Guild Wars 2

as the title states,i was testing a few things on my necromancer that involved just pressing one a few times…and i noticed every time i got a Barbed Precision proc,i would be getting 118 bleeding damage,and then back down to 117 from Blood Curse,but would only do 117 damage from Feast of Corruption barbed precision procs,and Life Blast BP procs

this was done on Target Golems in sPvP area without Sigil of Earth,or any random might boons (which wouldn’t matter,ONE damage?)

anyone else notice anything odd acting up about this trait in terms of damage?
of all the time using my necromancer i have never seen it do a random 1 additional damage

Ultra violet streak before your eyes.
My shocking aura, your love denied.
Burning speed, closer to your heart.
Ride the Lightning, we’ll never be apart.

You were wearing red, I was wearing pink. We encountered each other near the steps to the castle. While I appreciate how intensely it appeared you wanted to meet me, I found you a little grabby. I’m sorry I had to smack you like that, but you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Next time, maybe play a little hard to get?

Make him destroy anything in his path, literally. See that hill? Boom! See that bush? Boom! See that obscuring invisible bump on the road that shouldn’t prevent your hulking charging body to reach his target? BOOOOM!

Now that would be a golem’s charge

Nice idea all around though, it’s one of my favourite elite, just wish he was more sensitive to me been beaten to death while he watches a butterfly or kills a kitten.

Dumb question: why would you let an Orrian beat on you. You lose 3%/sec just being in DS….so taking combat damage would skew that wouldn’t it?

4%/sec is the baseline Lifeforce loss while in Deathshroud. 3%/sec is with the Vital Persistence trait. But that’s not the issue; I wanted to find out how much actual Health we have in Deathshroud, and a percent doesn’t really do that for you. Because we don’t have any numbers on our Lifeforce bar that show the actual HP, I took damage and found what percent that damage number made up, and used that to get some kind of estimate as to the numerical number of our Lifeforce bar. I just noted that I had the Vital Persistence Trait and then took off what percentage of Lifeforce I would normally have lost while in Deathshroud during the timeframe I was in it. Whatever the difference was between the estimated and actual is what I assumed to have been taken off of due to damage taken since there wasn’t exactly any other way to have lost that Lifeforce.

I’ve estimated Death Shrouds health at roughly 18K at 100% and 23k at 130%

How much Vitality was that with, if you remember?

Softspoken.2410:

Kuldebar.1897:

tooltips in GW2 are hosed! :p

Generally, yes.

Often. They’re not as descriptive or responsive as they could be, that’s for sure.

Whoever used to do tooltips in GW1 needs to be heading it up here. They were so painfully accurate that they had to make a view option to make the descriptions “concise” so that it didn’t take so long to read all the info lol.

Should retaliaton be % dmg based ?
What is the point in the reanimator minor trait ?

Dredlord.8076:

Softspoken.2410:

I guess the dirty secret of well of blood is that the massive initial heal has nothing to do with the well effect. After all, if an ally is inside the well when it’s first cast, they don’t get that same starting heal. They just get the smaller pulsing ones.

The description could do with a “Wells apply protection within their area of effect” clause I suppose, to clarify to what protection is applied. But as it is, the trait acts pretty consistently: be inside a well when its cast, receive protection.

exactly my point I am glad you were clever enough to figure it out. It would be stupid if the heal worked that way so why does this one trait work that way when combined with another trait.

I use the trait and drop a well and get protection.

Now I select another well trait to increase it’s range BUT it doesn’t help me at all because now I have to ground target it on me to get the effect of my first trait.

Even an idiot can realize that doesn’t make any sense.

If it is a poorly written tooltip and the skill is working properly then this is just another bit of evidence of the lack of synergy our traits have. Our traits are actually working against us now?

Except there still is benefit: you can now drop wells on allies and give them protection without putting yourself in harm’s way, or wasting the time it takes to run into the correct position.

Frankly, the whole thing is a natural progression of game mechanics / systems. The trait adds an effect to your wells, as evidenced by the way it affects allies. If you’re not inside the well, you can’t complain about not receiving its benefits.

What I was trying to explain about the skill well of blood is that it just uses a big heal at the same time it casts the well, but the heal and the well are two separate effects. So a trait that only affects the well (ritual of protection) will not proc on the initial heal, because the initial heal isn’t a well.

I feel like I’m wasting my time typing this out; mostly I’m here because people are specifically quoting me. It won’t be enough in the future.

Edit:

Even an idiot can realize that doesn’t make any sense.

You know, I’ve thought the same thing about a lot of what I’ve read in this forum. Usually though, I keep that thought to myself because it’s disrespectful to the extreme.

I won a 2v1 against a glass thief and a staff ele the other night, the thiefs opener got me to about 3k health xand then I manged to kill both of them. was bizarre and an awesome “Yes this build is awesome” moment

We only have 2 combo finisher (without water weapons) and bot are in the staff, the autoatck and a long cooldown blast finisher staff #4. Axe #3 could be a blast finisher or scepter #2, etc… Warriors has combo finisher in almost all weapons, greatsword and sword have a low cooldonw, guardians hammer #2(blast with only 5s cooldown), mesmer sword #2, every other class has more combo finisher than necros. Necros have no leap finishers, deaths shroud #2 can be a leap finisher.

Evan Lesh.3295:

This is a very real problem, but we can only work on so many things at once. I would still place it at a lower priority than Custom Arenas.

This isnt lower priority than custom arenas.

This issue is making people hate and avoid playing tournies.

For me, since there is no other option to get the title for my main character, I will only play tournies until I hit that 150 wins and then cease to play tournies forever because of this major unbalance.

4 vs 5 is a guaranteed loss. Its no fun at all knowing right at the start you are going to loose no matter what you do.

You need to ask yourself and the team what is the use of a new map if this problem persists.
When custom arenas come sure you’ll get a spike in spvp for a week or so, but then it will stop because of issues like these that make the game unenjoyable even before the gate is even open.

Fix this problem first and have a higher and more happy player base going into the opening of your custom arena and a higher player base for the months to come.

actually they already have half of the system in place,they just need to refine it.

when the tournament room is ready we are getting the pop up appear so we can go now or auto warp in 2 minutes.Just remove that auto warp feature, and replace “Go now” with “I’m ready”.in 1 minute,who ever didn’t click I’m ready,will be auto-removed from roster. All those who clicked “I’m ready” will be notified that the roster is not full and it is auto-resubmitted.The empty slots is refilled with those in queue and the pop up is again made available to all participants in each roster again. This will pretty much ensure that a full active party starts the tournament each time. It won’t solve genuine DC or AFK problems but at least it solves the. problem with manual re-submission of roster and starting without full participants.

i hate that i have to keep using league of legends as a comparison.

But they have put in two great systems for this.

First.

Before a match starts it asks each player to click that they are ready (you have about 10 seconds to respond). If not it throws them back into the shuffle till it can find another. If you had to get up and afk or walk out of the room or got distracted, your team would not be punished for this. you would simply have to reque when you are able to come back from what you were doing and play the game.

Second.

Leaver buster. Seeing as people who abuse the system by dodging matches they dont want to play often do it a LOT. The system tracks when they leave and picks up if they’ve been doing it an abornomal amount of times in great succession. For example, if you leave a game 20% of the time after its started. GOOD CHANCE you need your ability to que removed.

From my personal experience, the claim that people going offline causes 5vs4 matches is just wrong. So many times I have seen 5vs5 with one or more people leaving during the fight because it wasn’t going their way. Although there is no category for it I have always reported these people. That’s how I remember it being done in GW1 as well – until the penatly patch for leaving came (which took quite a long time if I remember correctly). Where is such a thing?
I’m honestly wondering how a game developer can think that creating solo join “high” rewarding (“everybody wants the orr armor!”) without any payment AND no penalty for leaving is a good idea. I’m having a really hard time believing somebody would implement such a thing into a game – yet there it is, ruining so many people’s gaming experience.
I’m fairly new to pvp in GW2 because I wanted to enjoy all of the pve content (which I did so far) before delving as deep into pvp as I did back in GW1. But in the last two weeks I have learned the hard way that this isn’t GW1 pvp, it’s flawed in so many ways.
Creating a penalty for people leaving tournament games would be a start. Or at least introduce Guild vs. Guild where only “premade” and more stable teams can fight each other. So far the new rated play is more a “premade teams farming 3-4 randoms”, not competitive in any way!

Don’t want to turn this into another minion AI thread but I found that running around Frostsound Gorge last night farming Colossi with the golem, shadow and blood fiends (just for the lulz) the only minion who attacked reliably was the good old Jagged Horror. It was as though he realised he only had limited time in the world and had multiple Leroy Jenkins moments, especially amusing considering their relative sizes

I play the necro class the most in WvW and i have two builds i bounce between. Basically the juggermancer and the conditionmancer (alt between fearmancer and a 0/30/20/20/0 build. I actually think the necro is decent in spvp, and ok in wvw. That said, we suffer from some serious problems in the meta of wvw which boils down to slow movement, 0 “realistic” escape mechansims, and SLOW CASTING TIMES.
It really leaves me to question what the devs where thinking when they said, yeah, lets make the attrition class, slow at speed and casting, make them hit like a wet paper bag, but let them have really good conditions, that will be what? easily cleaned by any class.

1. You cannot pin anyone down, because everyone and their mother has 2-4 ways to remove conditions, and what, oh yeah, cripple, chill, fear, are conditions and easily wiped off. So once again, devs have 0 idea what an attrition class means. I mean, sure, if the guy forgets to press his heal button or use one of his numerous condition removeal skills, then he will wear down. To add to the matter, if the enemy is trying to get away, we are the slowest class so catching up is difficult as heck. On the flip side, we have absolutely 0 escapes, so when our conditions get so easily removed, we are fat, slow AND they are running away… laughing. With regard to getting away, fat chance. You may say, but we have DS. Well whooopiedooooo i cant even see what conditions are on me, and even if i could, i cant do crap about it. other than switch back, try to get a heal off, get puppted around because we have 1 stability (that is used in no decent builds) and die. Or hay, lets try plague form or even the huge kitten cousin, fat kitten lich form. neither one allows us the ability to heal ourselves, or even see if our skills are off cooldowns, so basically you get double hammered, take away your skills, take away your heals, and guess what, your speed is slow as a fat kid at recess. 0 escapes, and our ability to keep them near us is boned. I am all about skill classes, but the nerco has absolutely 0 tolerance for missing a spell. Miss that cripple (because everything you do is easily avoided), and your boneslapped, or the enemy is gone.

2. This is the only class that actually gimps itself to use some of our best utiility skills. Thanks a lot. So, i want to kick up my pwer/condition damage, i bleed myself. Not so bad, because im usually running dagger offhand so i just kick that off, or hit staff 4 and hope an enemy steps into it, while im in the circle. Not really mad about that, but still, im gimping myself, 3.5k damage if i dont get it off. Epidemic – sweet, im making myself vulnerable, ill do it, and take the pain, since i just punched 5 people in the mouth if i did it right… oh wait, whats that, im out of range, it did not work, but im still F-ed and am vulnerable (or my personal favorite, stack 15 bleeds, hit epidemic and BAM it goes nowhere, because your dude fell down and ALL your conditions were erased when he went into downed form. SWEET). Ok, corrupt boon – i poison myself to use a utility to corrupt boons on an enemy (single target) and turn them into conditions, that are usually cleaned in once easily click of the button, or an elementalist/guardian cleaning everything every 6-10 seconds (let alone healing for 15k every 10 seconds.)

So WTF are they thinking. Do I think the necro is weak. No, Not entirely. I think it is a decent spvp class, albeit very very unforgiving. If you land everything accounting for lag, the dodge, leading for the slow cast times (my god it has to be the slowest in the game) you will do alright. BUT, if you miss one thing, you miss a rotation (yeah, we have good rotations and in pve, im a god), you’re out of luck because all of your skills are on huge cooldowns and your fiddle yourself in the corner hoping no one sees you, because you know you’re not running away heh.

I have played the necro since day one, i have tried most builds and have settled on 2 good builds. I still think our damage is higher with condition builds in pve (well, solo pvp, because if multiple people are running builds, your 15-20 bleeds stacks (thank anet for the one and only condition we have that does damage, along with 5 other classes) do NOTHING. In that case, you’re better off goign with a power build using axe so you keep 20 stacks of vuln on the mob and he goes down fast with your team wacking him.

In wvw, i bounce between the juggermancer and the conditionmancer. Juggermancer is great for roaming and 1 v 1 fights, but i find that in a zerg, your not doing much other than occasionally wellbombing (which is ok) and spamming staff, which scales HORRIBLY with power. Better off building crit damage, because with power your only hoping for staff 4 to get around 2-2.5k, which sucks. You can do some great damage, if 5 people stand in your well, for the full duration, but that rarely happens.

If you ever do PvP save your Downed 2 skill the fear for when someone is about to finish you. It can help buy some time by fearing them and interrupting them from killing you.

Finally the dev team has taken our complaints about the DS interface onboard. I was able to snatch this from the internets before it was removed.
Rejoice.

I’m sorry, I just had to
In all seriousness, please fix this bug before we loose all we have.

Here come the Monday morning quarterbacks. It is so easy to sit back with some popcorn and break down every move in the heat of combat and tell someone to learn to play. I do not think the point of his video was to try to prove that he is the king of all necros like some of you think you are.

Thank you Nemesis for proving the naysayers wrong and that condition specs do work in TPvP.

Hello everyone,

Yesterday i said in one of these threads that i will release a tournament play ahead of time, also uncut and with as few edits as possible. I had a few tournaments that i planned to mash up into one single necromancer experience… but… that is for another time.

So here it is… hope you find it both entertaining and motivating…

Guild Wars 2 – Epic conditionmancer paid tournament (TPvP with commentary)

As always feel free to leave any comments here on in the comment section on youtube, also tell me if you guys want to see more of this kind of “PoV” necromancer tournaments, in which i explain the reasons behind each of my decisions as i battle my opponents.

Took me quite some time to gather the items for this build, plus the actual recording process of it… A lot of work went into this one indeed… so…
Without further ado…. here it is

Guild Wars 2 – Fear… is my weapon [6x fear build – WvW version/tutorial]

This video includes the differences between PvE conditionmancer and WvW conditionmancer – how and why you change the build, why fear is so important & testing of the fear in this build… All of these explained in detail with the reasoning behind each decision.

Last but not least… we take this build on a field test in the most fierce WvW battles you have ever seen…
It will show you what to do in open battles, how to sustain the fight & pick your targets in the crowd and bring them into the ground… all of this while having really high survivability.

FINAL STATS:

“???” Attack – irrelevant
1837 Condition damage
93% Bleeding duration
50% Critical strike chance
2703 Armor
~ 20,992 Health
—
+ 100% fear duration increase
+ 6 potential fears
+ protection at 50% health
+ the ability to support in large fights

If i missed anything or if you have any questions feel free to comment here, on in the comment section on youtube.

Duration isn’t really our problem. Most of our bleeds are pretty decent length anyway, and we can get up to the length cap if we sacrifice some damage. The problem with duration is that it just gets cleared off in PVP too easily. If you lose 10 stacks of bleed, you just lost 1000 damage per second, that it probably took the first 5 seconds of the fight to put on, what other class has to deal with that? By that time you can be down to half health or lower against a burst profession, while only having done maybe 1000 direct damage of your own.

What I would like to see have longer duration is Poison, to give us a second source of attrition damage that stays on the target more often so that if they remove bleed, we are still actually doing some damage.

1. Allow us to see our utility bar while in Deathshroud. Sometimes you just want to pop in DS to survive until that clutch spell or heal is off cooldown. Allow us to see when that occurs.

2. Allow us to see the cooldown of DS spells while not in DS. Maybe a mini utility bar somewhere so we can monitor those spells to time DS more reliably. If you just want to pop in and out of DS for DS buffs and a quick interrupt via Fear, it’d help to know if Fear is actually off cooldown or not.

These two things are minor that would go a long way to letting us integrate DS into combat more fluidly, that IMO should have been included in launch. If anyone could look into considering this for a (not too distant) future patch, I’m sure there would be a lot of happy necros.

I made a reddit post about it: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10wgz2/how_healing_affects_necromancers/

@OP, just because the siphon traits don’t benefit from healing doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be there. Given the layout of everything else it is the best place for them. That line also gives the regeneration when struck which benefits from +healing, bonus damage above 90% HP which more healing helps you achieve, mark of blood on dodge, lower well CD so you can use Well of Blood more, autocast well of blood on rez, Transfusion, and Deathly Invigoration. Plus if you are using daggers then you are probably using dagger 2 which benefits from +healing. It’s fine as is.

+healing in the Soul Reaping tree would be even worse, there is nothing in there, not even any minors, that benefits from it.

but the horrors are going to run around and desert YOU =D

. . . because it cures hiccups.
True story.

Hello fellow Necromancers, I’ve been scrounging around the forums for a while, trying to find key information that is valuable to those building specific builds and characters for their own intended purposes and found some extremely useful posts/text blocks that i’m sure many will find helpful in their efforts to tune their necromancers the way they want.
This can also serve as a hot-list resource for people who don’t want to surf multiple web pages to get the info they need.

Special Thanks to Fiesbert.9816 for his Weapon DPS calculations originating here, Ascii.9726, and the official Guild Wars 2 wiki for furnishing parts of the information used for this compilation.
edit: Dacromir made a mention about Guild Wars 2 Wiki being one of the foremost go-to resources on the game that there is, being an invaluable tool and resource. If you’re new and haven’t taken a look at it yet, please do so at some point as information on the class is widespread and not all collective— You’ll most likely find what you need there if you can’t find it on the forums.
ToC:
Popular Necromancer Weapon Usages
Weapon DPS Calculated with Power
Commonly used Sigils
Commonly used Rune sets for Armor
Mechanic improving sources

Helpful External Links
Item Nomenclature – Armor set bonuses!
Necromancer Official Wiki

• Skills
• Traits

Game Mechanics You Need to Know as a Necromancer by Fiesbert
Condition Duration Formula by Tezoz
Popular Necromancer Weapon Usages by Ascii
Dagger: Close range quick damage, puts you in hitting range of mobs but does the most damage, has a okish healing skill, a 3s Immobilize, with a chain-blindness and AoE bleed on offhand.

Axe: Medium ranged decent damage, fast burst skill and AoE cripple, inflicts vulnerability every hit and 8 stacks of vulnerability can be kept on targets which boosts minion + allies damage.

Scepter: Condition damage (DoT) stacks bleed and poison quickly, though in big events your damage will suffer a lot due to the 25 bleed stack cap on monsters. 4 or 5 seconds of #1 spamming with scepter then Epidemic can deal a lot of damage to a group of mobs.

Staff: Extremely long range and a lot of AoE semi-spammable skills. nice for quickly removing conditions from yourself and laying down chill poison combos, builds Life Force very quickly. Noted combo field: poison for weakness blast finishers. on Chillblains

Builds

Minion Master: Uses all minions as utility skills and traits boosting minions health and damage. Very strong for PvEas they act as meat shields allowing you to solo pretty much anything. Suffers in PvP due to minions lacking AI and lower player outgoing damage sources.

Conditionmancer: Uses Scepter and Condition inflicting/ transferring utilities and traits for condition damage & duration. Great in PvE, suffers in large events because mobs dont survive long enough to deal damage and max bleed stacks cap at 25. Can be very effective in PvP small scale fights but tends to suffer a lot in larger fights because of all the AoE and self-target condition removals.

Power Necromancer: High power and critical damage that uses bursty skills and wells to drop targets quickly. Can be very effective in WvW and PvP with the combo fields acting mostly as perma-blinds in large fights but suffers a bit in small scale PvP like the mists because of focused CC and opposition mobility. A nice happy medium build for PvE, damage sticks and can be dealt fast.

question about your latest build…. no epidemic for instant ice age? i mean i understand the well of darkness but what about the other 2 wells? isnt there better utilities than them?
and given the crit rate of this build + main hand dagger why not slot sigil of ice? wouldnt that add more icing to the cake? (see what i did? :P)
and i was wondering if you could advice me on using the blood magic trait line instead of the soul reaping one, i was wondering about if its better to get dagger mastery, bloodthirst or vampiric precision?

She has no candy to give!

When Mad King Thorn burst out into Lions Arch I thought Magister Tassi was shaking in fear, instead she blasts him back down.

Hope she comes back next year, give it up Sassy Magister Tassi.

Tassi giving Thorn the smackdown in Lion’s Arch was hilarious the first time i saw it. That’s the type of pugnacious even Forbes would be proud of. Bring her back in November.