Guild Wars 2

Aireroth.7596:

So relax. Necro is totally playable, despite some minor bugs and mishaps.

The 2 best necro utility skills, corrupt boon and plague signet, are both bugged. It’s stupidly annoying when you use corrupt boon on someone, and it does nothing except for poison you. And plague singet not removing conditions from allies is just as annoying. Until these 2 skills are fixed I really do not intend to play necro…

Kayotik.5790:

I really do consider the self-inflicted bleed to be more of a blessing than a curse, as you suggested.

You can either consume it for extra healing, staff #4 to transfer it to the target, offhand dagger #4 to transfer it, or even turn it into a boon with a well.

I was going to go into details as to why i think it’s horrible, but I didn’t. I do not like it because as I said it’s main use will be to give a boost to LF when you need to most, at the start of a fight. Which means you generally wont have many conditions on you at the time, so wasting a heal/transfer on just bleed is pointless. Sure if you’re running with plague signet you’ll likely have more to transfer/heal from, but you want to use plague signet at the most effective time, which often isn’t in the first 10seconds. So you could heal first, but then you’re left without a heal for 25sec.

Which ofc is just my eternally pessimistic view of things.

I don’t think anyone is saying DS isn’t good, because it definately is. The main problem is that if you spec more towards DS, with 30 in soul reaping, for the 50% cd reduction (which is one of th ebest traits a necro has), you still need to put 30 in curses to do damage, which only leaves 10 points to alocate in either death for increase marks/staff mastery, or blood for mark of evasion. Which means youre going to be lacking survability at the start of the fight. I even tried using blood is power for the 20% LF, but this skill is meant to give that boost to LF at the start, however since it applies a 10sec bleed to yourself (around 2.3k damage ifyoure specced for condition damage….) it’s really a bad skill. The skill would be so much better if it just gae 20% LF and nothing else.

Of course you can start a fight with a staff, while using Soul Marks trait (3% LF from marks) and get maybe 15-20% LF with a little staff #1 thrown in, But this then means you’re marks will be on cd for for a signifcant amount of time (20/25/40sec for the 3 best ones), so you wont be able to use them at a more important moment during the fight, i.e. interupting a res/finisher.

So, you can spec more towards DS and SR, and lose that early survivability or spec a little towards it (like most people do now, 10/15/20 in SR) and have better innitial staying power, but slightly less towards the end of the fight.

A necros problems would definately be less severe if they just started with 20-30% LF.

Phantax.1369:

The only trouble with the clas balance issue is servers. By that I mean a certain class may seem OP on your server because several players may be extremely good with that class. On another server there may be no players of that class that stand out and another class seems OP.
Its not an easy job to balance out the classes for any game that has seperate servers. Yes within a certain margin of error you can balance things. But you will alsways have times when a certain class is thought to be OP.

I don’t konw what you’re talking about, you mention servers, which makes no sense. PvP is global, you play against people from all servers and in PvE there’s always going to be some classes that do more dps and some which provide more utility. You can’t give everyone the same dps/utility capabilities.

As for class balance, it’s at the point you would expect it to be in a game that’s 3 weeks old. Give it another 3 weeks and I’m sure we’ll be at a better place as far as balance goes.

So this is from a purely PvE point of view, to which I will add, for solo PvE we are fine, necro is well equipped to take on 5mobs at once and kill them very quickly, of course you do have to blow cd’s for this, where other classes can AoE to the same effect without needing 40-60sec cd’s but this doesn’t bother me too much. Single target dps is relatively weak but I can live with that aswell. It’s just group PvE, namely dungeons where necro’s become almost useless, You can co condition spec with a few well based traits and have minor use, but dps isn’t there and given how dungeons work out 9/10 allies will have to move out of your well of power/blood as there’s constant AoE’s you need to dodge.

On paper Wells look nice, but in reality they are not, the range is too small, the duration is not enough, they are too easy to avoid and the effects are weak. Look at a mesmers null field, this is basicly well of power + corruption * 9000, it removes all boons from enemies and all conditions from allies if anyone touches it, where as our Wells remove 5 of each and to get those 5 removed you have to stay inside the well for the full duration…Seems fair right?

I think a good solution to Wells would be make them last longer and give some kind of linger. So the effects will stay on whoever was in the well for 2-3sec after they leave, this would be an amazing step for both PvE and PvP if it ever came to fruition.

1/ Absolutely yes, or at least remove the 2nd/3rd ability of everyone.
2/ You can ping the map, I always assumed that people could see it, but I never bothered to ask.
3/ You can generally see what weapons people have, so it’s not overly important, for me at least.
4/ I think the state of CC is fine right now, considering classes all have mutliple stun breakers, and dodging to use.
5/ No, I think smaller then 5vs5 will be very boring, unless they introduce new small maps.
6/ I can’t see how this would work without nerfing all aspects of the game.
7/ Map sizes are fine for 5vs5, 8vs8 does get couded sometimes.

Most people will agree that necro needs some love right about now, there’s only 1 viable build to run in competitive PvP (condition build).

I think a step in the right direction for necro’s would be to give them a new offhand weapon, idealy a pistol. Why a pistol? Because they are often used for raw damage, which necro really needs to help make axe/dagger builds actually worth-while. Pistols are also very good candidates for finishers which necros lack. 1 skill would be raw damage prehaps with life force gain, and the other would idealy have some form of control cripple/chill/daze.

Also fix minions AI currently it’s just pathetic beyond all reason, most of the time the melee minions wont attack, making any MM build worthless. Something like an attack command, similar to rangers pet would be ideal.

Ofc there’s many other issues with necro, but small steps….