Guild Wars 2

Ah, thanks. I didn’t know that.

Bhawb.7408:

I think we need more stun breakers, not stability.

Would you like to have more skills that break stun, or would you like the recharge on one or more of our current stun breakers to be decreased?

Daecollo.9578:

Bhawb.7408:

It does not round down to 1 second. This has been posted a bunch of times, it has been explained over and over, conditions are rounded in tooltips only, a 1.3 second condition will be applied for 1.3 seconds.

Wrong, a bleed will only hurt you once every second. If you have 1.4, it will round down to 1, because the other 0.4 won’t matter because you can only bleed once a second.

You keep switching back and forth between cripple and bleeding, making you invulnerable to information. Kinda cool, but annoying to people who are trying to explain things to you. Also not very constructive.

A 1.4 second CRIPPLE lasts 1.4 seconds. it doesn’t tick, so it reduces movement speed by 50% for the full duration.
A 0.4 second BLEED lasts 0.4 seconds (not 0). The condition ticker timer starts ticking on an enemy when you apply it’s first condition. If that 0.4 seconds of bleed cover the 1 second mark it deals damage.
Say you apply 0.4 second bleeds every 0.7 seconds. You encounter an enemy, bleed it for 0.4 seconds. The condition timer starts. The bleed ends before 1 second is over so it doesn’t deal damage. The next bleed starts at 0.7 seconds on the condition timer and lasts until the 1.1 second mark. It deals one tick of damage.

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

What I mean is, that in this case, the profession distribution approaches a uniform distribution rather than a normal one, because a normal distribution wouldn’t make sense. What is on the x-axis? ‘Profession’ doesn’t have a value.
What is normally distributed is the amount of Necromancers in a sample. So you can use the Central Limit Theorem to ascertain the amount of Necromancers in the total population, but one sample of 30 individuals isn’t enough to create this distribution. You would need more samples.
Do you agree that one sample of 30 individuals isn’t enough to conclude something about the amount of necro’s in the total population?

I see a lot of suggestions on the forums saying we should get more access Stability. Do you agree? Why do we need it? And if you think we need it, how would you implement stability?

I, personally, don’t think we need more stability. There aren’t a lot of classes with stability, and we already have a niche access to stability if we want to in Foot in the Grave. Stability is a very powerful boon, and I like that it requires a big sacrifice into a traitline to gain access to it right now. What I would like to see is that I can stomp in Death Shroud without fiddling about with the keys (I never got the hang of that, and it seems like it’s a bug).

And let’s try to keep it civil and constructive, okay?

Dredlord.8076:

BadJas.5178:

Wow. It takes a lot out of me not to try to have the Gods of Statistics smite you down for corrupting the beloved Central Limit Theorem into the childrens’-sample-size-rhime about the sample size of 30.
Thing is, according to my latest numbers, smiting has no effect (p > .05), so I probably won’t.
Maybe reread that wikipedia page. It’s surprisingly comprehensive.

I’m sure you are math genius but I think I will side with my award winning math professor on this one and the fact that every university around the world teaches this.

I was just saying that the sample size of 30 might not be appropriate in this scenario. In practice the sample size of 30 is appropriate when applying the central limit theorem to apply sample-based statistics. You use sample-based statistics to force a normal distribution where there is none, so you can draw conclusions about a population rather than an individual. The thing is, then you need a number of samples.

The sample Blaine Tog gave us could be falsified, but I could still very well imagine getting similar results. What we could now do with his sample, is write down the amount of Necromancers in that sample, collect a large number of samples, and make a sample distribution of the amount of Necromancers per sample.

That is how you apply Central Limit Theorem, and I’m sure your maths professor and his award agree. My maths professor also won an award. It was for best Department Santa Claus, and I gave it to him. Awards mean nothing without context.

Could you maybe tell a little bit about what you would like to do most with your build? World v. World, PvE general map completion stuff, or maybe dungeon and/or fractal runs?
That could help.

Anyway, assuming you want to do general mish-mashy stuff, this is the ‘power’ build I use. I tried to get it defensive enough, and it works really well for me.
The Bad Jazz Build

Basically I wanted to abuse all the things that happen when you enter DS. With this build you get retaliation and fury, lose a condition, and cast enfeebling blood every time you enter DS.
The spectral skills help a lot with crowd control and Life Force gain. It might seem like overkill but both weapon sets are close-range and you tend to take more hits than other Necromancer builds.
In WvW I swap out Near to Death for Foot in the Grave, so I can have the 3 seconds of stability on Death Shroud (or 4.25 after boon duration bonus).
Overall it took me some time to get used to being so close to the action all the time with a caster, but if you get used to properly using your Death Shroud to take some blows. I hardly use skill 1 in DS, I just pop in, cast skill 2 and 3 and pop back out. Skill 4 is to survive groups of enemies.
As far as team support goes, I generate an incredible amount of vulnerability on foes, and the other damage dealers enjoy that.

Dredlord.8076:

Blaine Tog.8304:

I was speaking specifically about his reference to the population distribution between professions. It seems to be taken as a given in these discussions that there are substantially fewer Necros around than most everyone else but no one has been able to produce hard data to prove it.

nice back pedal

how bout you play the game and see for yourself

see how many thieves eles and mesmers you run into before you see 1 necro in wvw or ?pvp

I’m going to guess 3.

Blaine Tog.8304:

Gibbly.5480:

So I have been testing and found out that if you run full melandru runes it will take 50% of the duration off of your fear because it treats it both as a stun and a condition.

Clearly a bug. Runes of Melandru are only supposed to take off 15% of conditions and stuns, so they must be in error if they’re combining to reduce Fear by 50%. Of course it’s ridiculous that they should get to double-dip like that. And I say that speaking as someone who runs them on his ranger (to avoid having to use Signet of Renewal).

The number 2 and number 4 effects also decrease condition and stun duration by 10% respectively.

Is that because of the way Fear and Defiant interact or are you talking about something else? Because I have used Fear on bosses with Defiant stacks, where the boss loses a stack of Defiant and the Fear lasts its full duration. Personally, I always thought of this as a “defiant is weird”-thing rather than a “fear is weird”-thing. Although honestly both are weird.

I would completely understand if this was a bug, by the way.

Andele.1306:

If you are already on a NA server, doesnt matter since the dungeon instances aint actually linked to any of the world servers, if you are on EU, sorry out of luck.

Oh well, too bad.

Bennet.2954:

You are not completely correct.
Going by what you yourself are saying the runes should reduce the duration of the CONDITION by 25% and reduce the duration of the CC effect by 25% – they shouldn’t add up. They should reduce each effect (condition and CC) by 25% thus resulting in an overall effect duration reduction of 25% since they overlap.

Yeah I thought this at first as well, but there is no disconnect between the condition and the CC. Fear is not two things in parallel, it is one thing that counts as two things. So anything that applies to conditions applies to fear, as well as anything that applies to CC.

Now that I reread the wiki page on the Runes of Melandru again, it says -10%/-15% stun duration, not control effect duration or something. Maybe stun duration shouldn’t effect fear. Control Effect duration should, I guess.

Unclear about what exactly my opinion is? Great, so am I.

This video has Frostfang on a Necromancer.
Looks kinda good.
Frostfang on Necro

I’ll definitely join one day, when I’m near a real internet connection again. I don’t expect this to happen in the next three months.
By the way, I can join you in an NA server if I guest, right? Or is this impossible?

Things that don’t matter when it comes to this thread:
- Whether or not Runes of Melandru are used
- Food buffs
- Who dislikes whom personally
- How good you are at the game.

Topic of thread:
Runes of Melandru count Fear as both a condition and a stun. Should this be the case?

Fear is regarded as both a condition and a control effect. That’s why you can cleanse it as well as remove it with a stunbreaker. So technically, since the runes give you -25% condition duration and -25% stun duration, both should apply, according to the way fear currently is implemented in the game.
It is a powerful effect though, and I doubt it’s entirely intentional. Seeing as it could possibly hamper the Necromancers come-back to the sPvP metagame, definitely bring it up during the next BoC podcast.
Cool that you’re testing all of this!

Yendorion.2381:

First mistake: Don’t patronize people, don’t even pretend to do so. Different people have different opinions, sure you may be with the current state of the profession, good for you but keep in mind others have all the right to express their criticism anywhere they like, especially when backed up by numbers and facts in almost on a vast number of threads which have been gone ignored for months on end and some finally admitted to.

Second mistake: Criticizing the company for nerfing the profession and keeping it so in the current state that is doesn’t mean one is saying other things. Don’t make a fool of yourself by putting words in peoples mouths. ArenaNet surely did some great work on many aspect of the game and should be praised for it but when it comes to the case of the Necromancer in it’s forum they surely need the relevant feedback without anyone digging their heads in the sand. One can safely say that vast majority are doing so with nothing but good intentions and hopefully being worked on.

I certainly wasn’t trying to patronize anyone, or put words in anyones mouth. If I did, I apologize.
I just feel bad for the OP, who was trying to create this uplifting thread where people would say what they loved about their profession, and try to gain perspective as to what the devs have done for the Necro rather than haven’t. That would raise Necromancer morale a bit, maybe.
And I realize that maybe Necromancer deserves more attention than it gets right now. But I feel that pretending like the developers haven’t done anything for the profession since BWE but nerf it is a little bit deluded.
What we disagree about most is that “others have all the right to express their criticism anywhere they like”. I think that’s a bit misguided. Technically comments on how you’re disappointed with the devs is off-topic, as Kraag Deadsoul points out in his original posts. He created some guidelines and the second post disregarded them and was a blatant whine and/or troll.
That sucks and I pity anyone who comments like that. THAT was patronizing.

I think the absolute best thing you can do is to try out a whole bunch of stuff. I can usually afford a new equipment set (excluding trinkets, you don’t really need those until level 80) every 5-10 levels while leveling, picking a completely different stat setup (defensive, offensive, crit, conditions, etc.) and every time I also visit the guy to retrain my traits and completely change my build.
That way, by the time I’m level 80, I know what I like about a profession and how I would like to play it from level 80 onward.

So maybe the next time you change your armor, get away from condition damage and scepter/dagger, and focus on a more power-based approach with dagger or axe. It’s not that expensive to retrain your traits at the trait book merchant dude, and you’ll learn amazing stuff about what the Necro can do from trying all these different things.
Above all, be creative and play how you want to play, not how people tell you to play. I play an Axe/Dagger + Dagger/Warhorn Necromancer, even though a lot of players say that’s a stupid or useless combination.

And if you don’t want to listen to me, don’t.

Haha! Already did in an earlier post. No need to repeat myself, the devs are smart enough to figure that one out.

Are all of you really this disappointed in the game? Is it all that bad? I really like playing Guild Wars 2, and I enjoy the game tremendously. So, when I see a thread called ‘The “Thank You Devs” thread’, and I feel like I want to post on the thread, I write a ‘Thank You’.
And then I see a whole bunch of players airing criticism in the same thread. Are all these players really this disappointed with the game? So disappointed they can’t utter a simple “Thanks”? And if they really, deep down, are THAT sad about it, why are they playing?
Logically, if you can’t find some reason to be thankful for what the developers of the game you are actively playing do every day, you should stop playing. Just quit the game, find one that makes you happy to play.
Because playing Guild Wars 2 makes me happy. Doesn’t it make you happy? Stop playing. Does it? Say thank you, or don’t. Just don’t post criticism instead. It’s weird. Post criticism in other threads. Because that’s what most other threads are for.

Papish.5806:

I got an idea for how to apply it. Frostburn-everytime you apply chill you apply X seconds of burning

I doubt it will be as reliable as that. A lot of people agree that it could possibly be very powerful if Necromancers get access to burning. The developers obviously realize this as well, so I’m guessing the trait will give a couple seconds of burning on some trigger (perhaps indeed applying chill, or a critical hit, or when your target is below X% health, if your target has X or more conditions on it, AoE when entering DS, etc.) with a ~10-20 second cooldown. Depending on the trigger, it will also have an X% chance of occurring.

Usually the developers are very careful inserting new abilities like this in the game, so I highly doubt it will be game-breaking from the start. That being said, I am looking forward to this. It could be quite interesting to try and build around.

Insidious.3720:

Minion skills DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT, scale with any of your stats. Nothing, nada, zip, zilch. The only thing that you would benefit from would be bloodthirst helping out their healing to you if you choose that trait. Other than that, nothing scales. The stats are fixed, which is why a minion master can spec however the hell they want to because it doesn’t matter at all with regards to minions.

1625 dps? That’s horrible. Add that to your own dps and you might peak at 2k dps, which is craptastic. Look, you aren’t going to be dpsing so much as you are going to be trying to keep your minions alive and debuffing the mob. Also, condition damage in pve? Are you stupid. Condition dmg has no use, NONE, in pve. The reason for this is a dead mob is a mob that isn’t killing you. Faster and better dps will bring it down, not playing a game of attrition whittling away at it. There is a reason why it’s zerker or gtfo for the meta game, and why necros aren’t included on that list. Necro dps, in general, is kitten poor unless you run a power/zerker/BiP setup, and even then, you’re on the bottom end of the totem pole for dps. And if you try and bring minions into end game, you’ll be auto kicked. No one wants those things taking away valuable buffs from their team, aside from the fact that when the mob so much as looks at them they die.

Roll Zerker/Power/BiP and stop being bad and bringing your groups down.

I like that you’re giving your opinion, but you could stand to be a bit more productive. The fact that Minion damage doesn’t scale with anything could actually be a good thing for a bunker build, as Bhawb suggests. It’s a way to deal damage outside of increasing your power stats. So technically you could make a build that is kinda defensive, focuses on condition damage, and still has a way to deal direct damage to objects, without having to invest into the power stat. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? It does to me! And c’mon, even with the bleed stack limit there is definitely a place for a condition damage character in a team. I agree that it’s useless to bring 4 of them, but bringing one condition damage based character dealing massive amounts of armor-ignoring damage is not a bad thing.
Especially with condidmg increasing with might stacks, you could simply fit it into a team without any problem in PvE.

I like your build, but you can look at it in another way. What if, instead of making a trait setup that only uses general traits, you pick a trait setup where you can change focus from one weapon/utility combo to another?
I made this based off of your original trait setup.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQUQNBmODbkRrbvdTejfTBIV45JFk3NkidxNSxxDD-w

With this build you can change from raining down doom from a wall (Greater Marks, Focused Rituals) to a more close range necro. (Shrouded Removal, Master of Corruption, Mark of Evasion).
I hope it helps.

Wow, even a ‘thank you’ thread can’t stay civil too long. I think ANet customer service is quite good. They just don’t want to go overboard with the balance changes to ensure the metagame sees a gradual change rather than a complete overhaul every month. I totally get that.
And it’s totally cool the developers participate in streams, and when they don’t still show up to chat and provide input. Even if it’s a job requirement. Good job making that a job requirement for some developers ANet!

Thank you for fearing people off cliffs.
Thank you for corrupt boon.
Thank you for insane vulnerability stacking with axe/focus.
Thank you for 100 ways to stack bleeds.
Thank you for viable non-bleed builds.
Thank you for Dark Path.
Thank you for the Greater Marks trait.
Thank you for Terror and Master of Terror.
Thank you for all the awesome traits that can trigger on DS.
Thank you for working on the profession in a way that retains its identity.
Thank you for thinking.
Thank you for listening to player feedback, even if that means having to read this forum and some of its denizens.

digiowl.9620:

I will never understand why ANet felt the need to do LF math in percentage terms, rather than simply have it as a second health pool and apply the damage unconverted.

Maybe to make our profession supercomplicated and interesting. No other mechanic in the game can raise my left eyebrow to such heights while pivoting my head ever-so-slightly.
Love it.

@Andele: Bleeds do work the way the developers say they do, but the numbers show up in succession. You can see when the bleeding damage is applied if you give a relatively weak creature a couple of bleeds without dealing it too much damage. Then stop, and you’ll see that although the numbers show up one at a time, the health bar goes down in bigger chunks each second.
Why would developers even lie about this? What would be the point?
About degen in DS: I can find no documentation on condition damage buffering. If it ever worked the way Andele said it worked, it must have been a bug, because it makes no sense (to me) if it worked like that. Calling it a nerf is a bit much.

Andele.1306:

People, please learn, Condition ticks that dont do more together than degen dont apply in DS since they apply at the same time as the actual LF degen, game counting them as the same thing (ofc that loses value when the enemy got any kind of condi setup going, but still important to take on for calculations).

Could you explain what this means?
LF_degen = maximum(LF_degen_natural, Cumulative_condition_Ticks)
Is that right? If so, how did you obtain this info?

Thanks for the info!

In any case, we answered all questions that came up in this discussion.
Conclusions:
- Vitality is (slightly) more important for Necro’s than for other professions.
- Toughness increase DOES affect Death Shroud, but because of the way Life Force Gain works it has the same effect as Vitality increase.
- The above statement could be the cause of the myth that toughness doesn’t affect Death Shroud.

Haha!
Every time I try to clarify something, you have edited your previous post by the time I post my reply! You keep answering your own questions, and now it looks like I’m just pulling useless information out of thin air.

With a normal health bar Tgh > Vit because Vit doesn’t affect how much you heal back up.
1000 damage incoming
High toughness: 800/8000 health lost (health @ 90% 7200/8000)
High vit: 1000/10000 health lost (health @ 90% 9000/10000)
use heal skill: 400 healing
High toughness: 7600/8000 health (95%)
High vit: 9400/10000 health (94%)
then they get 1 burn tic (200 damage)
High toughness: 7400/8000 health (92.5%)
High vit: 9200/10000 health (92%)

Say the same thing happens in Death Shroud.
High toughness: damage —> 7200/8000| LF gain (5%) —> 7600/8000| burn(200) —>7400/8000 ending at 92.5%
High Vit: damage —> 9000/10000| LF gain (5%) —> 9500/10000 | burn(200) —> 9300/10000 ending at 93%

So Life Force Gain makes it so that the size of the LF Pool (Vitality) and damage reduction (Toughness) are interchangeable when handling direct damage. However, armor-ignoring damage such as from conditions is still unaffected by Toughness.

So, it’s better to have a large Life Force Pool than to have big damage Reduction. When it comes to DS.

Pendragon.8735:

Last two posts don’t make sense to me, it doesn’t matter if 3% LF is 500 or 600 HP you still lose 3% per second regardless, or 4% untraited. And when you actually get hit in DS, your 500 DS HP with more toughness will go just as far as your 600 DS HP with less toughness, just like it does for normal HP.

It’s just a second green life bar with the same mechanics of a normal life bar as far as Vit and Toughness are concerned.

Except that unlike the health bar the “Heal” (LF gain) is a percentage increase instead of an absolute number. Absolute healing makes Toughness >> Vitality for incoming direct damage (Vit being better than Toughness for managing condition damage). Percentage Healing negates the superiority of Toughness over Vitality for direct damage.
Thus, for defensive DS purposes, Toughness is inferior to Vitality.

Disregarding bugs, metagame, other skills, and possible counters I still wouldn’t say the skill is overpowered. It works really well on Guardians who just used Save Yourselves, and on Thieves who stole the skill from Mesmers where they eat a ghost.
But it shuts neither of them down, nor does it kill them outright. It’s a good counter for stability.
At the end of the day, the skill is a good counter for other skills, but it is situational. I don’t think situational skills have the power to become overpowered. They can become useful in a metagame, but then the metagame reacts and people start using not as many boons// more easily reapplyable boons.

It doesn’t break the game.

I would at least try to unlock all weapon and Death Shroud skills. Those are the skills you have to use the most. Try them all, get a feel for all the skills and how you think they would work best. Try a bunch of different combinations of weapons. If you feel you’ve tried it all and don’t like anything move on to another profession.
The only thing you can’t get a feel for between level 1 and 20 is the staff. The staff gets an incredible boost in power (and fun) if you have the Greater Marks trait. So if you like some of the Weapon Skills but you think the Staff is stupid, go get that trait at level 20 and try it again.

Good question!
For the off-hand all I can say is that both of them are useful in a dagger-mainhand build so neither of them are strictly better than the other. I really like the focus for the ‘rotation’ it creates in your bar with DS#2, so that you can alternate between chill and immobilized so they have a harder time getting away.
Build
I’m using something like this for my dagger build (I don’t remember exactly, I’m running a weird minion hybrid at the moment). It took me a little while to get used to the build and actually start killing things, but when it works it’s awesome.
As for sigils: I’m a BIG fan of the sigil that chills on weapon swap (hydromancy). I use that on all my off-hands in this build. On-hand I use lightning strike (air) for the dagger and something else for the axe.

Have fun!

vicious.5683:

BadJas.5178:

Compared to the Mesmer we do have more Health + our class mechanic provides a second health bar.

Please people, stop saying this. Life force is not HP, you start the match with 0 LF, you can’t heal LF, you can’t even heal HP in DS, it’s hard to build LF and degen itself at a stupidly high rate of 4% per sec.

You’re arguing a technicality. I agree that some of those issues need resolution, so that Death Shroud can be used in PvP as intended. But if LF was easier to build in PvP, you could use DS as a second health bar to get out of trouble.

vicious.5683:

BadJas.5178:

They need it to stay alive, we don’t. Theoretically.

LOL! so necros are meant to die…. Theoretically

This is why context is so important. You take a little snippet of what someone says or what a class does and you compare it at face value, ofcourse it’s not going to measure up. Especially if you misinterpret your own results.
What I said in this ‘quote’ was that Mesmers need more mobility, stun breakers, and access to invulnerability than Necromancers do, because Necromancers have a defensive use for their class mechanic.
How that leads to you thinking I think Necro’s are meant to die is a mystery to me.

That was some excellent paraphrasing, vicious. Thank you for that. <<— Those two sentences are sarcasm. Don’t use them as a quote in your resume to get a job as a parasailing instructor.

Torqky.3682:

cal.4718:

[spoiler]

Well said!

Bhawb.7408:

I totally agree they barely touched our bugs, and ended up introducing a new one that is worse than any they fixed. So if you are going to complain, base your complaints off of that, a totally legitimate reason, and not the fact that this isn’t a balance patch, which it was never going to be.

Bhawb you are making too much sense. However, rage leads to irrational thinking. Necro forum is raging because we have been neglected. The first bug they fixed was mark of evasion. Mark of evasion used to create a blast finisher. This made playing necro fun. Dodging into our well of blood giving our minions some retal and regen was rewarding. They fixed that bug so fast because it was beneficial to us. There were no people crying necro dodge blast finisher is OP. They just fixed that first and didn’t fix our staff mark sizes for ages (or anything useful for us). They finally fixed staff in time to nerf epidemic. Then they just broke staff again. And don’t get me started on minons, death shroud weapon swap being stolen from us, or many other things. It makes me want to smash my computer with a brick lol.

Make no mistake DS weapon swap was taken from us because of coding issues. After they couldn’t fix it they just labeled it as a balance fix.[/spoiler]

I don’t think they have a nefarious plan in place to persistently, purposely, and precisely prohibit one professions players enjoyment of the game. If you do, you might have a problem other than with the developers at ANet. All those things you listed are bug fixes or bugs.
Think about all the things you said: mark of blood is a blast finisher? you can weapon switch when wearing no weapons at all? something about epidemic… (i don’t know what that’s about) They make no sense.
Even if some bug accidentally works out well for a certain profession or setup, if it’s unintentional it should be removed on principle. Then, after the bugs are gone, you can add the intentional stuff to make a profession more viable if it’s weak.
And one more thing; I promise it’s the last. Nothing is ever “taken from us” or “stolen from us”. We might have bought the game, but we’re playing it by their rules. As it should be.

Andele.1306:

Stats pre 5 Fireflies north of LA:
Naked with amulets
435 – sting
604 – charging strike
160 – sting flurry

Naked without amulets
530 – sting
620 – chargning strike
213 – sting flurry

That settles it for me. I assume these are also in Death Shroud.

Andele.1306:

Funny thing trough, i took more damage in DS with soldier gear than out of ds with soldier, but took more damage in glass cannon out of ds than in ds with glass cannon.
My guess something is kittened up with armor scailing to ds, but its just 10% average damage increase from just soldier armor.

Disclaimer: only 92 fireflies were harmed during this test.

And this is where it got weird again. The damage increase in DS with soldier’s gear could be explained by you not getting the stat bonuses from weapons, right? Or were you not wearing weapons during all of this?
But a damage decrease when going into DS is completely unexpected. I can’t explain that. Bug, i guess?

Compared to the Mesmer we do have more Health + our class mechanic provides a second health bar. Zodian has a point in that we don’t need as much mobility//stun breakers//invuln as a mesmer does. They need it to stay alive, we don’t. Theoretically.

Context is everything. Mesmers will always have more mobility than Necro’s because they are the mobility casters. No one on the Engineer forums is complaining Engineers don’t have access to teleports and greatswords.

That being said, I think it’s not too much to ask to have at least one skill we can effectively use to break away from a fight, especially for the axe and dagger mainhands. Also, some skills that can combo would be nice. Underwater we are combo kings, but above water we have only one weapon with any combo skills. That is lackluster and might be why we don’t seem to fit into teams very well.

I agree that it would be weird if Toughness didn’t affect Death Shroud. I was just playing devil’s advocate//science guy. Cool that you tested this by the way, I bet if the guys from the podcast read this they’ll be grateful too.

Did you take off your armor? Could it be that the innate armor values do influence damage taken during DS, but the toughness stats don’t?
Just thinking of all the angles.

And you can still do all those things, and necromancer is still an awesome profession. I totally get where your coming from, and I think necromancer needs some love, but so do other professions and the general balance.
Did you know the Guardian has four traits that just give 5% extra damage to one of their weapons? What’s that about? They have other awesome traits, sure, but still…
The truth is that there is no simple fix to the “necromancer problem”. It’s not a matter of upping some damage and reducing some casting times. Necromancers need a way to fit into a party structure, and right now the puzzle-piece that is the Necromancer has a weird shape.
Imagine being the developer in charge of all this. It’s a brain-buster.

I think it was announced that this months update will focus on bug fixes and next month there will be balancing. Note that the other profession-specific updates weren’t balance related either. So no lying. I hate it when someone is wrongly accused of lying.

My advice: just stop playing for a little bit until the next update. If in a couple of weeks you miss the game, get back to it. If you don’t, move on.

No game should ever make you angry.

I feel like both the DoT on skill recharge and the DoT on condition removal would be way too complicated. Looking at the other conditions, they always have one or two effects that are intuitively linked, and easy to remember. Like poisons DoT + less healing or chills less movement + less recharge.
If it’s simple, you know how much to panic if you see the condition on you.
So stop me if you’ve heard this suggestion before (I haven’t read them all) but what about a DoT that decreases attack speed? Call it fatigue or something?

Player Character.9467:

Trait lines are designed to not just hand you perfect stat setups for pure builds and plenty of other stats can be seen as dependent on others. Crit damage requires precision AND power to mean anything. Precision requires that you’re either using pow/crit dmg or on crit effects (typically cond dmg/dur related effects) to mean anything. You could even make the claim that toughness, healing power, and vitality depend on eachother because there’s a point on the line where 1 more bit of armor protecting your current health pool is less valuable than 1 more bit of hp protected by all of your armor (or the other way around) or the potential to heal 1 more bit of hp every X seconds and this is only because of the amount of each you already have.
If trait lines were ALL arranged so you could get T/V/HP on 1 line, pow/prec/crit dmg on 1 line, prec/cond dmg/dur on 1 line, it would be completely silly and only support pure builds.

Also, stop looking at trait lines only for stats, powerful minor/majors can mean so much more.

I agree with you completely on how the attributes work, and that trait lines are more than their attributes. That interdependence is what makes the attributes interesting.
But isn’t critical damage the big exception? With condition damage, cond. duration, precision, power, healing power, toughness, vitality and boon duration you have a choice on how you want those to interact with other attributes in your build. However with critical damage there is only one way (for 7 out of 8 professions), and that is using precision.
And when you build a character that has a dead stat in the traitlines (say, boon duration) you can always consider using a skill or trait that takes advantage of the unexpected bonus. Not with critical damage (Arcane skills noted, no need to bring it up)!
Also note that I’m not arguing shuffling around crit damage so that it matches up with precision on all professions. I’m arguing that it doesn’t belong in any traitline. Ever. It should be replaced by another attribute. What attribute? I don’t know. Maybe something that helps Control builds, they only seem to have condition duration to rely on.

I would replace Critical damage from every traitline and replace it with a new attribute.
Please, before you start typing furiously, blinded by the smoke coming out of your nose and ears, hear me out.
Critical Damage doesn’t belong in the traitlines! Its effectiveness is entirely dependent on your another attribute (precision), unlike ANY of the other attributes. Without cond. duration, condition damage still increases a bleeding builds effectiveness, but the damage increase from critical damage is marginal at best unless you also increase precision.

This is annoying when making a build for a profession that has the two disconnected (Necromancer, Warrior, Guardian, Engineer). Maybe I want to make a build with my necro that abuses the Death Shroud without using critical hits!
That would put me at a 300 attribute point disadvantage compared to other builds I could make, right from the start! Any other attribute increase would increase my effectiveness at least somewhat, so any other independent statistical increase would do.

Keeping it on equipment would still allow for cool critical damage builds, without restricting the effectiveness of builds who don’t want to use crits, but do want to use Death Shroud, Tool Belt Recharge, Burst Damage, and Toughness (on Guardians).

I like how it makes you feel really powerful, and it is really powerful, but whether or not it should exist isn’t really the point.
My question is:
Should it be a boon, and if not, why not?

If it is a boon you could potentially have it stack in intensity, making each stack increase attack speed by 5% or something. That way you could add the effect to a bunch of traits and skills that add a mess of stacks for a short duration, or just one or two stacks for a longer duration.

No it isn’t! But shouldn’t it be?
In the recent updates Quickness skills got quite the boost. The Thief, Warrior, Ranger, and Engineer skills got an extra second of quickness and a reduced negative status effect.
Back in the beta tests stability used to be an effect like quickness is now: unremovable, usually short duration, and it made you incredibly powerful while it was on you.
Because of the negative side-effects of the thief, warrior, ranger and engineer versions of Quickness the effect wasn’t quite as powerful, I never gave it a second thought.
But this update is when the spark reignited.
6 out of 8 professions (necromancers and elementalists are the unlucky ones) have a profession skill that produces Quickness. Also, there are rune combinations that can produce it, and there is a sigil that applies it on crits, so everyone can join in on the fun.

So we can agree that it’s widespread, and it’s universally beneficial. Like a boon.
Now I completely understand what an impact it would have on the state of the game (especially in SPvP I guess) if Quickness was a boon. It would be affected by boon duration, and of course could be countered by boon removal, spread by mesmers with their signet, corrupted by necromancers… all kinds of horrible, balance-destroying things.
But isn’t Quickness kind of the weird cousin of all the boons right now? It stands outside of the rest of the game, doesn’t interact with other things directly, rejecting synergy and what-not…

There is a thread on the Necromancer forums about a new condition coinciding with the addition of a fifth skill in the Death Shroud skill bar. Would the opposite of Quickness (Atrophy, Sluggishness, Sloth, Fatty Arms) be an option for the new condition? Certainly you can think of some Engineer, Mesmer or Elementalist skill that could apply this condition also. I know I can.

TL;DR I would like for Quickness to become a boon. I have reasons for this.

What do you guys think? Would this destroy the game? Would this be the game’s savior?

Good elementalists know exactly when to switch attunements, and do it as soon as possible, i found. So when I was leveling I put my points into the last traitline first (reduces attunement recharge and the traits give incentive to switch often), and then in water magic for some extra survivability. That way, you can practice running dagger/dagger and dagger/focus in close range without getting killed too often. Hope it helps.

Waypointing costs were implemented in the game as a gold sink to ensure the game economy doesn’t go haywire. I completely agree with this philosophy, the game economy should be a stable thing. I also agree with the idea that things should become more expensive as you level.

From a lore perspective, it makes no sense that more powerful entities require more energy (and thus money) to teleport. If anything, this should be by mass, so Norn waypoint costs should be higher than Asura. They’re not going to do this, because this would upset game balance (and a lot of players). However it would make sense that waypointing to a location that is more remote or dangerous is more expensive, because implementation of a waypoint would be more costly due to danger to workers and waypointing there would require more energy.

Then there is the third pillar of gaming (the other two are balance and consistency), which is philosophy. As far as I know, the most important question Anet asks whenever they implement something is “Is it fun?”. And waypointing costs aren’t. They are necessary, but not fun. In fact, if a higher level player wants to help out his lower level buddies, the player has to pay a “Tax on Fun” to get there and back again.
From a gameplay perspective, as far as playing on your own or with comparably leveled buddies, the waypointing costs ARE actually fun, because it encourages teamwork and solidarity between friends in order to stay alive and not get wiped, and rewards this very directly when it works. The same can be said for repair costs.

Now here is my suggestion to Arenanet (for free!) (also TL;DR):
Make waypoint costs based on geographic location of the waypoint rather than player level. This still encourages good gameplay, but does give some room for helping out lower level friends. This is easily implemented as a system that calculates a cost to get to the nearest waypoint and then add a surcharge for every other waypoint (node) hit in the waypoint network to get to the desired waypoint. This surcharge is constant in every map. This makes waypointing costs more transparent and keeps players gruntled. Perhaps add a resurrection surcharge.
If this system does not give enough of a goldsink for the economy, simply raise repair costs more for high level gear.

Comments? Suggestions? Criticism? Positive reinforcements? Please post!

Sure you’re not playing an elementalist or engineer? they don’t have weapon swapping, but use attunements and weapon kits instead.