Guild Wars 2

But a gazilion of people complaint about the stealth broken mechanic and the constant legally exploit of thief around, for like how much? 10 month?
And what is the anet response? Infractions.

I’ve been playing a necro in sPVP since launch, and also I use a necro as my main in WvW. The necromancer, for all their strengths, has quite a few weaknesses.

The biggest problem with necros, and condition necros in general, is that both their offense and their defense is ultimately not in their own hands. While other classes get vigor or endurance regen for dodges, barriers that stop or reflect projectiles, shields that block multiple attacks, or straight up invulnerability, necromancers don’t get any of that. Their form of defense is to use blinds, chill/cripple, weakness a couple of scattered stuns, and life force generation/Death Shroud. The big problem with all these defenses is that they are stopped by stability, can be cleansed away, or require the opponent to make mistakes. Because of this, Necromancers don’t have a truly innate form of defense that they can use, other than being a big bag of HP. We have to rely on AoEs and Marks to land hits because we lack the lockdown abilities and the speed to land hits otherwise.

Combine this with the lack of mobility and disengage/maintaining engagement, and we come to what is the true problem with the necromancer: Our survivability is not in our control. How well we do is highly dependent on our opponent, and if they are built correctly AKA have a lot of condition cleanse or if they make good calls, there isn’t much the necro can do to fight back. That is the most frustrating part of using the necromancer in WvW: When I turn a corner on the map, my fate is ultimately decided by what is around that corner, and not what I can do. If there’s 4 enemy players there, I can’t escape or defeat them all so I die. If there is nothing there, then I am safe and I can continue going on. Whenever I get attacked by another player, whether I win is really about how they are built, and how good of a player they are.

I rarely ever make “skill shots” or pull wins from behind as a Necro. Either I win by a lot or I get pwned, and the lack of control on this matter just makes the Necro feel a bit helpless. They have a high skill floor, but a low skill ceiling, and this shows up a lot in play. I think this is where a lot of complaints while playing a necro comes from: while we can be considered bastions of power when on the field, we are also very helpless.

Necromancers have a lot of staying power with a full DS bar. It literally doubles our HP, giving us a ton of sustain in small scale fights. The two problems with it are that you have to get the Life Force to use it in the first place, and the second is that in large scale bouts DS melts in an instant. The bigger the fight, the more valuable dodge and reflects and blocks become, but the durability of DS is finite. Without an escape, there’s no way to stop being focused, so if you fall into that pack of ants you are done for.

fear is fine, but the fact it´s instant sucks. I like the downstate fear WITH animation , so you have a realistic chance to avoid it.

Pro’s:

It’s let the few top level PvP necro’s faceroll with glass cannon hybrid.

Cons:

It doesn’t fit into necro lore. Life & fire god vs death & cold.

It’s a condition stuck at the top of Power line.

It’s a auto-proc in the background of other things. Requiring no skill to use/activate, and also means no control over it going on clones & other things you don’t want it to.

Terror on Fear has been nurfed because of it. Slapping any condi necro who doesn’t go 30 points power.

30/30 build + Nightmare Rune is now seen as the ONLY PvP build.

Fairly useless in PvE.

Lots & lots of people don’t want to play PvP against this necro type, and lots of necro’s from beta, are feeling like un-main’ing there necro.

Rym.1469:

Here, my thoughts : Port should have unlimited range, same as Spectral Walk. If you port more than 1500 you get crippled for 5 seconds. Casting time should be reduced to 1/2 sec and cooldown by 5 seconds. To destroy minion without porting, click and hold utility for about 1- 1.5 seconds.

The reason Spectral Walk has crazy range and teles anywhere is because you can only cast it at your feet.

If Flesh Wurm worked the same way you could cast it in a place you aren’t meant to get into.
For example on top of a Jumping Puzzle and then teleport past the whole thing.

It’s the same reason Mesmer’s Portal has insane range (it’s cast at the player’s feet) and Blink has limited range and doesn’t go through gaps in the ground.

I would much prefer it if the initial casting obeyed shadowstep rules and Spectral Recall ignored them, though.
That way getting Wurm where you want it would be tricky, but you could always teleport to it once it’s set somewhere.

Anet probably won’t change that because it’d be reaaaally good then.
…but I hope they give it a shot.

No flesh worm blows, it sucks, and is worthless, do not nerf it

We’re OP, but not in the “right” ways. That 30 at the beginning there? For burning, something he mentions that most if not all of us didn’t want/need, and that led to a never ending QQ about condi burst damage, which I agree is ridiculous. OP does bring somewhat valid points, about trait lines, tools to survive, etc. They just buffed our damage to OP levels with conditions, not what we needed. He’s “whining” about that.

PMilkos.9103:

Some of you people here have to be smoking some pretty good stuff… They doubled our deathshroud health and you call that a nerf because apparently 50k+ hp on a heavy healing class is not enough these days…

Anyway, necromancers are fine, and in fact very powerful as long as you know how to build them. If you are building them glass cannon and then complaining that you’re too weak then it’s your fault for making a stupid build – you took the one class with no active survivability mechanics and no burst and went all-out offence on it, what exactly where you epecting. And max condition caps is a problem common to ALL condition builds of ALL classes – condition elementalists, rangers etc are in the same boat and “suck” just as much in that regard.

What can necromancers do better than any other class? AoE. AoE anything – conditions, damage, heals, you name it, we can do it (if we spec into it). We can dive head-first into a pack of mobs that would shred anyone else to pieces and kill them all without breaking a sweat. You just have to understand that the full offensive build you see on warriors and thieves simply won’t cut it here.

Just don’t run minions. They are bad. Just… bad. Every single one of them. They’re only passable until you get enough levels and skill points for a proper set of skills.

ok so just so were clear , we have NO BURST , and NO ACTIVE SURVIVABILITY MECHANIC that other classes tend to have ALOT of and still rip us to shreds (yes even those of us that ARENT GLASS CANNONS) and its our fault? sounds legit. and conditions cap , yet we have no burst or any REAL dmg beyond conditions , still sounds legit bro.

I can only speak from a wvw perspective but Necros are a strong class when they aren’t being attacked, the amount of aoe condition pressure we can put out is pretty scary. When left alone we do silly amounts of damage, but the moment we get focus fired my multiple people we don’t have many options to get away and we just die.

The devs say that we are supposed to rely on our innate toughness, high HP and death shroud mechanic to stay alive, but in reality this just means it takes a few extra seconds in order to die. Other classes have various methods to escape from a fight from boons, blocks, teleports, leaps and invisibility. My necros on the other hand can only hope those extra seconds my HP and DS give me enough time to get to friendly forces before I go down so I can be power rezzed, I use DS to absorb one big attack, or to jump off the nearest cliff and use DS to survive the fall and get away. The last patch removed the last two options for the most part.

Softspoken.2410:

rager.4963:

Took a break since release, came back to see what is up. Was in the mood for a necro. Use to love them in EQ and other games.. Come to the forum to check out pet builds and stuff.

Holy kittens batman. The aura in this forum makes me want to cry. Is necromacers really that bad?

How bad are pets? I mean I see people saying they are bugged, but they got to be useful for something right? I don’t see them leaving them worthless for this long.

In the forum’s defense, the most recent patch had a few nerfs in it that were pretty unexpected, so there’s a lot of recent upheaval.

In my opinion, the only major bug with minions right now is that Flesh Golem despawns if it enters deep water. They’ve actually gotten downright snappy in their response times with recent updates: I urge you to try them yourself and see how well they do or don’t react to your commands.

its not necesarily a bug , due to that the water skill set doesnt allow flesh golem to live , only got plague form in underwater combat (aka deep water) , so the flesh golem cant chase anything underwater.

rager.4963:

Took a break since release, came back to see what is up. Was in the mood for a necro. Use to love them in EQ and other games.. Come to the forum to check out pet builds and stuff.

Holy kittens batman. The aura in this forum makes me want to cry. Is necromacers really that bad?

How bad are pets? I mean I see people saying they are bugged, but they got to be useful for something right? I don’t see them leaving them worthless for this long.

In the forum’s defense, the most recent patch had a few nerfs in it that were pretty unexpected, so there’s a lot of recent upheaval.

In my opinion, the only major bug with minions right now is that Flesh Golem despawns if it enters deep water. They’ve actually gotten downright snappy in their response times with recent updates: I urge you to try them yourself and see how well they do or don’t react to your commands.

Enundr.9305:

say that vs a group of condition cleansers MightyAltroll…..lol have i ever seen a condition necro ever feel so useless…..and like i said , a perma stealth thief does insane burst dmg , and can go stealth and come out full health……yea …….sry but conditions are nothing if they cant actually kill , and these thieves prove it every day , and dont even get viewed as remotely OP

What, a group of people specialized in condition cleansing can own your condition only builds? So unfair!

I only have three gripes-

1) Life Blast doesn’t do enough damage for dagger builds. You’re better of just using the daggers and saving the LF for defensive purposes. The problem being situations where you’re not in danger of dying there’s not much purpose in using DS. The same can be said for the power coefficient on Life Transfer.

2) I agree that capping the amount of LF loss per second would be an interesting way to allow Necros to stand up to focus fire. Maybe it would deplete at a higher rather than it currently does when being attached by one enemy, but if it depleted at the same, or similar rate when being hit by multiples this could open up a lot of survival potential.

3) Healing in DS. For a Blood/Lifesteal build (just like in my gripe #1) this kills anyone wanting to use DS. If I could drop to 50% hp, go into DS and lifesteal my way back to say, 70%, then I could find a great deal more utility in it.

Or just having regular utilities show up at all would be nice….

What I would personally like to see is a shorter cool-down on the transformation but not on the boons given. That would further encourage quick fingers to use DS to ablate incoming damage. Life Force generation could stay the same.

(note: Please leave any gripes about recent offensive changes out of this thread; they’ve already been debated ad nauseam and it is generally accepted that there is going to be some sort of change in that area if not agreement about what and how much.)

It has been identified many times that Necromancers are particularly weak to focus fire and by extension crowd control that leaves them in a position to be focus fired. Reasons for this include to varying degrees:

Low/Limited: mobility tools, high up-time defensive boons like protection, aegis, vigor, stability, stealth, and invulnerability utilities.

Currently Death Shroud functions as a substitute health bar which helps greatly in 1v1 encounters; but is somewhat lacking compared to options other classes get when trying to ablate or avoid focus fire.

The result is an increasing lack of builds that are viewed as viable, especially in a game where the meta tends towards heavy offense + avoidance/mobility being king to begin with.

The purpose of this thread is to bring up ways that Death Shroud can be altered to better address this issue and move the class closer to the attrition ideal that has been stated as the design mandate by the Developers, without making the class an unbeatable monster in small scale encounters.

My suggestion is as follows:

Capping the amount of life-force you can lose to a set max rate per second no matter how many people are attacking you while in Death Shroud. That would give a closer approximation of the invulnerability/avoidance mechanics that other classes get.

Attacking a Necromancer would still cause them to have to exit Death Shroud sooner than they would unattended, but would help them greatly to survive the current behavior of mass focus firing a Necromancer the moment they are identified as such.

A hopefully simple way of doing this might include just two different degen rates while making the Necromancer technically invulnerable while in Death Shroud, one for not being attacked during the degen tick period, and one for being attacked during the degen tick period.

Certain effects like fall damage may or may not be allowed to bypass the degen cap in order to keep some behaviors in check if needed.

Alternate suggestions of course welcome; I just ask that they be focused on ways of addressing the class weakness to focus fire.

The following suggestion was made by chiefdiablo in this thread; I do not take credit for it. I do, however, tack some ideas of my own on at the end:

chefdiablo.6791:

[snip]
Would be cool if you had a secondary fearture a la spectral walk, hit it again and leave the locust swarm where it is crippling the enemy but breaking you out of combat to use the quickness. That would be clever and useful in my opinion.

I think this is a very interesting idea. I fully understand and accept the devs rationales for why necros have limited mobility and escape tools. I’m not asking for any of them; and after 10+ months of playing only necro, I don’t really feel I need them.

However, necro is – to paraphrase the devs’ vision for the profession – the anti-mobility class. We don’t move fast; we chill, cripple, or immobilize our enemies. We don’t escape; we prevent others from escaping. With the recent improvements to Dark Path (33% range increase, reliably teleporting its full distance), Spectral Grasp (now pulls the full distance), and the addition of Tainted Shackles, we’re getting closer to realizing that vision.

In keeping with this effort to bring the reality of the class more in line with the vision, I think chiefdiablo’s suggestion has merit. Personally, I’d approach it a bit differently, though; his suggestion speaks more to using Locust Swarm as an escape, while I would like to improve upon its snaring capabilities.

With that in mind, here’s my variation:

After casting Locust Swarm, it switches to a new skill named “Plague of Locusts”. Activating this new skill will send the necro’s Locust Swarm flying at a targeted foe.

If it hits, it will continue to persist as a Locust Swarm on that opponent, inflicting 1 sec of crippled to that target and any enemy within the radius of the Locust Swarm every second for the remainder of its duration. The crippled it inflicts can be removed just like any other condition, but the Locust Swarm effect, itself, can not be removed until its duration expires.

The duration is not reset when the “Plague of Locusts” is cast; it inherits the duration of Locust Swarm. That is to say, if a necro uses Locust Swarm but doesn’t activate “Plague of Locusts” until 3 seconds later, then “Plague of Locusts” will only persist for 7 more seconds.

Plague of Locusts

Damage: 60
Crippled: 1 s
Range: 900
Radius: 210 (the same as Locust Swarm)

Some aspects open to debate are:

1) Will the “Plague of Locusts” continue to generate life force for the necro in the same manner as Locust Swarm?

2) Should “Plague of Locusts” have the same radius as Locust Swarm and potentially cripple additional enemies near to the target affected by the “Plague of Locusts”?

3) What happens to the swiftness the necro gained from casting Locust Swarm; should it be removed once “Plague of Locusts” is activated and the locusts transferred to an enemy?

4) Should “Plague of Locusts” have a cast time or be instant cast? If it is to have a cast time, it should be short; 1/4 second would be my suggestion.

5) Should “Plague of Locusts” be unblockable?

(continued in next post)

Good discussion, gents. Too bad Arenanet doesn’t care. I was really hoping they’d read this and take it to heart, or atleast provide decent discussion around it.

SPESHAL.9106:

Comparing Necro survivability to a bunker Ranger is where you first went wrong.

Secondly, Necros actually got buffed with this patch, so whining about our survivability makes you look foolish.

Maybe you should test things and really understand the patch before asking for a laundry list of ridiculous changes that make no sense.

Overall, this patch was pretty good for all professions and the game in general. If you don’t see that and think “Anet been making bad decisions”, then maybe you don’t know the game as much as you think.

The game isn’t perfect and I don’t agree with zero LF out of the gate, but the profession is dialed in pretty good overall. In fact, I can play almost any profession right now and not feel totally kitten .

Comparing a tank Necro to a tank Ranger is wrong?

Necromancers got buffed? Where? Where are the top tier Life Force bunkers?

Mmkay.

Very good for Guardian, I agree. Obviously I know nothing of the game to be making such accusations in well detailed/thought out manner.

I’m glad you can hotjoin any profession and not feel cheaped/kitten. I’m glad you can play meta builds for each class and not feel cheaped/kitten. Well done.

I’ve seen stealth done better in MMOs before, through a system that was much more complicated.

The idea was this: each player had themselves a perception stat, and all NPCs had this stat, too. The stealth abilities granted to any player would subtract from this perception stat, and this would give the overall distance at which an enemy can be seen. So, for example, if a character had a perception of 500 feet, and stealth had a rating of 300, then the first character would see the invisible character at 200 feet.

This led to more diversity, with various classes having abilities that could increase their perception, as well as classes getting different and more powerful forms of stealth. There was even a buff item that could increase perception that was quite cheap, making it so should the situation call for it you could always see those invisible enemies should your class or build be vulnerable to them.

I think the biggest problem with GW2 stealth is that it is completely depthless. There is no counterplay other than randomly flailing feebly in the wind. There is no sophisticated method to determine of a player is visible or invisible in different circumstances. There is no active counter-skill that affects stealthed players greater than non-stealthed players, or anything of the sort. The most you can do with a stealthed opponent is to randomly guess where they might be and what they are doing, and unfortunately smart players use things like Blink and Shadowstep to insure that your guess is always wrong.

Anyway, the big problem with offensive mitigation is that, ultimately, the ball is not in your court. On my Engineer when I activate Elixir S, I’m invulnerable for 3 seconds and there is not a darn thing anyone can do about it. Because the defensive aspect of this is wholly in my control and acts irrespective of what my opponent does, you can say that I have full control over this defensive ability. But Necromancers never get this option:

Blind: Only meaningful with near permanent sustain or on critical attacks. Opponents can choose to not stand in the blind field, cleanse it away, or just fire off a useless auto attack before doing something crucial.

Weakness: Doesn’t work half the time. Can be easily cleansed away, or with the new short durations of the skill simply outlasted. Does nothing with conditions. Best use is the endurance reduction.

Chill/Cripple: only effective against enemies with limited range (melee mostly). Does nothing to ranged attacks. Can be cleansed away.

Stuns: Have to hit the target, target must not have stability, and can be broken through with stun breakers. As to whether a stun will work is merely guessing.

Death Shroud: The defensive utility of this skill lies in the assumption that your opponent will waste their attacks on you while inside of it. If they just do something like retreat and wait for the natural degen to take effect, this means that Death Shroud mitigates nothing. Requires the build up of life force in the first place.

Because of this I found most of the QQ about necromancers to be completely unfounded. In any battle, the necromancer is not truly in control over any of their defenses, and half the time over their offenses, either. The person who decides the outcome of a Necro vs. Class X fight ultimately is Class X, and as skilled as a necromancer player can get we simply lack the tools as a class in order to be top tier. So we default to spewing out a bunch of AoEs and hoping they hit, and also hoping that the other classes just happen to not be using one of the many tools that can shut us down.

Nem.1039:

I sure wish we had the ability to -1 votes for stupid dev’s posts.

I gave you +1 bro.

I also laughed. No offense but this is laughable a year later. I can’t seriously take anything at this point.

Block will block anything no matter how sky high it is. So will invulnerability. Ds…. what does ds do? Requires a resource which you need to fight/kill to generate. Also has a limit(you can’t generate anything as condition….just for example). But because its apparently super amazing we have no boons/no stability/no heals/no escapes and so on. We got 1 good stunbreak/swiftness skill… sadly its utility that sucks for anything else and doesn’t synergize with most specs. Yeah…

Cheers to another “It will get better and we will buff necromancers. Need time as to not over buff.” ™

Fun fact… in wvw guardians bubble of win lasts on average twice longer then my ds with full soul reaping. Yep… definitely don’t wont to over power our awesome class mechanic.

The trouble with Death Shroud becoming more and more our main defense it can be counter-productive in that you can’t heal inside it, negating siphons, regeneration, team heals, etc, and you can’t access your utilities which is always going to make it a dumbed down version of playing your normal form skill wise. Just less options to work with no matter how you try and synergize the 5 DS skills.

Also, once its gone, it gone. Some builds remain way better than others at regenerating it, primarily melee based ones the best, but they are also the ones that get focused the most, and kicked around due to lacking easy stability.

Other classes, particularly attrition build ones, their defensive ‘oh crap’ moves come up routinely on set cooldown timers. And remain a lot better at mitigating burst, due to negating outright or just escaping the immediate area.

JonathanSharp.7094:

I say play it a while and then see how you feel.

We did a big set of improvements to Necro recently, and we want to make sure we don’t over improve their defense capabilities.

We want to shift more focus to death shroud throug main hand skills, but, again, we don’t want to do this too fast, ESPECIALLY with a major Pax tournament right around the corner.

So death shroud gains may not be as high as you would like, but we’ll keep monitoring them and looking at further improvements to make.

Hello,

The fundamental problem is that deathshroud does not scale anywhere near as well as invulnerability, heavy evasion builds, channeled blocks, mobility, or stealth when you are getting focused by multiple people. The problem is much more obvious in WvW.

Tweaking deathshroud isn’t going to balance this problem out. Necromancers need some new abilities to help survive when they get focused.

We dont need more lifeforce generation. We need ways of making DS actually keep us alive. All it does is stall for a second. I really dont see why every other class has a wide range of access to blocks, evades, vigor and invulns. But we dont have a single one. I understand you want DS to be what we use for defense. However at the moment it doesnt provide that and with the direction it seems your going in, it will never be enough. We need vigor at the very least. And from a PvE standpoint its really frustrating seeing a trash tier class get changes which effect PvE far more than they effect PvP and making us even more trash tier than ever before.

The way necro’s are at the moment is the complete opposite to attrition and i dont mind being redesigned that way. Unfortunately we arent an attrition or a burst class in pve as we deal sub par dps and are a completely selfish class (with no team buffs and our debuffs can be done with other classes often better) and now lack even more survivability. Were very good at condi pressure which is the only reason we are ok in pvp (condi’s are actually good in pvp :O). However condition damage is useless in PvE. Ignoring that were supposed to be a attrition class, why is the most selfish class with the least escape and defense options the class which also deals awful damage. Surely we should get one or the other. At the moment we dont have either (except arguably in pvp).

No stability unless you go and dump 30 points into something that doesn’t provide migation in real combat.

There I fixed it for you.

As the title says. The necromancer has only one real way to defend itself. Life steal isn’t a reliable means of Survivability without the aid of high levels of tanking gear. And even then you need death shroud to last a bit longer with that where as a guardian as pretty does it just as well if not better with 1/4th the health of the necromancer.(this is including death shroud as part of the health pool.)

For people who don’t seem to have a clue about the necromancer’s defenses. They are garbage. Unless you are doing large world events where tones of creatures are dying all at once, you are not going to be able to maintain death shroud unless you dedicate to it. And even then your emergency button has to be planned for and built up to use it. Where as a guardian or a mesmer can pop a block or invulnerability to shrug off large chunks of damage YOU CAN NOT! You don’t have stealth, invulnerability, very little stability, no blocks, no vigor without jumping through hoops like a trained poodle and no teleports that can get you out in a pinch.

A while back the necromancer got a small… VERY small buff. So small of a buff that it only really helped the necromancer’s offensive power and made an already popular necromancer build even more popular. And now arena net have nerfed the necromancer’s already pitiful defenses even further.

You have been changing death shroud since day one, making it less and less like a true “Death shroud” and more and more like a power shield. This isn’t good design, and it sure as hell isn’t good game balance. I wasn’t happy with the last buff because it wasn’t nearly enough. And we needed at a minimum of 2 more buffs of the same size as that one to both our defensive and supportive tactics. And now you make us weaker in the area we are lacking the most? Fixing a bug doesn’t make up for a clear nerf.

You could rarely rely on death shroud to actually save you and now it just isn’t going to save you. The Aegis The guardian on your team is going to help you more then death shroud will. Even more so now that damage bleeds through death shroud. And we still can’t be healed through death shroud!

Arena Net. You frustrate your necromancer community to no end. You ignore us most the time and when you do listen, you listen to the people calling for nerfs when the necromancer doesn’t need them. A player getting beat once by a necromancer doesn’t mean that he necromancer was broken.

Afya.5842:

Who goes to fractal without any guardian……..

I do. We casually ran 77 two days ago with a warrior, a mesmer, two eles and a necro.

Went smooth, no wipes, grawl shaman especially; it’s my favourite fractal, because I can basically faceroll it with my necro.

Yet, but that’s just me, and you are you.

I’m all in for buffs but you guys demonizing the necro as it was some kind of useless abomination is really depressing.

And to be fair, it’s all in the design of dungeons. I’m eagerly waiting for a condition heavy dungeon or fractal where necros will shine even more due to their utilities.

Edit:
Ohh and before you bash me that my comparison is skewed because I play with bads… I played with [SOLO] players that day and they have probably the best PvE squad on EU-side. Hell, they have the almighty Wethospu (probably the best PvE warrior on the planet Earth) and Haviz.

spoj.9672:

Azreell.1568:

Not sure why there is always such a large debate over this.

ALL classes are viable in PvE.

The only difference is the time it takes to complete an instance and even then at worst what are you talking? 30second to a minute or two max for total completion?

That might even be going over board.

When I do a CoF 1 – If i do it in 6 minutes or I do it in 7 minutes or even 8 minutes. I don’t care and I truly don’t understand the games population being so fixated on this.

When you look at longer dungeons the time difference is much larger. 10-15minute dungeon takes an hour for pug groups.

Not sure why there is always such a large debate over this.

ALL classes are viable in PvE.

The only difference is the time it takes to complete an instance and even then at worst what are you talking? 30second to a minute or two max for total completion?

That might even be going over board.

When I do a CoF 1 – If i do it in 6 minutes or I do it in 7 minutes or even 8 minutes. I don’t care and I truly don’t understand the games population being so fixated on this.