Guild Wars 2

Are you that guy from the CM run that told me to ease up on the “attitude” because I called out a few people? I wasnt complaining about damage as I solo’d 3 mobs whilst “the other 4 were slaughtered by 1 mob” I was complaining about the synergy :P especially when I am consistently last one alive who has to suicide so others can respawn.

but yea Reading is hard for quite a few people. 80 Only will consistently get lvl 30’s

reading = harder than any dungeon for some people.
what I normally do to “fight” against ppl that don’t read is that I write a lot of giberish at the start so in the LFG you can only see something like this: OMGWTFTROLLLEETIDGASWIASI. After that I write the real message. Normally ppl will read what’s inside and if they don’t I do another thing too, I write ""something"@join" so if they don’t say that “something” its a kick in 10 sec for not reading.

Reading is an exploit to some. Happens when you’re selling paths too.

Seriously though, don’t enter my party that specifically reads “Casual run, no skipping, all builds welcome” and expects everyone to just kill things faster, and berating every single party member that their build is not meta when not doing fast damage. I am not a speedrunner, and I make parties for people like me. And you expect not to get kicked?
(-_-) Why don’t you join a speedrun then?

Sorry for ranting… But seriously, some people just don’t read… I fully understand how speedrunners feel when someone joins their party with no zerk gear. Casual players and speedrunners need not play together. We have an LFG for that.

Necro dps is fine when your group supports you and fully buffs you. But ele is the top class for dps in that situation and can also help with the buffs. Also ele has certain op abilities like Fiery greatsword (FGS) and Icebow which do ridiculous amounts of burst. FGS can do potentially 150k damage in a few seconds.

But for the standard sustained DPS and ignoring burst. In a fully buffed group ele will do about 13k DPS and necro will do about 11k DPS. Most classes do around 11k DPS. Ele and thief are a fair bit ahead with 13k. You will pretty much never achieve these values though as they are unrealistic even in the most organised groups. But it gives you an idea of how the classes compare to each other.

Heres a video of my guild maximising eles burst. It is op FGS abuse but it took many days of attempts to get this kill. Anet have said its not an exploit, but they may nerf it sometime in the future if it gets out of hand. http://youtu.be/vdCWwcZDXrM

I also have some ele povs of full dungeon records on my channel (shameless self promotion). https://www.youtube.com/user/Spojo1/videos

Ele has a lot more options to survive but when going glass it is very unforgiving. Many attacks will near enough 1shot you if you miss time an evade, block or invuln. Necro has a lot easier time in this regard but also only has the base dodges + extra if you use energy sigils. This is enough for most situations but it can make some encounters difficult if you arent familiar with them.

Its a case of whether you want plenty of options and you trust your knowledge and ability to time things right (This may take practise and experience to get to this point with an ele). Or if you dont mind missing a dodge or two and still living because of your larger hp pool and DS. Basically you are sacrificing damage and utility for passive defence on the necro. Whereas Ele sacrifices passive defence for superior damage, utility, buffing and active defence.

Utility and damage wise ele is far superior to necro in every way. But it is harder to play well.

I would say that Necromancer is the easiest profession to bring to balanced. With the addition of 1-2 2h weapons, some QoL changes (like making Locust Swarm not hit the boxes on Khylo putting you in combat), and some better access to stability/non-damaging conditions through traits, you’d see a TON of viable Necromancer builds.

As it is right now, there are literally tons of builds that are just short of being viable, but are held back by just a change or two. (All the below are considering high tier play, anything is viable in low-mid tier games).
MM would be viable if Flesh Wurm was 1500-2000 range (far enough that you could go from mid to home before a decap occurs).
Zerker power would be viable if they gave us a ranged power weapon
Condi would be viable if they reverted some of the Dhuumfire nerfs, and gave reasonable (not 6 trait points) access to attrition mechanics
Any bunker build would be viable with the addition of a relevant bunker/support weapon (one for power one for condi)

That wouldn’t necessarily fix all the issues, but with fairly easy changes you’d have a ton of builds. So in a way, Necromancers have the ability to be very balanced very quickly. Its unlikely to happen soon though, since to fully fix a lot of issues requires ANet to actually understand the profession (they’ve shown they don’t, and don’t listen to people who do), and to make changes to make the class have actual synergy.

Ignore the posts of the one person trying to turn this thread into an actual interesting discussion on what a Necro can and cannot do in PvP? This isn’t a support group thread where Necros agree with one another about how much of a bummer their lives are in top-tier PvP, and I’m glad for that. Part of the reason there’s back-and-forth is because sorrow is actually arguing another side of the coin. You want that to get the most out of a discussion.

I’m not saying he is right or wrong, but he’s healthily adding depth and value to this conversation, and to try to completely disregard his posts by telling others to ignore him or by telling him to “just go play” is really damaging to the initial argument that Necros need help. Nothing undermines an argument/point more than when the people defending it are completely unwilling to consider the fact that they are wrong.

For someone who doesn’t really sPvP, it’s interesting to see both sides of the coin. As long as sorrow isn’t being condescending/insulting (I don’t think he has been so far), I think he should continue to argue his side if there is still an aspect of his side left to argue.

djooceboxblast.9876:

If they stay on a node? A thief is never a free kill in a team fight. A decent thief with initiative and shadowstep/refuge will almost always be able to get away. A necromancer on the other hand cannot just get away. Now necromancers are almost always the first to be targeted because they are a threat if left alone but more so because they are an easy target.

sorrow.2364:

Thieves survive only because of the mobility and some evades, if they stay on a node for more than 2 seconds, they die.

Getting away isn’t exactly staying on a node. And by staying on a node I mean contesting it. If you focus a thief, either he has a stunbreaker available or he’s dead if you manage to land a single CC on him.

Point is that Thieves can’t stay in teamfights at all, which is fine as they are designed to do so, but Necromancers can while also holding a quite good amount of focus.

Necromancer isn’t the only profession incapable to leave teamfights at will. Guardian, Warrior, Ranger and Engineer have all not the best of time while trying to leave teamfights.

Necromancer aren’t a that easy target. A necromancer with empty life force bar, plague on cooldown, spectral armor unslotted and no flesh wurm available is an easy target.

Forsaker.9213:

sorrow , plz go play necro , u camed here talking about smt u have no clue. Necro dont fit to the game , he is in worst situation ever , bad mobility , bad sustain ( DS its not sustain it will give u 2s more before u will die ) , dmg on necro is super low atm , ofc necro can kill guardians but what decent team will let guardian 1v1 necro? Thief will just jump in necro dead thats why u cant even go for 1v1 situations , necro just lack defensive mechanism.

And idk why u compare necro to war??!! Ofc war is superior , atm with streaght runes its way over the top , try to 1v1 good ele with 0/0/2/6/6 build , i just started to play staff ele , when i see necro its simple free kill for me.

Before u will say smt more , go play necro , go see how it is . And its not only like ppl focus necro becouse if they dont they will lose every fight , atm gaurdian + ele can completly counter necro condi , they focus him becouse its free 5pts.

Who talked about 1vs1 situations? As much as no competent team will let the guardian fight alone vs a necro, no competent team will send a Necro 1vs1 against a guardian.
In case you missed, nobody here even mentioned 1vs1 situations in which I’m well aware it is not optimal to send a Necro alone. And no, I don’t think people focus necro first because it is a freekill, thieves or mesmers are much more a freekill, but more likely because if you leave him untouched your team will melt one by one.

But yeah guys, go on with your madness and “you’re not a necro, go play it” and keep whining for buffs.
Maybe someday ANet will go crazy again and will wipe away any downside of Necromancers, so you guys can walk in SoloQ melting people with fearchains, spamming conditions like no tomorrow while having permavigor, mobility and HS-like sustain.
How crazy are you sorrow for pointing out that a profession like Necro is supposed to have some downsides and counters!
Better buff everything to the roof because warriors can get 25 stacks of might and eles can cleanse conditions instead of being a Necro pounchingball.

lol at Necro in the worse situation ever.

Kiriakulos.1690:

DeathShroud is not sustain. This is a huge misconception shared by the developers which resulted in the attrition class with worst sustain I’ve ever seen in any game. DeathShroud is at best mitigation, which doesn’t scale with the number of attackers and which you can be forced out of.

Combustive shot’s fire field negates most condition removal by reapplying the burn when it’s removed, that’s not something the Necro can replicate with his AoE conditions.
Fear can be negated by both condition immunity as well as stability, that makes me consider it less reliable than normal stuns, but you are correct about Necro’s having a range advantage for their CC.

Blocks and damage immunity is 1vX mitigation, protection, Spectral skills with ICDs and plague while they do mitigate damage, they scale horribly with the number of enemies. Spectral skills actually don’t scale at all because of their ICDs.

Necros can’t cleave, this is a fact. Stomping is a very important part of combat, it can rally allies and finally remove foes at the same time, a single stomp can swing team fights so having a class with reliable stomping is very attractive, so this is an important feature that Necros mostly miss out on, except for the DS FitG stomp.

I don’t think that Hambows need the boonstrip to deal with bunkers like a Necro does because their damage output is already high enough even while the enemy has defensive boons, the Necro’s isn’t.

My point is that anything that you state a Necro can do, a Hambow can to it more reliably, more easily and with more room for error, so why would you pick this profession if a single build can outperform almost everything it does?

Death Shroud is sustain.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve listed Healing Signet, Dogged March and Adrenal Health, which don’t scale with attackers too, right? So why are those sustain and Death Shroud isn’t? A percentage of LF gained is the equivalent of gaining a less valuable amount of HP.

I’ve already pointed out that Combustive Shot provides only burning, which is nowhere close to the amounts of conditions that Necros can apply AoE. Of course you can permanently mantain torment, poison, cripple, bleeds, chill and weakness on AoE permanently (CPC goes close to it, though), but you’re not supposed to do so, otherwise necros will turn in a mindless AoE spam machine, which is the kind of gameplay anyone hates here, right?

Stability can be corrupted… in fear. Also, all warrior’s CC are tied to a pretty clear animation. Doom is instant cast if I’m not wrong.

Are you trying to say that Necros are supposed to sustain team focus for an unlimited amount of time? Warriors have endure pain and blocks, true, but once their effect wears off, what do they have?

About cleave, I probably used the wrong term. With “cleave” I mean using AoE on the downed body, which is in many situations a way better tactic compared to stomping. There are professions that simply can’t be stomped reliably, that’s where you’d rather have a Necromancer with poison and AoEs rather than a warriors with stability ready.

Do you think that an hambow warrior can solo a boon bunker? Well, they can’t. Not even close if the enemy isn’t completely incompetent. Necromancer, on the other can, can easily do it.

An hambow can’t do what a necro can do better.
Where is the poison on hambow?
Where is the AoE condition pressure (other than on a single condi on bow) on hambow?
Where is a reliable ranged weapon like staff on hambow?
Where is an instant-cast CC like Doom on hambow?
Where is chill to shut down your enemies on hambow?
Where is the AoE weakness to mitigate the enemy damage output on hambow?
Seriously…

djooceboxblast.9876:

What game are you playing? :O

The same you do.

Kiriakulos.1690:

A Hambow warrior can bring better sustain, mobility, AoE condi pressure and CC.

What are you even thinking when you compare that to a Necro? Lucky epidemics? With the amount of nerfs the Necro received on his AoE bleeds, combustive shot alone deals much higher and sustained AoE condi damage than a Necro can output with bleeds.

The hambow mobility is rather bad.
The sustain has been nerfed and it is not as good as it used to be.
The condi pressure is carried only by the runes of strength 25 mightstacks madness.
Other than burning, there is nothing left as “condi pressure”: no poison, no AoE bleed, no AoE torment, no chill.
The CC is superior on Necromancer by far.

Still, an hambow warrior does not provide boon removal which is quite of an huge selling point for Necros.

I really don’t want Necros to be crazy OP. What you’re suggesting is giving Necromancer mobility, even more sustain and even more condi pressure? Pretty much you’re saying “let’s wipe away any downside of the profession so we can be good at everything”…
Then we’ll be back at june of last year.

djooceboxblast.9876:

The thing is – there are many other professions that are good at team fighting which also have good mobility for fast rotations. Warrior, ranger, ele are the most noteworthy of those. As a necromancer you are forced to run either speed/traveler runes or spectral walk/warhorn to have a decent uptime of swiftness/movement speed. Necromancers are great at team fighting but need other professions to protect them. When you meet a high mobility team that forces you to keep an eye out for every point on the map – you do not always have those other professions to protect you which means that you are easily kitten by faster rotating teams.

The last ESL 6v6 tournament is a pretty good example for showing how good necromancers are at team fighting with the right support. But conquest brings totally different scenarios and requires a good deal of mobility/sustain(staying power) for you and your team to be succesful. Necromancer by itself does not have that.

Necromancer is the only profession who is able to melt anyone he wants if played properly while dealing a decent amount of AoE condition pressure.
No other profession has this teamfighting capabilities, that’s why it should carry also an opportunity cost with it.

If Necromancer also had good mobility and even higher sustain, then they would be a must-go in any team and will eventually outshine any other profession at it. There aren’t that many profession who can solo a bunker easily, if I’m not wrong.
So why would you bring a Warrior or an Ele when you can bring a Necro which provides better staying power, better CCs and outputs higher pressure?

What I tried to say before is that if you are running a Necromancer and get outrotated by an high-mobility team comp it is probably because you’re playing their game.
The point of high-mobility team comps is to split fights on three nodes and win on small scale combats, so if you’re playing for three points you are obviously going to be out-rotated because you’re adopting a playstyle which isn’t suited to the build you’re running.

Also, Necromancer has an huge deal of sustain. Of course they can’t survive to team focus from extensive amount of time, nor they can disengage the fight (this is an issue of other professions too), but they are tanky enough to eat a good amount of damage. Death Shroud, after the double damage bug has been fixed, provides an huge amount of tankyness to Necromancers and Plague has always been extremely good for holding points against multiple people and to force enemy players out of it.

How the game is all about mobility and rotation, seriously?
You guys seem to play a whole different game.

Rotations is just as important as teamfight capabilities and Necromancers are great at that.

“OP” isn’t a word, it is an acronym for two words “Over Powered.” It is also used as an acronym for the two words “Original Poster.” So my input is that this thread is invalid as there is no word OP.

I know, that is such a troll answer and for that I apologize, just couldn’t resist.

Possible Solution:

Have a “visibility cone” stretch out for about 200-300 inches in front of the player. If a stealthed player walks through this cone, you can see their distorted stealth image that the player sees, but still untargetable.

Also, maybe if a stealthed player attempts an attack you can see them attemping the attack for a split second.

If stealth was as bad as you make it sound with threads like this, and if the stealth classes were much better balanced in other MMOs, then you should be playing the other MMOs. If WoW is so much better then why don’t you play that game instead? Nobody is forcing you to play this game, and you can’t be bothered to learn how to play against stealth, so your best option would probably be to quit GW2 and play WoW I think. Good luck with the pandas!

Yeah this game needs to be like WoW. That would solve this problem! GW2 needs to be less like an individual game with its own set of mechanics we need to learn, and more like a game with pandas in it!

remove target while stealthes but once they appear give us our target back…

in a group setting tab target doesn’t cut it you will always attack something else and thieves and mesmers have quite frequent access to stealth so as soon as you click them they are gone again

Mattmatt.4962:

Stacking immo in duration was the WORST update done to the game. 10+sec immo = insta death cause its the last condition in the priority order (or not so far) while beiing the stronghest.

Enabling dodge while immo, could be a solution. But as you said, they should first debug it. How many time did i get immo at the end of a dodge … and how many time despite beeing spamming my heal, it doesnt want to work just because i was rooted …

^ This.

Duration stacks on Immobilise are way overpowered. It essentially means guaranteed death in WvW and its a pain for all classes (except maybe warriors).

NO ONE likes it. Brief 1-2 second immobilise is fine, 5-10 seconds is insane.

NeXeD.3042:

What the kitten happened to surviving for 20 seconds… 1v3 now you say if one of us is a mesmer its over?

I can 3v1 for hours, but only if two of you don’t attack me at all

Bhawb.7408:

During DS your utilities are technically unequipped (like a transform, just thankfully minions don’t die).

Shhhhh….they might decide to fix that feature.

Weirwood.5792:

Does this mean that from now on if I want to change the look of my gear I’ll need the transmog stones? that the skins were a one time only use on gear for free?

Exactly this.

You’ve unlocked that skin, but if want it on another armor set you’ll aways need transmutation charges.

Since is pretty easy attain lv80, I recommend to you only equip your visual when you reach at your lv 80 armor.

One think I’m most impressed with regarding Guild Wars 2 is the fact that the developers didn’t feel the need to slap breasts on the females of every race. Unlike WoW (which makes every beast race so dimorphic that the women all look like humans) and SWTOR (which won’t make any beast race at all since apparently no one would play them) Guild Wars 2 seems to understand that people want a variety of characters to play.

To that end, I hope not to see any elf-like races. We already have one – the Sylvari – who are elves with a very beautiful twist. I also don’t want to see any humans with monster parts thrown on (like cat people.)

It would be cool if, since Zhaitan is defeated in the personal story, some Risen were able to develop sentience and became playable. Kind of like the black mages in FFIX, who were constructs without a soul, until something happened to make them self-aware. I don’t think this can happen, but it’s an idea.

The Tengu have a lot of room for customization. As much as it would be fun to see the Kodan as a playable race, they all kind of look exactly the same, and wouldn’t work for a game that prided itself on pretty extensive customization options. Perhaps, with some sort of effect of the elder dragons, the Kodan could develop other fur patterns other than ‘polar bear.’ That would have to play out in lore, though.

I also have a soft spot for Skritt, but, unfortunately, as soon as a skritt leaves its colony, it becomes a whole lot stupider. Group intelligence, woo!

Ren.5842:

I’m not a lore buff so forgive any ignorance here but:
Cat people (ala FFXIV)?
Something like the Castanic or Aman from Tera would be very cool!

We have cat people. While developing the charr, (especially the females), the devs decidedly went as far as they could from the stereotypical human who just happens to have cat ears and tail.

The races in Guild Wars use archetypes, but avoid stereotypes.

Really it’s ok for a few situations but it’s just to situational for what it’s worth… The cooldown needs to be cut in 1/2 for it to really be effective… Once every 45-60 sec would have been best.

I’ve found this to work in some cases in pvp though but most of the time it falls flat due to most people having 2 or 3 cc abilitys + 1 removal to negate the fear…. While it serves it’s purpose the cooldown is just to long to justify using it over something else.

I usually don’t chain fear people because it just takes one stun break to have wasted all your cooldowns… But I did it to a diamond skin ele recently. That was a good feeling because he was after me quite a bit, and he melted once he got under that 90% threshold. Was a nice moment. For me.

The saddest part to me is that MM already has like 90% of the things we need (although its still unviable because mobility>everything), but they refuse to adapt the ideas that make MM work (decent HP sustain, high CC, high uptime of debilitating conditions) as an attrition build. Instead, we got pushed further and further into dealing mass damage through spam and having none of the mechanics we’re supposed to.

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?

I think open world duels are crucial, especially for teaching people how to pvp. You should be able to learn and practice your skills for pvp one at a time, just like you do in PvE leveling.

Instead we are given a full lvl 80 for sPvP with full skills and traits unlocked. My first impression of sPvP was that it was overwhelming. I had no knowledge of the significance of my trait point allocation, as i had no idea how i was expected to play my character. Luckily, i enjoyed PvE enough that i stuck with it, which carried me later in life to WvW.

Tl;Dr – if you wanna PvE, the game slowly teaches you everything and introduces you to your skills/character. If you wanna PvP, you are thrown in the deep end with the expectation that you already know how to swim.

Open world Duels would provide that intermediary/training for those interested in PvP without being overwhelming.