Showing Posts For Sigma.9746:
Sure, Plague form might be bugged and not get Chilling Darkness right now, but it’s still our best Elite by far for PvE and WvWvW. It’s one of those class defining spells, and outside of that one bug it’s probably the ability that least needs to be looked at
Toughness — sustained damage (which doesn’t really happen in pvp currently, good for pve though).
Vitality – Everything else (especially burst and conditions).
…I’m trying to figure out if people are being willfully ignorant or simply don’t understand basic math and how damage in this game works.
You have your HP. Vitality adds to it at a rate of 1 Vit : 10 HP. Adding more vitality adds HP which is then effected by your Armor value (Defense + Toughness) for direct damage. As Condition Damage ignores Armor, more Vitality gives more Effective HP against Condition Damage. On the other hand, your Effective Healing is reduced as your Vitality increases. When you boost up your Toughness you get a higher Effective HP against direct damage and it increases your Effective Healing. As the formula for maximum Effective HP is 10 HP for every point of Armor (and the base level at 80 pretty much sticks it to said 10:1) you want to increase your Toughness and Vitality at the same rate. You then adjust this rate based on if you think over the course of a single life you will take more Condition Damage or Heal more; more Vitality for the former, Toughness for the latter. We are fairly certain that Vitality effects Death Shroud, but it seems to be at a reduced rate (in that you could maybe get 5 Life Force for every point of Vitality). Once we have that figured out we can also compare the numbers there. Leaving Death Shroud out of the equation along with any % of X stat into Y, you want to go 1:1 of Vitality and Toughness, adjusting for Condition Damage vs. Healing. Sustained and Burst damage have absolutely no ****ing relevance here, it’s Condition Damage, Healing, and Death Shroud
So first you discount that the more vitality you have the more death shroud you have, which is does.
then you say the forum posters information is baseless yet you pull the exact numbers they use to try and prove toughness is flat out better than and that vitality has no place in survivability.
the only thing you are proving with the chunk you pulled out of the post if that going from 1800 armor to 2600 armor is a 42% increase. that’s doesn’t mean a 42% increase per point in effectieness
The formula isn’t just guess work it actually conveys how long you will survive vs damage with your stat weights. You are also grasping pretty hard if you think necros scale well at all with healing. Healing through siphon builds are pretty much a non factor when it comes to looking at a necros survivability. It’s actually the key factor separating us from being as tanky as guardians and warriors.Toughness only increases from healing if you have meaningful healing to begin with. If you say necro heals can compare you are flat out lying.
put simply an extra 26k health will be harder to chew through at 30% reduction than 20k hp at 40% reduction. especially when you have to contend with direct and condition damage.
honestly you seem set in your ways though so anyone reading can take what they will from this.
if you want to believe that necros have good enough healing to increase our toughness stat weight over vitality, that toughness is what makes death shroud more potent defensively than actually increasing it’s pool, and that necros make conditions completely irrelevant by all means just stack toughness.
It’s wrong but I’m tired of hitting my head on a wall.
If you dont recognize necros self healing then you have no grasp on our class. You spew disinformation, and it only hurts the community. Sorry you suck at necro, stop raging and spreading lies.
Please source me on vitality raising your pool for death shroud
We don’t really have much self-healing. Siphon Life just doesn’t work right now, nor do the traits that affect it/siphon health. The healing minion is complete garbage, so I’m trying to figure out where the idea of us having great heals comes from. You’ve got a regen off staff 2 and focus 4 (if you’re close enough for the former or get a bounce on the latter)? It’s not that good. I’d love to be able to run a healing heavy Siphon build where you lifesteal back all the damage you’re doing, but it’s just not feasible right now.
Necros are one of the best classes in WvWvW, regardless of their issues. We have extremely long range AOE, strong large AOE, incredible formation breakers and do better at large scale combat than small scale. Don’t use minions, that’s kind of dumb for large scale combat. Run abilities such as Plague Form, Epidemic, Corrosive Poison Cloud, Wells, etc.
Er, I’m fairly certain that’s completely wrong. I’ve seen that copypasta floating around a lot with absolutely no proof behind it and actual experience has contradicted it at every turn
Blood is Power is terrible. It’s two stacks of Bleed, four if you pop Plague Signet or Deathly Swarm. For Life Force I’d much rather take Spectral Armor despite the cooldown being much longer. It’s just not a huge enough burst of Life Force for me to waste the slot on such minimal damage.
Also, pre-Elasticity, I have a much easier time dealing with world mobs as a Necro than a Mesmer. Hell, we’re actually a really good world PvE class due to how much cripple/AOE Bleed can be thrown out coupled with Minions, regardless of their AI, taking Aggro. I actually think mass AOE is where the Necro shines; regardless of their issues Necros are a top tier class in WvWvW and do great in mass mob DEs (although single boss events tend to be their bane)
Right now the math I’ve seen from people who did the testing says that 1 point of Vit = 10hp. As damage taken is basically Damage/Armor, you want to get more armor when Health/Armor > 10. Necro at level 80 pretty much has a 10:1 ratio of Health to Armor, so with Healing held equal to Condition Damage (as you don’t heal much and you have an incredible amount of condition removal/transfer), you basically want to raise Vit and Toughness at the same rate. Assuming your Toughness stays the same but your Health effectively decreases in Death Shroud (as in you get less than 10 points of Life Force for every point of Vit) then you’ll want to err towards Toughness, same if you think you’ll be healing quite a bit. If you don’t want to run condition removal or feel that you don’t have enough, then you can err towards Vit. Until we have the DS mechanics mathematically laid out in front of us we can’t really rule on that, so we’re stuck with just saying 1:1 is pretty good.
Yes! Actual math!
Okay, as we do eat conditions and should generally be running at least 3 different ways of removing them (OH Dagger, Staff, Consume Conditions), I want to discount them for the time being. That means that unless you’re somehow going a heavy Siphon build (which doesn’t work at this point and time), you pretty much want to stick to that formula to maximize your eHP, or HP/Armor > 10, add Toughness, possibly erring on the side of Toughness for boosting up Death Shroud. That gives us pretty close to a 1:1 ratio.
The problem with condition dmg is, do you sacrifice power, which sacrifices your duration, for toughness? Obviously you need the condition traits, that’s a must. Do you go glass for duration , or toughness? Probably toughness would be the better choice. But the bleeds must not last very long at all.
Eh. I usually sacrifice power for toughness. I don’t remember exactly, but I do something like 10/30/20/0/10, or 0/30/20/0/20 for those times I feel I need more survability/utility out of shroud. I don’t usually find my conditions are expiring too fast. I can usually maintain 8-10 stacks of bleed when focusing a target. If I run BiP I can up that to 12-14 (BiP + any one of our many condition transfer skills = instant 4-stack bleed for 10-15 seconds, depending on how many duration traits/upgrades you take, plus at least a 2-stack for 30 seconds).
Condition damage/duration isn’t what the necro is lacking. What the necro is lacking is a way to counter burst damage. We laugh conditions off like they’re nothing but even going full toughness/vit + death shroud I find I get burst down way too easily. We have very few panic buttons besides death shroud. No way to get stability other than the one trait that gives you stability when entering death shroud. No way to break stuns. Only two skills that proc protection, both with large cooldowns. In my opinion the only method we have of countering burst is preemptively through the use of conditions (i.e. weakness, blind). But you need to see a burst coming for this to work, which is a tall order especially in team fights when it’s completely possible for a warrior you’re not paying much attention to to decide to charge at you and ruin your day with a knockdown+stun+100blades.
I’d actually argue this is one of our lesser issues, if it was an issue at all. Bring Plague form, never worry about burst again.
Couple of notes
Stability when entering Death Shroud is actually a pretty solid trait, I have no clue why you’re hating on it. There are also a lot of terrible traits you didn’t touch upon, but I’m instead going to take the easy path and list the good traits
SPITE
As we only have 1 combo of weapons that are condition damage (not including the staff as it’s pretty much just in any build regardless), the rest do scale with power, so we have to give those traits some credit. That said, the solid traits in this tree are Spiteful Talisman, Spiteful Spirit, Reaper’s Might, and Close to Death. However the last one is bugged and doesn’t work on condition damage, and having only 4 decent major traits is very limiting. In terms of minor traits, Siphoned Power is kind of there, but the other two are pretty terrible. Power + Condition Duration is also somewhat synergetic, as the Power weapons do inflict non-damaging conditions.
CURSES
The big issues I have with this tree are the fact that condition damage cannot crit, which forces you to take a Proc build as the extra damage is somewhat worthless. Otherwise I can pretty much just list the bad traits, as it’s a decently laid out tree. Terror does no real damage, Spectral Attunement is bad becausae Spectral skills are bad, Banshee’s Wail is weak, and Reaper’s Precision doesn’t do that much. The big bugs are that Hemophilia and Lingering Curses don’t stack for some godawful reason and that needs to be fixed.
DEATH MAGIC
This line is really hard to talk about because minions are garbage right now. However, my big issue with it is that Minion traits should all be Major slots, not Minor. It’s the Toughness branch, which is exceedingly important for everyone including non-Minion Masters. Sure you can have more Minion traits here, but don’t force them on anyone and make for a solid tree for both MMs and non-MMs. Oh, and Boon Duration is pretty much completely useless, but I guess it has to go somewhere.
BLOOD MAGIC
Okay, this is the life siphoning tree. Sadly, Necros have 1 weapon skill in their entire arsenal that siphons life in the MH Dagger. This is a TERRIBLE idea to build a tree around, coupled with the fact that there’s more bugs than usable traits in it. There’s also the fact that if you want to Siphon Life, Toughness is the skill it should be associated with; adding more HP makes Siphoning less effective % wise, while adding more eHP via Toughness makes it more effective.
SOUL REAPING
Okay, Crit Damage, while not an extremely strong stat, is still going to be solid both on Power and Condition Damage based builds because both of them build a decent chunk of Precision. The minor traits are pretty solid, although Last Grasp is currently very bugged and doesn’t do half of what it should. It’s actually a pretty solid tree, although there are some stinkers. Spectral Mastery is pretty bad for the reasons stated above and Path of Midnight is pretty weak. Otherwise it’s not plagued with the forced speccing of Curses nor the horrid layouts of the other trees. Easily the one with the most thought put into it.
Other big question here; is there a moniker for items that does +Condition Damage, Toughness, and then either Precision or Vit?
In general you should be rolling Scepter/Dagger with either a Staff or an Axe/Focus backup. Key skills to take are Plague Signet and Plague Form. Staff will not get you through the dungeon as even traited, it’s cooldowns are abysmal. You run the Scepter/Dagger for groups of enemies, popping your staff cooldowns to pull generally then swapping back after 25 or so seconds to blow everything again. The Axe/Focus is used for single large enemies where the Vulnerability and higher DPS does wonders. Plague Signet is absolutely amazing for keeping your team safe while breaking stuns if you get focused. Plague Form is 20 seconds of perma-blind on the enemies.
As for your healing skill, take either Consume Conditions or Well of Blood. Generally the latter is best if you’re not against any sort of conditions and/or you’ve got heavy healing power. If you’re not against any conditions at all you can swap out Plague Signet as well.
Signet of Undeath is very solid as an anti-**** up button; your team fails to dodge Lt. Scorpion? Res them all. You can also run Signet of Spite, as it’s decent but not amazing. Against larger mobs Epidemic is spectacular, while Corrupt Boon works well if they’re buffing themselves. In terms of other wells, Well of Darkness is great in dungeons and the Well of Power works well if you need even more condition removal. Generally avoid minions as they simply die too fast other than the Flesh Wurm (which you can place out of harm’s way). Corrosive Poison Cloud is also solid if you can immediately transfer that weakness off of you.
If you’re using a mainhand Dagger, offhand Warhorn, or autoattacking with the staff when Weapon Swap is off CD you’re doing dungeons wrong as of this build. Only other minion you should really consider are the Bone Minions for the Blast Finisher + solid damage; Flesh Golem gets one charge off a fight tops.
Well, I’m not sure if I’d say Crit Damage is a huge problem. Thing with that stat is that you’re better off with a percentage point of Precision until you hit 50% crit chance instead of any Crit Damage. Now, if the Precision → Crit Chance is all out of whack there may be some change, but we need to see the math behind all the attacks before we really make any sweeping declarations about the use of power or precision.
I do think we can talk about Condition damage though. It’s your main source of damage as a Scepter wielding, and Bleed is the big one for that. All the numbers are for lvl80 of course, which gives us 42.5 + 5% of your condition damage per second per stack. Your autoattack adds 1 stack for the first two hits, then a stack of Poison (which is 40 + 10% of your condition damage per second). A full autoattack rotation thus does 8 ticks of bleed and 2 ticks of Poison, giving us 420 + 100% condition damage, all ignoring armor. Base damage for this all is 292, giving us 712 damage without any condition damage or power. As we don’t know how Power factors in I’ll keep is separate at 292(Power) + 420 + Condition Damage. This takes about 5 seconds to do the full damage, and much of it can be removed partway through via condition removal. Can anyone else run the numbers on similarly ranged autoattacks and give us their flat damage before factoring in stats, and we can have a more even base of comparison?
we are indeed pigeon holed. For example if you wanted to main daggers, you can’t get precision tree- power tree, and blood tree. Even if you did go 30-20-20 in these, then you have no toughness so you will be weak as hell with melee as a main. Total fail. Take a long hard look at the traits for our class and you can see it pigeon shoots you into a roll that is mediocre compared to all the other classes in the game. We excel at nothing because our traits screw us over.
Might it be more productive to show how you feel the traits should be laid out? I’ve given my opinion on the matter earlier in the thread, but a comprehensive breakdown of why the traits are poorly done and how they should be fixed seems like something you have a strong opinion on.
I think our Trait lines need serious rework.
I definitely agree with this, and with the rest of your post. The traits are pretty scattered, and I usually end up making sacrifices with my traits that I feel other classes don’t have to make. My overall point is that although there are quite a few things that could stand a buff or some overhauling, we are certainly not a useless class, and we excel at the role we were intended for.
if our traits are completely screwed, what “roll” is this you’re talking about lmao? And what class DOESN’T play a better “roll” that we play in spvp?
You’re saying we excel at the roll we were intended to play, then say our trait line needs serious rework. You’re a freaking hypocrite.
Dude, calm down, you’re not helping to make your point by frothing at the mouth. You can have a certain level of messedupness and still be decent at your role. In this case for sPvP I tend to be a more versatile Engineer. You defend points slightly worse than a pure defense Engineer, but you roam and teamfight far better. You’re able to cripple/weaken entire groups very easily and you have one of the most devastating Elites in the game. Necros aren’t a lost cause, but they’ve got quite a bit of anti-synergy and poor design decisions that need to be fixed
The problem comes from how the materials quickly outlevel your crafting; it’s why Jute and Copper go for so much. Really, in a game with such an in-depth crafting system there really shouldn’t be random drops of Greens or below
As a fellow Necro Sylvari, there’s no way you should be using Take Root over Plague form. Haven’t really experimented with the summons however
I think our Trait lines need serious rework. If condition damage is going to be on the Precision tree, then we need better on crit procs. Minion traits should be Major picks, not minor; right now you end up with useless minor traits if you want to spec toughness at all. Bleed’s condition damage ratio of 5% may need to be reworked. The fact that we have a lot of traits that don’t have proper interactions (damage buffs not working on condition damage, Hemo and Lingering not stacking, movement speed not stacking), etc. Minions and Traitlines are the core issues of the class, and then there are problems with weapons that aren’t Scepter/OH Dagger + Staff. However, I don’t think it’s in quite as dire straits as you make it out to be.
There really is no reason for Condition Duration and Power to be on the same tree. Give me Death Shroud + Condition Duration and Power + Critical Damage and you’ll eliminate a lot of the anti-synergy. As long as we can proc Bleeds off Crits then you can keep Precision and Condition Damage together, but I really would like conditions to crit, even if they can’t proc off themselves
LOL PLAGUE??? Plague does no damage at all. It’s a tank spell. All the gotta do is ignore you and focus on the main problem, the other, overpowered, “good” classes. lol. Then once it runs out, GG. Uselesss…..
It’s a perma-blind and you can also throw in Cripple/Weakness (which shouldn’t be needed once they fix the trait); how can they hit that which they cannot see?
Well, you’re not immune to stuns in this form.
Plague is not actually that bad imo, but it has a 180 cooldown, you can only use it basically once before most rounds are nearly over. It’s the elite spell, and it isn’t that bad. Neither is lich form.
The problem is everything ELSE sucks.
Plague has Stability last I checked.
Now, there are issues outside of that, but I feel that Plague is very much a class defining ability, much like the Mesmer’s elites. Lich is kind of iffy to me (Makes you a huge target without a corresponding increase in tank while the skills aren’t mindblastingly good outside of having all 5 enemies in your face) and Abby Normal’s brains were clearly used in the Flesh Golem.
Now the class has issues. Minions for the most part are terrible, non-dagger offhands are unimpressive, Staff CDs are insanely long, etc etc. I just think you’re overreacting and refusing to look at some of the great stuff that Necros have going for them
The only mobile minion who can’t swim is the Flesh Golem (which does need to be fixed). It’s part of why I roll Minion Master for Orr.
LOL PLAGUE??? Plague does no damage at all. It’s a tank spell. All the gotta do is ignore you and focus on the main problem, the other, overpowered, “good” classes. lol. Then once it runs out, GG. Uselesss…..
It’s a perma-blind and you can also throw in Cripple/Weakness (which shouldn’t be needed once they fix the trait); how can they hit that which they cannot see?
Condition damage is for mainhand Scepter and offhand Dagger. If you don’t plan on running those, then you can pretty much ignore the statistic (with the caveat that Staff is a secondary weapon and is thus not considered for this discussion). Mainhand Dagger and Axe do no condition damage, and thus stacking it would be ill advised. The Axe benefits from condition duration while the Dagger only has a single immobilize and thus would depend on your offhand far more.
Necro’s a utility class. We put out a huge amount of conditions, blind entire teams, can corrupt boons, get rid of enemy conditions, blind entire teams, put out massive cripples, blind entire teams, and have solid if not spectacular DPS. But seriously, run Plague form. It’s very underwhelming at first, but then you realize you’re stacking up Bleeds, solid Poison, and you perma-blind for 20 seconds. Once they fix the Chilling Darkness trait you’ll also have a perma-chill. This is absolutely amazing in all modes of play. Right now the minions are for the most part terrible due to AI issues. You can however, use your wells to protect any point (or take them with the targeted wells), protect your team from conditions, and be a general nuisance. Sure you won’t have the DPS of a Warrior, the burst of a Thief, or the variety of an Elementalist but you’re about as annoying as a Mesmer while being twice as tanky and are far better at defensive play.
Does the class need some serious work on certain issues? God yes. Is it a bad class? Very much no
We don’t know how the Armor statistic works. If it isn’t flat then we can calculate the effective HP increase for each point of Toughness and find the optimal combo (as we have condition removal everywhere so I don’t find the fact that bleeds/poisons/burns bypass Armor to be of much issue)
Spectral Wall’s vulnerability isn’t proccing either the vast majority if not all of the time
Last Grasp isn’t breaking stuns as Spectral Armor says it does
Greater Mark’s Staff 2 isn’t increasing it’s radius at the same rate as the other Marks do
Hemophilia and Lingering Curse don’t stack.
(edited by Sigma.9746)
Well, Precision is good for the 66% chance of a bleed on a crit I suppose. Once we have the damage formula so we can see increase in effective HP from a point of Toughness then we’ll know when Toughness is better than Vitality (as we have so much condition removal that your eHP is a far better metric). Axe is a teamwork/farming weapon. You can cripple in a nice big AOE for kiting while dishing out damage or vulnerability. You don’t have the DoTs of Scepter and do less damage than the Dagger, but are still ranged and help the team.
Again, we need the formulas behind a lot of these skills; I’d love to see how everything scales with Power. If you want to main the Axe I’d probably recommend 30 into Spite, as that gives you damage and duration on your Vulnerability and Cripple. It also synergizes well with a Focus offhand. Throw in 30 Death Magic for Dark Armor along with the Staff traits and you’ll be hard to kill while putting out solid damage. Last 10 can go where you want.
That’s the current theory I have for Axe sPvP; haven’t tested out much yet. For dungeoneering you can probably use a similar if not the same build
I’ve yet to see a good Dagger Necro in dungeons. You just don’t have enough lockdown to survive in melee and the damage isn’t so much better than Scepter that I don’t find it to be worth it. Offhand? Dagger’s the best choice. For the main hand your DPS is while the best of the choices still not super hot while you lose utility and range. For generalized leveling it works perfectly well, but you simply do not have enough uptime on your blinds and knockdowns to make it worthwhile.
In terms of sPvP you’ll want to pair it with a Focus or a Warhorn and it works far better. Focus basically means that they can’t escape you between the Chill and your Immobilize while the Warhorn does it through cripple + swiftness and the Daze gives you a chance to stop annoying moves such as 100Blades and gives you 2 seconds of free hits. It’s still not as good as the other options in my opinion, but it works a lot better
This is, in my opinion, an absolutely terrible idea. The biggest problem with this game right now is that if you’re not lucky enough to know where Dynamic chains start and manage to hop on the train you’re left with massive content gaps. Sure, you can WvWvW or craft for a bit, but those also take time and can be pretty boring compared to questing. I’d support a toggle in the main map that only shows up there that reveals every dynamic event on the map. Make it less painful to get a toon up through zones and get to the more enjoyable dungeons. There’s a reason everyone jumped on cooking to powerlevel and it’s not because events were too easy to zerg