Guild Wars 2

Buglist Two, Necromantic Boogaloo~

This thread is an attempt to catalog all Necromancer specific bugs, for the benefit of both developers and players. Bugs that are based on larger game-wide problems (odd pathing with pull skills, phantom obstructions for projectiles) generally are not listed here.

• Bugs relating to skill – trait interactions are listed under the trait.
• Some bugs are only found in certain game modes. If not noted otherwise, assume the bug applies to all game modes.

ReMortis has generously provided videos showing clearly the behavior of each bug. Where available, click the name of the skill / trait for a link to the video. Each bug is followed by a date indicating when the bug was last checked and confirmed.

Death Shroud Bugs

• When forced to leave Death Shroud (Decay or enemy damage), you are locked out of your healing/utility/elite (6-0) skills for up to one second. (21 June, 2013)
• When forced to leave Death Shroud, the recharge for “Entering DS” is not reset to 10 seconds. (21 June, 2013) -Note: The timer for this recharge starts at 10 seconds when you first enter DS.
• In the Temple of Grenth event chain, entering death shroud cleanses the “Entered Grenth’s Realm” buff, making Shades immune to your death shroud skills. (19 June, 2013)
• Entering Death Shroud temporarily removes some transformation visuals, such as the ghost disguise of AC exp path 3. (9 Feb, 2013)
• Signet passive effects are not kept while in Death Shroud. (28 May, 2013) -Note: Possibly intentional?

Skill Bugs
Death Shroud

• The tooltip for Death Shroud states it ‘removes other spectral effects’, but spectral walk / armor persist through Death Shroud. (26 July, 2013)

Weapons
Staff

• Putrid Mark: creates two blast finishers, based on when the mark is laid and when it is triggered. Both activate only when the mark is triggered. (24 June, 2013)
• Putrid Mark: Can only transfer 3 conditions from the necromancer to each target. (4 July, 2013)
• Putrid Mark: Does not transfer conditions from allies to enemies. (4 July, 2013)
• General: If the necromancer is interrupted while casting a mark skill, it will go on full recharge instead of the typical 5s delay of other non-channeled skills. (9 July, 2013)

Trident

• Feast: Range indicator does not use Feast’s 600 radius, appears to use a distance of 360 units instead. (25 June, 2013)

Corruptions

• Epidemic: Does not appear to work on ‘object’ boss monsters. (Tequatl, the Nightmare Tree, etc) (28 May, 2013)
• Corrupt Boon: Still gets blocked by skills such as Shelter, despite having the Unblockable effect listed in its tooltip description. (10 Jun, 2013) -Note: Not observed in PvE. (Ornery / Hermit crabs)

Spectrals

• Ethereal Wall: The combo field is low enough to the ground that projectiles (Flesh Wurm and Bone Fiend attacks) can pass over without proccing the field, especially when attacking tall targets. (30 May, 2013)

Minions

• Bone Minions: When using Putrid Explosion, the combo finisher heart pops up immediately, but the actual effect is delayed for a few seconds. (28 May, 2013)

Wells

• Well of Suffering: lasts for 5 seconds and applies 6 hits, not the 6 & 7 listed on its tooltip, respectively. (17 July, 2013)

Elites

• Plague: The AoE indicator is not accurate. It will scale in size to match the player model instead of having a static radius of 240. The actual area of effect still has a radius of 240, regardless of character size. (28 May, 2013)
• Plague: Even if ended early, the AoE indicator will persist for the full duration of plague. (31 May, 2013)
• Lich Form / Plague: Causes interference with “On Swap” sigils (eg: Sigil of Geomancy) in PvP, and cannot be procced again until the sigil is unequipped & requipped. (15 May, 2013) -Note: Difficulty getting consistent reproduction of this bug.
• Lich Form: Does not preserve auto-attack choices (For example, auto-cast skill 1) between uses. (28 May, 2013)
• Lich Form: Skill 5 (Grim Specter) does not rip aegis properly, and is blocked by it instead. (11 Feb, 2013)
• Lich Form: Cannot proc the 6 rune set bonus of Superior Runes of Lyssa. (22 June, 2013)
• Flesh Golem: Despawns if it enters deep water, even if the Necromancer has not entered water themselves. (28 May, 2013) -Note: Other minions can swim across water, even if they are not equipped on the underwater skill bar.
• Flesh Golem: If Charge is used while the Flesh Golem is controlled (Stunned, dazed, etc) the ability will go on full cooldown, but the golem will not charge or receive stability. (30 May, 2013)

Whenever someone uses the phrase “slap in the face”, I always wonder when the last time was that someone gave them a good slap across the face. Because almost inevitably, they need another one.

Honestly? Screw the haters, Lich Form is a powerhouse. The massive boosts to Power and Precision alone practically guarantee it. 2-5 are largely circumstantial, which is an accurate description of 85% of the game so why should Lich be different?

Saying “You couldn’t have won without using your elite!” is such a pointless complaint. Why else do I have an elite skill, if not to win with it?

Edit: Man I just cannot get over that someone would actually whine at you for using your elite skill. Because what, you’re supposed to go easy on them and let people kill you?

Kravick.4906:

I just noticed this. On land its 1 1/4 second cast time. Under water its 1/2 second cast time. Has ANet given a reason for this? Or is this another over sight with this class?

This is a running theme with underwater skills across most classes. They tend to activate faster, possibly to keep underwater combat…

[shades]

Fluid.

Mostly it’s visual changes for me. EDIT- Actually I should come clean on this. It’s visual changes as well as allowing for utilities and elites to still be available, and the hope of healing going to your regular life bar. I’ve seen enough remakes of Death Shroud that I’m burned out on the idea of trying to re-imagine its skills. Frankly at this point of the game’s life, I don’t think I’d change its actual functionality much as a dev.

Hitting DS now alters your skillbar, instead of replacing it with a Downed-style UI. You could possibly add ghostly green effects, as inspired by how a guardian’s virtue of justice causes those blue fire effects.

• Since everything else is in place, all boons / buffs / debuffs / conditions / control effects are still visible in the standard places.
• Functionality change: You can receive healing while in Death Shroud. This is a strict buff, but I’m tired of feeling like Regeneration and other constant heal effects are wasted on me.
• Instead of the single long bar for life force, your health circle is covered in a translucent green coating that fills / empties similarly to regular health. It also shows a static life force total. Your regular health level would still be visible behind it, (possibly darkened) but the exact total is then hidden for the sake of UI space.
• When not activated, your life force total would still be shown as a bar above your 1-5 skills. It fits with the general location of class mechanics, and keeps it easy to read.
• Your first five skills are replaced with the current death shroud skills. You could add a fifth, I guess, but frankly I don’t want to go there.
• Your heal skill is visible, and usable, whether or not you are able to regain health. If the skill won’t regain health, the 6 skill should have a heavy, obscuring green/black border while in Death Shroud. The timer should still be visible though.
• Functionality change: Utility skills and elite skills are visible and usable. Any skill that would normally be cancelled by entering death shroud (Spirit Walk, Lich Form, etc) will now cancel death shroud on use, placing death shroud on full recharge. These skills might also get a unique UI effect to symbolize that they’d cancel it, but this doesn’t seem as necessary as for the heal skill.

My major worry is that these changes would make it too much like an Elementalist attunement visually, and personally I’d like to distance it from that comparison a bit.

You used a particular word in your title.

I don’t think it means what you think it means.

Grenth’s Balance: A fast life siphon-style skill (2s channel duration) that won’t stop until you and your enemy have the same % of life remaining. If successfully used (Not blocked, missed due to blind, etc) on an opponent with less life than you, no effect & a five second recharge.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Softspoken.2410:

Kiriakulos.1690:

I think you’re confusing viable with mediocre. I’d rather use a single weapon that was extremely good instead of having my choices of kinda ok.

Could you please explain how this doesn’t create the “You have to use X weapon or you’re playing your class wrong” problem?

That’s a problem? You would be playing the class wrong.

Well, you’ve then created a lot of false options for players, and narrowed build variety to the point that people know exactly what to expect the moment they identify someone as a particular class.

That may not be a problem for you, but I like profession choices to be a starting point for what a character can do, rather than limiting them to one specific build if they want to be effective.

Stop this

just

stop

Polite reminder that initiative is also a profession mechanic for the thief.

Rauderi.8706:

With the new daily structure, the incentive to go to WvW is much gentler, rather than a “no dessert unless you finish your WvWegetables,” which could mean a lot less resentment.

I could be wrong about this, but it also seems that WvW dailies encourage people to accomplish generally useful WvW goals. By comparison, world completion in WvW maps only required people to run to points of interest and get the hell out before the tower flipped again and they were killed by another server. And that behaviour doesn’t seem especially helpful, honestly.

So it makes Signet of Malice stop working for builds with high hit-volume in exchange for increased healing on slow-hitting builds.

I have no idea why you would do this.

Zodian.6597:

• Necro: Death shroud is probably the single most brilliant class mechanic design in the entire game. It’s an ability that can be … countered by passive play (bar diminishes over time) or aggressive play (chunk through the bar + cc).

Doesn’t this mean that any playstyle will counter Death Shroud?

Dredlord.8076:

Softspoken.2410:

Dredlord.8076:

Bhawb.7408:

while increasing toughness is only helpful for healing builds.

I see now, this is where you are having trouble understanding…

toughness increases survivability in EVERY single build because it reduces damage the minions take (this is what we are after).

In healing builds it has the ADDED benefit of increasing effective healing.

For the record: Toughness doesn’t increase survivability against condition damage.

for the record: the necro has abilities to deal with conditions on allies, but you already knew that right?

That I did! Now let’s see which post the readers think is more relevant.

I cannot imagine the signal:noise ratio would make such an endeavor worthwhile.

I agree. It was pretty exciting when they introduced the wallet to keep track of all your currencies without clogging your bank, and then they promptly introduced yet more currencies and never added them to the wallet.

Maybe the purpose of the wallet was just to make room for the new tokens.

Every time someone shares a story about purchasing 250 of an item instead of 1, I wonder how many times they clicked the window at random before hitting “Buy” to confirm that they wanted what they just chose via the interface.

Edit: I’ll be honest. I want to see less “Are you absolutely sure you want to do what you just told me you want to do” user interface safeguards in the game. Salvaging rares takes way longer than it should because of that hand-holding.

If it doesn’t get resolved in this patch (28th May), I am going to pursue the Words Can’t Express My Disappointment campaign and create a video for every bug on the list, starting with this one. Because this one has been around, and reported, and obvious for too long.

Luke.4562:

A pity that if you miss your attack, or the target is invulnerable or temporarily untouchable your pets will just ignore your orders.

“Man, I wish my minions attacked invulnerable opponents more often.”

Said no-one, ever.

Crovax.7854:

Neat changes but rewards for daily logins? Really? That is a psychological tactic for sleazy f2p games to get players to spend more money in their cash shop, not something for a supposedly respectable AAA MMO.

Overall good changes to dailies though, but still…

It’s worth noting that they avoided the slot machine / roulette reward screen that taunts you with the impossibility of premium currency. Also, they avoided “Log in every day or else”, since progress on a track isn’t reset.

I just say this because I had the same reaction to the “Log in daily” tactic, but this is a very tempered version of that strategy.

So, this might be a rude question, but did you have a 5 man group during all of that? I’m not entirely familiar with the events leading up to CoF, but I thought a single 5-person group could clear it.

I believe toughness and armor already do this? Increasing the amount of toughness you have reduces the damage you take by a certain percentage. In fact, I think your example might be low-balling it. For a medium armor class in level 80 exotics, the first 105 additional toughness is equal to about 5% damage resistance. (The next 105 is closer to 4.5%)

America.9437:

Softspoken, i’ve viewed every vista in the game and have pics of them saved on my hard drive.

“I saw this location once and stored a picture, now I never want to see it again”?

Like okay maybe I shouldn’t criticize your life decisions but this still seems like a weird thing to be proud of?

After stacking 1 minute of revealed, your character gains a spotlight shining on them.

After stacking 10 minutes of revealed, they gain their own personal swarm of paparazzi.

The paparazzi periodically blinds you. (Camera flashes)

9 am pacific would have placed the tournament as starting three hours ago. Maybe it’s already over? If they ran simultaneous matches instead of showing every single one, it’s plausible.

The bracket reveal show, at least, is available on Twitch’s Video on Demand service here: http://www.twitch.tv/digitalprosports/v/5517546

Also note that this is on the DigitalProSports channel, not the GuildWars2 channel. I wasn’t around this morning, but it’s possible that the DigitalProSports channel also aired the tournament. That would mean you should keep an eye on their channel history if you want to see replays, rather than the GuildWars2 channel.

The wiki just copies the tooltip verbatim, and the tooltip is misleading. As someone who uses this trait I can confirm that as long as you’re below 90% health, this trait will trigger every 30 seconds when you get hit.

To my knowledge, all traits that reference health levels behave like this.

Edit: I honestly prefer using Regeneration instead of an additional buff because I feel like adding new buffs and debuffs instead of using existing boons / conditions will just lead to too many icons and prevent clear play / counterplay. As it is Soothing Mist still irks me a bit.

This is all about Life Blast vs Dagger 1

After a bit of preliminary testing, full dagger chains will out-damage life blast + might stacking alone.

I tested it in the Heart of the Mists with a berserker’s amulet, PvP dagger and just 10 points in Spite for the might stacking trait. The dagger chain gives me around 640 + 498 + 583 = 1721 damage (via the tooltips) every two seconds, while Life Blast gives me 996 damage (again, according to the tooltip) every 1.5 seconds. (I measured the times myself by chaining about 8-10 attacks together and dividing.) So that averages down to 860 dps on the dagger, and 664 dps on life blast.

Now those numbers don’t include the might stacking effect on life blast, but I calculated how much might is needed to close the gap. Since we need to boost the dps by 200 to be competitive, we need 200 dps x 1.5 seconds / attack = 300 damage per attack extra. (Again, as indicated by tooltips.) Every stack of might increases the projected damage for life blast by 18. So that’s 300 / 18 = 16.6 (We’ll say 16) stacks of might that have to be generated by life blast for it to be more powerful than the dagger auto attack chain. To match this, we need enough might stacks to increase the power to 130% of its previous value. I can’t remember what my power was at the time, but at level 80, a base value of 916 power would require 275 power, which is 275 / 35 = 8 (7.86) stacks of might. This figure only gets worse the more power you have, so if this is relevant at all you’ll probably need at least 11 might stacks anyways.

The problem is that 16 12 attacks with life blast takes a really long time, so even if you have the bonus boon duration required to prevent them from expiring as you reapply, you still need to sit in Death Shroud for 24 18 seconds. Death Shroud decays at somewhere around 4% per second (unless traited to 3%) so not only would you drop below the 50% threshold needed for any of these damage numbers to be relevant, but you would also be left with under 30% LF remaining. (Unless you traited for it, in which case you’d have closer to 50%.) And all of this is assuming you take no damage while in Death Shroud.

So… No. It’ll probably never out-damage dagger for single target. As soon as you add piercing and hit another target though, you’re golden. It may also be worth it to just add a few stacks of might here or there that you carry with you outside of death shroud. Plus you can use life blast from 900 range.

So, just attempted Tequatl. PUG map, and we totally flunked on it. It took way too long (9+ minutes?) for our map to start his first burn phase, and after that we only got him down to half health before the burn phase ended. There was only about 3 minutes on the clock, so the map basically conceded.

Although, our map was having a hell of a time organizing. North defense / turret operators were refusing to check in, based on how the event started with people calling for more operators, but was perfectly fine once it was underway. (I actually left south boats team at the party leader’s suggestion to go north. When I got there, 3 operators, competent defense, I only saw turrets get destroyed twice.)

A major problem in my opinion is that the only crittable location is invisible / impossible to find. During the burn phase there was a good mob beneath Teq’s neck, but it was spread out enough that I’d bet a quarter of the people weren’t consistently finding the hitbox.

Overall, I still think the new HP total is plausible, but the restriction to melee / AoE attacks on a largely invisible hitbox if you want crits is throwing off a lot of players.

War Mourner.5168:

Corruptions are not strong enough to justify self applied conditions.

Those conditions are negatives If you think otherwise then you’re ignoring the fact that condition cleanses all have CD’s, and are all extremely important to only use when needed, not waste on junk that your own skills are applying to you.

I find this incredibly true. It’s not that ‘Necromancer condition transfers are bad’. Necromancers are basically the only profession that can transfer conditions to enemies multiple times, and a reversal like that will always have some power. But the Necromancer’s condition transfers are expensive. They don’t get to casually toss them onto an opponent, with the exception of Underwater DS 1.

So putting self-inflicted conditions on these skills isn’t really a hidden positive, since it requires a very expensive skill to then turn it into a benefit. It’s just a drawback that can be mitigated.

Plus, some of the design for the corruptions are iffy. For example, Epidemic’s 3 stacks of vulnerability are basically meaningless. They could be removed entirely and hardly change the skill. As well, the bleeds on Blood is Power are the textbook definition of why low intensity & long duration conditions don’t hold up. In PvP, that gives them more time to be cleansed before they go through on your opponent. In PvE, it just gives them more time to be pushed off the stack by other people’s shorter bleeds.

Regarding the original post:

Mesmer Greatsword.

Edit: Its only gimmick is that it does less damage the closer your target is to you.

I, for one, can’t wait until the anecdotes of people ‘double hitting’ Death Shroud on accident with Unholy Sanctuary roll in.

(Someone tries to press DS right before death, overshoots and ends up cancelling their trait-procced DS early)

Dredlord.8076:

why do you keep reporting my posts?

if you cant move on with the conversation dont post here?

try to absorb the advice I am giving you.

when I say go see for yourself we dont need a diatribe on how accurate the info is statistically because………

your just going to go see for yourself…..

While I can’t speak for the rest of the readers of this thread, I’ve been reporting your last few posts because they’ve been contentless and abusive. I’d assume they’re getting removed because a moderator thinks something similar.

Unfortunately, population demographics at large are nigh impossible to “go see for yourself”. As much as I advocate testing things yourself in regards to skill and trait details, especially bugs, the sample size that you’d need to make sure that the population trends that you’re seeing are accurate is prohibitively large for a player to acquire single-handedly. Even the larger-scale surveys on forums and the like are prone to sample bias.

Personally, I would love to know the general proportions of professions in various modes of the game. I’m very certain ANet tracks such statistics, but I’m equally sure that they don’t release that kind of data to the public because if the general player base could see it, it could seriously alter which professions they play and reduce the accuracy of that data in determining which classes don’t feel fun / powerful / interesting.

And as a general note? Making sure that information is accurate and statistically relevant is very important if you’re using it to fuel major decisions, such as the design direction of a profession.

I like a lot of what I’ve seen in regards to the changes.
It looks like they generally tried to grant more condition transfer and cleansing (plague sending, new shrouded removal) to the Necromancer’s traits, which is really good. Signets of Suffering also has some serious potential, since that is a lot of boon corruption.

There’s also some support for a long-duration Shroud build in there somewhere, which I might try again just to see what it can do.

I’m still not a fan of some of the traits, but the trait slots all seemed to have a good option or two at least. Before there was a couple lines & levels that were super niche.

Corruptions are making me raise an eyebrow, but I don’t feel like I can judge before I know exactly how Master of Corruption works, and how the new condition cleanse options pan out. If nothing else, Master of Corruption is much more interesting than a flat 20% recharge reduction.

I’m curious if they’ll consider speeding up the attack rate of Life Blast (regular Shroud 1) to bring it more in line with the previewed Reaper Shroud chain, since that changes how well it works with Dhuumfire, Unyielding Blast and Reaper’s Might. Obviously the damage / shot would go down to keep it at around the same DPS when untraited.

Edit: Although, still no way for Necromancers to generate extra endurance or interact with projectiles. So I guess that’s just Never Allowed.

I swear I’m the only person that thinks “Disabling your enemies to keep them from harming your allies” is called Control, not Support.

I think the point is, they don’t want it to be an escape mechanism anymore. It’s supposed to be an aggresive blink to get you into melee(?) combat. I’m not really sure I like it, but it does help differentiate it from Blink.

EverythingXen.1835:

I’ve only managed to run p3 so far… and while I liked most of the changes, almost all our parties frustration revovled around Grast.

1. You basically get one good shot at Rumblus when Grast is at full health. If he dies it is extremely frustrating to make another attempt. He runs full bore back at CR with half health ready or not… after the party has likely used a good bit of their defensive cooldowns to stay alive long enough to rez him.

2. Consistently Grast would NOT use his shield when CR would use his rock attack. I’d see CR wind up his attack and instead of shielding Grast would be using his sloooooooow wind up hammer attack. Then the whole party, including Grast, gets knocked down and wiped. This caused a vast majority of our failed attempts

I can agree with these complaints. You had one job Grast.

If his bubble would interrupt / cancel his own hammer attack, I’d be very grateful, as well as if there could be some way to resurrect him without his instantly aggroing onto Colossus again so we could make a clean start of it.

For my own personal complaints: I think the spider hatchling spawn once the Spider Queen fight starts is a little cruel. It’s really important to clear them out ASAP, which is fine, but if you’re not experienced with the dungeon it is really easy to miss them until you’ve got a few spitting all over you. Maybe they spawned just a bit later into the fight (80% health?), or more visibly?

I just feel like you should help player realize there are suddenly 6(?) more spiders, because it’s too easy to pass one / two off as “spiders I happened to miss earlier”.

The reason for this restriction is that the way Temporal Curtain checks whether or not someone has already received its benefit (so it doesn’t erroneously apply its boon again) is by checking if that character already has swiftness. Something may have changed from a technical angle, but this was billed as necessary to prevent people from stacking a minute or two of swiftness from one temporal curtain by just wiggling back and forth over the AoE.

I would love it if they could change it to apply its swiftness exactly once to any given character, whether they already have swiftness or not.

Yeah, necros are immune to ground-targeted AoEs now, unless their graphic effects go up as high as waist height. It’s pretty nice.

Thanks Dulfy, you’re a credit to the GW2 community.

In my opinion, the two biggest surprises?

• There might actually be a condition spec in Reaper, since the new Death Shroud can do rapid AoE burning, and traited chill will presumably scale with condition damage.
• Blood Magic was singled out as a trait line that’s still under heavy work, and siphons now heal through death shroud! Progress!

The shouts look like they run a pretty wide spread for what they can do. A chilling condition transfer, minion summon, AoE weakness & might spike, Boon rip & unblockable… Something in there for everyone, really. And the new elite skill is such good control.

Ooookay. Now I see it.

So I was wrong, and Flesh Wurm does get a 100% combo finisher, and there is a problem when using it Spectral Wall: the wall is not tall enough. If you put the wurm somewhere sort of low, then manage to lay the wall across a rise in the ground / object so that it’s lifted up, you can get the combo to work.

I’ll put it into the list. I’ve seen other walls that do this, but I think it’s a case-by-case basis on which are tall enough and which are not.

The blast finisher on wall is finicky, but it’s there. I still think it has more to do with how ethereal wall is a line combo field than anything, so it’s hard to hit with blast finishers.

Edit: Hmm, I’ll look into the weirdness from the bonus duration trait, I was getting these results without that. The ethereal combo field could be expiring early.
Edit2: Yes, it is definitely losing the combo field early.

I’m interested to hear how long it takes to get larger structures to T2 & T3. If T3 can happen in under 6(?) hours with zero dolyak caravans, we may see more lock-outs on the bottom tier matches when one server manages to sweep a Borderlands for the night, or something.

Do you mean from the previewed changes? I’m pretty sure they explicitly removed that one because it rewarded taking mantras and then not using them. Their replacement for the damage multiplier was the new Ferocity bonus on the updated Harmonious Mantras, since that gives a damage bonus immediately after using any mantra.

Necrotic Slash/Stab/Bite vs Necrotic Grasp

S/S/B’s chain is about 2 seconds, grasp uses about 1.3 seconds per attack.
By the tooltips, grasp gives about 521 damage (again, Berserker’s Amulet + 10 points in spite) where the chain gives us the same 1721 as before. So our averages are:
S/S/B – 860 dps, Grasp – 401 dps.
From there it’s multiplication. How many enemies do you need to hit? 2 with grasp puts you almost on par overall (dagger still wins), but 3 makes you far exceed the damage of dagger. Of course, this is spreading your damage out over 3 targets, which isn’t always desired.

Edit: Life Force wise, as soon as you’re hitting two targets, Staff out-does dagger. (In 4 seconds, you get two dagger chains or three staff attacks. Two targets is 3% * 2 * 3 = 18% for staff, but since dagger can only hit one, it’s 6% * 1 * 2 = 12%)

I’m really starting to reconsider my “No Staves” policy.

Using right click to orient yourself, look up slightly, then try firing again.

There’s no protection to keep your character from aiming into the ground, so I find that if I attack without a target, most ranged weapons fire into the ground because that’s where I’ve got the camera (and thus, my character) pointed. But yes, I find at least some form of this on all ranged weapons.

A few things:

2. Barbed Precision:
33% chance to inflict bleeding.
Apparently this was an intentional change. But the explanation for why they did it seems rather weak: “we lowered the critical chance because you’re also getting that 20% bleeding duration”.

I did a bit of math for this in another thread, but in the context of Necromancer the 20% boosted bleed duration usually adds much more bleed damage than the removed 33% chance to proc a 2s bleed on crit. It’s worth remembering Hemophilia used to be it’s own major trait that actually saw play, and it’s now rolled into the minor.

flow.6043:

4. Terror:

Not an actual news regarding the skill itself, but Robert Gee said that it was moved to master because of the feedback they got from the community.
First of all, no one was bothered by the tier Terror was in! It was annoying that it didn’t get the same treatment of the baselining of traits that were standard picks accross all classes, including the necro.
Also, even if moving Terror to master tier was an actual request from the community (it wasn’t), this feedback would’ve been based on the version of the Curses specialization we saw before. With this new trait setup Terror makes just as little sense in master as in any other major trait tier. Seriously, please merge this with a minor already!

(Emphasis added by me)
Terror going from Grandmaster to Master was absolutely requested by the community. But you’re also very correct that it was based on the old version of Curses, especially the old Lingering Curses grandmaster. As Yamsandjams already stated:

Yamsandjams.3267:

I think a lot of the feedback they got concerning terror was with the older lingering curse trait, which was stated to give +100% duration to ALL conditions. Since it is now only scepter conditions, I’m not really sure that the same feedback is valid anymore.

100% to all conditions while holding a scepter was viewed by the forum (possibly rightly?) as mandatory for any condition damage build. Which meant no condition build would be able to justify taking Terror over Lingering Curses. Since the only thing Terror does is add condition damage to Fear, it didn’t seem usable in that context.

I also recall that at the time, some members of the forum (not myself, I’ve got hindsight not foresight) pointed out that Terror would then conflict with Path of Corruption, where it was usually taken together. But it wasn’t nearly enough to reverse the momentum.

I’d really like to see more elite skills on almost all professions that have a cooldown of less than a minute. I didn’t play GW1, but it’s intriguing to me to look back and see how elites tended to be build-defining, but could have interesting play without a two minute cool down.

Body Shot’s entire purpose is to be a 100% combo finisher on pistol main hand. They could try things like making it pierce or be AoE somehow I guess? I mostly just wish it was cheaper, somehow. But 2 initiative is probably too cheap, so.

While I like the idea of more fluid animations, I can’t fault the ones there now. I think you’re right in that black powder could probably use something a bit more special though.

I… Don’t see any reason to add confusion to head shot than “I wanted to throw more even MORE damage and control into this weapon”.

Crovax.7854:

I personally think they had the option to
a) make the game more fun so people want to play by themselves
b) resort to psychological manipulation and take the easy way out to avoid spending resources on improving the game

They chose option b and it’s hard to respect a company that acts that way. However that’s just my personal opinion.

As much as I understand your concerns over manipulation, there’s basically no coercive element to this that I can see? There’s no new punishment if you stop / don’t log in, for example.

Thaddeus.4891:

But why Anet is still putting time, effort and money on daily/monthly? I guess that ya some ppl were not happy with the current system, but it wasn’t a big issue for the vast majority of ppl. It should be so low in the list of priority of Anet that I can’t understand why they did that.

It’s the kind of system that can powerfully shape player behaviour, and can be especially good guidance for relatively new players. They can use it to push people towards certain content that might be under-utilized, and it would help introduce players to new zones. Which I think would be done so that people stumble over something they really like because of it.

Dredlord.8076:

Softspoken.2410:

I guess the dirty secret of well of blood is that the massive initial heal has nothing to do with the well effect. After all, if an ally is inside the well when it’s first cast, they don’t get that same starting heal. They just get the smaller pulsing ones.

The description could do with a “Wells apply protection within their area of effect” clause I suppose, to clarify to what protection is applied. But as it is, the trait acts pretty consistently: be inside a well when its cast, receive protection.

exactly my point I am glad you were clever enough to figure it out. It would be stupid if the heal worked that way so why does this one trait work that way when combined with another trait.

I use the trait and drop a well and get protection.

Now I select another well trait to increase it’s range BUT it doesn’t help me at all because now I have to ground target it on me to get the effect of my first trait.

Even an idiot can realize that doesn’t make any sense.

If it is a poorly written tooltip and the skill is working properly then this is just another bit of evidence of the lack of synergy our traits have. Our traits are actually working against us now?

Except there still is benefit: you can now drop wells on allies and give them protection without putting yourself in harm’s way, or wasting the time it takes to run into the correct position.

Frankly, the whole thing is a natural progression of game mechanics / systems. The trait adds an effect to your wells, as evidenced by the way it affects allies. If you’re not inside the well, you can’t complain about not receiving its benefits.

What I was trying to explain about the skill well of blood is that it just uses a big heal at the same time it casts the well, but the heal and the well are two separate effects. So a trait that only affects the well (ritual of protection) will not proc on the initial heal, because the initial heal isn’t a well.

I feel like I’m wasting my time typing this out; mostly I’m here because people are specifically quoting me. It won’t be enough in the future.

Edit:

Even an idiot can realize that doesn’t make any sense.

You know, I’ve thought the same thing about a lot of what I’ve read in this forum. Usually though, I keep that thought to myself because it’s disrespectful to the extreme.

Amun Ra.6435:

As the title states. What was the reasoning behind the death shroud nerf? Necro have no real escapes outside dodge…I don’t see the reasoning with this…

They didn’t want a Necromancer to counter a one-shot style attack with the last dregs of their life force.