Guild Wars 2

Necro scepter 3 getting condi burst of some sort instead of power burst would be very nice, as well as touching up the AA/2 skill to be strong immediate threats instead of needing to stay on for the full 30s duration to be comparable to other skills.

Gryph.8237:

Haha Bhawb, if I was an anet dev and saw you upset and these changes, i would feel terrible as you’re one of the few voices of reason here

I feel awful for the person who did these changes honestly. They did an amazing job in almost every single way, and then someone actually thought the corruption changes were a good idea. If you could remove that from the changes, I’d be super happy, but alas.

We don’t need controls, their current AI system would be fine if it just didn’t bug.

Unpredictability.4086:

Maybe the reason why Necros aren’t allowed to heal that well is because they’ve been studying/obsessed with death so much that they forgot what life is like.

Obviously not that much, otherwise Death Shroud would be better.

leman.7682:

But tbh, I run fractals 50+ and while there are problems (downed state anyone?) the necro isn’t bad. I contribute with my necro in many interesting ways.

We aren’t bad in PvE, we just aren’t ideal. Debuffing is the one thing we do best, and it isn’t rewarded (and in fact discouraged) by most dungeons/bosses.

As for Torment. Remember it is a condition, and it is on three classes, two of which are going to be hit hard by it. What can Necros do with conditions? Throw them back on enemies. I am not worried by a thief getting torment, because it means I now have two ways to Torment a thief; my own, and throwing his back at him.

Necros are extremely strong against condi builds because condi builds literally kill themselves through transfers. The Necro doesn’t even need condi damage.

It depends. I almost always play side point bunkers so I’ll use that:

How consistently did I keep my point capped?
Was I able to successfully pressure far/mid/objectives?
Did I win my 1v1s? If no, was it a build vs build issue, or did I simply get outplayed? And if it was because of my build is there something I can do to change that?
How often could I draw 2 or more enemy players to me, and did I win/survive a satisfying amount of time?
Was I communicating to my team on how they could help me (like calling out when 3 people come to 3v1 me so I can get a rotation)?
Were my deaths actually #Worth or was I dying because of stupid decisions?

Stuff like that. Basically, was I playing well in fights and was I at least pulling my weight on the map.

I just…

The shouts aren’t useless at all, our traits all got rebalanced really nicely, we have access to a crapload of fields and our finisher situation is getting better, I’d be surprised if Gee doesn’t address it when he can.

This complaining makes no sense. Necromancers have been getting a lot of great attention, and now we’re going to start complaining that other professions aren’t getting shafted? That’s idiotic.

No it really doesn’t.

Can we get his stability upped to a reasonable amount? He’s been left alone since the stability nerfs, and frankly its a fairly important part of the ability, especially since so many AoE pulsing CC skills were put into the game with HoT. But he went from having 15s of ignoring all CC, to 15s of ignoring a whole one CC, while every other stability granting elite was given significant stability changes.

Its a joke m8, make like a Reaper and chill.

Espoooooooooooorts!

The minion in question gains health. The minions are given credit for the source of the projectile finisher, so it would be the same as if another player did it. Also worth mentioning that bone fiend has two finishers per auto attack, so double the effect.

The only special interaction is that minions use your condition damage/duration. So if they projectile finish through a poison field, while they are given “credit” for poisoning, it is your condition damage and duration that they use.

spoj.9672:

Ive never understood why we have 3 different choices for 25% movement speed. Its a waste of trait/utility slots. We could have something else but instead we have duplicates of the same thing. Makes no sense.

I think this is a larger issue than just 25% speed. We have 3 sources of 25% speed, we also have almost excessive levels of might, vulnerability, and crit chance stacking, to the point that we can theoretically have 130% crit chance in Death Shroud without fury or any investment in precision or precision based buffs, not in DS can still get up to 80%, meaning a Curses/Reaper Soldier Necro can hit 100% crit chance with just fury.

So we end up with a lot of traits that effectively duplicate effects, and instead of other professions who can stack up a lot of their beneficial effects and get crazy results, we hit ceilings with our “stacking” very quickly because they are based primarily on mechanics that are shared heavily.

We actually heal very well, though if they ever gave us back a proper Well of Blood scaling I’m pretty sure we’d be the highest healing in the game without blast finishers.

But the most likely thing is we’ll be on debuff duty. It doesn’t matter in current PvE, but we are very capable of putting out large amounts of all the non-damaging conditions in one build, and we’re very capable of dealing with high sustained damage unlikely nearly anyone else. We should be okay once they get around to balancing all the extra things that need balance, which is going to hold us back more than a “role” will (looking at you Well of Garbage).

Let me guess, you play a build with a lot of boons and not a single condition removal or stun break and you got destroyed by a Necro?

I can’t even believe what was just said in the few posts above me. The fact that you think its okay to do that… wow. Great showing of why the PvP community is absolutely terrible though.

To the original question, I believe its possible to get those statistics through twitch, or some third party means. I don’t stream much so I can’t say for certain, but I know that Blu has stated numbers like that before, and it isn’t just something they pull out. Its actually not that rare to have a really high amount of individual people log in, while a relatively small amount at max concurrent viewers. Pretty common of most similar events really.

Gryph.8237:

It would make wvw hilarious. I don’t like this fight, I’m gone. Can you imagine the response?

Yeah. It’d be exactly like fighting Warrior, Thief, Mesmer, or Elementalist.

I’d say that Greater marks should be standard (the size, not unblockable), if a weapon is absolutely useless without a trait, I think its a sign that the weapon needs to have some changing.

I’d also replace reanimator with something that gives vigor.

+9001. This was a gigantic nerf to staff.

Wait what? Robert just posted like 3-4 times before the weekend, more dev posts than the combined posts of every other profession currently in the game. Sure Revenant is getting a lot of talk because it is new, but besides that we have had more communication than everyone, and if anything he is probably very busy sorting through the feedback and allowing us to hold the conversations ourselves (I’d say we’ve done an incredible job so far without needing help, leaving him to actually compile and start to figure out what needs to be changed). No reason for him to post until he has changes figured out, I imagine he’s crazy busy for a while.

Colin seemed pretty excited in the interview with Angry Joe, there might have been some stuff elsewhere as well.

I’m not getting my hopes up much. There is a chance we get something cool, but frankly I’m not sure it will really matter to me as long as the core issues are still around.

Blighter’s Boon was nerfed for the builds that needed it most: shroud-based soldier teamfighting builds. They relied entirely on Decimate Defenses/Death Perception to have enough damage to be at all relevant as a bunker (since we still bring very low support), and Blighter’s Boon was absolutely necessary to have the sustain to bunker. The trait is still just fine for 1v1 builds, though it definitely pushes you towards having Chilling Victory. But 1v1 builds didn’t need any more sustain, and as I listed in another thread we have far more boon sources that don’t at all scale with enemies hit than we do that scale. And our best source of scaling boons used to be YAAW, until it received a 50% nerf to how much might it can generate per cast, which again heavily hurts Blighter’s Boon based teamfighting builds.

We asked for scaling defenses, we got scaling defenses, and they were nerfed because apparently we’re not allowed to be teamfight bunkers, and very specific builds on other professions were making us OP. No attempts with ICD, nah let’s just remove an entire type of Reaper build because Herald spams 10 boons every 3 seconds.

Rising Dusk.2408:

I always felt that Reaper would’ve been better with stances.

I actually think “Rise!” and “Your Soul is Mine!” are awesome as they are, they just seriously needs to be instant cast. This whole cast time thing on shouts is really crippling their viability, and only really the elite deserves that treatment based on its effect.

Stances would be cool, something I’d like to see in the future for sure.

Rise! is honestly pretty bad as is from a design standpoint. Forces MM builds to do things MM builds otherwise hate to do (fight multiple targets), and in everything except some cheese condi builds using DN it is just a worse version of Bone Minions.

I do think shouts should be useful outside of big fights though. Which is why Nothing Can Save You is probably the best designed shout, as it is strong 1v1 and then in teamfights scales well without being reliant on multiple enemies.

Charblaze.6958:

To the guys like Falcon and Bhawb, why are you not posting videos, guides, whatever, to teach others to be awesome necroes like you? Really, if necromancers were on par to other classes given equal player skill we wouldn’t be pitied by pretty much every other class and majority of the PvP forum.

Are my 50+ episodes of But of Corpse not good enough for you? How about my 7,000 forum posts? I’ve contributed my fair share to the Necromancer community thanks.

Also I talk pretty much constantly about how Necromancer is sub par in literally everything. I don’t even like how we are in zerging for WvW, and I’ve been vocal that the only reason we are good there is because we have ranged AoE direct damage, a niche that someone else could easily steal from us.

Shiki.7148:

Give me a single example of when Anet listened to us please. Teamsupport?

Foot in the Grave stun breaking, Vampiric Aura, those are two more recent ones and I’m honestly too lazy to list them all but a TON of changes have been made due to forum suggestions, in fact most of the good changes are direct copypasta’d ideas of ours.

nearlight.3064:

@manveruppd, what do you think necros will run when ele gets nerfed? Also I heard from a popular streamer that the ele balance dev is on vacation right now so thats why it hasn’t been nerfed yet… but I guess it will be soon since vacations can’t last forever.

They’ve been on vacation for two years? Man I want to work at ANet.

Blackari.2051:

I wouldlike if they nerfed dmg by 25-30% but reducecast time to 0,7s .

That’s exactly the opposite of the entire point of the skill.

Bawi.9541:

Ah, which good pvp game doesn’t need a bit of hardcountering

Rock-Paper-Scissors agrees completely.

Current Necro will never be good at PvE without major additions… oh wait that’s what a specialization is :P

The devs care about every single profession, thinking otherwise is absolutely silly. ANet wants the best for this game, and that includes the best balance for every profession, this is not just their job, its what they live and breath all day every day. You can disagree with the changes they make, because they aren’t always right, but saying they specifically dislike certain professions, professions THEY made is just dumb.

Dagger is 100% a DPS weapon, it has one of the highest AA DPS in the game. Gaining LF on hit doesn’t make it sustain, and the healing is less a “sustain” weapon and more a “I’m melee and taking a ton of damage I need some way to deal with this”.

Axe, and all the comparable weapons to it, are burst weapons. They have a fairly weak AA with some kind of effect, and a burst skill on 2 that the rest of the kit is supposed to set up. While they borked it, it wasn’t going to be DPS as much as burst.

The problem with Guardians has always been that bunker/support guardian has been top tier in every game mode every single patch literally since launch. So while every single other Guardian build has had issues (although now DPS is seeing a rise), ANet has basically ony given them cursory balance patches in a feeble attempt to do something about it.

Its a good and bad thing. On one hand you can pick up guardian and be guaranteed to be useful basically forever, but on the other hand, you better like support.

Just so people really understand the context:

Pre-Dhuumfire Necromancers were only picked up in PvP teams if they were amazing players. Even some really, really amazing players had a very hard time playing Necro (Symbolic had to change to ranger, people who didn’t change just had a hard time finding teams). This was for a few reasons.

First off, all of our meaningful damage is done via Bleeding. Yes Terror and Poison add in a little DPS, but you don’t truly die because of those, its the bleeding that does it. Pre-patch, it was trivial to keep yourself fully cleansed and the bleed stacks would basically never stack up to a dangerous amount.

Second, we were very easy to focus down. If you had a Necro on your team, it was essentially guaranteed you had one player on the team whose job it was to make sure that Necro didn’t die. And even with this protection, we were generally outclassed by Engineers.

Engineers didn’t need to hide their conditions, they used Burning. A very high DPS condition that they could readily re-apply, along with tons of might stacking, and direct damage for “free”. Not only this, but they could fend for themselves. Even when Necros were run, they were often done so with an Engi that could “feed” them burning.

The Dhuumfire patch, though, changed a lot. Buff to scepter 1, Burning, Torment, better defensive tools, and teams were generally running less condi-removal spam than before. This meant our Bleeds now had 2-3 more cover conditions (poison got a massive boost in uptime due to scepter 1 buff), and thus were far harder to remove. All of a sudden, our Scepter 1 spam alone could put down heavy pressure on targets, not to mention our AoE bleed bursts that were very hard to deal with.

We went from Zero to Hero in a way. Dhuumfire was needed if we were going to be taken seriously pre-patch. But they put in way too much in that one patch.

I don’t hate Dhuumfire. I dislike that they have implemented it in the way they have.

I felt the changes were overall great. Condition got a huge potential buff with Dhuumfire stacking 3 burning on its own with no extra duration, Scepter having 100% condition duration to all outgoing conditions while equipped. Minions got some potentially really nice changes, we had a lot of traits consolidated together, some base buffs to things.

I really don’t see what there is to complain about. This is trait changes, they can’t fix all of our problems. But they are absolutely a large move in the right direction, and these are tentative.

Evan Lesh.3295:

I consider this a different problem than the readability of Asura animations. Yes, they could be fixed in the same way with many of the solutions the players have suggested. However, all melee attacks hit outside the visible animation for all races. That specific problem is not easy to solve because it is a product of us trying to create fluid combat.

Asura animations specifically, above any other problems with melee create new problems. If 4/5 races have animations that are “good-enough”, and 1/5 does not, then it isn’t something inherit to the entire design of the game, it is obvious that one specific thing is causing issues.

I can understand if melee simply looks a bit different than it acts. But when I’m in PvP and a large burst of fire is coming at me, yet noticeably stopping a distance from my model and not touching my character at all (or even very close), I should expect to not be affected by it. However this is not the case. Lets be honest here, this wouldn’t fly in PvE if a boss’s red circle was actually half of the size it needed to be, so even if you were a full body width outside of it you would die anyway, so why is this allowed in PvP?

Hello everyone, I imagine most of you know me already. For those who don’t, I have hosted But of Corpse, a Necromancer podcast, for about 9 months, “lead” the all-necro guild (also called But of Corpse) and am an active poster around here. I wanted to update whoever still follows BoC, and inform any new people about what has been going on and some plans for the future.

First off, the Guild is still “alive” but doesn’t really do anything at the moment. Anyone is welcome to join (NA or EU), just PM me on the forums or in game and I can invite you. If you would like to organize all-Necro type things, I can give you privs to do that. As it is now I don’t generally have the time to organize fun things to do, although I would love to.

On to the podcast. We are currently on a short break, as I move houses to a new room to go to university. This is why we’ve missed the last two weeks, will miss this upcoming week, and may miss the next one. We aren’t gone, but I’ll be too busy to actually put the podcast together. That said, when we come back, I hope to get the community much more involved in what is going on with a weekly forum thread to get ideas and feedback.

As for a general idea, the schedule of the upcoming podcasts we do will (generally) be:
1) Patch
2) Minions (likely multi part)
3) An overview of weapons – like we did with traits
4) An overview of utilities – see above

When the next episode gets released, I’ll open a new thread where you can keep track of what’s going on week by week and give feedback, and also the weekly subject threads for the next podcast.

If you want to contact me:
Twitter
Forums
In-Game – Bhawb.7408

Thank you all for your time, and obviously feel free to leave feedback below or message me.

TL;DR people in the sPvP forums isn’t capable of looking at things outside the meta. Is spectral armor + DS incredibly strong? Yes, in fact it is almost as strong as these crazy other things that every single other class gets called evades, invulnerabilities, dodges (and vigor), blocks, etc. We don’t have a single one of those, except one dodge every ten seconds. We get a single defensive measure; Death Shroud. It is a single, deplete-able HP bar that we have to fill up in combat.

What happens if we have no DS? We die. What happens when we get CCed? We blow our single stun break, or die. What happens when we get focused? We pray that we have enough DS to absorb it all, or that screaming “HOLY CRAP TEAM HELP ME” in teamspeak is enough to get your team to peel for you. Because guess what; we have no ways to avoid damage, we have no ways to get out of combat, our ways to deal with CC suck. Currently the way to play Necromancer revolves around trying to do so much damage that they aren’t able to go offensive on you OR praying to God that your large HP bar is enough to absorb burst after burst after burst, because guess what, you aren’t avoiding a single sliver of that damage.

Yes, passive play is bad.

So lets remove all signets from the game, lets remove banners, anything that is summoned, boons, conditions, defensive specs, healing, auto attacks, any proc that doesn’t rely on you pressing a button, any buff, all AoE, and downed state, and we’ll all just have berzerker only naked power builds 5v5 mid (unless 5v5 is too hard, we can change that too) and whoever has the largest kitten at the the end wins.

Seriously though, these topics are old, ANet obviously isn’t going to nerf AI just because clicking the right target is too hard for you, or because your super skillful build is actually awful.

Axe’s issue is not its range.

Because there is something comical about a spectral sperm.

The Wizland.8435:

While these aren’t exactly enough to make us equal to other classes

Basically this. Most of the changes to Necromancer were a buff, while a few seem to be nerfs. The problem is that any nerfs aren’t really deserved, Necromancer isn’t strong enough right now so nerfing anything makes no sense. On the other hand, while we did retain some buffs, these buffs might not keep us up on the level of power creep other professions had. Meaning we took one step forward, but if everyone else took two we’ve effectively gone backwards.

And we still have issues in our trait lines and major deficiencies, which is part of the problem: these changes weren’t enough to completely bring us up to par. Blood Magic is better now, but still not good enough, and life stealing still conflicts with Death Shroud. Curses has no good GM trait to use for power builds, despite the rest of the line having great potential synergy for power builds. Death Magic still has two minion GMs taking up slots, making it hard for other builds to justify going into DM if they don’t want to play with minions. Axe Training seems to have taken a definite step backwards. And unfortunately even if ANet had gotten the trait changes right, there are still major problems like lack of useful fields, lack of finishers, etc, although those couldn’t have been fixed in this kind of trait change most likely.

Overall I still think the changes are a net positive for us. The problem is with the overall changes it isn’t hard to feel like Necromancer took two steps forward, one step back, and everyone else took a cab to the other side of town. I’m hopeful, because at the end of the day I think we’re getting closer, and the devs are obviously listening to us.

No, we didn’t get that good of increased survivability. What we got was Dhuumfire, a ton of damage, and then they nerfed a lot of our damage to compensate for that added damage. But then they took away the added damage and didn’t return a single bit of our damage.

So now that we’ve all had some time to play with Reaper, I think its time to start going back and talking about the professions as a whole. I think our specialization lines are one of the biggest places we could see improvement at this point, and they are also extremely important when it comes to enabling build types. I say this especially because Spite/Soul Reaping/Reaper are now nearly omnipresent in builds, while Curses sees almost no play, and Death Magic/Blood Magic are far more niche than they could be. I want to focus on what the trait lines as a whole should be doing, and then talk about the specific traits that I think aren’t quite up to par.

I’ll be posting these separately and not all at once, because it is a ton to digest, but also because once I wrote out Spite I realized it was an entire post all on its own, and I think this is more useful to everyone involved if we condense the topics.

Spite
Conveniently our best designed line (in my opinion) is also the first one, so I get to laud over it first. Spite’s entire point is making you deal more damage, and it accomplishes this goal in every single build. Furthermore, it does this through a fairly unique and thematic approach: build might to increase your own damage, and use vulnerability and boon removal to decrease your enemies defenses. It also has an interesting focus for these themes, concentrating these traits around shroud and low health targets, which makes it feel unique and allow for you to have periods of high strength without being too strong.

Minors
Not much to say here, they are the definition of how the line works: provide might/vulnerability while in shroud and against low targets.

Adepts
I actually think all the adepts are fine so I won’t spend much time here. While Spiteful Talisman sees little play overall, this is because of Focus being subpar, not this trait; a strong focus weapon and I can see this being used.

Edit:

And i agree with Tim on spiteful talisman. With HoT and new fracs we see a lot more boons in PvE now. And its very difficult to keep them off for long periods even with multiple mesmers and necros. So relaxing the 5% conditional damage might be a nice change. 1 or 2 boons would be nice. Or even give it a scaling effect. 10% no boons, 7.5% 1 boon, 5% 2 boons.

Masters
No surprise since I said this is a great line, but I like most of the traits here. Unholy Fervor is the only exception, because its just a fairly weak trait, especially comparatively. Let’s compare it with Forceful Greatsword :

Unholy Feast

• Conditional 10% damage increase on Axe skills, though the condition isn’t too hard to reach.
• 20% CDR on Axe skills
• Affects 3 skills, and one trait

Forceful Greatsword

• Unconditional 10% damage increase on Greatsword skills
• 20% CDR on Greatsword skills
• Gain 5s of might on critical hit, no ICD
• Affects 6 skills
• Technically also affects Spear, an underwater weapon, but I think this is irrelevant for comparisons

So, in a 1 for 1 comparison between two weapons that are pretty similar, and trait lines with the same goal, with traits of the same tier, Forceful Greatsword is just flat out better in every single way. It has more effects, and affects more skills. So Unholy Fervor obviously needs buffs. The first is to either completely remove the condition on the damage increase, or like Spiteful Talisman open it up to all damage dealt while that condition is fulfilled. If the second is done, I think this trait is probably fine as is, with maybe a small extra effect tagged on, and if the first option is taken then like the other weapon traits it needs an additional effect, preferably something that is in line with Spite’s increasing of damage dealt.

Grandmasters
Similar situation to above, two great traits and one that isn’t really worth taking. Spiteful Spirit is of course the odd man out, since it doesn’t particularly do much to warrant its use over the other two. Signets of Suffering is the obvious choice for builds utilizing signets, and Close to Death has great damage increase that any build can use. Spiteful Spirit just needs something unique, a common suggestion is adding a blast, but the first thing to do is remove the ICD like we learned with Weakening Shroud. Other suggestions would be granting an effect more similar to GW1’s Spiteful Spirit, instead of just granting retal grant something similar to Glyph of Unity for a few seconds after Shroud entry, to further its niche as something to use to punish enemies when they hit you, and differentiate it from the other choices.

Overall though I’d just like to point out that Spite is an amazing line overall, with only 2 of 12 traits really worth mentioning in a bad light. If all our lines were this well done we’d have to really reach to find things to reasonably complain about.

Now that you’ve braved this wall of text, what do you think? Agree or disagree? Please leave your feedback, especially for possible changes to the traits I mentioned, though I think as a community this is probably one of the least controversial specializations.

The Necromancer subforum has long been one of the most helpful, constructive, and non-toxic subforums there is. There are constant posts on changes that could be made to help the profession, people are always happy to help each other, and we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that Necromancer is god tier when it isn’t. We’ve managed to figure out bugs months before ANet has, we’ve tested interactions that ANet still doesn’t appear to know about, and all in all we get along well as a community.

So let’s not pretend like our extremely valid and warranted complaining is anything but our attempts to beg ANet to stop making bad changes. Let’s get one thing straight about this recent patch: the biggest thing that we have to praise anet for is fixing SIXTEEN bugs that have, to our best knowledge, existed at least for 4 months or so. People have made posts about how hilarious downed state is now, we’ve talked about the good and bad of the blink and stability changes, we’ve praised ANet where they deserve it but we’re not going to sit around acting like they are faultless.

The fact is the Necromancer community is one of the most realistic communities. Any time you see us suggest buffs there is always consideration of compensation to make sure they aren’t too strong. Any time we get buffed or nerfed you have people analyzing it and making helpful suggestions when needed. We’re pretty fair, although definitely a bit cynical (for kitten good reason).

But we’re not going to collectively shove our heads up our kitten and pretend like every change is some holy blessing from our saviors above.

Gryph.8237:

So tired of everyone trying to sugar coat the problems by saying, we are so good in x, when x is like 20% of the game

To be fair, we’re really good in downedstate, and when playing a Necro being downed is probably more than 20% of your time.

Lily.1935:

That doesn’t even come close to fixing all our problems.

+1

The reality is Necromancer cannot be fixed within the scope of their normal patches. We require far too much, including things like brand new skills/weapons, and large-ish scale reworks of core mechanics (adding healing in DS). Realistically I’m not expecting anything until we get that mystical expansion that’s coming soon™.

As far as every necro is concerned, this trait still doesn’t exist.

Oslaf Beinir.5842:

Yes. Or you could use a ranged LB for an opener.

Because the ele is just going to stare at the 1s cast time and go HEY GUYS WHAT IS THAT BIG BLACK BALL COMING AT ME OHMYGOD I’M HURT.

yep, that’ll get them for sure.

Just look at the full leak, every single class gets a huge list of changes, there are 460 ish lines of changes in the leaked notes. Assuming its true, everyone is getting changes.

I mean the good news is that now that staff is buffed I can go back to using staff after like a one and a half year of boycotting it. RIP Unholy Feast, I won’t really miss you because I’m probably going to use the trait to pick up the only useful Axe skill.