Guild Wars 2

Bweaty.9187:

We had it in DS, 30 trait cost. It’s now 2sec. (It still bugs out and doesn’t stop all CC’s)

Its 3s and doesnt bug out, but it does have a activation delay sometimes.

a) combat log doesnt register damage reduction post armor
b) easy way to test it are fish heads/mines/exploding objects

The difference in playstyle is exactly what we lack, there is no special nieche of using fancy utility tricks of being able to evade 9/10 of the boss attacks while attacking or timing blocks, you mostly just sit around in a position which a boss either focuses so you kite him away from the team or he doesnt and you shoot for free while side stepping/get LF generation going.
Look, on its core structure, necro has no real problems in pve survival if you keep your focus on it, but you are being so selfish during that, why not just take a mesmer who by focusing on survival helps the entire team or guardian who doesnt have to focus on survival as much because of kitten block on default boss setup+ 2s block from heal+invul on ulti+aegis actives, seriously i know 2 guardians that i ran Lupi with from TTS that just facetanked all his attacks without hp going under 40% because of the good block uptime and knowledge of when to use which type of defensive cooldown.
Now im not saying necros should be able to do that (because we would plain be bonkers just as our condi burst was during 4s dumbfire + unnerfed terror), but at least letting us not get dumped on by every little knockback we eat in DS or 4th hit in a row (to use same example take the p2 lupi barrages and siphon projectile, both skills which are way bigger than the aoe indicator and barely avoidable with SoL and proper knowledge of animations; it helps that they rehash ranged attack animations on mobs), since you cannot use that second dodge because there is a possible instakill on the way in a second which isnt enough for the evade to regen up.
I just dont want to feel more useful as a mesmer which drops a portal blinks drops it again uses feedback once or twice to reflect like 100k damage at the boss and do nothing the rest of the fight since im terrible at shatter and phantasam drop timing, than as a necro on who i know that i can reliably kill the clockheart if he doesnt do the rng throw into lightning.
In terms of survival id place us at a ranger level (for pve) and warrior (for pvp) *cant comment on wvwvw because i wave at my enemies and they let me enter their jp without a scratch*.

Flumek.9043:

Id trade all our swiftness + take a perma-chill debuff for stability. ok we must be slooow but why also a ping pong ball

Permachill>stability, only reason why we are even close to able to survive vs a cc warrior if you got 4 times his skill is the chill, stability n stun breaks too stronk for fear.

tazer.4982:

@Andele, on condi builds scepter’s Feast of Corruption and Staff’s auto attack generate enought LF to enter DS on demand after its cooldown. Very easy to do.
As for other classes: thieves and mesmers are squishy pretty much regardless of their builds, necros are generally not unless they choose to. Their dodges, evades and invuls are not only needed to absorb one-hit-KOs, but also many other blows that wouldn’t hurt necro that much – that’s the reason behind them imo. I recently played my low level thief and mesmer and died way more often when compared to leveling my necro. I believe it’s also true to classes like elementalist, ranger or engineer. Actually elementalist is made of paper, that’s a common knowledge :P Guardian’s Aegis is not on demand, it’s random or has to fall under circumstances.

By the way, if you think about it minions are pretty good to absorb one-hit-KOs :P When I think of how many times Jade Maw targetted that poor Jagged Horror, Golem or some other pet it’s amazing.
And maybe that’s also some explanation to necro’s lack of additional defense – we can have an army of tanky (one of the last updates!) minions that will absorb a ton of damange for us and for the team, most probably one-hit-KOs too just because PvE bosses are stupid and target those low profile minons. I know MM is not a popular option over there but hey, it’s aparently possible.
And yes, mesmers can have their small army of illusions too, but as I said before they also need them for protection from even trash champs that otherwise could kill them in 3 regular hits.

First of all your combo requires: the skills to hit (reasonable unless cced), the enemy to have at least 4 condis and/or 2condi + weapon swap up (both kinda ok expectations on a one time basis but not regular).
A staple of every mesmer build (just as staff is for necro) is either to have MH sword or staff, thats a blink and 2.5s evade, both things that avoid way more than a single hit vs ds could have absorbed in the last portion/1% of its span, also lets not forget that the thief has 60% on a base build and on fractal setups 90%+ vigor uptime and 4 dodges instead of 2. Also you can hardly compare leveling which a minions can solo by spamming to actual “end game content” (btw if you managed to die on a mesmer on something that isnt fall damage during leveling, i must ask how?).
Eles while being very very kittenty annoying to level 10, are quite a breeze to play in pve thanks to the aoe power of staff and scepter focus for personal story.
Also i think you dont know that guardian virtues can be activated…

Look, lets not troll around with extremes, right now DS is about as viable as the only defense as if a ele lost all his traits and attunements and his only allowed utility was CES; reasonable a nice bit of the time, but utterly failing where other very simple skills make it seem like its nothing.

Speaking from someone whos 4 most played professions in pvp are guardian>thief>mesmer, last 2 being fully geared zerker 80s in pve with all dungeons unlocked (and mesmer used for fractals when group whines). My ele is past the first 30 levels and i had no problems in pve (i did quit leveling him but thats because asura really annoy me, same for the guardian, they were pvp alts originally)
AND as someone who has been playing necro since the first press demo into beta all the way to now (even if im more on my ranger for the current patch/farm because of staff bugs) gathering 9k achivement points, soling both challenges during politics solo with necro, finishing Liadri, soloing new AC (2/3 paths) getting to lupi in arah path 4 solo and farming both MF and AR when they existed for items and carrying 5 pug groups trough the “new” TA path while they were 80% of the time dead (i cant really brag about fractals or bothering to do a legendary since for the first i got plain bored after like 24 and am way too lazy to farm up for a precursor/waste money collecting all recipes and skins.
Now excuse me and my technically pompously pretentious post (since a lot of people did stuff way better and more impressive than that), but DS absorb plain needs to return in one way (as it was) or another (limiting the amount of damage DS can take), not faffing around with it and adding weird arbitrary reudctions on DS, implementing obviously stupid stuff and pointless limits to traits/skills.

BTW fun fact DS absorb couldnt take more than 60~ times of total DS value of the % you had/stuff like lava, jade maw tentacle grape lazor and golem crush still killed you had less than 39/70~/90~% LF respectively.

Nagato no Kami.4980:

At 3 seconds of stability every 10 seconds when traited and requiring no slot, FitG is far too powerful to be moved down a tier.

a) its not every 10 seconds because unlike attunements you dont tap it
b) its not aoe thus even if you were tapping it it would mean playing necro wrong/in a imaginary realm where it has no impact on playstyle
c) cced necro is a 0 sustain necro, both in terms of LF and siphons, no other profession gets their sustain/tanking lost by cc/they can always avoid it properly without special conditions

Just to mention it, i dont think that Unholy feast fits on axe.

Pendragon.8735:

Spectral skills make a lot of sense both thematically and mechanics wise for granting a little bit of stability. I don’t know about 5 seconds, because what if people take 3 Spectral skills with reduced cooldown. But 3 seconds might be about right on a trait.

One of them should probably grant it just by default, maybe SW, since its on that super long CD and no longer returns much LF.

FitG would be relatively ok with 5 seconds, but could be abused too easy, spectrals, while it does make sense, would be kinda problematic since you cannot really make a build out of them. I just say return shade (immunity to movement impairment), but let all cc do a bash/mini stun/interrupt if used on us while its active, so it cannot negate the player, but delay our ds skills/waste time causing degen.

tazer.4982:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

No actually it would be more like having Aegis. It only blocks one hit, and all the following hits still go right through to your health bar. The only difference is that you can’t use your healing while in DS, nor can you use it a second after leaving DS, due to the annoying skill recharge thing.

Aegis would be inferior for a very simple reason: it’s way more random so maybe it can absorb 100k damage or maybe just 1k. By all means I’m no guardian specialist, but from what I can see Aegis is mostly granted through Virtue of Courage every 45 seconds, so purely random thing, or by “Retreat!” with 60 sec cooldown… so how can you compare it with old DS? There are also some traits that grant Aegis but again, very randomly. Funny thing is that necro can actually grant Aegis AoE: with Well of Power while removing burning and that’s exactly the randomness I’m talking about – quite useless (unless you’re facing grawl shaman in a fractal, WoP is great over there! :P)
I will say it one more time: DS is a class mechanic that can be frequently used on demand. Don’t compare it to any skills or boons, because it’s like comparing apples to oranges.

Ok, then lets compare it to profession mechanics by your logic, which are on demand, Steal – free teleport and quasi stun break, Ele attunements – essentially 10 free skills and on each setup is at least a total of 2 evades or invuls, Mesmer – free invul for 3 seconds, Engie – Free second heal, guaranteed stability+boon, stealth, any number of damage abilities to fit the game, cc and/or 3 stun breaks, Guardian – Sustain, A on demand block and damage boost, Ranger – FREE DAMAGE AND A TANK!

Ok please dont say stupid stuff, vigor which 4 out of 8 professions have on a 100% uptime and other 3 on a over 60% (one having for 5 points half its worth passively and other having 4 dodges instead of 2) when required, please tell me how its not just as strong (if not stronger since multi hits are evaded by dodge while DS was only able to absorb a single hit move/100b could leak trough just for example) as DS absorb? Also lets not forget that unless you are on a D/Wh build you were cooldown dependent (highly so on condi builds) to generate any kind of LF.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

A trait that grants stability in Death Shroud, would certainly be worth a GM tier for sure, but it is something our class is badly lacking.

You mean like Foot in the Grave?

I get what you’re saying, we do need more options to deal with CC, since we can’t avoid the attacks, but yeah. May want to word it differently.

FitG has a very bad uptime if you use DS properly, hell even if you use it as a stance dance, its uptime is lower than when a ele rolls around.
We need shade back.

Guys multi hit skills went trough DS, unlike on some aegis applications which is a plain skill block for the second.
Vigor something we so aptly dont have, is a more reliable way to get the same type of invul only for multi skills in same possible time frame (of 10 seconds).
SO no every other class has a more spammable DS absorb that they can permanently keep up on them be it via critting or plain playing/using skills.

TheDevice.2751:

First one is has a rather flamboyantly evil look. But yeh

The second one is my vampire (vpowerwells)

The poofy and emo of those are too strong, my eyes, they are mekromf,,,,

It has a quite big animation, blood swirls (or in case of the last attack blood swirls with green sparkles) on the enemy…

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

Both perspectives aside and looking at it instead from a game play point-of-view, being a low mobility class is a weakness. Long cast times are a weakness. In a game that favors high DPS and twitch mechanics, a slower pace of combat is a weakness. Then throw in necros’ vulnerability to CC on top of all that, and we suffer a quadruple whammy. There are attempts to compensate with our strengths; but those fall short, at the moment.

You point out a good thing, how about we get a trait that increases enemy cast times, forcing a pace as slow as necros (something like reverse quickness).

- warning, the urge of testosterone in this video is so high it might cause: headache, severe trauma, ungodly urge for chocolate cake, a visit to the local gym, reproductive failure, rainbows, cupcakes, smiles, getting shunned by everyone who sees your browser history, wanting to butter crumpets, bangle some mash, vinegar chips, parties, teethless crocodiles and mental illness or rage in case of missing the point. Watch at own risk, in case of these symptoms there is no return for you.

P.S. Combination of new youtube, me playing a charrior and spawn camping a necro in a game to earn easy glory for toxic containers and lack of sleep for 30 hours.

Stand The Wall.6987:

5 pt: shrouded removal
15 pt: gain 400 toughness in DS. helps non mm builds, mm builds get some help when minions are down.
necros do not need more access to protection. with +30% prot duration and spectral mastery one can gain 31.5 seconds of prot. add weakness on top of that, plus awesome cc, its a wonder why you guys are asking for this.

What? thats 11 (20 if you waste 2 utilites) seconds of protection not 31… Also under awesome cc what do you mean, we got 3 reliable cc skills, that is kinda very very low compared to others, true potential cc via mark and wall is about as high as a daze mesmers (which is still bad compared to warrior, guardian and ele).

I think i said it before, for most skills on a necro a 3/4 cast time is good, gives enemy time to react while not making you do too fancy hand waves with WoD, WoP, Plague, Lich, Spectral Walk, Armor and Taste of Death that should be instants while SoU (as all rezzes should be) set on a 2 1/4 cast *maybe also cutting WoB to 1/2 as all aoe field heals are, but it doesnt really matter*

Please no stats based minors, effects are usually better/less numerical problems like with vampiric and fit more builds. Like lingering attunements, fortifying bond, fast hands, sharper images, etc.

Electro.4173:

I got Rytlock in one last night with one of my Charr characters, so I can confirm that. He was the hardest boss I’ve faced in there, did a fair amount of damage and summoned Blood Legion soldiers constantly. It seems that the personal bosses are much rarer than the generic Clockwork / Molten Alliance / ect bosses, though, which is a shame. I’ve seen Rytlock once, and in all of the other 4-5 I’ve gone through its just been generic bosses. I did face the Molten Brawler twice, but I consider that generic too, at least not on the level of the enemies based on personal story.

I wish the personal encounters were more common. They’re the only thing that really makes the player feel like they’re the one hallucinating, otherwise its just all the NPCs who are wigging out while the player seems perfectly fine.

Also, anything that ties into the personal story (particularly the earlier parts of it) is much needed in this game. It makes it feel more important and less like something you do and then it never comes up again.

I was also impressed that Scarlet also taunts you based on the personal story during some of the chamber instances. She called out my Charr character about his father and asked how his redemption was going and if he’d slipped up yet.

Human nobles get called out and scarlet gets all GLADOS on a orphan character, she calls out for your sister if you went for that route too, so yeah the entire 1-30 stroyline is taunted in there (including mentor/order choice). Maybe a bit of the pact part with “what is your biggest fear” which made no sense since not a single one of them had anything to do with the quests you did for the part but maybe that counts too, sadly nothing about zhaitan nor choices you did within the story (like orphanage vs hospital or stick the corrupt blade into the underworld vs lock it off in a potentially unsafe sheathe, etc).

SolemnMalevolence.5248:

It doesn’t ‘quad your power’. It triples it. It also only doubles your precision. The problem with this is that the trade-off is that you get an awful skill-set and a very slow auto attack. The precision buff is negligible because on pretty much any zerker build you won’t need the extra precision. Just throwing one build out, 30/25/0/0/15 will do way more dps auto attacking with the dagger than done auto attacking with lich form.

Even 30/10/0/0/30 would rather not be in lich form because that build’s damage comes from Death Shroud, which gives them +50% crit chance anyway. For conditions—that speaks for itself. You gain no benefit from Lich Form here whatsoever. Tell me, what build is Lich Form good with, exactly?

edit: Not only is it only 3x power and 2x precision, but the base values for these stats are what are multiplied, making it even less useful.

I dont think that you get what multiplication is, here let me explain 1×4=4, that means it got quadrupled. Also in no unverse can you call a jump from 2 to 4k of the main damage scaling stat “not useful”

Also Dagger deals more dps than DS even in a 30/x/x/x/30 showing your lack of knowledge of the profession and basic math.

SolemnMalevolence.5248:

With most builds Lich Form will have you do less dps than you would do while outside of it, so it’s kind of a waste. Yeah, the horrors are good for drawing attention away from you in PvE, I guess, but that’s about it. I’d rather just keep Flesh Golem for the extra little bit of constant dps, aswell as a CC on demand that can hit multiple targets if I need it. Plague’s also a decent panic button if you need that kind of thing. Both are better than Lich, imo.

WTF are you smoking? Lich form quads your power, triples your precision, just with 15 points into SR on any power build you do more than you could do with anything else except maybe for with UW life blast with UW based setup. Golem is worthless as “dps boost”, he is there for the charge/more minions to proc stuff off.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Mark of Horror is pretty good, which shows that the problem with the Jagged Horrors we are used to is in timing, not the minion itself.

Well, no, the minion is actually also very kittenty, hell bone minions without PE would still be better because they kinda position themselves and know how to path correctly (as in dont run away from enemies 33% of the time after being spawned).
MoH is good because of the headcount it creates, causing aggro confusion, well for pve at least, in WvWvW they are meh at best (aoe sink) and in pvp maybe ok, but since the 78% change didnt happen there, i think that a Mighty Blow/Fire Bomb still kill all of em…

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I think one of the main reasons no one takes Toxic Landing, is because there are very few situations where you can purposefully take falling damage and land right on top of enemies. And even then, it only reduces falling damage, depending on how high the drop is (it could still kill you). That is why perhaps it should be changed so it promotes team play. I think I like the idea of Spectral Net the best, because it would allow you to assist a zerg and give a whole mob of players falling damage reduction.

Nagato no Kami is right that we’ll probably never see the day that we receive a block or invulnerability in any way, shape or form. But would refilling all your life force on taking falling damage be overpowered?

Net seems awesome and LF on fall damage would be abused.

Actually horrors are really useful (and more reliable than wind) in terms of dealing with mob aggro, since it seems that NPCs hate the sodding rats just as much as we do.

If you get onto a overflow it doesnt consume the guesting chance since it didnt put you on the actual server.

So yeah his instance was bugged, pollen not being on a timer (which might have been a feature of the instance to make it just as annoying as him and keeping you permanent in combat), but it also makes pollen damage stack each tick causing for funny 300k tick damage by the time you get to him. If you do encounter this relogging/swapping overflows fixes the damage stacks, but still annoying as kitten and honestly funny.

P.S. make the apple/cherry encounters better, they feel like normal mobs…

Can we get the curscene as a item?

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

TheAgedGnome.7520:

I’m unsure what he means by “high end” PVE. What part if PVE is “high end”? Does this means Fractals? Open-world champion zergs? Weapons racks?

But the overall gist is heartening.

I would assume Fractals, Dungeons and maybe champions in the open world (Temple of Grenth for example). I also hope this includes world bosses, like Tequatl. Because unlike most other bosses, the issue with Tequatl is not about the condition cap, but about him being considered a structure.

Actually its quite awesome that he is a structure/object and not just a npc. If he were mesmers would do the same what you could do with SB and Jorlag p2 in the first month or so and instagib him with his own skills, since we kinda know that devs wouldnt fix it till its too late.

Arius.7031:

Andele.1306:

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Intentional. We could probably add a max range but I don’t think it’s necessary at this time since it isn’t really breaking anything. The bug was what Godless described.

Dude, it wasnt a bug, stop acting like it was one that you “fixed” instead of openly saying no we will nerf necros by removing their single hit damage absorb (since all multi hits/aka most burst skills in game would go trough it when the damage to 0LF was delt); for friggas sake it was even added to the game when removing the orbs from wvwvw plain in the patch notes.

Did you ever stop to consider that the word “bug” has become synonymous on the interwebz with “not working as intended” / “currently not desired by us” and as such you’re scolding a generous dev for a small grammar mistake? With folks like you I’m sure the devs will be posting on here really frequently from now on.

a) but is something that isnt working as how it was coded because insert one of hundreds of reasons
b) the devs themselves implemented it, thus by very definition not a bug, saying they fixed it is plain lying and disrespectful to the playerbase.
c) No, the net holds and updates words according to its proper meaning, thats why saying "thats g_y means nothing, because its original definition is carefree/chill/relaxed, same reason why newbie and noob are also treated differently, look if sites like 4 chan can keep their overall respect in terms of communication to others better than the devs of a MMO its a serious problem.
d) Sure go with ad hominem if you want to ignore fact, by the way here let me sell you some magic beans that keep away tigers and tell you about a magic invisible fairy that will make sure that you dont just decompose but see all your friends and familiy on far away planet in space.

Distaste.4801:

Andele.1306:

Distaste.4801:

They don’t want healing to be powerful, that is why most healing skills in the game scale horribly. That’s actually one of the biggest problems with class balance in this game is that they are so afraid of healing and mitigation being powerful alternatives. You should be able to build a 75% mitigation build that takes huge hits and still keeps on ticking. Healing should be powerful and thus make poison a real counter. The whole class/balance system is a complete mess from start to finish. Given a day to revamp the game I’d make all armor available to each class with certain tradeoffs for each one. Make the base health the same for every class. Then make armor/toughness mitigate more, healing power scaling to match power, and % crit and % crit damage nerfed down to reasonable levels.

You mean thats why every dedicated heal is at a 1:1 ratio, heals on aa have a 0.2 ratio (which if i may add is a lot for on auto attacks), why our dear Transfusion and the following: Geyser, Water Trident, Empower, Cleansing Wave, Shadow Refuge, Super Elixir are all over a 0.8: ratio (DK DC about other professions traits tbf).
Yeah no heals scale just as well as just power does, the only broken scaling in game is crit to crit damage since they had the wonderful idea that it should be additive.

You do realize that a lot of attacks are at a 1.0 ratio or higher right(100b is 4.4, Necro dagger #2 is 2.2)? You mention the auto-attack having a .2 ratio but neglect that most attacks power scaling is .3 or greater, with the vast majority being greater. Even at the base level healing power doesn’t scale nearly as well, if it did you should be seeing equal values, instead the dedicated heal is at a 1.0 and on a 15-20s cooldown where weapon skills with much lower cooldowns can have 1.2 or greater scaling before even including modifiers.

Heals cannot be modified by any other means besides healing power, at least that I know of. Power gains use of % damage increases, certain conditions stack, both gain a bonus from might, and then there is crit, crit damage, and condition duration. Regen doesn’t stack except duration so it will never compete with bleeds even though it scales better (.05 vs .125), it scales slightly better than poison(.1 vs .125) but when you account for the 33% heal reduction it’s worse, lastly it doesn’t have the scaling of burning (.125 vs .25) so it can’t compete there.

If healing power doesn’t scale as well as power at the base level and doesn’t have modifiers how does it scale well again? Yes there are a few, emphasis on the few, skills that scale decently but that’s also why I said “most” don’t scale well. On the whole there are a ton more damage skills that scale better to power or inflict more conditions than the few decent heals can heal.

Because you can totally compare power which gets reduced by armor to healing power which gets boosted by armor… right (seriously please dont post random kitten with no worth, also Dagger 2 on necro is 2.7 power, yay for people on the wiki not writing decimals btw, and 0.3 healing power scaling didnt test since bloodthirst changes but it was that while Warrior GS is 5.5 since its melee, right?)

Poplolita.2638:

We can also turn retaliation into confusion. We might as well argue a wall is not a wall with those contesting necromancer “master of condition” title. At least, the discussion will go somewhere…

a) reliable uptime
b) no as proven before a lot of other professions can apply conditions in the same or even better controlled aoe
c) No warrior ele mesmer guardian and thief are bad condi classes because they are better in other builds and they are too limited/a 2 condi cleanse negates all their damage and if necros and engies got problems keeping a decent amount of condis on a enemy without cheeze builds (terror/toolkit) what do you think happens to those guys?

Poplolita.2638:

Andele, do you know why necromancer and engineer are considered the best overall condition build both in pvp, and wvw?

Because they are able to spread them with ease.

And for pve, warrior, thief, ranger and mesmer are in fact better at stacking condition to a single target than necro. But, with condition cap, it is simply more viable to simply spread them, something where necro excell

Uh, no its because of the condition count that they can apply (engie being able to do everything but fear n torment and necro everything but confusion even if both “weaknesses” are easy to fix with runes)

Both Warrior and Thief got the same “cleave” aoe as our epidemic can, one with a burst skill and basic attacks other with no cooldown on any skills and no utility skill usage. If you do use a utility the thieves limitation to 3 instead of 5 targets like epidemic is also mostly gone, Also engie got same area of threat as us only it doesnt require the target of all our bleeds to be in the middle, that only leaves ranger (who get aoe burning on the other hand) and mesmer (derpz reddit video of the TA overseer losing 30% of his hp doing basic attacks since a mesmer got his 25 confusion stacks on over the 10 seconds).
And no, secondary x of y means that you aint specialized in either damage/healing/tanking, but are a build that can do that efficiently/passively while focusing on another thing. Only way necros fall under strong pve condi dps (which is the only situation where you can pull your combo off) is on a boss not immune to terror and that is single target since the fears dont stick around long enough to be epied and even if they did youd need to have a bone fiend there to immob the enemy for long enough to stack it all up and cast epidemic.

Also guardians compared to mesmers ele and rangers are weaker supports, they just got the entire kit over really good specialization in one segment (Feedback>WoR, Spring>well every heal in game except their tome elite cast which is absurdly long, Auras, Fire fields and Conjures from Ele>Guardian versions). That mean just as (little) that guardians are in any way weak for helping their team just as necro being secondary condition profession means that they cannot keep and control condis on the enemies. IT DOES MEAN that your original post how we can keep a bleed cap and it being viable is utter kitten since i have shown that for not only less traits but about a third of the total investment other professions are better primary condi casters for a group.

MethaneGas.8357:

When you see a group of enemies in PvE and you’ve got Epidemic, Signet of Spite and Blood is Power and you’ve got 30/30/0/10/0, for example:

Bla bla 6 skills and tons of traits list~
So we have: about 21 stacks of bleed and more than 20 seconds of poison on an NPC (including other conditions), and a bit less on the surrounding enemies
- Epidemic —> 2x everything to everyone around the target. In other words… bleed cap. You can achieve a bleed cap with doing half of the above actions, as most attacks are AoE. Not to mention a few skills will be off cooldown by the time you use epidemic….

Except that a warrior gets 18 bleed stacks in about the same time/less (around 3 3/4 seconds) with 5 trait point+sigil investment (more if you use the on crit bleed over geomancy) via 2 skills and no dodges.
Except that thief gets at least 22 bleeds in 4 1/2 seconds with a 30 point investment and leave with 4 initiative and 70% energy.
Except that mesmers get 15~20 bleeds with a 15 point investment via 2 skills in 2 3/4 seconds.
Except that rangers get 23 stacks of bleeds with 2 skills and true wasting a pet swap in 3 seconds (not to even mention the elite that about half the mobs dont know how to attack and the other half just attacks because of aoe spam also you can make the damage a tad lower but more of a consistent upkeep and team buffs by not going for the open world eagle route but a nice kitty cat lowering it to 20~21 stacks).

Sooo, no your point doesnt stand, we are still a secondary condition class, like how shadow priests aint healers but do kinda heal and mana battery raids in WoW (at least used to).

Dalanor.5387:

You forgot Engi.

Didnt put them on because rng is rng, thing is with 3 chances each drop might have as well added em (their value, just like our, is in the plethora of condis that can be on a enemy at the same time, not the sheer stack value of a single condi). But even so we do shine quite nicely in keeping a clumped mob group chilled thanks to plague, wod, DP (no not that kind, the one on Death Shroud you pervs) and chillblains, add 40%~ cond duration and maybe like me hydro sigils (since i like the looks of it and the bit more damage also since its a good enough alternative to energy sigils with the rotation) not only permachill but tend to overkill it if you do it too fast in a row.

MethaneGas.8357:

Haha @ Y Not xD
don’t touch my wurm >:*(

@SolemnMalevolence,
—In PvE, Necros are masters of condi… theres no one else that can stack 1000000 bleeds and epidemic on all those around. The only real problem is the condi cap, which sucks when there’s more than 2 heavy condi people in the team.
— In PvE you don’t really need mobility. I wouldn’t take wurm in a dungeon, for example. If you take Blood is Power, Signet of Spite and Epidemic in a dungeon, you will be godly. By godly, i mean thousands of damage per second.

Thief, Warrior, Mesmer and even a bird shortbow Ranger are better at applying bleeds (and poison/weakness/cripple/burning respectively).

Panhauramix.2784:

Just a note to other necros: Use Spectral Walk and Wurm more often, I’ve just been accused of cheating in WvW because “Necros can’t teleport like that”. Gotta bust that myth! Peoples think we only have Signet of Spite and Epi as skills.

WvWvW is not a point of balance here, its pve (where wurm dies in now kittens and is a very bad utility even if you have the time to cast it like with lupi since it can draw away mobs you wanna kite, proc boss effects like on hit damage/grub pre headcount and swalk is plain worthless since the nerf) and pvp (where wurm is losing a utility slot which is kinda okish in case of condi necros if you wanna be selfish and swalk is mostly worthless since nerf). Please dont compare a game mode where mantra heal mesmer is something relatively op since you get a portal kitten and a aoe has a efficient 1.5k regeneration on them.
On old spectral walk it could be argued we had enough mobility since its defensive use allowed continued kite and sustain via lf.

MethaneGas.8357:

Two things.
1) We do have teleports which people don’t seem to be aware of. Spectral walk and wurm are two excellent teleports, if you know how to use them. I hate when people say “we absolutely without doubt cannot do this” when it simply isn’t true. Oh yes, and Dark Path. In WvW, USE it on neutral monsters. If you pop spectral walk, then dark path to a neutral, continue walking, then teleport back… the distance covered is unbelievable. There so, so, so much you can do with those. I’m a teleporting Necro and I’m proud of it

2)Don’t speak on behalf of everyone to better your point. There’s just as many people satisfied, if not more, than there are dissatisfied people – they just won’t come on here to write a “thank you” thread cuz that’s… human nature. Anet doesn’t ignore us. If you go to the Dec. 10th Balance Preview (Necromancer) thread, you’ll see. Also: Necro’s have been getting nerfs because it was warranted, and I’m a saying that as a Necro fan. They simply were over the top in certain aspects. No use in denying it.

There’s a few traits that people can use to refill their deathshroud. I played a Necro since beta, and I play WvW more than anything. I noticed I severely lacked deathshroud in situations. Once it ran out, I was gone. What did I do? I adapted. Oh look, 20 points in Soul Reaping —> Soul Marks --> Problem Solved. On a condi Necro you spend barely any time auto attacking with staff. Auto attack with staff is NOT condi, does no damage, but IT is what charges your deathshroud. See the problem? You take Soul Marks —> marks charge 3.3% of DS --> life’s good (or better).

Lastly… other professions have stealth, invulnerability, etc etc, but in many cases they have to invest utility skills to do that. I realise this isn’t always the case, but let’s look at
Warrior. Endure pain + Berserk Stance = 2/3 utility skills purely for defense.
—-With a Necro, people grab Blood is Power, Signet of Spite and Epidemic and cry when they get rolled over. Well…. yeah, you went with all damage. How about swapping 1-2 of those and grabbing spectral walk or spectral armor, spectral wall, flesh wurm. There’s more than a few defensive utilities that are a godsend. Personally, I take spectral wall, spectral walk, and flesh wurm. Yes, every. single. one. is defensive and yet I manage to get 145+ tick from bleeds and can easily stack them up. Not to mention survival is through the roof. I’m not even build as a tank (other than the utilities) and people say “Oh bunker Necro”. Of course, it has its ups and downs, as does everything, so sometimes I switch in corrupt boon or another offensive utility if i’m in a group setting.

I do agree that CC is a problem though, especially if you get caught in a chain of it. The best thing you can do there is close your eyes, count to five and hope you are still alive when you open them. Jk :P

You forgot a part: TLDR, play necro to casually to know what a teleport escape is.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Lorelei.3918:

I really don’t think survival is our biggest issue. Mobility, by far, is. A lot of the damage you take as a necro comes from simply not being able to get from here to there.

No, a lot of damage you take as a necro, comes from not having access to invulnerability like all other classes, and being CC’d and rooted in place. It’s our inability to render ourselves invulnerable for a few precious seconds, and the fact that all conditions continue to affect us in Death Shroud. This is why necros often are unable to escape, or survive high damage spikes.

Its not really lack of dodge/invul that hurts us, nor really the mobility (the spectral defensive changes are still dumb trough), its that we have to take the ENTIRE burst (DS is pretty much limited but refundable hp, not real migration and when that leaps into real hp we get into a lot of problems because of said thing since) its the CC that hurts us hard since if we cannot go aggro mode, we cant refill hp, we cant weaken the enemy nor can we somehow try to delay the fight till allies come. Like yeah some of the stun breaks we got are good enough in their specialized situation (right now SA for 1v1 and plague vs condis as a condi), but it doesnt do jack if we are in DS, the mode we should be in at least 40% of the time.

Bhawb.7408:

They only have one general build type in every single game mode: tanky support. And actually, they really don’t ever get changed, all that happens is things are slightly shifted around, and the best tanky support build changes. But that is basically all Guardians have ever been, a tanky support.

So hammer cc, symbol spam, meditation leap and the kinda beta infamous retaliation of fire builds are all non existent? Like ok the 3 base (shout) builds are the most popular, but thats because they give op returns for the investment thus allow the player to do whatever the *ck they want. Guardians aint getting anything because they are the current definition/stepping stone to very good.

spoj.9672:

If they want to fix this issue then they really need to fix unshakeable. Having weakness and blind being pretty useless on bosses and some bosses being completely immune to cripple/chill/fear is hurting condition control. Condition builds can be fixed with slightly better scaling, which would make the optimized groups take 1 condi spec in most dungeons.

Actually, weakness is a lot of weaker on most bosses compared to chill, to which bosses are rarely immune to and the only ones that are "immune" are structures that have timer based attacks *like the giant green linguini of tentacle knockback and lazor grape or the oakheart in the latest TA patch since slowing it and/or the holos is kinda really really bad* People just dont take note of it because the boss doesnt turn blue and drop snowflakes. also noone really bothers with their attack timings but stacks up and hur-durps fights (or tries to and gets obliterated in spin2win, axe chain throws, lazors, whipping-it-good-or-bad, getting their snake gently touched by a giant snake,etc).

With the fact that you can keep a enemy permachilled with little investment even on a power build (and you should invest in that because its bloody strong even in pve since its aoe on the target), that would also mean perma 3 or 4 stacks of confusion on the enemy unless the duration is like 2 seconds…

Dredlord.8076:

Bhawb.7408:

Avigrus.2871:

I think he was referring to the overflow changes and the lack of a one hit kill block mechanic.

This needs to be reversed if only in PvE for dungeons.

The lack of a one-hit block mechanic I agree needs to change. But no class in the game should be able to, without a single investment of any kind, be able to block one hit of infinite damage every 10 seconds.

see this is where it’s obvious you are clueless to the big picture with necro balance

In fact the necro should have this level of mitigation since by design we have the worst mobility/disengage AND no access to…..

Myrmidian Eudoros.4671:

1) Skills that block on Weapons
2) #6 Skills that block or evade
3) Access to Vigor which is entirely absent from Necromancer
4) Skills on Weapons that evade
5) Instant cast Teleports that can be used for this purpose (S Walk and F. Wurm are not the same quality as other classes have)
6) Instant Cast blinds that can be used for this purpose
7) Aegis
8) Skills that block/absorb/reflect Projectiles

at this point bawb it would be better for necro class balance if you didn’t comment on it at all with your short sighted tunnel vision arguments.

I think that you are taking my role as the person who has to smack down Bhawb from the close to devs to middleman position and pointing out some stuff.
I do have to counter point 5 of ME (wont bother copy pasting the name), Swalk used to be a ok/goodish disengage, when it was on hit 3% no ITC and left you swiftness even if you swapped out of it if you managed to get out of combat, a lot of other stuff quite similar can be done so it wasnt worth nerfing. Even if its scape power was about as strong as heartseakering out of a fight as a thief or using a targetless serpent strike, it still was a viable escape…

Lily.1935:

I can’t believe this thread is still alive.

Minion mastery seems to work on threads, sadly it procs reanimator too.

Bhawb.7408:

Avigrus.2871:

I think he was referring to the overflow changes and the lack of a one hit kill block mechanic.

This needs to be reversed if only in PvE for dungeons.

The lack of a one-hit block mechanic I agree needs to change. But no class in the game should be able to, without a single investment of *any* kind, be able to block one hit of infinite damage every 10 seconds.

LF generation isnt "no investment" its more of a investment than some other things *cough feline grace, natural vigor, etc* that allow you to not only block a single hit but a entire skill (since, if you forgot multi hits like 100b and Ghastly Claws leaked trough 1% LF absorb).

Oozo.7856:

And, let’s compare necro staff to guardian staff which is also a utility weapon. Guardian staff 1 is good while necro staff 1 sucks, particularly if you are condition.

I can’t see justification for nerfing necro staff 2 unless necro staff 1 is buffed in some way. Again, being stuck in staff when it’s utility abilities are on cooldown is nonfun, at best.

The fun part is subjective (i like the animations and fancy annoying noise), but i think that you are comparing a grape and a tomato by putting up the nvsg staff comparison.

Overkillengine.6084:

Yes and no; it really depends on how they stack up since stacking them does incur the opportunity cost of speccing in Blood as well as spending traits to get them. One way to do it is a base siphon trait gives % siphon for the base power damage on all attacks but does not crit; while vampiric precision gives a separate % bonus amount on crits only. Getting both means at least 20 pts and two traits right there.

What i had in mind more was: a) siphons being focused to compliment builds, not to make builds focus on siphons (way less toxic to the game), thus keeping healing on condi, heal on crit and heal on normal hit split.
b) not be a % of damage delt, but be either a % of your or enemy HP (so 0.5%~), based on the amount of damage you took in the last, like 7 seconds with a minimum amount on hit or a % off the dps you manage to deal once pre second (so vampiric based “regeneration” effect). All have worked in other games (even if the last one was kinda a disaster it was still enjoyable to play).

Also if you are speccing into blood (on a non well build) its probably for sustain, and if you can get sustain that keeps you going enough that you can only live with 2 dodges while actually helping allies and keeping chill/weakness/other stuff rotations on bosses to weaken them so that your allies can dps easier, it would be well worth 15/20 points (tank/dps setup respectively) or even 30 if it would heal allies wink wink nudge nudge devs.

Distaste.4801:

They don’t want healing to be powerful, that is why most healing skills in the game scale horribly. That’s actually one of the biggest problems with class balance in this game is that they are so afraid of healing and mitigation being powerful alternatives. You should be able to build a 75% mitigation build that takes huge hits and still keeps on ticking. Healing should be powerful and thus make poison a real counter. The whole class/balance system is a complete mess from start to finish. Given a day to revamp the game I’d make all armor available to each class with certain tradeoffs for each one. Make the base health the same for every class. Then make armor/toughness mitigate more, healing power scaling to match power, and % crit and % crit damage nerfed down to reasonable levels.

You mean thats why every dedicated heal is at a 1:1 ratio, heals on aa have a 0.2 ratio (which if i may add is a lot for on auto attacks), why our dear Transfusion and the following: Geyser, Water Trident, Empower, Cleansing Wave, Shadow Refuge, Super Elixir are all over a 0.8: ratio (DK DC about other professions traits tbf).
Yeah no heals scale just as well as just power does, the only broken scaling in game is crit to crit damage since they had the wonderful idea that it should be additive.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

And sadly that happens in PVE a lot. We only have our 2 dodges, and there are plenty of situations where 2 dodges are not enough. We’re not talking about something as simple as Lupicus here, such boss encounters are easy to memorize. What we’re talking about is the general chaos that is PVE, in which champions/bosses spam devastating attacks left and right, and you run out of dodges fast. Having a panic button for that split second invulnerability is essential, and it’s absurd that we are the only class that cannot do this.

I run into this problem on a regular basis, where huge mobs just spam immobilize and stuns all over the place, and every other class simply pops their invulnerability and runs off unscathed. This is why necros are abysmal for dungeons. Invulnerability also makes you immune to new conditions, and Death Shroud does not do this. That is why necros get rooted in place and turned into a fancy red Rorschach test on the floor in dungeons and in wvw.

Well you can survive lupi even with just 2 dodges, problem is you have to play very very selfishly and ignore your allies when someone gets downed to keep the focus on positioning, making sure to be a fair amount away from the red circles (since ofc they aint representative of the actual damage impact) and keeping LF up while dealing good enough damage.

Guys guys, dont feed the grawls.