Guild Wars 2

Add me to the list of the skeptical. If you take 9000 damage from a Lifeblast while running 2000 toughness then a glass cannon thief would instagib you back into WvW queue with Backstab.

as a powermancer that finds the thought of condi to be lame

I would like to see a cleave on Dagger
Do something with our casting animations so slow
For the love of god please do something with the Golem dying in water
Fix obstructs on spectral grasp
I don’t know if it me or not but Corrupt boon for some reason makes me sad
It would be cool if DS auto removed condi’s
Fix obstruct on DS 3 or 2 I forget which off the top of my head
Remove Sig of Spite
Give my access to more reliable Fury or might or Stab

They won’t do this because then Dredge and Grawl will never be played.

/signed

It’s the obvious way round to do it.

wads.5730:

fractal weapons have NEVER been ascended

Thanks, I think everyone knew that. He was asking why they didn’t make fractal weapons ascended with this update.

They aren’t weapons.
They are skins.

After some more thought, what I’d like to see is a PvE wardrobe that works as follows:

1. Skins which are earned via AP’s or the completion of meta achievements go into one tab. These skins can be withdrawn from the wardrobe as many times as you want for free, similar to the way Zenith skins work now. (For convenience, put the HoM reward skins in here too.)

2. All other PvE skins must be unlocked by putting an existing copy of it into the PvE wardrobe. Both weapons and armors can be unlocked in the wardrobe this way. Once unlocked, you can generate additional one-time use copies of the skin by paying either Transmutation Stones (creates a version that works for any item up to level 79), or Transmutation Crystals (can be used for all levels). These skin copies are account bound, so they can’t be sold.

This allows players to gradually build up a wardrobe of skins they like to use, and don’t have to waste inventory/bank space holding multiple sets of armor or weapons. At the same time, ANet also gets to keep its lucrative transmutation market, since you still need Stones/Crystals to generate additional skin copies.

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.

Unwanted, proc based skill which ended up by nerfing nearly everything about necro (survival, sustain, damage etc).

+1: Hating it because devs refuse to remove it from the game.

Yeah, I have no friends amongst NPCs.

When you reach the top of the tower, the corpses of your guildies should be hanging from the walls. Checking the roster shows all their locations as ‘Tower of Nightmares.’ I’d be freaking out, maaannnnnn.

Not all things make it to the release notes.

Here are the undocumented changes for this update ones found so far, noted by wiki collaborators:

• Added “Show Rarity” option to the Inventory window which shows a border around the item based upon it’s rarity. (Activate it in the gear icon in the inventory where show/hide bags is, also works for bank icons)
• Essence of Luck now plays a tone and displays a numerical amount (eg: 100 Luck) over your character when consumed.
• When your account Magic Find goes up a percent, a notification appears over your minimap saying, “+#% Magic Find”.
• The 6/6 bonus on Runes of Perplexity now have a 8 second cooldown.

Remember, kids: Always check the wiki update notes !

I have to agree that a necro is the easiest target for my necro. It all depends on the players of course but one thing is sure, a necro cannot get away from me and I cannot get away from him/her. In the end one of us will die, and I cannot say the same for any other class.
All other classes can reset the fight and run like hell from me and while I could kill them, they are gone so no kill for me.

Done it alone as a ranger, elementalist and engineer.

Part of the problem is indeed the scaling – a large party moving through an event not bothering to kill will leave behind upscaled mobs that are quite a bit harder to get past.

Another factor is other people clearing mobs, particularly around air purifiers. It’s significantly easier for me to traverse it solo if other people have already cleared.

If you’re having trouble I highly suggest you find a party, or guest to a realm that hasn’t had a huge upscaled event spawn everything.

Fortunately, Floor 3 probably has the easiest progress block event, provided there aren’t a ton of corpses nearby, or people leaving for whatever reason upscaling it.

I leisurely made my way up the tower after having collected several key sets over the last day or two for the tri-color chest, smelling the roses, chatting with the local residents, and enjoying the sights, etc.

As I capped the top, I decided to spend my keys to try and get that Mini Toxic Hybrid that has been alluding me thusfar. Having scanned the summary sides of the UI for the Mini after opening, and not finding it much to my disappointment, I then opened my inventory to open the various seed packs that I got. I double clicked on a few, half paying attention, when I doubled clicked on one that asked how I wanted to apply the skin (either normal or for PvP). What the heck? A skin? This thing came from the chest, but what is it?! Looks like a seed spore.

It actually turns out to be a Toxic Seed back item! I had no idea they even put that in there. What a pleasant surprise, a hidden gem that wasn’t announced!

Anyways, thanks for reading this colorful …. indeed, TRI -colorful … post.

My personal opinion of Necromancer:

PvE: Condi builds face the same issue as all other classes do: slow build up. This means that it’s very weak on trash as it is slower than Power. Bosses then face the issue of shortened conditions, but I’m able to self-stack to 25 bleeds. Rabid gear + Earth + Torment sigils means that each scepter swing can potentially slap on 3 bleeds + torment + burning. Add in Torment ticks and some respectable vuln stacking, and you are likely the strongest DPS on the target. Of course this all goes down the toilet the second condition removal mechanics or more condition users come into play… which leads on to the other option of Power. Necro can do respectable damage through power – but you face the fact that unsupported you do about 50% of the damage of an Elementalist. Once that support comes in, you pass Warrior, but are still short of Ele. Unfortunately in any build, you are coming into the party as the least supportive class in the game (you’re best being traiting blinds to chill and working towards a perma-chill)… so why take someone that has to work for their DPS and doesn’t help the party vs someone that has easy-mode DPS and helps the party? Luckily, all told, it doesn’t matter – PvE is easy; knowing the mechanics of your target is 90% of the ability to beat them and you could complete any PvE content naked (discounting weapons ofc), no trait points spent, on any class if you felt like it.

PvP: Necros are solid here – the PvP scale is within your bound of abilities and support isn’t quite as important as you’re not fighting targets with millions of HP. Conditions are currently the strongest spec mainly due to Dhuumfire. Locust is also laughingly beautiful for point holding. Just face the fact that you’re going to be top target because you have so few survival skills (most of those being conditions that they can cleanse) – just an HP sponge that WILL die if they target you. Though at least in PvP you can actually use Worm/Walk as escapes due to the static fight locations if you’re willing to sacrifice your killing power for running away (and subsequently put yourself out of the fight for half the game and be useless to your team if you plan on only entering fights when those long cooldown skills are able to be set up).

WvW: Necros are absolutely beautiful in WvW zergs – Just run Wells and staff and tag to your heart’s content. In roam fights of 6 or less, you’re still pretty solid since as long as you’re not fighting anti-condition builds, Weakness + Blinds + Chills + DS should keep you going. I’ve even won a fair share of 1vX’s. Unfortunately you face a cold fact: Necro is the only class with no scalable survival skills – no blocks, evades, invulns, etc – and what came close (spectral and non-rolling DS damage) has been stripped away. Add in the lack of real escapes that work in a moving WvW situation, and you might as well lay down and die if a group looks at you and you’re in combat mode.

TL;DR – Are Necro’s unplayable? Absolutely not – they have great AoE in both Condition and Power respects, and that can be used anywhere. And while meta can show what class may have the edge over another, Necro is still within the skill > build range as all classes are. Play what you want and have fun – I for one have all 8 classes

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

Every time anything new has been released, I have always seen far more teams who don’t give a hoot what profession you are than ones what specify.

No classes will be “omitted”. The majority of teams won’t care. You always have those few who scream in all caps that they only want ZERKER WARS and everybody must be GEARCHECKED, but they really aren’t the majority. Not even close. PvE in this game is far, far more open than most.

This post somehow reminded me of back in the days of RuneScape, when everyone required end-game gear to get into a party for an end-game boss, but the end-game gear was dropped only by that boss.

There is a reason why I still play GW1.

More places to go and, now, no Scarlet stupidity.

Putting certain skins in the gem-store is perfectly understandable.

Putting ALL skins in the gem-store is just disgusting.

Achievement 1:
Diving goggles on the corner of the platform in front of the entrance to the boss chamber

Achievement 2:
After beating the hybrid boss, don’t leave the instance through the “door button” – go through a “back door” portal instead, it will take you to the outside of the tower. The other pair of diving goggles are at the end of a plank there.

An observation regarding the tower and complaints about its difficulty: people are still REALLY bad at the basics of the game and don’t seem to pay much attention to what’s going on around them. The tower is really good at exposing those two issues and punishing offenders accordingly.

I have run bottom to top numerous times in a desperate – and so far futile – bid to get the apparently mythical “green key” (notably even getting multiple keys on level two of only the blue and pink varieties…) and I’ve seen a couple of things over and over and over since the start of this event.

1. People pay no attention to the mines or the rings they create. Repeatedly I’ve seen groups run through the first and third floor mine fields with large numbers of individuals making absolutely no attempt to roll out of the blasts. I even see people who were downed by those blasts later run right next to mines and trigger them even when they could easily run wide around them

2. People repeatedly get hit with the warlock’s Life Blast volley because in Champ fights they just focus fire and ignore everything else. They stand there and watch it coming and don’t even blink, then wonder why they go down as if they just magically lost all their health with no warning

3. Not only do people frequently not bother to try and break cocoons, when cocooned themselves, they often just stand there waiting for others to break them out. Since the damage done by hitting 1 when cocooned is considerable, it makes it very difficult for everyone else to break people out if they don’t participate in the process themselves

4. People STILL, even after Southsun, pay absolutely no attention to stacking confuse and just continue to slap away at buttons even as they do thousands of points of damage to themselves in the process

5. People don’t understand how revives workittenep seeing people stopping an attack on an enemy with low HP that would rez a downed player on death to manually rez the person, even standing in AoE rings to do it so that they then go down as well. Obviously this is somewhat short-circuited by the annoying PvP-kill that was introduced for certain enemies, but many enemies in the tower don’t require that and killing them would still be a superior option to stopping an assault to rez a downed player

6. People will just mindlessly follow a blue hat no matter what even though that means nothing more than that they spent a hefty chunk of gold. On my last run we were running with a Commander who had absolutely NO idea where he was going and people kept following him anyway. I finally gave up and started running ahead to pop champ events so people would follow the map waypoints instead

I agree that there are some design issues with the tower. Notably the problem of having a large group that just runs through an area creating spawns they don’t kill that makes it extremely hard for a smaller group that follows behind to get through. However, it’s sort of hard for me to take complaints about difficulty seriously when I continually see a considerable chunk of the player base simply not exploiting basic controls available to them or applying a basic level of critical thought to their surroundings.

Part of what makes a game a game is that you are given a set of rules by which you operate in order to achieve some goal or best some opponent. If you’re not going to use those tools given to you, you can’t really complain that it’s too hard because you haven’t really tried to play it in the first place.

It’s less “end of the world necro’s suck” and more that we are not being given the opportunity to live up to the awesome potential this class possesses in conjunction with being constantly ping-ponged around. With that latter statement, I mean it both literally and thematically.

From the literal perspective, we have poor mobility and no block, evade, or invulnerability; so we get focused and CC-d to such an extent that we are ping-ponged around in fights.

Thematically, we’re ping-ponged around by the devs who don’t seem to have a clear vision of what they want the necro to be in this game outside of condimancer. It’s like the necro of GW2 is undergoing an identity crisis.

I play necro exclusively. I love the class. Sadly, I’m coming to the conclusion that I love the class more for what it was in GW1 and not for what it has become in GW2. A case of failed expectations, I guess.

Can necros be competitive and viable? Sure, if you don’t mind playing to a pretty high skill cap; being frustrated by unjustified, out-of-left field, “WhereTF did that come from?!?!” nerfs; buffs to things that didn’t need buffing; and suffering through a complete disconnect between what the class could be versus the direction it’s currently being taken. That’s a lot of hoops to jump through for so little reward.

Warrior, by contrast, will get you invited to all the cool parties and be rofltstomp easy by comparison. Your choice.

This is by far my favourite open world content and one of the more enjoyable placed in GW2 period. I’m fine with the tower leaving but I’d love for the tower climb platform to return in a more robust and permanent form in the future.

• While zerging was still the easiest method, I had many times where I would be split into either solo exploration or small group co-operation. This is why I play MMOs – to play with other people. Unlike champion zergs or Scarlet events I felt like combat was interesting in the tower beyond auto-attack.
• The champions used diverse combat mechanics. Rather than just being a giant damage sponge the champions in the tower felt like dungeon bosses. Attacks to dodge and learn, people to res and different tactics for them.
• It encouraged partying. Even if it wasn’t a formal party, progressing with a handful of people was very rewarding. I often found myself in a two man unofficial party until we resed someone or solo runners caught up to us. Often we ended up creating a small group of players working together. Rarely does open world PvE feel like this any more. I felt like a hero when I came along someone downed and resed them and together we worked together to get to the next floor.
• Exploring was fun. The environments aren’t as diverse as they could be, but climbing the platforms, finding your way through the maze, discovering chests and taking on the different bosses, all these things were fun. I’d love to see that expanded later on in another form. A tower climb open world dungeon has so much potential.
• Elite mobs are so much more fun than generic champions because defiant is bad. The removal of defiant but still having powerful enemies means that CC skills are useful. Watching for a powerful charge attack (like the double dagger stab from the krait) and pulling, pushing, stunning etc was a lot more interesting that DPS the HP sponge or wasting CC on a weak mob that you may as well kill instead of control.
• Scaling worked well. Small groups were capable of taking on a boss and as more people bottlenecked it usually got easier, but it wasn’t just annihilated. Small party gameplay felt more co-operative than dungeons.

I still have some issues with the content.

• Solo runners can ruin your day. If you have two people (or you are solo) taking on several mobs, you are forced to run if a solo runner with a massive aggro tail drags mobs onto you. Because the AI just switches target, runners will often ruin the experience for everyone else.
• It can suffer from population issues. It sucks to play in if you go for 20 minutes at a time without seeing an ally come through. As the content dies down, I can see this becoming more of a problem. I like accessible content and this can easily become inaccessible if not enough people are coming through.
• The rewards are lame. I spent a lot of time in there and I have almost no rewards to show from it. I feel like I am using similair effort and skill to dungeon runes and a lot more effort and skill than champion farms but I have very little to show for it. I think tuning it into a champion farm would ruin it (zerging is incredibly boring) but at the same time I think the rewards are poorly balanced for this content. Even the content specific rewards (the mini, the recipes, the back pack) all feel unatainable because of the intense grind or the incredibly low RNG. If I want any of these I’m better of farming dungeons or champions for gold than spending time in the tower.

I think this was the best open world content we’ve seen so far.

Every new condition cleanse option is a nerf for wvw necros, we have to learn to live with that.
Conditions can’t stay longer than 1-3s on enemy in wvw due to massive area cleanses. And we have to play as condition necro because it’s the only viable and ranged build for necros. But it’s constantly losing efficiency due to more cleanse options with every patch.(plus buffs to cleanses of other classes)
We have to stay ranged because of the lack of stability. We have only melee power weapons yet we don’t have the stability to get in melee range in wvw. We are golf balls to be played with hammers in zergs. These contradictions are just ridiculous. Necro needs power based ranged+aoe weapons and more stability asap to get rid of inefficient condition builds. They are only thinking about pve and spvp, yet there’s no class efficiency balance in wvw.

Anyone else irked by the fact that EVERYONE now has access to “Antitoxin Spray” which is tantamount to the Necro’s “Consume Conditions” (though Antitoxin Spray is an AoE & a FULL 1/4 of a Second FASTER!!!)? [I mean BONUS Healing for Each conditions removed??!! Really?!?!?]) Consume Conditions was our special heal – now its not special … and it has a Slower activation time. -_-

EVERYONE now gets a heal that reduces the effectiveness of Necro weapons, while Necros cannot even get DECENT STABILITY?? EVERY OTHER Job gets access to several seconds of stability, AND access to heal while stable. Necros don’t.

Just wondering if else thinks this is completely unfair?

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Necromancer

^This is a necromancer..

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Necromancer

^This is a very weak substitute.

short post, but a “feel” of the dark magic of the necromancer makes me love curses and self inflicting blood magic. GW1 is definitely my top 3 favourite necro. However GW2 has a childish, non (evil?) feel to it.

EDIT: 9/10.5 says one of my most badly worded post