Guild Wars 2

That’s actually a good point. I completely forgot about that, my bad!

narcx.3570:

Xamin.6895:

Here is the source (hop to 1:50 where he talks about the Scourge torment + burning elite, he will mention the nerf there):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/163637673

Personally I don’t like this approach at all and I would feel a kitteneated as a reaper. I’ve heard mention where people say that this might just be an intermediate step from Anet before they perform a reaper overhaul that is a bit more complete, but based on my experience from previous years I doubt that will happen (remember all the bugged minions for how many years?)

I am not too bothered about the idea of making the reaper power based, and the scourge condi based, but then why not replace the reaper elite with something power specs can use instead of simply nerfing it, rendering it useless and thereby forcing people into a fixed build which goes against this whole build diversity thing they advertised during the announcement video.

Deathly Chill is already scaled to one stack of bleeding in sPvP… This video is in the sPvP training area. Thus, the necro in the video will be shackled by sPvP balance.

No need to lose our minds yet. :P

Here is the source (hop to 1:50 where he talks about the Scourge torment + burning elite, he will mention the nerf there):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/163637673

Personally I don’t like this approach at all and I would feel a kitteneated as a reaper. I’ve heard mention where people say that this might just be an intermediate step from Anet before they perform a reaper overhaul that is a bit more complete, but based on my experience from previous years I doubt that will happen (remember all the bugged minions for how many years?)

I am not too bothered about the idea of making the reaper power based, and the scourge condi based, but then why not replace the reaper elite with something power specs can use instead of simply nerfing it, rendering it useless and thereby forcing people into a fixed build which goes against this whole build diversity thing they advertised during the announcement video.

1. Ranger
2. Necromancer
3. Elementalist

Norjena.5172:

Xamin.6895:

I go 30 Spite for Dumbfire, 30 curses for fear damage and scepter condition duration and 10 death magic for staff cooldowns.

I just blow them all with my sweet conditions <3

Conditonbuilds are not rls stronk in Dungeons/Fractals. Rampager Hybrid OK, but all other builds have bad dps and no other useful suppport.

You’d think that, but everyone is just running zerker, so i can get my 25 bleed stacks on the enemy very easily without having to share the bleed cap with other people. I then use epidemic for AOE, my bleeds tick for around 2k per second on average (sometimes more, sometimes less). Terror normally procs 2 times (2 and 3/4 sec duration) when I fear (DS 3 and my staff AOE fear), that’s an additional 1.2k damage every now and then per enemy. This all excludes damage from burning, poison, a bit of torment and my main attack hits.

The damage can be surprisingly good if you have the right gear for it. I definitely do more damage than my zerker guard simply because of the AOE and range/safety i have with conditions.

As for useful support, the only useful support you have atm is stacking might and dealing damage, this whole zerker fest thing made support roles useless atm.

I go 30 Spite for Dumbfire, 30 curses for fear damage and scepter condition duration and 10 death magic for staff cooldowns.

I just blow them all with my sweet conditions <3

cubed.2853:

CHIPS.6018:

aspirine.6852:

CHIPS.6018:

It is GREAT NEWS that Dhuumfire is nerfed to the ground. Now perhaps our whole profession won’t have to balance around Dhuumfire anymore.

I support any kind of nerf against Dhuumfire. In fact this whole trait should be deleted from the game altogether and be forever forgotten alongside the Forgottens.

How is it great news that it is now completly useless? Nerfing does not mean make it so bad no-one would ever want to trait for it.

Because Dhuumfire should never have existed in the first place. It is universally hated by both necro and non-necros alike. Necros hated it because they knew it would cause tons of nerfs to other skills, and those nerfs did come as expected. Non-necros hated it because it was too high damage, and it was.

Lore wise it also made zero sense. Why would Dhuumfire suddenly become a good guy and start helping the good side?

Nevermind the nerfs to Dhuumfire. I will be happier if they just delete this whole trait and replace it with something totally different.

‘I dont think so. I like every additional condition I can put on my target. It covers the other conditions. So I cannot agree. I also dont think this is too strong for current wvw meta – it’s pretty balanced from my pov. But making it bound to DS, LF and GM is not acceptable… And who cares about pve? I think and feel like all those changes necros receive are pretty much entirely related to spvp – well I NEVER play spvp! Thanks anet…

I agree completely with this. What happened to splitting PVP and PVE skills? PVE condition necros will not only get a 3s burn instead of a 4s burn, but that burn will be difficult to access, and take a long time to apply. It also means my toughness/precision/cond. dmg gear is now more useless because Dhuumfire no longer syngergises with crit chance.

We see an unwarranted reduction in damage in PVE (I thought power builds were the problem?) and we need to look at different gear stats now as well, just because of a single volatile gransmaster trait that caused the reduction in terror damage already.

Cant we at least get some other grandmaster trait in any other trait line other than curses that will be of benefit to conditionmancers? I tried several other condition builds without Dhuumfire, my DPS is significantly lower, so we can’t just ignore it and build something else, because there is nothing else.

Greetings fellow rangers and Anet!

First off I would like to thank Anet for their great work in implementing such a fantastic pet system. Rangers have an enormous amount of different pets to choose from, and I love it when I randomly stumble across a new juvenile animal during my adventures.

Up till recently I have always been a devourer kinda guy. Me and my old carrion devourer go a long way back, however since the devourer pet’s DPS nerf I have realised that spiders’ damage are now similar to that of the devourers! I could not resist the temptation for a new silky friend called Cosette.

I however realised that my favourite spider, the Canyon Spider did not have a tameable version, which to me is highly unfortunate.

So, I thought I’d reach out to the community and ask you guys what you think? Should we get Juvenile Canyon Spiders? As for their unique ability I suggest the following:

Tormenting Poison: Your pet’s next 3 attacks cause torment on the enemy.

For reference, here’s a link showing what the Canyon Spider looks like (beautiful, I know):
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Canyon_Spider

The reason why I chose torment is because if you look at the Jungle Spider for example, they have Paralyzing Venom, which is an ability you need to use in conjunction with Entangling Web (ideally you’d want to activate it after Web has been used and the target is inside/approaching its poison cloud). I am a big fan of this style of play where you have to make decisions based on a given set of conditions.

Torment works in a similar fashion; if your target is webbed and you torment the enemy, the damage will be reduced, so you’d want to do it after Web as well, however in PvP you would actually demotivate other players from moving around too much, especially when they are under pressure, so unlike Paralyzing Venom, you end up giving your opponent that difficult decision to make, resulting in more fun plays!

Torment, alongside Confusion are the only other conditions I can see that would work with a spider’s venom ability as well. It would be strange to see a spider that causes burning. I also did not choose confusion since we have the Reef Drake causing it, but of course that would work very well regardless!

I also apologise if this thread belonged in some other recommendations forum, I did not exactly know where to post this, so I thought I’d just post it where the most rangers are.

Why not a condition that does nothing on its own but improves the effectiveness of other conditions on the target?

That would make for a great opener, and since it will most likely be death shroud based, it gives you more of an incentive to use death shroud if you are a condition build necro (normally you would use death shroud after having applied blood is power to make good use of that extra might), but in this case you will be stuck with a choice where you either start the fight with death shroud to improve the rest of your DoTs on the target (could work well with the teleport ability to close in on some distance) or you could just start a fight as per usual and apply the new condition later on after having benefited from the 10 stacks of might

of course this means that the additional effects from your conditions are only applied after you used your new condition on the target, if it affected conditions that were already on the target before you applied the new condition, then everyone would apply it later on and leave it at that, making it less fun

Ye skill number 5 does not cause vulnerability; the description should be changed. Its pretty easy to test, just use it on an enemy and see if he gets vulnerability or not.

Well I did some minion testing again after this patch came out, and I have to say, minions improved a lot actually. The problem where they just run off for no reason is fixed by the looks of it, it didn’t happen to me at all since this patch. That used to be only 50% of the problem however, the problem where the minions just chill about while you are being utterly devastated has not been properly addressed yet, just like what you’ve said.

I now realise that minions sometimes do not attack the enemy if the enemy AI is not targeting and/or attacking you, for example if you run around, you see a monster, you cast a spell on it or start to auto-attack, the monster will respond, and so will your minions then. But if you fight a monster that is determined to run from point A to B and ignores you, the minions just chill about, or if its a group fight and the monster is attacking someone else completely, your minions might ignore them as well. This is what I found from personal experience after the patch.

Before the patch minions were just randomly lazing about even if the enemy attacked you for me, this observation I explained above is something I only found after the patch.

So for PvP, obviously the player does not behave like an AI attacking you, so I would imagine the minions would just laze about from time to time like they usually do, but since the bug has been corrected where they just run off, I would imagine they would ironically be worse in sPvP since it’d be difficult for them to attack at times.

I’d also like to see what the others think based on what they observed so far, I genuinely feel an improvement was made, but only half of it, if minions can enter combat properly (simply base it on the moment you land a negative ability or auto-attack on the enemy), then our legendary minion issue will be sorted at last!

I also agree with Darc, I’ve been playing the necro since beta here (lev 80 since a while ago) and have always wanted to try the minion master, but every single time i try after every major patch i feel like i had wasted my time. The minions will run off to a nearby enemy (it seems like they are aggressive and their aggro range is larger than that of the enemy, making them run into combat without you even wanting to do this), and since you are in combat, you begin to move slower, so you cant just ignore it, its extremely frustrating.

I also experienced on several occasions how the minions, especially the flesh golem, just stand around and do nothing while you enter combat…this happens at random for me, using minion abilities sometimes help, but thats clearly not the point here! Its completely broken and I dont want to send my flesh golem charging into another enemy nearby just because he refused to attack.

See what i think the problem is, is that the minions might have a similar AI to that of the ranger pet, but since the ranger has the pet command bar, it constantly has a certain ‘behaviour’ assigned to it (i.e. passive, aggressive or defensive), and it would check to see what the pet’s current status is before it makes a move, but with the necromancer there is no such control, making it invalid… i could be completely wrong here but im just throwing ideas around…

I’m not saying a pet control bar should be added, but if the pets could always just attack what you attack, or attack the enemy that hits you or them first, then that would be great! But it also feels like pet pathing is an issue here as well…

I understand fixing AI is actually a pretty difficult task (my brother who worked in the gaming industry always complained about it), so it might take a long time to fix, but I never once heard Anet say that they recognise this as an issue and that they are working on it, and thats what worries me…

unless you want to run around killing mindlessly, minion master builds are completely useless to me, its unplayable, its really that bad! I’m a burden to others in groups because I just pull everything at random…

For staff i would recommend power, if you want to go conditions then the scepter/dagger is the way to go. The staff’s main attack also fills your death shroud bar enabling you to go into death shroud to use its main attack more often, which is obviously more powerful if you have more power. Marks themselves also do damage the moment its broken, where the damage increases if you have more power, and you can trait into spite (which improves power) to make marks do 10% more damage as well. Staff works very well with power builds, go for that!

Devourer pets are my favourite ranger pets in game!

They do significantly more damage than spider pets (the only other real ranged pet family to my knowledge), and are a lot more defensive as well (bear in mind that spiders are a lot better at snaring enemies, which could help in PvP).

If you exclude cats and birds of prey, devourers, along with drakes, dish out enough damage to be at the top, making them a great choice because even though their damage may not be as high as the cats or birds of prey, they are a lot more defensive and are ranged as well.

Out of the 3 families, I took the carrion devourer as soon as possible (I ran into some high level zone at lev 17, think the zone was a lev 50 zone or something just to get my carrion devourer). I chose this type of devourer because of his F2 ability, the AOE poison he makes works as a poison combo finisher for yourself and other allies, and it deals the most damage when compared to the other 2 devourer families provided the target remains in the poison zone at all times.

This means that in PvP the carrion devourer might end up dealing a bit less damage since players can just roll out of the poison, but the other devourers’ F2 abilities are projectiles, making it more difficult to dodge.

The devourer is also a very responsive pet i realised, I’ve seen a lot of talks that are still going on about pet responsiveness, but since the last fix on our pet’s AI i had no problems except when my devourer is attacking structures in WvW (for example keep doors), where my pet sometimes refuses to attack the target I call for it due to him being at an awkward angle relative to the target.

Oh and as for dungeons, when a devourer is in trouble, they just burrow away to safety (most of the time hehe)

And last but not least, devourers have awesome animations, they are just plain awesome!

Regarding those of you who stated that the necromancer curses traits ‘Haemophilia’ and ‘Lingering Curse’ does not stack may be wrong. I believe that the trait ‘Haemophilia’ is not functioning at all, whether or not they stack is not the real issue here!

I tested it against Heavy Target Golems in the mists. I had runes equipped that increased my bleeding duration to increase the accuracy of my results. I used Grasping Dead once on the target golem and timed the length of time I saw the ‘bleed’ condition icon on the target.

With only Haemophilia active, my bleeds lasted for about 14.03 seconds.
With only Lingering Curse active, my bleeds lasted for about 17.63 seconds.
With both traits active, my bleeds lasted for about 18.18 seconds.
With neither of these traits active, my bleeds lasted for about 13.48 seconds.

Of course there are inaccuracies regarding my response time, especially since I timed in milliseconds, but the duration of the overall bleed was long enough for me to safely deduce the following:

Haemophilia is supposed to increase the bleeding duration by 20% as the description states, meaning that if we take the 13.48 bleed duration when no traits are active, and we add 20% to this figure, the theoretical duration will be:
13.48 * 0.2 = 2.696
2.696 + 13.48 = 16.176 seconds.

I however got a bleeding duration of only 14.03 seconds using the haemophilia trait, which is far off the theoretical value (over 2 seconds!), meaning that the trait is either not working as intended or its not working at all (14.03 seconds is very close to 13.48 seconds, possibly within the error for this experiment, which is my reaction time, making me strongly believe that the trait is not functioning).

When I used only the Lingering Curse trait I got a bleeding duration of 17.63 seconds. If we add 33% to the original 13.48 seconds, we get a theoretical value of:
13.48 * 0.33 = 4.4484
4.4484 + 13.48 = 17.93
This theoretical value works well with the actual value of 17.63 seconds I got (difference due to error in my reaction time). This means Lingering Curse is working as intended.

With both traits I ended up with a bleed duration of 18.18 seconds as stated before, this value is very close to the stated theoretical value of 17.63 seconds, which once again proves that Haemophilia is not working.

My raven is named “Nevermore”
My pink moa is named “Beauty Personified”

I for one agree that minions should have an out of combat regeneration or as TeasingPink suggested, a cooldown that starts after the minion had been summoned and not when it dies. The necro was my main in guild wars 1 as well. You cant really compare the minion master in GW1 to the one in GW2 since the mechanics are so different, but in guild wars 1 you had an ability that focused only on minion healing whereas in guild wars 2 there is no such ability. Of course, people often use abilities like Mark of Blood to heal some of the minions for a bit during combat as well as spending a few traits in the blood tree to heal the minions through death shroud. The problem with these abilities however are that they limit how you can build your character, for example:

Mark of Blood – since its a staff skill, traits that improve on its effects (radius, damage, cooldown, etc.) is also located in the Death Magic tree along with the minion traits, meaning that there will be a trade-off, making your main weapon weaker without you even wanting it to be so.

Death Shroud healing – its traits are located in the Blood Magic trait line, which is very annoying because there are minion traits located in the Spite tree line as well (30% increased minion damage starting at 20 points), this forces you to spread your traits out over several trees, meaning that your character cannot focus on certain stats (i.e. increased condition duration for every point spent in Spite), meaning your character’s offensive capabilities will reduce, and with Marks that can hardly be improved, this is a real problem.

So in short, the current methods used to heal minions, even when out of combat aren’t really worth it since you sacrifice too much.