed. Because minion masters always take golem. The whole change is nice to some degree. But at best it’s nice for non-MM taking something like spectral wurm for mobility. It hardly does anything for MM.
Adding projectile destroy on CPC actually turned one of lesser used (it wasn’t worthless, there are some great plays out there with CPC) utilities into something that is worth using.
What did you want. Them to put projectile destroy on Well of Suffering? Yes please make this class even more one dimensional. Also I’m not sure how you think it got nerfed. It’s still 5 pulses, the conditions still last 3 seconds, so it’s only gotten more bursty now. The duration decrease was solely done because of the new projectile destroy.

For everybody who said, reaper is in trouble unless they fix necromancer….. Did they?

I think what people meant (At least that’s why I always said this); is that if they don’t fix some of the core issues of necromancer. Everyone will be playing reaper. Did they fix necromancer? Hell no. You can’t do that in one balance change, everyone with the slightest bit of MMO knowledge knows that takes several patches with a ton of itteration. But at least they’re starting on it (about 2.5 years late, but whatever).

Did you miss the point where they said that this is just a few points and that the whole release notes will come out on tuesday?

I’m not saying that there will be many more tweaks. In fact I wouldn’t even be surprised if this is it.
But, you can’t go argue about the lack of fixes in this balance patch, when you haven’t even seen the complete patch notes.

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.

The new scepter looks kind of nice. But it’s the lingering curse change that has me thinking. Because if it’s just a flat nerf from 100% to 50% base duration, than the whole scepter change has been mostly for naught.
Auto attack would be practically equal with the trait. Scepter #2 would take a heavy hit in burst and dps. Scepter #3 is nice, but would only barely make up for that.

I hope that tuesday brings some clarification, and hopefully some more tweaks. Because just extending axe range is clearly not enough. And shifting the scepter auto attack to be more backloaded is nice, but also needs more context.

I’m quite glad with the change to Feast of Corruption though. The skill never made sense, as it was a power ability on a condition damage weapon. Hybrid weapons are OK, but that move just didn’t fit well. This change makes it a lot better though.

Erasmus.1624:

Silverkey.2078:

• axe : range 900
• scepter condi buff, torment on scepter 3 (2 stacks + 1 stack/condition on enemy up to 5)

Direct upgrades are the least creative and interesting ways to “improve the quality of life” of an ability. The playstyle is utterly unchanged and these sort of changes are on par with “reduced rapid fire activation time from kitten to 2.5 s.” I already called this sort of stuff long before. Anet doesn’t do anything but raise and lower numbers. It doesn’t actually generate playstyles or soft counter opportunities.

I’ve been reading most of your posts, and they all sound fancy. But your arguments are kinda shallow.
You talk as if ANet just tweaks number, and yet the scepter #3 is a clear example of them going slightly beyond that point. Adding torment to, what was up to now mostly a power-move, the scepter is a major gameplay change that might allow condimancer to actually be a thing again.
Not so glad with Lingering Curse change, but it’s very unclear at this point in time what it exactly entails, so I’ll hold my opinion on that until tuesday. If it now includes every condition, I might like the change. If it’s just a flat nerf than I’m disappointed as it doesn’t get us anywhere.

If there is anything I learned from 20 years of theorycrafting and playing MMOs though. It’s that often the little tweaks can have the biggest impacts and open up new playstyles.
That’s why I think your whole argumentation of ANet just doing dull number tweaks not leading to anything is ignorant; no offense.

I really think some people underestimate how big of a buff it is to be able to use axe from 900 range instead of 600 range.
Many dismiss it as something that is pointless, but it’s one of the major things that we asked for in the “axe discussion” thread that has been around.

I’m assuming that these are just a few of the things we’ll be seeing. But axe range increase puts axe back from a semi-melee weapon into finally having a ranged power weapon.
Also with range being 900 range it gives it a reason to not have as much dps as dagger or upcoming greatsword. Not that it doesn’t need buffs (god we all know it will need to have damage buffs on TOP of this), but at least it will stop competing with 2 other weapons the necro has/will get access to.