Guild Wars 2

That’s actually a decent use for the tonics.

Nerf inc.

They’re stealing it from me, right? Doesn’t that sort of require that I have it in the first place?

Sigh. Why couldn’t they take the flesh golem, instead? “NO WHY ARE YOU RUNNING OVER THERE FFF-”

PvE Condition Necromancer: 30/30/0/10/0. Focus on precision and condition damage. Use a Scepter/Dagger combo. Pick whatever Spite traits you want; you’re only in the tree for the +30% condition duration anyway. For the Curses line, you want Hemophilia, Master of Corruption, and Lingering Curse. In the Blood line, you want Dagger Mastery.

Your elite can be to taste, but you need to take Epidemic, and it’s strongly recommended that you take Blood is Power.

Once you have enough +condition duration that you don’t need the 30% from Spite, you can consider swapping more points into blood to get some better selfhealing.

1. Death Shroud doesn’t “decay faster when taking damage,” it takes the damage for us. It is, quite literally, a second health pool.
2. This would make us immortal for twenty or thirty seconds, more if talented into soul reaping. That is, ah, bad for balance.
3. The solution to a buggy class is not to introduce overpowered compensation, but to fix the bugs.

80. Because I’m not ready to start another character yet, and I want to see what they do with the next patch.

Uh, curses is probably our best line in terms of major traits, and the minor traits – with the exception of Furious Demise – are better than most of our major options.

Majors:

• 20% bleed duration. Flat damage boost for condition necros on anything except zerged world bosses.
• 20% reduced cooldown on Corruptions. Blood is Power and Epidemic are both Corruption skills, and are cornerstones of PvE condition builds. Getting 20% reduced CD on them is huge.
• 33% scepter debuff duration. You could also call this “Bleeds: The Bleedening” and you wouldn’t be far off. Roughly half of the bleed stacks on a target are from scepter attacks, either the scepter itself, the crit proc, or the sigil. Getting a big buff to those is a good thing.

Minors:

• 66% chance to bleed for 1s on crit. Probably the second-most powerful minor trait we have, especially given how long our bleeds last. A typical condition necro will get a two second bleed from this; a duration-heavy necro can get 2.5 or 3.
• Furious Demise. This is basically “Let Life Transfer crit all the time” as a minor trait. Our AoE is already good, this just gives us a fast AoE in the case of surprise adds. When they fix Barbed Precision so it works while in Death Shroud, it’ll be even better.
• Target the Weak. The most powerful trait, minor or major, in the necromancer’s arsenal and probably one of the most powerful across all the classes. Our constant-uptime debuffs alone make this a 6% damage increase, and on a full boss it’ll be at least a 14% increase, with short term spikes as high as 22%. Again, when they fix condition damage to be affected by percentage modifiers, this will be godlike.

They stack, but the tooltips do not update.

Dagger, take Blood is Power as a utility skill, and you suddenly have another 2 stacks of relatively long lasting bleed as well as a way to get 20% Life Force for emergencies.

Enfeeble is a decent way to reduce incoming damage and is another AoE skill for tagging mobs in dynamic events.

I run 30/30/0/0/10/0, because our vitality 5pt and 10pt bonuses are actually worth something compared to soul reaping and (lol) death magic.

Rampagers doesn’t do as much DPS long term, but stacks up quite a bit faster than rabid. I actually prefer it for soloing.

DS allows us to live through the initial burst, because it really is a second health pool. The problem is then that they can reset the fight, and do it again, and we can’t soak another opener.

So then the fight becomes “thief opens for the second time, necro has no defenses, necro explodes.”

There are a few things they could do to fix this.

• They could give us a cooldown to restore all of our Life Force. Sure, it’d be mandatory for PvP, but it’d give us an out.
• They could give us a way to stack up our conditions without requiring more uptime than we’ll ever have. Example: Making Blood is Power apply, say, ten or fifteen stacks of bleed to a target for less time rather than just two for nearly a minute.
• They could pull some of the insane penalties off of what few defensive options we do have. The whole “eat a pile of negative conditions on a long cooldown to do something nifty” is great, but does effing work when the rest of the professions can do the same thing on half the cooldown without the penalty. Yeah, I get that we’re supposed to transfer them, but by the time we actually manage to do that we’re dead.

There’s a whole host of issues with Necromancer minions right now. Let’s go down and make a summary, shall we?

• The Flesh Golem will attack enemies that get close, despite not targeting them.
• Minons stop attacking when you enter Death Shroud and will not begin until you exit the shroud.
• Minions do not have any “AoE avoidance” AI routines, so they die in a heartbeat to environment effects or monster AoE.
• Minions cannot be ordered to attack a target.
• Minions get one-shot by dungeon enemies, except the flesh golem, which takes two hits.
• Jagged Horrors are utterly useless except to grant a rally to downed enemy players.
• Activated minion skills require the target not move out of the way of them. Given their long cast times, actually landing these abilities is a gamble at best.
• Blood Fiend doesn’t heal for the correct amount when sacrificed.
• We have no way of dismissing a minion short of leaving combat and changing the skill.
• The 20% reduced cooldown on summoning minions doesn’t work on the Flesh Golem.

I cold keep going…

Scepter/Dagger “Bleeder” (30/30/0/10/0) is high damage, but short on defense and mobility. Good AoE, though.

Staff “Minion Healer” (20/0/30/20/0) is pretty low damage and the pet AI is still dumb, but they soak hits like a sherman and when combined with a good boon-granter are insanely tough.

I love the spell effects, especially Necrotic Grasp’s staff effect and Grasping Dead’s burst of arms.
I love the minion models.
I love the voice acting. (“Oh, you killed my minion? I’LL MAKE SOME MORE!”)
I like the idea behind a lot of the mechanics, even if the implementation is lacking.

No, a Sylvari couldn’t catch a human flu. Much of what we, as humans, find disgusting they probably wouldn’t mind, and things that we don’t mind at all they would be horrified by.

Here, some examples.

Humans find piles of sewage disgusting. Why? Because waste carries transmissible diseases, and having an instinctual avoidance reaction helps keep you alive and thus able to pass on your genes. To the Sylvari, though, it’s just a pile of nutrient-rich fertilizer. They have no reason to avoid it or seek it out, they would simply note it like we note the smell of grass.

On a similar note, humans don’t particularly mind the smell of decaying plant matter. It can range from something nasty – like rotting fruit or food – to something largely inoffensive, like a decaying log, or even pleasant, like well-decomposed compost. A Sylvari, on the other hand, might have the same reaction to it that we have to the smell of rotting meat – revulsion and nausea.

Perceptions are interesting.

Evil is subjective.

Do you define evil as inflicting pain and suffering? Then yes, you could consider them evil.

Or do you need to have evil intent to commit an evil act? In that case, I would argue that they’re not evil. The Nightmare Court rejects the Dream of the Pale Tree, as well as the teachings of Ventari. To do this, anything he prescribes, the Court does the exact opposite.

It is, perhaps, a naive rejection – a better way to split from the Pale Tree would be to simply ignore the teachings and go their own way – but one of the defining attributes of all Sylvari is naivete.

I’m not sure what the exact section for this would be, but… would it be possible to get a “replay personal story” option? I really liked the personal story in GW2, and I’d like to explore some of the alternate paths that it can take, but I’m not interested in creating a whole new character to do it.

Basically, how hard would it be to make a “reset my personal story” option available that would allow us to redo the entire story from start to finish? Is that something the developers would be willing to consider?

I’d absolutely love this.

While I got my appearance right, I’d absolutely love a “gems for character recustomization” feature.

Given that a properly built, spec’d, and geared bleeder necro can hit 20-22 stacks, 40% duration won’t do a whole lot. It’s nice, sure, but not super critical.

Vampiric builds will be viable (good single-target and soloing, weak AoE) when they fix life siphon’s scaling problems.

Condition builds are viable if you outgear everyone else trying to use a condition build. This probably needs fixing, probably in the form of a changed condition cap and more condition variety to help with removal.

Minion builds are viable if you’re on a flat empty plane with monsters at wide intervals. This doesn’t really happen that often, so this also needs fixing. Luckily, most of the issues are with the absolutely insane AI used by the flesh golem, and could be relatively easily solved by giving necromancers a “control minions” pet bar like the rangers have.

Reaper builds flat out aren’t viable. Even the builds that try to use DS – generally some dagger or axe build – only end up using it as sort of a “here’s something to do while you wait for your main skills to come off of cooldown” deal. Even if they do fix the monumental list of problems with Death Shroud, it won’t fix the fact that a halfway-geared condition necromancer will do more than three times its damage with more utility than reaper form offers.

But the issues with DS aren’t really on topic, and in fact probably deserve an entire thread.

I’d rather wait and see what the reward and difficulty changes are going to be like on monday. I think that your solution, while workable, addresses the symptom (grinding) and not the problem (stuff needing grinding).

If the goal is to cut back on speed-running, why not just disable monster tethering in dungeons?

Fixed on Henge of Denravi.

Trying it now, post-update. Hoping for the best…

I think the last patch broke it. Here’s hoping it gets fixed soon, it’s the last point I need in that zone.