Guild Wars 2

Hammer needs to stay full power, or put condi on every ability. I really dislike any weapon that has some Power abilities, some condi abilities, and some that do both. You can’t gear for that weapon.

Scepter, Pistol, Shortbow… those should be the condi weapons.

don’t forget

E) Go afk once they lose the initial fight for middle.

I stopped que’ing for ranked after watching team mates going afk in the respawn point for close 5 days in a row.

Unranked spvp is still fun though. And so far, much higher quality matches: closer scores, and no afk’ers at all.

So I got into Ruby yesterday. The quality of team mates has taken a nose dive. Before ruby, if my team got pushed off of middle at the start of the match, I often saw the team rally back and sometimes win sometimes lose. But they kept trying to win.

Ever since I’ve gotten into ruby, I’ve seen a different thing happen over and over. If my team gets turned back at the initial fight for middle… at least 1 person goes afk. One match, 3 people went afk. No matter how skilled or unskilled one is… if the teams are “fairly” matched and one team gets an afk player, it’s going to be a loss. Only with MMR, this apparently results in a higher likelihood of being teamed with people who go afk or don’t know what to do.

1. Don’t use a boon-spam build. It makes my day when I’m using my necro and I encounter an engineer using FT and juggernaut trait. The pulsing stability timing is almost the same as the Scepter AA, which will never go well for the engineer.

2. Choose your attack. The greatest weakness of Reaper is the same as Necro: focus fire. When you engage the reaper 1v1, you are playing to the advantage of the reaper.
If you have to wait 5 seconds for a respawning ally, wait. 1+1 > 2 when it comes to fighting reapers.

3. The second greatest weakness of Reaper is also the second greatest weakness of Necro: CC. Engineer has lots of CC options. Don’t spam them, space them out. Don’t think of yourself as doing it all. Engineer applies CC… your buddy applies the DPS. When I see lots of necro’s, I slot in Slick Shoes and Blast Gyro. Sometimes mortar.

This is what’s OP about Revenant: it’s the only new profession. Yes, the others got new traits and weapons, but none of them got a fundamentally new mechanic, with the exception maybe of druid… but it’s new mechanic doesn’t overwhelm an opponent with new choices to make. The revenant’s mechanic is new.
Everyone has 3 years of experience fighting against the other profession mechanics. Even with the new elites… people still can look at the traits and know what to do without thinking about it. Revenant… they have to think.
On the other hand, a revenant doesn’t have to think about any non-revenant opponent’s mechanics, and has to think less about other rev’s.
Here’s the think about competition: the more one has to think, the slower one is to respond.

When people have sufficient experience against Rev to fight them without thinking about it… then the intrinsic OP factor of Rev will be gone. Only then can the mechanics be truly evaluated.

I am enjoying your build. It is most fun and easy and effective for grinding PvE (map exploring, gathering ascended mats, karma train, etc).

I am having mixed results in PvP, but’s that’s due more to inexperience using it. Right now I do better with the power-hammer build… but your build can transition into modified power-hammer on the fly.

I am seeing a potential wvw frontline use for it as well, but with PVT gear of course.

I think what I like best about it is that having all the utilities in your build isn’t strictly necessary to make it work, which allows a lot of tweaking for the various game modes.

It doesn’t take a dodge or a power to avoid most of the damage from Rev Staff 5. You can avoid at least half the damage simply by choosing a better way to move.

That is… it has counter play already: don’t run directly at a revenant wielding a staff. Strafe a little while running at the Rev: the initial hit and knockback will move your character more sideways than backwards, and thus the following attacks are each increasingly less likely to hit you.

One doesn’t need to use a dodge to avoid the dreaded CoR. Advance towards the Revenant while strafing, that will often be enough to avoid all damage completely. No cooldowns used, no energy used, all dodges kept available.

Or play a revenant for a little while, and learn where the terrain causes CoR to do no damage. It has to be one of the easiest attacks to avoid at no cost.

I took a long break from gw2. Came back for HoT. When I left, necro in PvP was in a bad place: they were easy to focus fire down, and typically were focused out in most matches without have any significant counter play. I didn’t stop trying though, simply because necromancer style appealed to me in both WvW and Pve, and I dislike having different character for different things. I like one character to do everything. Now, revenant is more fun to me in PvE and WvW than necro, so I have a new “main.”

Now in spvp, when I see necromancers on the other team, as a Revenant, I find myself using the same tactics that I did with my necro 3 years ago. I don’t engage necro’s head on; I prefer to get a team mate to engage on point while I attack from the periphery (un-noticed if at all possible). IMO, a free-casting Revenant with a hammer is far more effective than a free casting necro (the old one, not the new upgraded one) was.

That doesn’t mean revenant’s are fine as is. It was a poor design for necro’s to be so easily focused. More or less, they’ve been fixed with reaper. Eventually Revenants will be fixed as well. Might take another expansion to do, since 3 of the legends are essentially unfinished. Kinda like how necro-DS was unfinished at launch due to radical changes in mechanics from original design to launch day.

I took a long break from GW2, shortly after ascended armor came out to just before HOT. When I left, GWEN wasn’t really a thing yet; at least not on my server. When I came back… there’s necro’s everywhere. I guess there’s more after this most recent balance patch than before, but it’s a smaller difference than from when I left a few years ago.

I am wondering if Anet designed Coalescence of Ruin specifically in response to the mega-blobs that run around T1 and T2 wvw servers.

Sometimes those fights come down to numbers, and the more people there are the more often that is the case due to server lag and weaponskill delay. Just look at CoR’s properties:

1. 100% ineffective depending on terrain elevation changes.
2. Weak damage at close range.
3. Can be avoided by strafing at max range; ie if you can see the revenant starting the attack you can avoid it completely without using anything that has a cooldown.

As some have written already, a coordinated group of revenants can have a disproportionate impact against a zerg using CoR. Really gotta wonder if that’s exactly the purpose of CoR.

This bug is happening to my revenant in WvW. Didn’t enter any water, nothing turned off my glint aspect. Zoned in… all aspects cycle once for 3 seconds. I do get the buff, but then it turns off all by itself. Facet of Strength turns off .5 seconds after activating.
Facet of Chaos turns off after cycling once, but doesn’t go no cooldown, so at least we can get perma-protection.
All that said, this is more piano-playing than engineer.

Reducing the damage of CoR may be warranted…. but only when opponents cannot achieve 100% avoidance by simply having half a yard of vertical height above the revenant using CoR.

Seriously? Asking to nerf an attack that one can avoid completely simply by taking advantage of the terrain that exists on all maps? I am realizing that the pathways commanders call out directions for the zerg movement put them in positions that negate CoR. Granted, their motivation is not to avoid CoR, there are other tactical reasons to take the path the commander is directing us to… but a tangential benefit is completely shutting down CoR from the enemy zerg.

Ozzy, you just moved the goalposts.

I have played a lot of revenant in the past week. I have played necro more than any other profession. Whenever I am playing my revenant, and I am thinking to myself, a necro with a condi build would tear me apart.

But there’s more, to respond to where you moved the goalpost to.

How not to die to a revenant? Play a revenant for a while. You’ll learn that revenants are also weak to terrain. Coalescence of Ruins (the dreaded hammer 2) and Unrelenting Assault (dreaded sword 3) are both severely affected by terrain. By playing a revenant I have learned what stairs, walls, ramps, little pebbles on the ground, do to those two attacks. That also means I know how to close distance on a revenant using sword or hammer and take much less, even zero, damage from those two powers without using any of my own powers.

Using terrain may not help one who is trying to hold a point, but it will help just about every where else.

Dagger does too much damage. We don’t know how to balance it, so we removed it from the necromancer set of available weapons. Both primary and off-hand.

Necro stopped being my primary character when the blood-magic-fix patch came out, and it turned out that Anet’s great idea to fix it was to shuffle things around with no significant improvement to anything.

I split my time between necro and engineer and guardian at that point.

Now… my engineer is my primary. Anet has proven to me that they have no idea how to fix the problems with necros, they instead nerf what is working for us while neglecting what isn’t.

When conditions are viable in zerg wvw, pve boss events, and/or power builds have a cleave and sufficient sustain to compensate for the lack of movement… I’ll come back to necro.

I ran into a guild group of 10 people that were doing a group condition group cleanse every 2 seconds. I assume they were using voice coms to coordinate cleanses in rotation.

That means every condition I applied ticked at most 2 times, and not infrequently they would tick 0 times before being cleansed.

If you want to suggest changing how conditions work, or want to increase condition cleanse, you need to consider that even in small to medium sized group encounters conditions can completely negated with existing skills.

I have used ASCII’s wellomancer build and terrormancer build quite a bit, probably even against his own zerg.

My one question: any thoughts at all to using the new vampire signet?

The only place I think it may actually work is in a zerg, but only if it is true that the ICD on the passive is 1 second per target really works like it sounds: that each person hitting my wellomancer triggers ~350 heal, limited to once per second. So if 10 people hit at once, theoretically that’s 3500 healing received.

If it’s 1 second ICD global… then it’s useless.

I’m going to experiment with it tonight.

Staff:
I think it would be reasonable to increase the coefficient on staff 1 by 5% or maybe even 10%. Perhaps the trait that increases mark damage by 10% could be changed to increase staff damage by 10%. Given that marks don’t work at all on downed players, objects, several world bosses…. and now with the big change to putrid mark, staff 1 needs to be stronger.

I would also like to see Anet consider adding 1 or 2 second torment to staff 1. I think this should also be done via a trait. I have no idea what trait it would replace. This could be a big deal (gives necro an additional cover condition that does decent damage, which could easily mess with the spvp meta). It might need to be a grandmaster trait.

Mark of Blood and Chillblains should do perhaps 5% more damage.

The numbers of course, are somewhat facetious. Anet’s internal testing would end up dictating what they could actually be.

That’s enough about staff. I thought of 3 other things.

1: Spear as a terrestial weapon.
2: Trident as a terrestial weapon.
3: Terrestial life blast transferring 1 condition like the underwater version does. This would give condition necro’s a reason to use lifeblast, while compensating all necro’s for giving up stun breaks and cures when we use our “defense” ability.

Now that Putrid Mark is officially nerfed, and they are gung ho to nerf Mark of Blood, the other staff abilities need to be buffed. Staff was never overpowered on it’s own, and now it’s weaker and offers almost negligable support to a team. We have no other team support weapons.

Ax 1 needs to be a cone attack. It does comparable damage to guardian staff 1, yet it’s single target….
Ax 2 needs to be a 130 radius AE attack, centered on the target.
This would solve the lack of cleave issue.

Fought a warrior tonight several times in a row. Spent 90% of the time stunned or knocked down. It wasn’t until the 3rd fight that I’d gotten enough LF to actually use DS.

A few times tonight in sPvP, putrid mark has not transferred any conditions at all, only remove from myself.

So putrid mark was indeed stealth nerfed. They are only now updating the tool tip for the nerf.

Given that Mark of Blood is being nerfed too, and staff was never overpowered to begin, they really need to up the coefficients on the attacks or something.

The problem is not warriors, or lemongrass, or melandru’s.

I play necro, eng, and guard in wvw, on Tarnished Coast. Sometimes I respec back into condition damage on the necro and the eng.

Given that I can have rare pizza, and +30% duration from runes/sigil, and +30% from traits, and +10% from toxic tuning crystal… lemongrass and melandru don’t even keep up with my own +duration for the damaging conditions. The CC conditions are more noticeably affected, but not unreasonably.

The real problem is the number of group condition clears or condition conversions. It’s easiest to see using a necro and Mark of Blood (especially with the increased radius). It is very common for my 3 stacks of bleed to tick perhaps 3 times per target before it’s cleansed. It’s not uncommon to see it tick only once. That’s with my theoretical 16 seconds of bleeding per application. I ran into a guild group of 10 SoS players that were consistently cleansing before the bleeds ticked once or twice. They sustained the group cleanses, every 2 or 3 seconds, for the entire duration of a 20 second fight.

In spvp I have noticed people targeting the worm first, and of course it dies fast. In pve and wvw it dies faster.

A few weeks ago my guild small group (about 6 of us plus a few other PUG) ran into a Sea of Sorrows guild group of 10 that were doing a full condition wipe every 2 to 3 seconds.

Some of the t1 commanders that have shared in interviews or live streaming, or have hosted “classes” some nights have begun taking the perspective that enemy condition-appliers improve their own zerg. They are doing coordinated group condition-conversion.

My necro is my main, in that it has the most hours of all my characters. But I’ve stopped bothering with conditions anywhere except spvp. They are a ineffective mechanic in wvw, and much of world pve for that matter.

One more thing for the wishlist:

An ability, maybe a trait or a temporary boon activated on a new weapon, that would cause instant damage equal to 33% of what a stack of bleed would cause when that stack is cured.

1: A 1200 range weapon that does only power based damage.

2: Fix Putrid Mark

3: Add a condition to staff1: 1 stack of torment for 1 second. Useful for everyone, but limited ability to stack too much of it. Anet never seemed to make up their whether staff is a condition or power weapon.

4: Make Ax1 a cone attack similar to Gaurdian Staff1. Either remove the vuln, or make it perhaps 2/3 to 1/2 the width of the guard staff1 width.

5: Make Ax2 a 180 yard AE hit.

5 1/2: Or leave ax as is and add a weapon with melee cleave.

6: Add a weapon that has aura type attacks. This allows us to activate an ability that will still affect the opponent even when we’re being daisy-chain-CC’d all over the map. Have cooldowns > duration obviously. Stuff like a 300 yard radius point blank AE pulsing attack (mobile well, just make them weaker than wells).

7: Scepter Lifeforce generation needs to be slightly improved.

I’d prefer they leave the range, but make ax1 a cone attack, maybe 2/3 as wide as the guardian’s staff1. It already does less damage than guardian staff1, even with the vuln stacks.
And make Ax2 have a 180 radius ae hit around it’s target.

So I cleared 2 temples today. One i got credit for, including a chest from each champion and the final chest with 30 dedrimor ore. That was with my engineer, using a mix of knights armor and celestial equivalent ascended trinkets, grenades and might stacking.

The other, with the same size zerg, my necromancer got zero credit for any champion, and no chest. Everything simply dies before the necro damage attack hits, or the total damage done to the champion wasn’t enough to get credit. My necro had on all exotic carrion gear. One champ I was able to do nothing but lifeblast (it died before my lifeforce was gone), and it still wasn’t enough. I switched to my berzerker dagger for one… still not enough. Axe also wasn’t enough.

But before I decide this is a real problem, I’m looking for other people to provide feedback. When you have a mega zerg clearing a temple, can you get credit with your necro? Do you get credit with a different profession?

There are a few things engineers have as niche.
Clearing people and siege off of walls. Being on a wall and pushing the zerg 300 yards farther away. IMO grenadier is better than anyone else for this.

Super elixir, fumigate, and overcharged heal turret are handy if you have a ball of defenders in a lords room holding a choke point.