Guild Wars 2

A few points I’d like to bring up in this context:

• DS somewhat favours power necros atm, but I don’t think it’s a good a idea to add a skill that only benefits conditionmancers and is utterly useless to powermancers. To that end, and since the DoT part favours conditions, I think it’s fair if the second part somehow benefits both (as is the case with poison).
• I guess we don’t really want a skill is completely useless in PvE either.
• Considering this, I’m NOT in favor of a type of cover condition that deals some kind of spike damage on removal. Mainly because of all the passive condition removal and condition removal from allies, I don’t see how this could work out well. As in, you get spiked because your trait decided to kick in? Or you get spiked because some dude next to you decided to remove your condition? This doesn’t lead to interesting gameplay imo.
• What I’m personally in favor of (and has been proposed by others as well) is something akin to Spitefull Spirit from GW1, as that type of gameplay seems to be missing for the GW2 necro atm. As the target already gets damage from the DoT, I’d propose something like this (obviously, this is but one of the many variations on this idea): Hexed – Deals damage every second; every time you deal damage, you deal X% of damage to nearby allies; stacks duration.
  The idea (in pvp) isn’t directly to deal damage but to force the enemy to do one of the following (obviously this is in situations where multiple enemies are close together): 1) cleanse the condition, 2) stop dealing damage (stop attacking or only use non-damaging skills), 3) move away from allies, 4) having other allies move a way from the affected target. All 4 benefit the necro in some way, be it making the enemy more open to other conditions (1) or temporarily taking enemies partially out of the fight (2-4) and wasting dodges (3-4). Also, it promotes smarter awareness of positioning on both sides. To achieve this, X should be chosen to add significant pressure to the enemy team if it is ignored (notice that, since it’s % of damage dealt, damage reduction/avoidance actually reduces to effect of the condition, so X could be fairly high). Imo, this could lead to interesting game play, both for the necro and for the enemy.

PS. If you go down this road, please call DS5 Spitefull Spirit and rename the trait, cause let’s be honest: the trait really isn’t worthy of the name.

Yeah, it was pretty fun. Also, like I said in the video at some point: I don’t do PvP all that much (as proven by my rank :P), so it was a very nice opportunity for me to learn a thing or two from you guys.

Concerning my recordings: my files were around 18GB… so I convert them into mp4’s with lower bitrate and I’m uploading them atm. (Also, my voice isn’t on there either and since my resolution is already rather low, I should have recorded full screen instead of 1/2…)

If you’re a man short, or if someone has to leave early or something, feel free to hit me up. I should be on but I think we have guild rush at 7.30.

jpnova.4572:

This is for dungeons/wvw

Seems to me that some of the advice you got was more PvP oriented…

A few bullet points that I’d want to bring up:

• Be willing to experiment with different stuff. Also watch a lot of videos/read a lot of guides to figure out what works for other people, but take all of it with a grain of salt. Nemesis’ video that was linked earlier is nice place to start. Keep in mind though that that video is about an attempt at a max-zerker necro build, not about a general pve build.
• Somewhat linked to this: you’ll probably figure out through experience that several of the minor traits you picked can be replaced with something more useful. Also, I started with 20 points in blood as well, but blood isn’t very awesome tbh (at least, that’s my opinion) and those points are generally better spent elsewhere. Again though, it might be best to experience this yourself.
• Do consider staff as well, the utility and general usefulness of it is pretty much unmatched in PvE and WvW. To this end, consider having staff at pretty much all times, and switching between axe/focus and dagger/warhorn as the situation demands. If you do use staff, you’ll probably want 10 points in Death Magic for greater marks.
• As said before, when using axe, consider resorting to DS1 as auto-attack. Reaper’s Might and Unyielding blast are very hot traits in that case.
• Utility skills should be changed based on the situation, but I almost always have Signet of the Locust on my bar. The passive movement speed increase gives you all round benefits that can be used both offensively and defensively. For instance, with a lack of access to vigor, the increased movement speed makes it easier for you to just run out of red circles, which in turn means less dodging and less need for increased endurance regen.

This is coming from someone that started off from a similar interest as you. Now, about 8 months later I guess, I’m running 30/0/10/0/30 with knight’s armor, berserker’s/rampager’s (depends which one) weapons and celestial trinkets. I always have staff on and switch between dagger/warhorn, scepter/dagger and, to a lesser extend, axe/focus as the situation dictates. I use this because that’s what works (best) for me atm. This is in mainly in dungeons/fractals and some casual WvW (with a 20-30 man guild group) btw.

To be fair, I found the tip on Blood is Power + boon conversion to be pretty interesting, as I hadn’t connected those dots myself yet. Obviously, taking both Blood is Power and Well of Power is a pretty unattractive way to achieve Vigor. Still, this little ‘tip’ sparks creative thought and makes me smile a little inside. The way I read it, that was pretty much the point of the post… I’d take these types of posts over yet another essay about how bad we are any time of the week (and twice on sunday :P), as we have way too much of those and they just make me (us?) feel depressed.

To take this idea a bit further: I wouldn’t be surprised if they would change Shrouded Removal to a condition conversion instead of a removal at some point (imo, it’s in line with some of the other changes they have done/plan to do) and then this idea of self-bleed+conversion suddenly becomes a lot more attractive…

Kravick.4906:

The warriors axe auto attack beats necro dagger auto attack by quite a large margin too.

You mean to say that the best sustained damage weapon on the best sustained damage class outperforms our dagger? Omg, whatever are we going to do now?

All kidding aside, yes there are still classes with better weapons. Yes, there are classes that can just load up on a bunch of +damage%, +crit%, +crit damage traits. But still, calling dagger mediocre damage is saying that 90% of the weapons in this game perform below mediocre damage… It’s my opinion that you need to adjust your definition of mediocre in such a case.

Sheobix.8796:

The dagger provides speedy mediocre power based damage, but lacks the base ratio numbers to be able to hit for numbers higher than 3.5k without too much unbalancing of your stat and trait spread.

Except that our dagger has one of the highest DPS chains in-game…

If you ever need a replacement or something, I’d love to play with you guys someday. GMT+2 atm

I looked through the patch notes before posting this and couldn’t find any mention of it. Can you point me in the right direction?

Either I’m dreaming or they recently fixed Staff 1’s range. I just noticed that I couldn’t hit Claw of Jormag anymore without standing in his ice ground thingy. Then I tested it in the Mists and if the range indicator is red you now always get the ‘Out of Range!’ message. (Where previously, being slightly out of range didn’t trigger your auto-attack, but you could still hit stuff.)

Darklimbo.1476:

So Tribune you used 1540 daggers. How much does a rare dagger cost atm ?
I think its 38 to 40 silver.So you wasted around 600g to get it. The buy offer is 610g atm so you almost bought it. Gz but thats still a problem on the precursors

Cause the other ± 76 exotic daggers he got are completely worthless?

I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible. But if you need dusk or something and you use that method and end up getting Venom… you’re going to rage pretty hard.

I think it’s reasonable to think that you just put 3 greatswords and 1 sword in there (or something similar), which for the game is just 4 random weapons and thus you get a random weapon back.

Some greatswords and swords seem to share the same icon, hence the possible confusion. I also noticed that you didn’t make the distinction yourself, as you say greatsword in the title but sword in the post.

I’ve done some more tests and reported my findings in the other thread

I have redone some of the tests above + some other ones and have both good and bad news: all the tests done above are still valid and nothing has changed the results, but the interpretation of the results was wrong. :S I’ll start with the new tests I’ve done first, as they yield the most important results and then I’ll come back to the interpretation of the previous ones.

So I went mano-a-mano (actually more like him pounding my face repeatedly, but that doesn’t sound so cool) with the warrior npc several times and recorded it all. I let him destroy a full DS and then watched the recordings to see the damage and the amount of ticks that happened. Obviously, this will always overestimate the real percentage, but I got lucky once and only received a very small amount of ‘overkill’ (I’ll try to upload that video, once I have figured out how to do some basic editing to it) that resulted in a DS-HP that is (78.5/1.3) = 60.5% of my normal HP (the 1.3 is to account for the 30 points of soul reaping I had at the time). In other words, the real number is likely 60% (which is more in line with what others have found).

In the previous tests, 60% was also the number I arrived at for conditions. Why did I/we assume then that it should be 120% and that conditions just did double damage? Well, part of the tests were done on the bonfire, which deals 2 types of damage: something that you could call ‘environmental damage’ (a percentage of you max health, similar to falling damage) and condition damage (which is based on your own condition damage). This allowed to very neatly control the damage you take by increasing the amount of condition damage you have; but the numbers only made sense if you doubled the condition damage compared to the environmental damage. Back then, Death Shroud still allowed you to see ALL the damage you took (including condition damage, falling damage, etc.), not just the damage that is also in the combat log, as it is now (when did that even change?). And the amount of environmental damage displayed was the same in and out of Death Shroud, so nothing suggested that it might actually not be. Furthermore, there was already a theory that condition damage might be doubled in DS. So since that theory could perfectly explain the results, I didn’t even consider the opposite: that halving the environmental damage explains it just as well… It now turns out that the numbers displayed on the screen back then were probably wrong (go figure) and that that is exactly what happens. (This might explain why they are no longer shown.) I looked into this a bit more and it SEEMS that environmental damage is indeed based on normal HP, but halved, in DS and not on DS-HP or something, because 1) the numbers don’t match up if you take 60% of the environmental damage it needs to be 50% and 2) the environmental damage taken in DS does not seem to depend on points in soul reaping.

TL;DR

• DS-HP is 60% of normal HP (with 0 points in Soul Reaping)
• Conditions are not treated differently
• ‘Environmental damage’ might be reduced by 50% while in DS

Softspoken.2410:

Since the “How much health does your life force equate to question” is still here (yay!) I wanted to point out that the thread Arvid gave, while great, predates the fix to Soul Reaping that made it actually yield bonus life force. I highly suspect the way calculations work have changed since then, since the numbers I’ve gotten with personal testing aren’t getting my life force damage mitigation anywhere close to 120% of my regular HP.

What if instead of it being 120% of your regular hp and conditions doing double damage, conditions always took the correct amount of life force, but direct damage was taking too little…?

Glad you actually looked at it.
As I’ve mentioned then also: I encourage everyone to try and repeat this to see if they get similar results. I’m perfectly willing to accept that the patch that fixed Soul Reaping and/or Gluttony have somehow altered this (given that someone actually ‘proves’ it in a solid way). It’s why I will also try to repeat it next week.

War Mourner.5168:

Go into DS, take the hit, leave DS. It’s quite easy to do that fast enough to get no degen.

War Mourner.5168:

… and the number I gave was after accounting for degen.

So you accounted for the degen that was supposedly not there? 0.o

War Mourner.5168:

A single hit from some random npc in wvw did 1466 damage, and did 11% of my life force

War Mourner.5168:

Edit 3: It was supposed to be 10%, not 11%, so I’ll be generous and say 1500 was 10% to keep it simple…

Recap: I spend a full day screencapturing myself and subsequently analysing every file. Finetuning the damage I take to multiples of the natural degeneration. Doing this finetuning to damage differences caused by single(!) stat points. Doing this for 3 different ‘damage sources’ (bonfire which is direct damage+condition damage, bleeding from blood is power and poison from corrupt boon). I come to the conclusion that doubling the condition part (not my finding at all btw, just confirming what others had found before) of all 3 cases yields the same effective DS-HP for all 3 (very very close to 120% of my real HP).

And then months later, this is supposed to be the counter to that? Not, hey I repeated what you did but I get something different? Not, hey I think your method is wrong because…? Not, hey I think the last patch changed something? But THIS? Are you kitten serious?

Akame.1073:

if you want 95% acurate DH health pool : …

The method that I used to calculate it, and that is explained in the link that I posted, was already more accurate than this. And more controlled and only requires you (1 necro). Feel free to falsify it…

War Mourner.5168:

Have someone use a single attack on you in pvp, make it something with a visible cast. Go into DS, take the hit, leave DS. It’s quite easy to do that fast enough to get no degen. Look in the combat log to see how much it did, and compare that to the percentage lost.

A single hit from some random npc in wvw did 1466 damage, and did 11% of my life force – that’s with 30 in soul reaping. You do the rest.

Several problems with that:

• In all the tests I’ve done, I have never seen a case where damage in DS is not applied on the tick, so no it’s actually impossible to do it fast enough to get no degen.
• For that matter, the first tick largely coincides with the transition-animation to DS, which makes it feel a lot shorter than other ticks. So it’s actually entirely possible that you even had 2 ticks in that case.
• You haven’t told us if you were using Vital Persistence, kind of crucial.
• You haven’t told us what your hp is, kind of crucial as well.
• With these small numbers, the impact of the rounding in the figure that the game displays will huge, so you’ll end up a very large error in the DS-HP you calculate.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

I’m not doubting you, but I’d like to see some hard tested numbers on this. Many of us have been questioning just what’s going on behind the scenes in DS lately, and it’s just too sketchy to theorycraft on without some hard numbers.

Actually, all of this stuff was hard tested months ago (back in october); unfortunately no one cared.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Death-Shroud-HP-Pool

Assuming that the results from then are still valid (there is nothing in the patch notes to suggest it wouldn’t, but you never know):
1) Full DS-HP is 120% of your normal HP
2) The same as out of death shroud, not including the 4% (3%) loss per second which is affected by neither vitality, toughness or +life force %
3) It deals double damage while in DS (this includes agony afaik tell)

I’ll try to repeat this experiment somewhere next week to confirm that nothing has changed since then.

Could you post your attributes in this setup?

No, the basic +5 agony resistance is a versatile (omni) infusion, meaning it fits in offensive, defensive and utility slots. Also, all the current offensive and defensive infusions come with +5 agony resistance and +5 in one stat. So, the only thing you need to ask yourself is, if you ever go for one of these more advanced infusions, do you want the small boost to one of your defensive stats or to one of your offensive stats?

You can make omni versions of the more advanced infusions as well, btw. I just costs a lot more.

Mackster.9726:

… but I have noticed that exiting DS seems to trigger weapon swap sigils, which I hadn’t noticed occurring before.

If anyone else can confirm that, I’d actually call this change a buff to be honest

I recently reached fractals lvl 40 and I was wondering if there is any way to abuse make good use of Death Shroud to survive Maw’s agony?

I know that at lower levels you can take a few more ticks with DS and if you lack a bit in the AR department, this can be a life saver. So now I’m wondering if there is any way to use the same idea to prevent the team wipe and subsequent gimpy tactics. (Probably something involving guardian’s Light of Deliverance?)

Khal Drogo.9631:

… and in Ascalonian I use the Shadow Fiend for the blind and to soak some damage if my teammates are fragile.

Is the blind AoE? I’m interested why you find the fiend more useful than Well of Darkness.

Bhawb.7408:

That said, necro is the one class where HP is possibly better than toughness, simply because of death shroud. Death shroud scales with your HP bar better than with your toughness, because everything that gives you LF gives it based on a percentage. 10% LF is twice as much with 20k HP than with 10k.

To be honest, I don’t see why DS would scale better with vitality than with toughness… Taking your example: 10% will be more in the first case than in the second one, but the natural degeneration will be the same in both cases; so the only thing you improve is your capacity to take damage. But your normal armor also still applies in DS, so alternatively you might double your armor and you would get the exact same result.

Going into this a bit further: the interplay of health and armor is generally expressed trough an effective HP (eHP) through the simple formula eHP = health (per fight) * armor. Making some abstractions to keep it simple (like ignoring healing and condition damage), the ideal ratio is to have health = 10 * armor. As you already said though, long fights (with lots of healing) quickly lower the value of health (by increasing your health per fight), while lots of condition damage lowers the value of armor (because it ignores it).

The same can also be applied to Death Shroud, which changes the formula to health = 12 * armor (because your ‘hidden’ DS health is 120% of your normal health). Natural degradation in DS affects health and armor equally (as shown earlier), so we can ignore that. From this, you might think that health is indeed a bit more valuable in DS than out of it (keyword: a bit). On the other hand, healing (life force gain) is normally also readily achieved, so all in all the scales actually tip in favor of toughness for me.

TL;DR The same principles as normal eHP apply to DS: you should find a balance between health, healing and armor. All in all, it might be best to optimise it for your ‘out of DS’ parameters and your ‘in DS’ values shouldn’t be to far of their ideal case.

I was just about to ask for an invite when I stumbled on this:

1. We are not on EU servers, sorry guys, but this will be NA servers only.

Can you elaborate on your reason for this? The only one I can find is that it facilitates party formation (avoids confusion). But, imo, having to add NA or EU to your LFGs hardly measures up to extending the fun to the other half of the player base.

Have you taken down your guides or something, Lopez?

Especially since OP’s question is about traits specifically, I seriously doubt it’s as black and white as depicted above.

Taking Mark as Blood as an example might nicely illustrate your argument, but at the same time it’s conveniently the only mark where the condition/direct damage ratio is so high. One might take Necrotic Grasp or Putrid Mark as examples and come out with the complete opposite conclusion. How all these abilities interplay with one another in a real situation is, in my opinion, very hard to judge and I’d welcome any attempt to do so. As such, it is also very hard to judge which one of the two will come out on top. For now though, we could have a look at what governs all abilities separately, (from 1 to 5, thus from low to high cooldown) that is: Power, Condition Damage, Condition Damage, Power, Power. To some approximation, this, for me, suggests that staff was actually designed to scale roughly equally well with both power and condition damage.

That all aside though, and remembering that the question was mainly about traits, let’s take a look at Mark of Blood again. As it so happens, Spite does not only increase power but condition duration as well. So if we have to make a choice between 30 Spite or 30 Curses, Mark of Blood would respectively deal 30% (from increase in duration) or 35.3% (300*5%=15 and 15/42.5=35.3%, notice that this goes down A LOT if you have other sources of condition damage) more bleeding damage. I’m pretty sure your increased direct damage overcomes this 5.3% difference (and remember that this is the mark that deals the most condition damage…). In return all your conditions are more effective (including chilled, poison, etc.) and you get more damage out of the rest of your Staff, Wells, Death Shroud, Lich Form, etc. (And for those that would argue duration increase is bad because of 25 bleeding stacks limit: outside of open world PvE, I have very rarely seen 25 stacks of bleeding on a target, let alone it being a real problem.)

Now if you would’ve asked: do I take a Berskerker’s or a Rampager’s Staff, that’s another discussion entirely…

The tooltip damage is actually the result of that equation versus a reference armor value (2600 at lvl 80).

Or as the wiki puts it:
Tooltip damage = (average weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (level-based Armor value)

Is it just me, or is attack a completely useless and misguiding statistic? It basically says in the tooltip that it governs damage, but that actually depends on the product of power and weapon damage instead of the sum…

Unless you want to specialise yourself in single target for some reason, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t take staff.

Also, I love how people have proven since the first month after release that, even in a power build, scepter is our second most damaging single target weapon (after dagger). Yet 5 months after release, we still get to read all these awesome ‘Scepter on a power necro, you noob bro?’-opinions… At the same time, we can also enjoy the flood of ‘bug this, bug that… Anet you so slow, fix it already’-topics. Hooray!

Karl actually addressed this in november (glad you’re keeping up…):

Difficult times editing posts!

So here’s the deal on that one: Dark Path is intentionally slow because it tracks the target and allows you to start using other skills before it connects. One of the ways that I love using it is launching it at an enemy that’s at near (but not at) max range, fearing them, exiting DS, then starting Dark Pact. As soon as the Path projectile hits them, you shadowstep and immediately immobilize them from the short-range Pact, then pound on them with dagger skills and wells. When Dark Path is faster, it’s harder to use it to effectively combo other skills.
For in-deathshroud abilities, I tend to use Life Blast until my bar’s about 50% depleted, then Dark Path+Life Transfer for maximum damage and chasing power.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/PHEW/first#post610999

Also, I read somewhere that Dark Path was a ‘normal’ (ground targetted) teleport in one of it’s earlier iterations and it turned out to be OP, so…

From https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Simple-Improvements-to-Death-Shroud-and-Boons/first#post980222:

I can say we are working on updating the UI for DS so that you can actually see your health bar, boons, conditions, etc. We think this is the first step for DS.

So I think there is a reasonable chance that we might see some improvements in this area in the next patch.

I’m betting on DS UI improvements as the major thing for this patch. As it was mentioned in December, if I’m not mistaken, that they are working on this. Also, reanimator+lupi and similar issues will be addressed.

They said they were working on minion AI as well, but I expect that to be in the february/march patch as this was a lot later than the DS UI post and it probably needs a lot of testing internally.

Vissy.5861:

I tried Dagger/warhorn with berserker gear which I think is very fun.

If you like this playstyle, Knight’s or Soldier’s gear are good alternatives to Berserker’s if you want to trade a bit of your offence for more durability.

Haha yeah, I did 20 the first time with 5 as well. We ended up doing the dredge fractal with the dredge powersuit, I ended up as lava guy but because of that I couldn’t see his agony attack (on top of that, I had no clue yet how his attack works). I got downed every time he did it… Good times

Just to add some information:
I did/do 20-28 with 10 AR and it’s very much doable, although you can’t go about it brainlessly anymore.

What I mean is: the damage you receive from conditions is doubled. In other words if you would take 328 damage from burning, and you’re in Death Shroud, you instead lose a percentage equivalent to 656 health (on top of the 4 or 3% natural degeneration).

I can suggest this old thread if you want to read up on it. (I specifically linked to a post by myself which I believe contains some good evidence, but the idea was brought up by Vadren earlier in that topic).

If the past is any indication, I’d dare venture a guess that we will see some red posts again in the coming days. So here is my attempt at getting some elucidation on a few points related to Death Shroud and condition damage/agony.

• It is ‘well know’ that damage from conditions is doubled while in Death Shroud: working as intended? (It’s been a while since I last tested this myself, but since there has been no mention about it in the update notes, I assume it still applies.)

• It has also been mentioned before that you can take some pretty ridiculous damage from agony while in Death Shroud. E.g. in lvl 20-28 fractals with 10 AR it is not uncommon that I lose a full life force bar in 2 or even 1 tick of agony*… (Because agony damage is typed as condition damage and the effect described above applies, or because AR isn’t taken into account?) Again, working as intended?

I’m hoping we could get some answers on this, as I feel it could benefit all necromancers. In the mean while, please feel free to add any information you might have on these topics.

*Probably when the agony is stacked in intensity, but still…

You’re right and on the one hand that makes more sense.

Following your comment, I did some calculations and it seems I was completely off about some stuff I had always taken for granted. I’ll need to take a step back and re-evaluate certain things. Thanks for helping me see that

I’d like to add: I just did some calculations regarding power/precision/crit damage. If I’m not mistaken, the ideal ratio is
1+Crit Damage*Crit Chance = Power/2100

So assuming you have 50% crit chance and +100% crit damage (50% from gear and 50% naturally), you would only need 1400 power to maximize your efficiency. Since you start with 916 naturally, that’s only +484 power. Notice though that this is just to maximize efficiency, obiviously more power will still mean more damage.

Also notice, for crit damage, that there are good and bad sources for it. Specifically the crit damage/‘other stat’ trade off is ridiculously good for jewels (you get close to 3 times more crit damage versus other sources) and, to a lesser extend, the Soul Reaping trait line. See http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature#Numeric_Attributes_vs._Percentage_Attributes

Imo both are useful, scepter is probably higher single target damage (e.g. most bosses) but staff is superior in aoe.

I run 0/30/10/0/30 myself, not really pure direct damage more of power-hybrid approach. I primarily focus on DD but do not forgo condition damage where it seems worth it; that means taking celestial items where possible, knight’s for the other trinkets and armor, and rampager’s weapons. (Still fine tuning this, so don’t blindly copy it). What I actually want to tell you with this : if you’re going to run staff, please consider Greater Marks (10 points Death Magic) as it’s very useful/strong for an adept trait.

As to Power/precision/crit damage: this depends on how much you have of each, similar to how ideal eHP relies on an interplay of vitality and toughness.

Good guide, I have to agree with most of the points you make.

I can only suggest to clean it up a bit by fixing some of the errors that slipped in there, if only to shut up those that would dismiss your guide based on that. For instance, Weakening Shroud having an internal cooldown and only applying 1 stack of bleeding and Gluttony giving +10% from skills (not kills) are two things that come to mind.

In fractals, I’d say toughness>vitality:

• As the previous poster pointed, in long fights a high HP buffer is worth less. Or to expand on that: it’s only worth it if you have means to recover that lost health. In my opinion, our HP recovery is generally somewhat limited. Every fight that matters in fractals is a long fight, so yeah…
• It’s important that your HP buffer is high enough so that you can at least take a hit (in other words: so that you’re not dead every time you fail a dodge or something). I’m at Fractals lvl 23 atm and I have yet to encounter any move that truly 1-hits me (except Maw, obviously; and only when I have sufficient AR). My health is only at 20k, which is pretty close to our base health.
• With the way agony works, you’re just plainly getting more damage from it the more health you have. Health that you’ll then have to recover somehow. On the other hand, there are no %-based healing skills that I know off…
• I’m constantly running around in Knight’s gear and I’ve never had any issues with aggro whatsoever. Obviously, I’ll get the random boss attack once in a while. But I have never encountered this ‘why does he only target me’-thing that others have previously described.

Could you elaborate a bit on what we’re seeing in that picture? Like, where is the necro: close to the enemy beast?

I see you have fear on you there: the only way I can see that coming from a necro that is that far out of range is if you just stepped into a Reaper’s Mark?

MrMoo.7923:

Having a vote to disable kicking or just automatically disabling party kicks in FOTM would be far superior to this. I’ve never even needed to kick anyone in fractals anyways. No matter how bad someone is, it’s still better to at least have them in the party.

I’m only at lvl 21, but I’ve once had a guy going inactive (he had to go to work) without logging off his character. So, the only way for us to continue to the next fractal was to kick him out of the party (or perhaps wait until he was considered inactive and out-logged out?).

On the other hand, I’ve recently had 2 idiots that decided to kick a guy that was afk for 2 minutes during Maw… as an added bonus: the guy was party leader, so we all got thrown out… -_- (a nice waste of 2 hours of my life, as it had been far from a smooth run to get there…)

Long story short, there are times you need to kick a guy and there are times you wish the ability wasn’t there…

Kravick.4906:

There are many instances where having a pet is detrimental to your party. […] The “Lightning Ramp” in the Rata Sum fractal.

I have somewhat of a question about this: before I had any points in Death Magic, I was always the first one up on this “Lightning Ramp”. But since I changed my traits, it has become a lot harder as my jagged horror will always trigger one of the ‘traps’. So… does anyone know a quick trick to despawn your minions (other than quickly going in and out of Lich Form/Plague)?

Ok, makes sense.

Is there any way to see how many stacks of agony you got? (I don’t remember ever having seen a number attached to the icon?.) And does agony stack in duration or in intensity?

Last week I did fractals lvl 20 with only 5 agony and the Dredge Powersuit was constantly 1-hitting me with his agony… Yet looking at the wiki, I should only have received 50% damage from him (4*12.5%). On top of that, it’s strange that he could hit me in the first place as I was rather far away from him and he had no line of sight to me when this was happening (because I was the guy doing the lava and I was wall hugging on the platforms while running inbetween panels).

So my question is: does anyone have any explanation for this? Cause I’m starting to fear my AR is somehow bugged…

@Lopez: What are you smoking and where can I get some?

There’s a lot of stuff wrong with what you said there, but this takes the crown:

This is particularly exacerbated by how the weapons work. Dagger’s overall coefficient for power is about 40 to 50 percent, while its coefficient for condition damage is very close to 0 percent. Scepter’s overall coefficient for condition damage is 40 to 50 percent, while its coefficient for power is about 10 percent. That means stacking the right stat for each weapon is extremely beneficial.

The game mechanics don’t work like that… at all!
Direct Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
Bleeding = 2.5 + (0.5 * Level) + (0.05 * Condition Damage)
Etc.

This means that a skill’s skill-specific coefficient determines if it is a high or low direct damage skill, but all of them scale exactly the same (doubling power is doubling direct damage whatever the skill coefficient is). Also notice the absence of weapon coefficients for power or condition damage…

And finally: look up what exponential means, cause I don’t think you do.