Guild Wars 2

There’s also the fact that Necromancers have to choose between surviving and inflicting damage. Lich form’s damage is impressive but if you use it you become incredibly frail, and as in caster form you only have a few CC skills with gigantic cooldowns to delay (not prevent, delay) being killed. Necromancers often get focused and after using their cooldowns (which do almost no damage) all they can do is try to dodge and run. A great deal of Necro spells need their cooldowns reduced or durations increased. Our siege damage is terrible because we rely on conditions for damage; which is fair enough but we should have SOME variety of decent siege damage and we do not. Our lack of stability skills is at odds with the various skills of ours requiring a channel; we have absolutely no way of preventing interruption and knockdown. Giving Necromancers a stability skill wouldn’t break the game, and it would make life easier (even in PvE) for Necromancers everywhere. I’d also like to suggest an ability that removes conditions; although we are capable of transferring conditions to our enemies the skills that do this have very long cooldowns and one often finds oneself after an encounter having killed everything but still getting downed because you have poison/bleed and no enemies to pass it on to.

Necromancers, at least on my server, are very underplayed. Guardians and Warriors, who are overpowered compared to Necromancers (and Rangers and Engineers) are being buffed every single patch to make them even more imbalanced. There are various reasons Necromancers are a very underplayed and underpowered class. I will list them below.

-Minions are useless until your level is very high, and even then only if you’re specced into them. This means that Necromancers have 5 or so slot skills that are completely useless for all but one spec.
-Signet cooldowns are stupidly long, and the active is almost never worth losing the passive.
-We have very limited ability to buff ourselves, we are given a large health pool in compensation for a lack of invisibility/stability which simply does not work out. Constantly being knocked around and having no way to escape encounters other than desperately trying to run away is not worth having more HP than the other casters. If a Warrior, Guardian or Thief focuses a Necromancer in PvP, the Necromancer dies; our large health pool merely means it takes the Warrior killing us about half a second longer, whereas the Mesmer and Elementalist have various escape mechanisms. All we can do is throw marks around and once the good marks are on cooldown we are destroyed. Necromancers are particularly awful against Thieves as positioning a mark for an invisible target is about as easy as it sounds. If Necromancers are conceptually adept at absorbing damage rather than avoiding it like the other scholars, fine; but as it stands they’re not. Fear is our only real crowd control and it has a gigantic cooldown, and we can’t get swiftness to run like an Ele (unless we have a useless offhand detailed below) or turn invisible like a Mesmer. If you want Necro to be tanky rather than reliant on escapes and crowd control, maybe you should do something about us getting obliterated once fear is on cooldown.
-Warhorn. Completely useless. Nobody in their right mind would use it, Necromancers are supposed to focus on inflicting status conditions on the enemy to exascerbate their damage, Warhorn gives almost nothing in the way of damage and its daze is short-range. The swiftness skill is nice but it’s not worth sacrificing an offhand weapon that would actually be useful. I would suggest reworking Warhorn in totality and giving us a slot skill that grants swiftness.