How does this sound… This is for an EB replacement.
There are 3 lanes with 5 points in each lane. These lanes meet together like a Y shape.
Point 1: Your spawn.
Point 2: Tower A.
Point 3: Keep.
Point 4: Tower B.
Point 5: SMC.
The map uses a linear model. Take take a point, you must have all preceeding points. You can still siege and kill the lord in any structure you want, but the control point doesn’t activate unless you have a lord alive in every point leading back to your spawn.
This does 2 things. 1, it forces zergs to split up to defend and scout properly to ensure your structures aren’t attacked in your lane to stop you from claiming a new structure. 2, it makes it harder for 1 server to dominate both other servers at the same time because there are too many structures to keep the link back to your spawn.
You can then introduce a MOBA element to this with siegerazer.
When activated, 50 guards will spawn and march to tower a. Once they reach tower 1, they will stay there for 30 seconds and repair it, and build some basic siege to defend it.
After 30 seconds, 25 guards will move to the keep and stay there for 30 seconds. Once there, they will repair the keep and build some basic siege.
After 30 seconds, 15 guards will move to tower B. Repair its walls, and build some light siege. And that’s it. No NPCs will help push an advantage on SMC.
Siegerazer will also march from spawn to the keep giving the guards a survivability buff, but will stop at the keep so his advantage won’t push to tower B or SMC.
Does something like this force zergs to split up sufficiently? At least once they try to move beyond SMC? Does the NPC element seem like enough to push an overwhelming force out of your lane in the event you’re trying to fight against coverage?
I could see it just turn into a ‘rage’ type mechanic like Warriors have.
Greatsword auto would build life force rapidly and skills 2 through 5 would use a set % of life force and deal damage directly related to the amount consumed.
Like number 5 would be an arcing slice type attack that did x+25% of your life force. So if you had 15k life force saved up, it would use ~4000 of it and deal that much more damage on your attack.
The F1 skill could be changed to an overpower shot that drains 5000 life force a second and once you reach 0 life force, it shoots a beam attack at your target dealing XX% of your life force drained in damage.
Alternatively, it could just be a channel where you root yourself in place and rapidly build life force.
But that’s just me wish listing. In reality, do you guys honestly feel the class is in a position to have the shroud mechanic changed substantially? The class would be a sitting duck imo. It’ll probably be something far more basic. A hybrid of my first point perhaps where several of the greatsword skills cost life force to use for example.
The problem you’re ignoring is what those classes sacrifice to provide the utility being mentioned. Most of the classes provide it with their meta weapon like Engis and Eles. Necromancer doesn’t use focus. Mesmer can remove boons with their meta wepaon. No content will ever require perma chill or weakness to beat an encounter. At most they’ll have unique times to use them. And at that, other classes do it better.
If you want a class to do poor damage to provide these things, Necromancer still wouldn’t be it because a Ranger can provide perma chill and weakness with the same weapon. Warrior can provide perma weakness with tons of other utility.
While I admire your goal, simple fact still remains that Necromancers provide subpar damage and no utility. They are the least effective PvE class in this game. Even if they introduced encounters that needed specific mechanics tailored around things the Necromancer provides, they still would be inferior to alternative classes.
There’s nothing wrong with being a selfish class. Overall, Thieves don’t provide too much to the group, but they get invites because their damage is significantly ahead of all but 1 class. Increasing Necro sustain to this level would get the class noticed and it would be quite easy to do without breaking PvP or WvW. Alternatively, give the class only a moderate increase in overall sustained damage but up the group utility some.
But no matter what the problem relates to damage and utility of the class, not the zerk meta or the straight forward approach to PvE content. No one wants to be the anchor in a group brought only because some niche role 1 encounter requires a necro for. The class should be vital regardless and those niche encounters you’re fighting for should be the icing on the cake.
(edited by Atherakhia.4086)
Rapid fire shouldnt hit through stealth. its a load of bull. Also, no you can’t always dodge it. A smart ranger will always use rapid fire after a dodge roll so you can’t dodge the whole thing. Signet of stone is just kittened.
This isn’t a rapid fire issue. All channeled skills will hit through stealth. Don’t stealth after the channel has started.
You’d just be back here the day they made that change once the damage lost from the pet was placed back on the ranger.
Which would be waaaaaaaaaaaaay worse. XD Oh my lord.
The only ranger pet thing that needs changed is the “automatic” knock down from the dog. I don’t support 100% passive CCs like that. But yeah, buffed rapid fires would be glorious…That ‘automatic’ CC is on a 40s cd (that can’t be viewed by the player) and has an activation time of 1 1/4 second if anything that already a pretty high price for knockdown that otherwise not really controllable.
Doesn’t really matter. That sort of automatic thing doesn’t really have a place. if it was an automatic short immob or cripple, sure, but knockdowns/stuns, they just don’t really have a place in as a completely behind the scenes aspect to an AI unit in PVP (specifically this game’s PVP). The active ones are fine. You can justify it as “a long cooldown” but it doesn’t really change the fact that people LOSing the ranger to heal are pretty often getting hit by these semi-rng knockdowns out of anyone’s hands technically.
Rangers have begged for the secondary pet skills to be put under player control for years. You’ll just have to live with it I’m afraid.
This is the most absurd logic I think I’ve ever heard on this topic.
The game is dying. The playerbase can no longer support the number of servers it has. It does more harm than good keeping the player base fragmented because people see fewer and fewer playing each day and they get more and more bored.
You’re right. The game mode needs to change so it’s worth people’s time and energy to play. But in 3 years have you gotten any hint from ANet that they are capable of this? I haven’t.
Server mergers are a necessary way of life with MMOs. They all do it. The fear that the expansion will cause some huge influx of players is also unfounded. This happens in other MMOs too. You know what they do? They open another server and allow servers to transfer to the new one for free.
This constant shuffling of servers ensures the players are always presented with a viable playerbase to enjoy the game with. It’s a far better alternative to the ‘lets wait until ANet fixes WvW and makes it worth doing’ theory you’re trying to suggest.
Did they mention if they’ll ever get around to adding the ability to save multiple builds and swap between them quickly? This is the main problem with including courtyard in the queue as well.
The other main problem is how horrible overall class balance is in this game. Many classes aren’t viable at all in Conquest, but somewhat viable in Courtyard. The same will be true in Stronghold no doubt, but 10x worse with the addition of another class and specializations.
We need seperate queues and swappable builds.
Alternatively, a balanced product may also work.
(edited by Atherakhia.4086)
Its not even that it is mobility, but stealth exists as a mitigation for “squishy” builds. Imagine if Guardian or Warrior got stealth, it would be absolutely ridiculous. Same for Necro.
Engineer is hardly squishy and they have access to it.
Stealth conveniently solves one of the major problems the class has: pealing. With no mobility or knockback, stealth would at least give the class an answer to being trained down.
The reduced damage would be easier to swallow if the range was 900. As it stands, the range is simply too close to dagger and the damage so significantly inferior to it that the weapon feels redundant.
Another major issue is with the limited utility. While vulnerability is great, it’s also a very common condition throughout the whole game and hardly worth trying to style a weapon after. The set as a whole needs more utility. The easiest thing to do is either reduce the cooldown on unholy feast or to make unholy feast a blast finisher.
At least with these 2 changes you’d feel like the weapon has a unique niche to actually fill. Right now the weapon feels so similar to dagger that it’s just not worth using.
We can’t even get 8 classes fairly evenly distributed in PvP with any kind of diversity. It’s safe to assume that increasing this to 18 will be disasterous.
I agree with OP and eagerly await the day they increase Rapid Fire’s damage by an additional 35% to offset the loss of pet damage given the Ranger’s class mechanic. No take backs!
How did other games with similar playstyles handle the coverage wars?
Few offer a persistant open world like GW2. Shadowbane and DAoC did. Instead, most just have overflow servers and your total score is the sum of each server’s total.
Will Shadowbane’s approach work? In shadowbane you had siege stones and in order to attack a structure you would declare a siege. The defenders would then interact with the siege stone and be given a window of 7 hours (I think it was 7, can’t remember) to choose when their structure would become vulnerable to attack. You then had 1 hour to try and attack the tower while also needing to defend the siege stone from attack.
Will what WAR did work here where there are just overflow servers so effectively it was just a FFA 100v100 map with an objective to attack or defend something and at the end of the day a total score was derived from the sum total of all these overflows. At least with this you don’t need servers.
Or do you do what GW2 and DAoC did and just say kitten it all and let the players do whatever they want?
Is there a better alternative? What did some of the other open world games do?
Tier 4 – 7 hasn’t seen a queue in a year even 30mins after reset.
Every server in T4 and T5 has seen a queue outside of reset.
My appologies then. I was on FC just this last reset and lol. I think I saw 20 people.
This just in: a single T7 server represents twelve servers across four tiers.
I acknowledge it was a generalized statement. Still kitten tier.
Tier 4 – 7 hasn’t seen a queue in a year even 30mins after reset.
Every server in T4 and T5 has seen a queue outside of reset.
My appologies then. I was on FC just this last reset and lol. I think I saw 20 people.
We already know what forced PvE incentives for WvW looks like. It was called Season 1 and it made things much worse.
Your concerns about over population are also easy to fix. You just open a new server and offer free transfers to it from over populated realms.
This is how real companies handle population problems. Yes, even the ones that charge for transfers.
T1 and T2 have higher populations of players who like to WvW. It’s a game-style choice we make. Anet can’t force T3, 4, 5, 6, 7 servers to WvW if they don’t want to.
But given the way world servers work for PvE and how all PvE content ignored server boundries, why even have tiers 4-7?
Tier 1 is great. Tier 2 is alright, but it has 1 too many servers and one is always cycled out. Tier 3 is absolute [censored] because that one tier2 server that cycles out each week completely obliterates both servers in tier3.
Each week this server that’s cycled out loses hundreds of players because they’re tired of taking a break every other week when thrown to tier 3. So eventually one of the tier2 servers that cycles out will be a desserted wasteland like tier 3 and below.
Tier 4 – 7 hasn’t seen a queue in a year even 30mins after reset.
The servers need to be combined or they need to introduce the PvE world server architecture to their WvW game mode in some fashion.
The icing on the cake is the fact that the other thread hasn’t even been locked yet. People are literally attacking the new guy and I’m starting to wonder how many pages deep it’ll get before ANet gets around to doing something.
Poor Marmatt is going to need a lot of help in here. It’s funny that they gave PvP 2 specialists when they already have real devs and community managers visiting that page on a daily basis posting. You’d think they would have chosen half a dozen people to handle this forum.
You’re pretty much spot on Nick.
Their paid moderators are probably being downsized or burned out so they’re getting players to fill the void.
Players will take all the forum discussions and summarize them for the official community managers to summarize even further before handing off information to the developers.
The developers will then see a giant WvW sticker at the top and throw those suggestions directly in the garbage.
Business as usual.
But best of luck to Marmatt. Hopefully he can get some real discussion going and maybe ANet will prove me wrong too.
Okay, so serious question. Let’s say you burn both your dodges to avoid that Rapid Fire. You have zero endurance now. Assuming they started attacking from 1500 range, you have to close some of that range, right?
Now you have no endurance and they have Point Blank Shot. So if you close distance and don’t have a 3rd dodge ready, they can knock you back again. And by this time, Rapid Fire’s back, you have to eat at least half of it.
Let’s say you have Vigor or something and get a 3rd dodge by the time you close distance and dodge the PBS. Now you have zero endurance again and, oh look, Rapid Fire is off cooldown because it’s 8s traited.
And even if you manage to get to them, they have Signet of Stone for 6s of invuln which is practically enough time to get Rapid Fire back off cooldown again.
Anyway, I totally get the “dodge the big attack” thing, but in the end, that big attack requires more dodges than you have (without vigor) and leaves you vulnerable to other attacks.
(The real lesson for me is that I need gap closers as I have none. I’m just saying that “l2dodge nub” isn’t necessarily workable advice. Especially if you add a second Ranger in the mix.)
You just described the issue a Necromancer may have while at the same time ignoring that the Necromancer still has access to several fears, several chills, dark path, and the possibility of lich/plague to get there. And this is the least capable class of countering a Ranger.
The OP is a Thief. It’s laughable to think a Thief is struggling at all with the 1500 range of a Ranger.
Play ranger, learn its weak points, problem solved.
+1
Lol this is great, Thieves have been saying this forever, whenever another class complained about them.I don’t find playing 2-button class fun.
You keep saying 2 button class like that should mean something.
If you’re legitimately losing to a Ranger using only 2 buttons then you have a lot more wrong than anyone in this thread is giving you credit for. Most think you’re just trolling, but perhaps you truly are the absolute worst Thief known to man?
There is a single class in this entire game that has a legitimate complaint when it comes to Rangers and that’s Necromancers. The next closes class to have an honest issue are Rangers themselves. Thieves least of all should be struggling against power Rangers.
It’s best used to help get the stomp. Its firing arc can be sketchy at times as I seem to have Hunter’s Shot fail far more often than the other shots. Just keep at it and see if you can find out which scenario mentioned in the posts above are causing you problems and try to work around them.
Cut him some slack guys. In order to be a specialist you had to have no infractions and have a positive outlook on the area you represent.
One does not post in the WvW forum without being infracted.
One certainly doesn’t have a positive outlook on WvW after nearly 3 years of playing it.
Cut the OP some slack and lets see if anything positive can come of this.
OP: Why don’t you try and hit the ground running by going through the past few pages and find a topic you’d like to send to ANet first and we can get some discussion going.
Lack of rewards, dying servers, poor coverage, horrible balance, and stale gameply are always winners!
ANet doesn’t know what the WvW community wants because they didn’t bother listening to the WvW community when we tried to bring it up. They effectively told us to shut up and wait for the official, and now defunct, GvG CDI.
ANets mistake (or the players for inferring?) was ever relating Stronghold to GvG in the first place. It’s just another sPvP game mode along the same lines of team deathmatch in Courtyard. It’s anets next feeble attempt to make GW2 relavant as an eSport and try and fit into the MOBA scene.
Perhaps ANet will figure out one day how great WvW could have been and how GW2 could have actually been genre defining. Alas, it will be another in a long line of failed esport titles.
I think it is viable, you just need to have good teammates.
Radioactive could use better necromancers on their team. If you go back and watch the NA wts qualifiers their necros dont really win any 1v1 and you can tell they heavily rely on lich form. The only thing they seem to do right is coordinate lich forms.
OP is good, rip could be better.
OP was the power Necro wasn’t he? Other was running Dhuumfire?
This was the match against Euratein as well? Ranger just man handles Necro so easily. Especially when they’re power spec.
If you changed it to transfer before the stunbreak, wouldn’t it transfer a stun as well (not just fear, but a standard stun).
I think it would be more valuable for the class as a whole to leave the functionality the same but improve the overall value of the signet another way.
Things like reducing the cooldown or adjusting the passive’s range so you wouldn’t pull from so far away.
ps. You can steal fear from an ally if people were still wondering if that was possible.
OP: Already been asked for numerous times. Ignored each and every time like the entire WvW community.
I’ve just got 3 easy questions for ANet to answer…
1.) Can they at a very bare minimum, turn FFA PvP on a PvE map and keep the world server archetecture in place so players can fight other players outside of their current match up?
2.) Can you expand the FFA PvP to simply make it so players outside of your guild are flagged for PvP and those within are friendly and can’t be harmed?
3.) Can you clone a PvE map, remove all the PvE NPCs and allow players to ‘queue’ to this map just like they would EotM or OS?
That’s it… a cloned PvE map devoid of all NPCs that players can join and create overflows just like a normal PvE map, that uses a different ruleset so everyone outside of your guild is flagged an enemy.
That’s all it would take. ANet can continune to ignore it and allow players to police it on their own just like they currently handle GvGs on their own.
I am curious, if conditions are so strong, why do you see no actual conditions builds on high end teams?
Every high end team is running celestial amulet with engis, warriors, and elementalists. Each of these see a lot of their damage come from condis. Not every class has hybrid weapons like these do
The game’s flashy enough imo. the best you could hope for are animations more in line with telegraphs so spells are easier to distinguish while casting.
Marks for example is something a lot of people have been asking for so they are easiest to distinguish which is being cast as the current casting animations are too subtle. Beyond that I wouldn’t hope for much unfortunately.
While Druids have some basis in real life, it’s safe to say they’ll follow the more traditional D&D/RPG elements of what a Druid is. Just like the Ranger class, while having a real world meaning, follows a more traditional D&D/RPG role.
It’s like the whole ‘Rangers are called rangers because they range’ argument. No one cares. Rangers follow a very specific archetype that’s common within the genre.
Druids will likely follow suit, and in the MMO genre Druids tend to be more support/healer archetype focusing on crowd control and conditions.
I’ve been a fan of the staff and druid angle for a long time now. You’ll find my posts in the old cdi thread hoping for just this kind of thing. The reason I like the idea of the staff and druid angle is they have the potential to completely change the way the entire class is played.
This is where your idea, while entertaining, fails imo. You really don’t change how the class will play. You kind of just expand on what the class currently has.
The expansion needs to draw people back in. It can’t do that by introducing more of the same. Hopefully the Druid doesn’t disappoint us.
It’s not even a flat 5%.
Per the OP we’re only talking about armor. Armor has a much lower impact on your overall stats than weapons or trinkets have.
If this were a discussion on weapons, yes you absolutely want the ascended weapon. Trinkets as well, but they’re relatively inexpensive. Armor is trivial.
The only time turrets are easily countered is if the engineer piles them all up on the center of a point. Most spread them out giving you no option but to single target them down. Not every class has rapid fire levels of single target damage to rip a rocket or net turret down in a split second.
They simply provide too much utility ontop of the excessive levels of utility the Rifle already provides.
That’s one thing I really liked about my Asheron’s Call days. It took a lot of effort, but once you finally crafted that Atlan Weapon, Greater Shadow Armor, Composite Bow, etc you really felt like you had something great.
But all of these are PvE types of things. I really don’t see how you make PvP rewards more meaningful. They’re all just a grind and a PvP players really don’t want/need any of it.
The good old ‘stand there and take it up the …’ motto.
Generally speaking classes are either swift and nimble or slow and steady. The Necromancer is neither.
How do you expect the class to hold its ground and fight through every engagement without stability? On top of this, a lot of the Necromancer’s skills have long cast times or are channeled so they’re easy to avoid and interrupt. Especially if you play a power spec.
Something needs to change. Either the class needs to be given the tools required to escape a melee train and repositon itself to reliably deal damage, or it needs to be given the tools to reliably deal damage while face to face with the enemy.
Personally, I’d prefer it be given 1 or 2 more reliable methods to escape a melee train so it isn’t so reliant on its team in PvP and can also roam more effectively outside of a condi spec in WvW. But it also needs stability so it can be more self sufficient in WvW and PvP.
The durability angle is such a joke. You honestly think Death Shroud provides more durability than healing signet? Troll Ungent? Perma Regen? Come on guys… face facts.
Necro sustain is bottom tier and group utility is non-existent. Stop being delusional… lol.
This should summarize everyone’s opinion…
No class in GW2 is useless, but the Necromancer is the worst PvE class in the game.
That good enough to make everyone happy?
Since when are Elementalists not great at Zerging, Roaming, PvP, and PVE?
Not sure what you expected. Even if you’ve been gone for a year all you’ve missed is one (maybe two max) feature packs, and a few tiny balance patches. The expansion will be the first time since the Dumbfire patch that we’ll see a big change.
That’s alarming in and of itself though. It’s reasonable for the OP to complain about this 6 month patch cycle ANet seems to have adopted. Especially given the most recent ‘6 month’ patch we received a week or 2 ago.
Things like Necros under-performing in PvE should be fixed prior to going into the expansion. Otherwise the GS will be less about providing the Necromancer a fun, alternative style of play and more about filling in holes to make it relevant in PvE.
How do you propose nerfing it then since everyone acknowledges it’s strong. Unless we want to continue this ’it’s too strong—it should be’ circlejerk?
My opinion of the sword, even when ignoring the leap, is it’s a PvE weapon or a condi weapon. I’m not a fan of the weapon for WvW or PvP on my power build and I don’t run condi Ranger.
I can have a negative opinion of a thing and not have a problem using it. There isn’t a L2P issue for me. The argument I’m making is there shouldn’t be a L2P issue for anyone.
But anyway, since I was mistaken… here are your quotes:
Main-hand sword
I just want to clarify for good that main hand sword is currently working as intended. All movement skills cannot be interrupted by dodging and this is currently intentional. It has a very specific play style, and I would like it to remain. I understand that rangers want a one handed melee option that is more mobile, but that will have to wait, as I know there are a mix of players who also like how this weapon plays and I do not want to take away one of the more unique playstyles that we have and replace it with something that is fairly common.
I just had a wacky idea that might make some aspects of MH sword less frustrating. I’ll test it out when I get in to work and report back.
Jon
So is the weapon working as intended? Clearly. Is it counter intuitive and frustrating? Clearly. Do I care? Apparently more than I should.
You give ANet far too much credit. They’ve even said it’s not working as intended in the CDI thread I believe?
I wonder which side of the debate has more supporters.
At what point do we acknowledge that we shouldn’t have to work around a problem?
So what you’re saying is that you just want easymode. Too lazy to work around a unique class mechanic, with the argument, that some other classes have it easier… Nice…
Again, why should I have to work around something? Working around it implies it has a negative, unintended effect.
All of those methods to circumvent a problem that shouldn’t exist results in a DPS loss. At what point do we acknowledge that we shouldn’t have to work around a problem?
ps. I’ve done all PvE content this game has to offer except the new fractals with a Ranger on a 1h sword. I know how to use it. So please don’t persist with the whole ‘l2p’ argument.
I also run Dagger Focus as I prefer the regen and bouncing reaper’s touch. The boon removal on shivers is also nice in the rare event I actually land the skill. I honestly don’t understand why so many Necro skills are on such long cooldoowns.
The only time I really run dagger off-hand is when I’m also running Chilling Darkness which is usually in a zerg scenario if I run triple well.
Firstly, I can think of PBS as something 99% of the player base HATES to see a Ranger use. Ill effects include…well anything you wouldn’t want KB’d, now gets KB’d way out of range.
As far as the sword, It is like that because of the leap chains. You cannot just cancel out of a leap. It just so happens your ‘overwhelming majority’ thinks everything in the game stands still, and thus gets stuck in a leap animation when that thing eventually moves.
What I am getting at is, spamming in general is bad. Yes, it may have worked in situations such as early dungeon runs where you shove something in a corner and spam at it. That does not mean its good game design. As a result something like the Ranger’s 1H sword suffers…because it punishes you for spamming.
Again, you’re going outside the scope of the discussion we’re having. We’re comparing spammable attacks, which for 7 of the 8 classes, is the #1 skill for each weapon.
Of these dozens of attacks, only the Ranger’s has a negative impact on their DPS when using the attack in its default implementation.
I’d bet money on the only reason the attack has the leap in the first place is because ANet designed the attack animations and needed the leap on it to make it look good.
The weapon is great on a condi build where you don’t care what’s going on. It’s less than ideal on a power build that needs more control than what the evade and dodge provides.
Shortbow and Longbow also. If they pop reflection or retaliation you best stop auto-attacking them.
Unless you mean from a PvE standpoint, then yeah, spamming #1 is probably the way to go.
But from a PvP / WvW standpoint, wisely using even the #1 skills is a must.
No, I mean any attack anywhere that has a noticeable ill effect on the player or their allies when pressed.
Your projectile example is just counterplay. That goes beyond the scope of the discussion imo.
The only other attack in the entire game that you wouldn’t spam because it would have a negative impact on you or your team is the Guardian’s Hammer… and only then because the field would overlay a high priority one.
So unless we go with the popular theory that all bad players somehow chose the Ranger class and ANet decided to give Rangers this attack to offset the fact that they have so many bad players, why else do we need something so counter-intuitive on a spammable attack that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase no doubt has on auto cast (and I’d wager a similar overwhelming majority has no idea they can turn it off).
I disagree with your opinion on unholy sanctuary, but 44006 is what a lot of zerging necros run.
My issue with unholy sanctuary is you’re almost always going to have regen on you while running in a zerg. You’ll also have numerous times where you can ge blast heals from your group. You simply don’t want to sit in shroud all day spamming life blast while you wait for your wells to come off cooldown.
If it healed for more or at least allowed regen and blast heals to go through at even just 25% effectiveness then it would be a trait worth considering. But with as weak as it is, even if you already went 5pts in death, I’d sooner go 03506 before I went 02606.
For any other #1 skill for any other weapon in the game, is there ever a time you wouldn’t want to use it to maximize your DPS?
I can think of one: Symbol of Protection. And this one doesn’t harm you in the process.
Don’t
mindlessly mash the AAmaximize DPS and you will be fine.
Fix’t