1) Whose pet is better is debatable, it just depends on what your intent is
2) The fears don’t even begin to compare. Thieves get a single fear, only against necromancers, on a 45 second CD; warriors get a single fear on an eighty second CD that only lasts longer than ours if you are close enough; every Necromancer gets a fear on a 20 second CD, staff gives us an AoE fear on a 40s CD, we can also get 2 fears from flipping boons, one from being stunned, and one from being downed, can be traited to do huge damage per tick, and can be traited to have double duration. It is incomparable what we can do with fears and what they can.
3) Epidemic. A single epidemic totally and completely outclasses everyone else’s condition application.
At the very, very least signet passives should persist while in DS, even if they don’t add utilities (though I think they should).
The best news about this is it is officially recognized as the way it is meant to work, rather than being a potential bug to be fixed.
More high quality “balance” from ANet. Greatsword is as slow as Guardian Hammer with a fraction of the damage, they loaded ICDs onto anything that might have been useful, Rise! is still garbage, good stuff all around, nothing new to see here just Necro as usual.
This severely limits the class, it’s potential builds, potential roles, and, as a consequence, makes the class a shallow one to play.
You couldn’t pay me enough gold to roam as a Necro instead of my Thief.
Creating more viable choices creates depth in a competitive game – something I am beginning to suspect Anet are not moving towards.
Every single class has its own unique way to accomplish things. Staying in the fight and gaining power as we debilitate our enemies is our unique way to accomplish things. If you are not okay with the idea of being a high sustain, stay in the fight class, then this will not be the class for you. And yes, you should roam on your thief, it is literally built around the core mechanics of roaming.
Its a pathing issue. The longer he’s out technically the more likely he is to stop attacking. It tends to fix itself over time and can be worked around in any important content.
Of course, which is why they need ICDs on those skills; aka limiters. If there is a 1s ICD on Vampiric, for example, then instead of worrying “what if it hits 10x a second” you can know exactly what the upper limit is, and control it very easily.
How would you permanently stay in death shroud? Out side of death shroud you can’t use life stealing to out heal damage, so how would that change in Death shroud? And I completely disagree. Life force Defensively is worth .75 HP to every 1 HP
DS has more ways to gain LF than just siphons. You’ve got your 4 skill to gain quite a lot back + proc siphoning up to 90 times total (2 per tick, 5 people per tick, 9 ticks) plus its own LF gain, reaper’s precision, minion siphoning, and then DS 1 spam for up to 6 procs of siphons per shot. Will it hold up under focus fire? No, but it wouldn’t be crazy for you to sit in DS for a very, very long time.
Also its not an opinion, its fact. DS is 60% of your HP, but you take half damage (this has been shown many times over the last year). So if you have a siphon that heals you for 50 normally, if it adds 50 LF then you are actually gaining twice that, effectively, plus potentially some slightly higher mitigation with the +170 armor while in DS you can get.
Honestly, I don’t think its the best fix short term either. It’d be much easier if they just plopped vigor on us in a 5 point trait (reanimator be gone!), and then removed it when they finally fixed this issue, and it would be healthier for the game in the long run.
Reaper is in a really good place right now. In raids, people will finally actually want a necro on their team as well.
There is absolutely nothing to suggest this is true so far.
Neither of those things from Guardian were designed. Just because a profession is currently deficient in an area does not mean that is its design, only that it lacks those things currently. An example for Necromancer is that just because most of our builds lack attrition and favor burst doesn’t mean the Necromancer design and theme is burst with bad sustain.
Guardian is still true to its design, it overall lacks condition output, it is still mostly immobile (the new leap isn’t exactly tons of mobility with a massive CD), and range was never a designed issue. And they get bleeds from one source, while they can stack in very specific situations Guardians still have pretty bad actual bleed stacking, they just have decent burst on immobile targets, with a huge CD.
So no, Necromancer isn’t going to suddenly go directly against the entire design. We could get support, we could get tankiness, there are a lot of things we could get that we currently lack, but lots of flat mobility and stealth is not something we’ll ever get.
I suggested this in another thread. Add a trait to apply torment with dagger skills.
Quickening Thirst: +25% movement speed while wielding a dagger and all dagger skills apply 1 torment for 5s.
Move it to Curses to replace Chilling Darkness, and add a brand new Blood Magic trait to replace it.
This makes no sense, dagger isn’t a condi weapon, why make it hybrid for no reason.
So, as it is Unholy Martyr removes 1 condition from an ally every 3 seconds while in DS, starting 3 seconds after entering DS, and then gives you 5% LF. As it is now I think this trait underperforms, partly because of its return is very low, and partly because it starts too late.
So I want to propose a slight change in functionality:
Every 3 seconds (procs on entry and then every 3s after) in Deathshroud, transfer a condition from an ally to yourself AND in an AoE around you to all nearby enemies (same radius as Epidemic, with a similar visual effect, but just one that radiates out from you instead of comes down and then radiates out), and lose some LF.
Thoughts?
How to make Necromancer relevant:
- Remove internal cooldown on “Barbed Precision”
- Shorten cooldowns on most Utility skills
- Increase damage on most weapon skills.
- Allow use of utilities while in Deathshroud. (Think of it as an Engineer kit)
- Give Spectral Armor Stability for 10 seconds.
- Give “Blood is Power” fury and swiftness for 10 seconds.
- Buff Corrosive Poison cloud to do pulsing physical damage as well.
- Give might, fury, and regen for every sacrificed minion.
Boom, Necromancer is now on par with all other classes.
Would you like a side of tactical nuke with your order?
Why would you put a bleed on a weapon set that has absolutely no innate condition damage. Axe stacking vuln on AA is absolutely fine.
Not really. 5 blasts requiring 5 targets. In most situations you wont get that. And well on a lot of fields its not that strong. And in other cases the number of blasts is already completely covered by teammates. So no i dont think its broken.
You’d have up to 25 blasts across your skills, many of them on lower CDs than single blast finishers in those situations, it is absolutely 100% undeniably broken, and the only way it wouldn’t be is if they completely gutted the shouts.
There are plenty of things in the game already that could easily be considered insanely broken. And they are certainly more powerful than a situational 5 blast skill on a class which has a lack of fields. Icebow, lightning storm, meteor shower are some good examples. Then theres phalanx strength trait. The sheer number of blasts ele has on its weapons. Timewarp now that it has slow. Ring of Earth for projectile defence. Mimic… You get the idea.
1. Those are only broken in PvE, your suggestion would be broken in everything
2. You don’t balance a game by making everything awfully designed/balanced, your suggestion would just be Dumbfire 2.0 and would end with shouts being worthless.
No offense to ANet, but they aren’t known for being good players. I’ve seen their PvP streams more than enough to know I wouldn’t trust them when it comes to high level gameplay. Necromancer would need some insane buffs to be worth bringing over Ele.
Only 3 minions would need anything flying, since Shadow/Blood Fiend both float and Flesh Wurm can’t move. And for those 3 it would make the most sense if they grew wings, but frankly they magically teleport all the time anyway, so unless we had mid-air combat its nbd.
Interaction isn’t simply “attacking” the person. To go to League of Legends (because its always easy to draw examples there), they recently nerfed the 9 HP pot start that almost everyone had been using, because you essentially had 900 extra HP in lane. What it was effectively doing was completely removing the actual interaction of laning opponents during laning phase. That isn’t to say they were never attacking each other, but that the massive sustain brought by one side demanded that it be brought on the other side, and there was almost no point in recognizing that you had an actual enemy in lane because you would never do anything to them.
Drawing from above, interaction isn’t just attacking someone, it is meaningful play/counterplay that adds fun to the game. Just because a Necromancer is in the middle of 5 enemies to maximize their attrition, does not mean that there is meaningful counterplay to it. The old Retal/DS tanks in beta are an example of this. There was no meaningful counterplay to them, attacking them caused you to die off to retaliation before you could drain their defenses and killed them, there was no way to stop them from sustaining themselves, and if you didn’t kill them they could sit on point all game with impunity.
Not saying that is the case now, but that is an example of aggression (Necromancers were completely in their face on the point, disrupting the teamfight and getting damage out by way of retal procs) but no meaningful interaction going on.
Stop saying this. i dont want THEM to notice that and stealthnerf dagger#4 to kitten aswell.
Let’s be honest here. What actually happened was they somehow royally screwed up while trying to sneak in a small nerf, bugging Putrid Mark, and have absolutely no idea how to fix it.
Dagger AA is one of the highest DPS skills in the game. Don’t just pay attention to the numbers, but also how long they take.
Actually doing some testing on their aggro, I’m fairly certain I’ve got an idea on how to “brute force” their AI into working again even after clearly bugging it out.
They made the attack time longer, gave the axe an animation that doesn’t match the hit effect at all, the animation was rushed out in an unfinished state and still hasn’t been fixed to show the focus after almost a week. IDK, not showing a lot of love there.
Making a bad change due to incompetence or ignorance (and I really can’t attribute this to anything other than one or both of those) is not the same as a purposeful change out of spite. The idea that ANet would actually hate something they spent and still spend hundreds of hours working on is just stupid. They were trying to fix an unintended interaction, had the right idea on how to fix it, but screwed up. This is proof of a lot of things for ANet, like bad QA, poorly thought out changes, and lack of transparency for what should have gone by the community first, but not proof that they hate us.
I don’t lose very much damage when switching to a staff from dagger/focus.
That’s just factually inaccurate. Staff’s AA is 58% of the damage of Axe’s, and that’s assuming it even hits, and its a slow projectile vs nonprojectile. Marks hit for 0.3/0.5/1.2/0.25 coefficients, which is again, pathetic damage. Every single mark added together does less direct damage than a single Axe 2, or a single Dagger AA chain – 2.55 vs 2.88/2.8. So you absolutely lose damage, its not debatable.
Also, staff doesn’t keep people in wells. It has a single soft CC to keep people in place, in the form of chill. One dodge and they’re out; or if you fear them they’ll leave on their own.
Well i use staff in both power and condi builds (acutally i run staff in all my builds…), but you are right giving the marks additional utility instead of damage would be better. I only wanted to start a discussion about that trait.
Discussion: what to do with it.
Answer: get rid of it, either by merging it or axing it completely.
Done :P
The flesh golem is rather pitiful
I have to say, I love every minion design except Flesh Golem and Bone Fiend. The rest are appropriately disgusting, for creatures made of assorted accessible deceased organic material, and imo look the part quite well. Not to say that everyone loves them, or that I wouldn’t like new skins for them, but I am happy with them.
However, Bone Fiend just looks so meh compared to the other minions in my mind. He isn’t bad, I’m just not like “that’s pretty sweet”, like I am for the rest. Flesh Golem is just… sad. In his own right, he’s okay, he certainly looks menacing, but I remember GW1 Flesh Golem like you, and holy crap did he look monstrous.
Maybe we can ask a high level pvp-er to ask for changes.. oh wait..
They shut down the high level PvP program because after about the billionth time they were told a change was an awful idea (cough Dumbfire cough) they realized they should just fix the problems. By removing the feedback obviously.
They’re wrong. MM builds do need a bit of help, but they are pretty good right now, flat buffs to anything but a bit of AoE resistance would be over the top.
*AFK players resulting in 4v5 or worse
*disparaging comments among teammates
*insults and arguments between opposing team players
*players who give up and stop playing as soon as they’re losing by a decent amount, 50-100 points
*a loss is always everyone else’s faultSure, some of these aspects can be annoying, and when multiple games in succession contain these elements then it can certainly hurt the experience. But these seem to me to be minor flaws that will be inherent in the system no matter how PvP is actually structured.
So, aside from the possibly inherent toxic elements and bad eggs of the PvP community as a whole, why do some people think the actual system is “poorly designed?”
Thanks in advance for any input!
Basically, those are expected in any game. But well designed games actually fight them, GW2 seemingly does not.
Let’s go over to League of Legends, which I believe is the most popular game to ever exist depending on how you look at the numbers, and how they deal with these issues:
*4v5: the game will not start without a 5v5. This is done when a match is found, by making all players re-accept their involvement in the upcoming game, then by having another check during champion select. Players who simply do not accept a game have no punishment, but players who “dodge” games they have accepted get increasingly worse punishments to prevent consistent queue dodging.
*toxic chat: simple, the game records every single word that is said between teammates, and then at the end of the game you report them. If a player receives enough reports they get some kind of a ban, a system that they have shown to actually be incredibly effective, with something like 75% of players never getting a repeat ban, and those who do receive more significant punishment until it is obvious they will not reform, and are permanently banned
*giving up: again, a report system that will track negative behaviors like this and eventually punish you for it
*difficulty in communication: League has instituted a smart-ping system, a step above their normal ping system, which allows you to communicate extremely well what needs to happen. In fact it isn’t unreasonable to go entire games in League at a high level without saying another word to your allies because it is unnecessary, everything can be communicated quickly.
*leaderboards: lets face it, GW2’s leaderboards are awful. League has a great ranked system, you get placed based on your first 10 games and your past rating, up to a maximum of Platinum 1, at which point you then have to climb the rankings. There are checks in place to make sure you don’t jump very far per game played, but also systems so that if you are obviously better than your ranking you can jump a little. And the highest, most prestigious ranks on the leaderboard are simply unattainable without at least 100+ games played.
GW2 on the other hand doesn’t seem to respond to reports very well, as high level players who are known to be toxic simply go on being toxic. The queue system in GW2 is also sub par, with no real punishment for leaving/afking, and also no way to avoid a match before it starts when it is obvious you cannot complete it or the team environment isn’t good. And finally GW2 not only has an awful ping system, it also refuses to allow you to use simple chat macros to make the communication that is necessary to play the game possible. This is why you end up having people like “Guardian Cruuk” as Blu’s stream was affectionately called them, who literally just do one thing all game every game (in this case rush far every single time they were alive) because doing anything that requires coordination is impossible.
TL;DR all games have the same innate problems or similar ones to GW2. Great games however actively make changes to alleviate these issues, whereas GW2 doesn’t appear to have done this.
Thieves, to my knowledge (and I’m not an amazing thief mind you), need some help sticking to targets in certain builds without being forced to use their escape mechanics (shadowsteps) to do it. Mesmers, idk, maybe in some of their less used builds.
Edit: also, this will be interesting due to the forced movement we can cause with fear. You can Torment someone, then chain fear them and they are forced to eat the damage. MWAHAHA… but yeah, this will be interesting for sure.
1 useless minion, ah ah ah!
2 useless minions, ah ah ah!
Hes agreeing with my solution. Which basically means it cannot proc more than 5 times within a second. So it has an ICD of 5 procs per second. Kind of like how Chilling Nova is limited. Only instead of 3 procs every 10 seconds. Its 5 procs every 1 second.
I think this would be a reasonable change.
They aren’t pets, stop using that word. You can swap targets, they will abandon combat when you have run a fair distance away (about 2000 I think). Why don’t we have control? Because they are NOT PETS. That point cannot be stressed enough. In GW1 they were called servants, now they are called minions. If you are looking for controllable creatures you want to play ranger, or you want a different game.
Survivability is not fine, in fact it is the single problem that keeps them from being more widely used.
They often are attacking your target before your first skill even lands, and are plenty fun for people who aren’t biased against them for older (though valid at the time) reasons. They are viable in certain situations like, you know, every build in the game.
2k over ten seconds is laughable. Learn about some condition builds.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQJArImgYokC0clRHAWAA-TJRAwAAOBAKeAAM3focZAA
You were saying? No one even runs that build, but that is a very high condition damage and its only 2k for an auto attack over 10 seconds.
The fix was a nice one. I still agree it has absolutely no need for an ICD though, if Necromancers want to be an idiot and double dodge just for bleeds then who cares.
For the condition damage, you need to remember that we only have access to 3 damaging conditions (fear, bleed, poison) without the help of another class.
PvE/PvP linking is necessary, and I think ANet finally is realizing it. They need to stop making such a big divide between the two game modes, and make it so people want to play every part of the game, not just one.
Why are we still fighting about 1vX?
1 from each enemy hit
Internal CD came along a massive buff to allowing them to work in DS and a pretty large increase in SA LF gain per hit. Not that ICD is the greatest, but it came hand in hand with the strongest buff SA’s ever seen.
They don’t need to bother with all that. The game is combat-based, so base balancing on the combat interactions themselves. Team deathmatch would really be the only thing required for balancing. Once you can balance how two teams fight against each other, everything else would fall into place.
The lack of an objective makes a massive difference, and the nature of the objective if you have one matters a lot as well. Objectives will always matter and influence the nature of combat, you cannot just separate them.
Also, ANet has said dozens of times that they are making a new mode, I’m not sure why people appear to be unable to comprehend that when its sitting on the forums with a bright red mark next to it.
Best weapons depend on situation. PvE just go highest DPS build you can manage, PvP Dagger/WH is undeniably the best set, imo followed by Axe/Dagger (debuffs enemy). Staff works but it really doesn’t do much of anything for the minions except regen, which you can get through well aimed dodges anyway.
I think when you boost your two strongest classes, Warrior and Necro, and don’t do much for the others, even apply nerfs, you haven’t helped the game at all.
1. No class is strong, builds are strong. I could make a god-awful Necro build that would make ele’s look like gods.
2. Its the 30/20/0/0/20 Dhuumfire build that is so strong, which received not a kitten thing. The necro buffs were to PvE/WvW minions, and then to Blood magic, and neither one of those are going to buff Necro meta builds.
Spite doesn’t have too much. Neither does SR. The other traitlines just need to be brought up to par.
This absolutely. While I do think Spite and SR should maybe have some mechanics shifted around to make it so we don’t have so many traits and mechanics that conflict (like superspeed on speed of shadows, or some damage modifiers instead of vuln/might), they should be the strength standard everything else needs to be brought up to.
All the other transformations are pretty gender neutral (Tornadoes don’t have genders afaik) or actually affect your own character model (Rampage). Lich is the unique one that makes you look specifically like a male entity.
It is possible though, as Riot said, that we are taking the appearance of something specific, and as such it doesn’t matter what gender or race we are, we all take the same appearance. I have a feeling though really this whole debate is just pulling stuff from our kitten to give ANet an excuse :P I’m not actually sure they put this much thought into it.
Some moron probably thought that un-nerfing Plague meant they should nerf this. Honestly can’t justify this with any remote kind of logic, its like trying to understand someone who enjoys smashing their face against a wall.
It is awesome, yes, and if it didn’t have the problem of directly countering our other defensive mechanics, like healing, I’d say it is easily the best profession mechanic in the game (frankly I still think it is).
If you think Necromancers are supposed to be some wussy cloth caster profession, then I think we’ve solved the problem right there.