Guild Wars 2

I got bored, so here’s a couple more:

Minor Traits:
Bitter Ordeal – Gain toughness for each unique condition on you.
Devour in Shadow – Chance to steal boons on hit while in death shroud.
Affliction – Chance to transfer a condition when struck by nearby foes.
Bond of Agony – Gain retaliation while suffering from damaging conditions.

Master Traits:
Pain Split – Reflect damage when you take damage greater than a percentage of your maximum health. (10% threshold, 33% reflection)
Living End – If you would take lethal damage while you have life force, you lose all life force instead.

oZii.2864:

Barbed Precision passively stacking bleeds because you have crit chance or dhuumfire proccing because you have crit chance. It is such active play to crit. Pot you seen Kettle?

I have a necro that I enjoy but let us be realistic here about passive play. Just about every build in the game takes advantage of something passive.

I urge you to go into the Necro subforum – Dhuumfire fans are a hard catch.
And just because every build utilizes passive play doesn’t make it right. I’m all for removing passive traits – starting with Dhuumfire, Diamond Skin and Automated Response. Traits like Lotus Poison/Leg Specialist are much better, as they modify active play instead of erasing it.

If I recall correctly, several people tried to make it work, but the loss in that Life Force health buffer was too great in comparison to thew few gains you get from high boon uptime. If we had better defensive flashes, such as Protection, or if flashing triggered on swap sigils, we might be in business, but currently, it is what it is.

The available flashing traits are:
Spite: Spiteful Spirit
Curses: Enfeeble, Furious Demise
Death: Shrouded Removal,
Blood: Deathly Invigoration (+ Vampiric Precision in 10 slot w/Furious Demise)
Reaping: Near to Death, Foot in the Grave

Unfortunately, you can’t spec for all of the flash traits together as they require a total of 85 points. I think the big trade off here is between Spiteful Spirit, Shrouded Removal, Furious Demise, Deathly Invigoration and Foot in the Grave.

The Necromancer suggestions all seem reasonable (I’d take that Axe any day), except for Dhuumfire – I just don’t think animating a support model for a trait is a good idea. Moreover, Dhuumfire procs on hit, not on attack, so the animation would have to trigger after the server registered the attack, which brings into question when exactly the burning is applied. I also think it would be odd to have Dhuumfire have its own attack animation as it would make it seem dodge-able.

If anything, I think that what Dhuumfire could do as far as revealing its proc in terms of animation would be to simply have the target(s) explode in green fire similar to Flame Burst (Ele Staff #3 in Fire) on hit. The animation already exists, so they would only have to play with shading, and it would also trigger on hit, along with the applied burning.

My recommendation would be to keep Ride the Lightning as a safety, and you expect that you’ll the Terror’d, try to pre-emptively swap into Air and get out. Necromancers can’t chase, so if you hit and run, you can reset the encounter, only the Necro will be short Life Force, and will have trouble breaking Diamond Skin. Think of Fear-chaining as the Necro’s equivalent to Bull’s-Frenzy-100Blades – you know it’s coming, and it relies on some moderately long cooldowns, so if you avoid it, it’s easy pickings. Predicting it is the hard part.
Another piece of advice is to try and set up his heal when you want it. Necros have one of most predictable and interrupt-able heals in the game. If you load the Necro with conditions when they are at low-ish health, many with succumb to the temptation of boosting their heal by Consuming Conditions. If they take the bait, the long channel should be more than enough for you to rush in and Updraft it away.

That’s a very pretty diagram. Mighty I ask how/where you got it?

@ArmageddonAsh, Mookzen, amiavamp: Woah, now. Cool your horses – we’re going one at a time for a reason. Trying to tackle everything at once is just going to lead to an incredibly disjointed discussion.

So far I’ve managed 25 responses including my own. I’d like to get a couple more before moving on, so let’s see if anyone else feels like answering in the next day or two.

I think that is the best set up suggested thus far, though I would still keep Vampiric Precision as its own trait since, if buffed, it would force a trade-off between high risk/reward versus passive baseline healing (Vampiric vs Vampiric Precision).
Having it function on hit circumvents invulnerability/blocks, but still has counter-play in dodges/blinds/movement. We have more than enough AoE to let something like this function at close to passive-radius levels, and numbers can be adjusted to make it viable. I just don’t think passive healing (or passive anything really) is good for the game, and having it be based on a variable parameters you don’t control with set limiters still screams complexity creep.

In applying the “common boons” idea to scaling, I think Bloodthirst could be worded as follows: Siphoning is increased with the number of unique boons on foes you strike.

amiavamp.9785:

Needs other options:
-“This trait is too powerful/this trait feels broken.”
-“This trait should be merged with another.”

“Stellar” implies that a trait is good to have and well-designed. Some traits, on the other hand, feel like they break the balance of the game or lower build diversity.

I also have to ask – why are some of the traits (III and V) not present in the survey?

On a side note, I just noticed that Mark of Revival is a blast finisher, while the normal Reaper’s Mark is not.

o_O
Those two were there before. I think Google may not have saved the form before I exited it…I put it them in just now – hopefully I can still get some results for them. As far as updating the questions, that’s a fair call. In the future, I’ll add some more options, but if I were to reconfigure everything now, I think it would just mess it up.
These mistakes are the reason I decided to start with Soul Reaping – it’s pretty kitten solid, so if I were to screw up/miss something, it’s not the end of the world.

As far as Mark of Revival, that is most likely an unintended bug, as traits that copy skills tend to imitate all parameters. Mark of Evasion was behaving in a similar fashion for a time, but it was bug-fixed, and so given this seems to be an unpopular choice, I think it just hasn’t been caught yet.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

[Redacted]

I don’t disagree with what you’ve said, but you need to keep things in perspective. Simple ideas are good ideas, and are more likely to attract attention and/or be implemented. The basic concepts here are definitely worth exploring, but some of these suggestions are just too much/awkward. For example, compare the following:

Trait - Regenerate health over time based on the number of boons on nearby foes with diminishing returns due to distance. (Healing per boon per distance: 400-600 range: X; 200-400 range: X+Y; 0-200 range: X+Y+Z; Range: 600)
Trait - Gain health whenever you a trike a foe with boons. (Healing per boon: N)

I can’t honestly look at these and believe that the first has any chance of taking off compared to the second (and I tried to make the first have appealing syntax). The base concept is the same, but the execution is radically different, and that’s important. Complexity is the opposite of what we want – we should be suggesting simple, easily grokkble mechanics/skills/traits.

I’m already acquiring some very interesting data regarding how people feel about these, and not all responses are what I had expected. I made a post about this on Reddit to see if I can’t get a larger sample size.
Please ask any other Necros you know to collaborate, as it helps normalize the data.

However, tackling everything in one go will be way too difficult and messy, so let’s start off simple and work our way up. Blood, Death, Curses and Spite all have their issues and and all have been the subjects of some very controversial problems, so I think they’re best left for later on once we have everything worked out. For now, let’s start with Soul Reaping, which I believe to be our most solid trait-line.

I would request that you take this Short Survey in order to gather community data. In the meantime, I encourage all discussion.

Link List
Soul Reaping Survey
Soul Reaping Survey Results

Curses Survey
Curses Survey Results

Spite Survey
Spite Survey Results

Blood Magic Survey
Blood Magic Survey Results

Death Magic Survey
Death Magic Survey Results

I’ve seen this in other profession subforums (though not as extensive), so I figured, hey, why not us? Since the Dev’s don’t seem particularly keen in involving themselves with our subforum (whatever the case may be), let’s have our own home-grown CDI (Collaborative Development Initiative). Let’s have a trait workshop thread.

The purpose of this thread will be two-fold: identify traits that the community feels are currently subpar, and recommend changes based on community involvement.
If you would like to get involved, simply post your feelings and ideas on the current topic, and be sure to complete any and all surveys. Those wishing to participate on a more administrative level are welcome to message me.

This post will be used to maintain historical information/responses/links.

Frankly, I am of the opinion that having the effectiveness of anything under your control be affected by your opponent leads to unsavory gameplay. Moreover, I see a lot of possible flaws – for example, all of our poison skills would begin to interfere with our gameplay (not a good thing) if it was “healing draining”. If we instead switched to “healing-by-boons”, you start to get into a lot of gray areas, such as the leech ticking when a boon would expire/be corrupted/stripped (presuming that corrupting/stripping has a net positive gain; a reverse Healing Signet if you will), or it ticking when a boon is applied. I think that having variable-scaling healing, especially one you don’t have full control over, is adding unnecessary layers of complexity to a game already full of hidden internal cooldowns and unknown scaling parameters, which are complicated enough by themselves.

If siphoning is to be buffed, at least as far as traits are concerned, I think it’ll simply revolve around playing with the base and scaling values. One of the main reasons I think we will never see siphoning to match Healing Signet or Signet of Restoration is because we trait for siphoning versus committing skill slots to it, which is far less risky.
That being said, I believe that an entire new class of skills, some of which featured siphoning, are not foregone possibilities. As SoV has shown, ANET are not against the idea of non-condition debuffs, so I believe we could see some form of hex derivatives come into play in the long run. However, this is all speculation on things that, should ANET be interested in, are multiple development cycles away.

I think that reducing things to a simplistic base level makes them more likely to appeal to the Devs, if they’re even listening – I would gladly have Vampiric Rituals demoted in order to gain Grandmaster team-share siphoning, or a boon-strip on hit and that healed you for each boon stripped.

I’ve repeatedly said Dark Path should work like Judge’s Intervention (since Guardians are also meant to lack to mobility) and I still believe that.

If anything, I see new traits and skills on the horizon, followed closely by the possibility of the Tengu becoming playable. Adding/modifying skills/traits has proven to not take heaps of time. Moreover, as I recall, the Tengu were scrapped as a playable race last minute, plus we already have in-game models and assets, so expanding on those seems natural.

While I think adding another profession would have a much greater impact on gameplay, I also think it would require a much larger development cycle, so I doubt it’ll happen soon. That being said, I’d love to be surprised with one.

If I could actually give you an e-cookie, you would have it right now. That was amazing.
This needs to be posted in the GW2 Discussion forums. It needs to be done.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Draehl.2681:

Or buff Staff auto. We desperately need a ranged power weapon. For power builds. Not in DS.

They could add another weapon for range Power builds, Staff is to much of a condition weapon for it to make any sense.

If we’re to assume that more new skills are in the works, and that some of them will weapon skills, then I think this would be the logical next step for the Devs, though I don’t know which in-game weapon would really fit Necros thematically while fulfilling this role.

TheDevice.2751:

I mean I love the necro i do. I think our elites are the coolest and I think if DS had some tweaking it could actually feel less clunky and more fun. I think the progress is very 2 steps forward 1 step back but at least we’re kinda getting somewhere right?

I think if anything, taking the time to embrace the class for what it is and still do well is good practice. Hopefully there is a point where not only necros feel more rounded but the other professions do aswell. I can’t possibly be as much of a class act as Bhawb or others but gotta try to give some earned gratitude for the way the profession is in general sometimes.

Honestly, that’s true.
As far as profession design, we were given by and far some of the best attrition tools in a vacuum: we debilitate opponents to the point where their strengths don’t matter; although I hate to quantify it as such, we have an easily accessible “extra health bar” on top of our high base health to withstand bursts; we have health regeneration without consuming skill slots if we desire; we have an incredibly easy time cleansing conditions; we have easy access to soft and hard CC in every build; and we have skills and damage that continue to function when we are disabled. The only things we really lack are mobility (not an issue by design) and crowd-control avoidance.
By all accounts though, the profession is entirely conceptualized around attrition. The numbers are just not well adjusted, skill/trait arrangements are too awkward, and combat is too burst-centric and reliant on full immunities.

I suppose I should I upload my latest picture.
Grenth’s Hood is just too much Necro to deny.

Dear Grouch,
Have your intended design philosophies for the professions changed since Jonathan put them up on the December 14th patch thread last year? Do you feel that the professions are closing in on these design philosophies (whether the original or new ones)?

jpersson.7368:

Stx.4857:

Don’t be afraid, you are correct.

Afraid is not the right word.

It’s a thin line dedication-prestige, especially on internet forums. This is a good discussion and I don’t want to see it derailed or watered down.

I also agree that Vampiric Master limits siphoning, but only because of how siphon traits are located in the tree. If there was more competition between them, I think it would make Blood a lot more interesting and easier to balance.
In my dream world, I would shuffle Blood traits around as follows:

Adept: Vampiric Precision (buffed healing, lower frequency), Vampiric*
Master: Vampiric Master, Vampiric Rituals
Grandmaster: Something that shares siphons.

*Move Mark of Evasion up to the 15 point slot, remove ICD (we have no vigor anyway).

In this way, you are forced to choose between the more powerful Vampiric Precision which occurs less often, or Vampiric, which will be weaker but ever-present without commitment. Then, you get your choice between minions. wells, or the other passive on-hit trait you skipped. Lastly, continuing with Bhawb’s idea, you can then share the healing.
Under my ideal set up above, you have the following options, with comparative healing:

1. Spec Minions and Precision – Medium sustained healing, small burst healing.
2. Spec Wells and Precision – High burst healing.
3. Spec Vampiric and Minions – High sustained healing.
4. Spec Wells and Vampiric – Medium burst healing, small sustained healing.
5. Spec Vampiric and Precision – Small burst and sustained healing, free utilities.

Hero-tron, due to his (its?) instrumental collaboration in defeating Scarlet.

I agree.
Also, Signet of Vampirism should also have its on-hit requirement removed, and should provide stability with 20% uptime.

I think some of the reasoning comes from the fact that outside Corrupt Boon (which no longer does it anyway), it is impossible for foes to mass strip boons. On the other hand, cleansing conditions is significantly easier. Hence, SY is balanced against itself, while SoS is balanced around some sort of cleansing effect removing the conditions before their full duration.
Whether this actually works out in practice is an entirely different matter though.

I’ll probably get shot for this, but I figured that asking for buffs without involving the rest of the GW2 community would likely get us nowhere. Hence, I made the following thread. Please show your support (and help me fight trolls)!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Let-s-talk-about-Necromancers/first#post3390002

We have a thread dedicated to the Warrior, so I figured we might as well bring up the other elephant in the room.
Before this boils down into a discussion about how Necros are “faceroll easy”, “spammy” and “OP Condi” let me point out that the Necromancer subforum is not happy with the current state of the Necro either. Most of us were blind-sided by Dhuumfire (which we still dislike), and believe that the profession is not currently what it was meant to be. The running gag in the Necromancer subforum is that our profession is a bug that will be patched out sooner or later.
As a reference, here is the original balance philosophy for Necros:

JonathanSharp:

The necro boasts the highest natural health of all the caster classes, and also has death shroud to extend that life total even higher. While they don’t have some of the escape or damage reduction capabilities that other classes boast, they do have a lot of ways to win attrition fights. They have access to poison on multiple weapons, they are able to combine condition damage with raw damage, and they have multiple disables to interrupt enemy skills. Necomancers also have multiple movement disabling abilities, while allows them to chase down enemies who are low on health.

Currently, the necromancer is one of the worst professions for attrition in the game.
As stated by Dictionary.com – at·tri·tion [uh-trish-uhn]: a wearing down or weakening of resistance, especially as a result of continuous pressure or harassment. In SPvP, Necros typically win fights via fast condition bombs, not the slow drawn out affair that was originally advertised. And often, little “raw damage” is involved.
Necros also have a very difficult time catching fleeing foes. While flight might be seen as a victory in the frame of SPvP, as stated above, Necros are meant to be able to stop it. As far as disables, one could argue the exact meaning of what was said, but I would like to believe the intention was to have chill, fear, cripple and weakness slow down fights into the attrition battle Necros were meant to be good at.

JonPeters:

We brought down some of the raw DPS conditions that necromancer enjoys, while also maintaining their pressure and sustain elements. The necromancer’s mobility will remain where it is currently, as we want the Necromancers to be focused on sustaining themselves through death shroud, siphoning health, and slowing down their opponent’s ability to act.

In my experience, while DPS has been reduced, the condition burst can still be oppressive, and over time, the condition resistance of some professions have been buffed to try and match condition bombs. Not all professions, mind you. This has created an awkward balance scenario where:

• Those without immunities are still complaining about condis;
• Other professions have a more difficult time running condi builds;
• Non-condi Necros are complaining since they can’t land control conditions like chill;
• Many of those that have immunities feel the things are all ok since they can “spank” Necros, who were running amok for too long.

Overall, very few people seem to be satisfied with the Necro is at this point in time. Many Necromancers feel that this profession isn’t what they signed up for, and many non-Necros feel the class is/was broken/OP and/or deserves bigger nerfs.

Given all of these, I figured I’d steal the “Let’s Talk” tag and create somewhere we can try and rationalize what people do/do not want the Necromancer to be, and what steps we would like to see be taken towards achieving that. I also personally believe that we should have running community thread regarding the state of each profession, but that might just be me.

tl;dr: Both the Necro and SPvP community seem unhappy with the state of the profession. Necromancers were advertised as attrition fighters, not condition spammers. Where would the community like to see the Necromancer go?

Personally, I would trade the Bleeding for Torment, though reduce the stacks/duration so that it matches the current expected damage output. Necros apply enough bleeds anyway, and it might help discourage all of that bouncing around other professions seem to do. It would also add some play to the skill since by not moving as much, opponents will take less damage.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I’m of the opinion that traits should never be designed for a specific skill unless that skill is always available. For example, Unyielding Blast, Reaper’s Might, and Transfusion all affect a specific skill, but these are skills that all necros, regardless of choices made, have available.

Having a trait that specifically boosts Flesh Golem, on the other hand, is not a good trait.

Will get to adding the new suggestions. (though I HIGHLY disagree with minor traits tied to a skill type or weapon, as that just gives us the same problem we have now with the minors)

I really hope a dev is reading this thread. If we could get a confirmation post saying “yeah, we’re keeping an eye on this thread” and nothing else, I’d be most happy.

You’re talking about a total game rehaul with every class then, there’s a lot of traits that work on specific skills/weapon skills.

Also, I’m not sure what happened to one of my posts, but, what are you proposing happens to Reanimator and Protection of the Horde? Complete removal with replacments from the above suggestions?

There are very few traits that reference specific skills – the ones that do are often tied to profession mechanics, so they’re always useful to the player. Traits that affect weapon sets are more common, but at a major level, which makes it a build choice. A trait that only affects one utility or one weapon skill would be strangely restrictive since minor traits are meant to support every build (that’s the current issue with them).

Personally, I think PotH is weak enough to become Adept Major, since gaining 100 toughness some of the time in exchange for slotting all minions doesn’t seem oppressive. Reanimator is supposedly getting merged with Death Nova.

Well of Blight: Target area draws foes in, then pulses, chilling and poisoning them.
Pull Range: 600; Radius : 240; Duration: 5s; Pulse: 1s; Chill: 5s; Poison: 5s; 90s CD

This is the perfect well to top them all off. Foes can’t run away with the pull+chill combo, and poison prevents them from healing through whatever damage you/your wells will do.

Tainted Power: Consume target foes’s conditions. You gain boons for each condition transferred this way.
Channel: 3s; Might: x8, 2s /condition; Fury: 2s /condition, Stability: 1s /condition; 90s CD

This is the double-edged sword that corruptions were meant to be. The more you suffer, the greater the benefits you reap. The symmetry is somewhat broken via condition removal/Consume Conditions, but then that’d require you to save up cooldowns for an elite, which seems fine.

I would also vote for Staff Mastery.
In Zerg v Zerg, your marks are pretty much guaranteed to hit something, while in 1v1 the size is irrelevant, making the reduced cooldown better. The only arguable case is in between, but I still think cooldown is better, since the bigger radius doesn’t guarantee multiple hits anyway.
I think the only saving grace for Greater Marks is unblockability and better area denial. Your build seems to have area denial covered, so you really just have to weigh how much you think your DPS varies between getting things blocked but firing them faster, or slower unblockable marks. I would personally err on the on the side of cooldown reduction, as its useful more often (outlined above), and because blocks tend to be limited – you will waste one skill to break the Aegis/Block, but then have faster cooldowns, meaning you’ll likely get your skill back before they retrieve their block.

Bhawb.7408:

I swear to god I hate how they designed these forums. Second post in a row that got thrown out for a stupid error

You can download Chrome/Firefox add-ons/extensions that save form input data, so if you time out, all you’d have to do is hit “Back” to return to the posting window with all your text there, ready to be copy/pasted.

Asking for things they will not do isn’t really productive.
Necros are meant to be the counterparts to the Guardian – conditions vs boons, damage vs support, but both still squarely attrition, since neither can run away once in a fight. Issue is, boons > conditions, and we lack the damage to outdo a Guardian’s support. They are also much, much better at attrition.
Hence, I think the best mechanic/skill ports for Necros come from Guardians, since they actually perform rather well in attrition based fights.

Dark Path should be changed to “Judge’s Intervention”, and Tainted Shackles to “Binding Blade”.

Reposting because it really needs to be said again.

Pyriall.5027:

Didn’t they nerf the healing signet of ele’s, because there wasn’t a choice in whether to use the passive or active? Interesting that this has come up again…

At least you don’t need to get hit to acquire pitiful returns… [/Signet of Vampirism]

Bhawb.7408:

3) Bloodthirst is fine actually, I think. It helps gate certain issues itself, because to have a fully selfish siphon build essentially stops you from being able to also have a supporty build. Otherwise, you could have full siphoning and support options.

I agree with everything else you said, except for this. Maye if they buffed siphoning to meaningful, and upped the support Blood Magic provides, this would be true. As it is, I think Bloodthirst is just pointless limiter you’re forced into.

jportell.2197:

RyuDragnier.9476:

jportell.2197:

Just throwing this out there. The amount of buffs and such that other classes have recieved have left guardian in a very underwhelming place. At launch they were “OP”. The beginning of this year they were “okay”… Now…. well now I think its about time they got some meaningful buffs…

I laughed. Guardians will never be underwhelming, Guardians rock for every occasion, and are IMO one of the best classes in the game in terms of overall design. Besides, you think you’re in a bad spot? Level a ranger to 80 and play every game mode for it. THEN talk to me about underwhelming.

They are not underwhelming… However all other classes are getting love in leaps and bounds… And anet is just kinda fiddling with guards… Nothing to major in any direction.

Presumably, that’s the sign of a balanced profession.

jportell.2197:

Aza.2105:

jportell.2197:

DeathPanel.8362:

jportell.2197:

DeathPanel.8362:

jportell.2197:

DeathPanel.8362:

Dynnen.6405:

If someone sees us CASTING our meditation, they run from us. Since we don’t have any soft CC…they get away and we have a useless heal.

Please, please, please, get off this idea of Guards ‘holding points’ and letting people get away from us. Its gotten old and there are many problems with the Guard. Fix it quickly.

This change in no way “magnifies problems”. First of all you don’t need to take the heal if you don’t like it.

Secondly you are talking from purely a pvp/wvw perspective, and ignored pve applications.

This skill is very good for meditation guards in pve since it is a meditation and will trigger additional heal and fury as well as very good sustain against multiple mobs due to the life gain on damage.

If you run meditations anywhere but open world… i just…

You can run meditations anywhere. Most roaming guard builds are meditation based. And I’ve already stated before, the heal is not required. You can use whatever heal you were using before so this whole post about how the new heal “magnifies” problems makes no sense.

The heal magnifies the problem because in order to get the most use out of the heal you have to do damage. In order to do damage you need to be on your target. In a pvp environment where people don’t come running at you and stand there for you to bludgeon them so you can heal you need to have good gap closers and good snares…

Guards have a laughable amount of either. You can not have a class with only one legitimate and very predictable ranged weapon, have terrible gap closers.

As for those dismissing med guards in pve, bads with no imagination will always be bads with no imagination.

This thread is about the heal so why woudn’t i mention the heal? Also if you use meditations in pve content such as dungeons fractals or world boss fights…. You are possibly the most selfish guardian in the game… Meditations are great for DPS pvp, open world pve, solo wvw. Thats it. Using it in zergs, dungeons, boss fights etc… There are so many great and “imaginative” builds that use other things besides meditations because they provide group support something meditations completely lack.

You can successfully run meditations in any aspect of the game. I’ve ran mediations exclusively for awhile with my static group just to test viability and if it affected my group. It did not.

Then you had someone else providing all the reflects? In things such as dungeons Meditations are completely lacking group synergy…. No fire fields which means less might, no reflects at all… No party wide boons, no stability, no group condition clear….

Viability=/=optimal…. While meditations are great in theory. In group play such as dungeons they are eh…

Saying meditations are great in all aspects of the game is like saying I am going to run clerics in every aspect of the game just because I know its viable.

Would you like to trade them for a Necro’s Corruptions? Or maybe trade heal skills with Signet of Vampirism?

I don’t disagree, but asking the devs for things they’re not likely to do isn’t going to get us anywhere either.I have serious doubts we’ll be seeing a new condition, much less a new status effect (daze/distortion/etc) any time soon, and especially not one that griefs skills (despite it being necessary).
I think that if Dark Path was changed to “Judge’s Intervention”, and Tainted Shackles to “Binding Blade”, we’d already be significantly further ahead. After that, maybe we could re-evaluate, but at least those two are attainable given they already exist.

Only after typing this did I realize that Guardians are essentially better at lockdown than we are, but they also have better mobility…

Draehl.2681:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

But I would love to see a unique debuff that disables teleports and shadowsteps on the target.

I could definitely see something like this. Rather than a full on daze/stun it could simply suppress all movement skills/effects. Be it teleports, leaps, swiftness, etc. In fact, call it “Suppression” it could be the necro equivilant to stuns. It could have a slightly higher duration than a stun or daze would since you’re still able to move, heal, attack, etc. It might could be worked into Death Shroud, Focus, or MH dagger?

I don’t think they’ll do this because beyond profession mechanics, they don’t seem fond of giving any specific profession a mechanic that no one other profession has an equivalent of.

If anything, they need to get Spectral Grasp and Dark Path to work well before looking at anything else.
Frankly, if we’re looking for mass pulling, they should just either modify Tainted Shackles into a Binding Blade equivalent (immob + torment = nonbo), or they should make Spectral Grasp a mass pull.

Before fully redesigning skills, I would change Dark Pact to a skill that stacks Immob the further the enemy; like a reverse “Fear Me.”

I’ve seen lots of threads discussing why siphoning is bad in its current implementation, why it has dangerous scaling potential, and I’ve even seen a few Dev posts on the matter. With the new Signet of Vampirism, which is a riff on siphoning, sucking so badly comparing to its contemporaries, I figured it’s time to sit down and have a proper discussion on this topic.
The purpose of this thread is to try and identify the issues we currently have with siphoning, both in skills and traits, and figure out ways to improve them that could be implemented. Hopefully, as part of the Dev’s new CDI initiative, we’ll get some red posts, but if not, they’ll at least have this as a resource.
___________________________________________________________________
DISCUSSION POINTS

Currently, I think there are four things that are holding back siphoning from achieving it’s full potential (feel free to discuss any others; this is just a starting point):
1) Deathshroud: This has been beaten to death, but siphoning does not work with DS. It seems rather lame to me that our primary class mechanic interferes with our traits (among other things), but having played in the Betas, I do recall the Necro bunkers that wrecked the PvP scene. I’m not sure what can be done about this, but if nothing else, I would like to see the Signet of Vampirism passive (along with other Signet passives) be useful; right now, DS kind of wrecks the skill since you lose a lot of its benefits.
2) Base Values/Scaling: The current problem with a lot of siphoning traits is that they are balanced on the presumption that we have maximized their potential – we have five enemies, standing on three different wells that keep critting, while we drop critical marks on all five of them; or we have all minions attacking while we crit marks on 5 enemies. In these cases, you could say siphoning is really high, but the problem is that siphoning is something that naturally scales: if you are gaining lots of health by hitting lots of people, you’ll also be losing lots of health as all to your foes won’t just be passive dummies. When transferred to a 1v1 scenario, though, the numbers scale down terribly – the 30-60ish health is effectively nothing against attacks that hit for thousands.
3) Bloodthirst: I really hate this trait, because due to it’s existence, all siphoning has to be toned down in base values in order to account for a possible power-up that not everyone will take. If you don’t take Bloodthirst, you essentially kitten yourself. I would rather all base values be set to Base+Bloodthirst and have something else so that Necros aren’t forced to take this trait to maximize other ones.
4) Trait Positioning: This one may be contentious, but I feel like siphoning could easily be turned up if Vampiric weren’t a “free” obligatory trait you had to take while going down Blood Magic. I would rather have Vampiric be more powerful and moved up into Master Major than it’s current incarnation. The other issue is that siphons appear to be balanced to be utilized all together; but not every necro wants to run three Major vampiric traits (Precision, Bloodthirst & Master, or some other combination), and not every Necro wants to go that deep into Blood Magic. If we had to choose between different siphon traits, they could all be individually powered up, as you would not achieve the same critical mass.

I don’t think the above are all of the issues Siphoning currently faces, and I don’t presume to have the solutions to all of these issues. However, I feel like if we at least have one centralized place to discuss things, more good might come of it.

As much as we complain, often rightfully, the main issue is that the necromancer does not match GW2 gameplay in it’s styling, and the developers have other things to worry about, such as the company’s PvE goals.

We were built to be an attrition class with no mobility and no damage avoidance outside of a finite resource. However, this game is all about burst, poor healing, movement and positioning, and evading damage. Moreover, our skills and traits are very binary – they are either too good or too weak, and so scaling becomes horrid. The best example is Deathshroud itself – it’s scaled to be good enough in 1v1’s, so it melts when outnumbered, but if scaled for 2v1s, a single player could never deal with it.

I’m sure that somewhere, deep down in ANET’s dungeons, there is a Dev who would love to have the Necro be as awesome as the warrior – statistically, there just has to be one. But this “mystery dev” is most likely not on the balance team, and the balance team pays little attention to PvE, WvW or anything outside of the SPvP forums. And the “mystery dev” also has his own job, and his own bosses to tend to. Additionally, if we were as popular as Warriors, the flagship profession of the game, the QQ spewing out of the forums would massively outnumber what’s happening here now since awful Warriors would just start crying “NECRO OP” because they lost.

I feel like the Devs dug themselves into a hole with a lot of decisions they made, and digging themselves back out of it is not going to be particularly easy. While there are several quick fixes like stomps/rezzing in Deathshroud, I feel there are several fundamental problems that would require the complete redesign of several aspects of the class. And one possible problem with quick fixes is that once they spit out one, we’ll demand more, and we get into a slippery slope until the Necro is exactly what everyone wants it to be. Moreover, while we’re not really optimized for different game areas, you can get by since PvE is easy, WvW is numbers, and we have some semi-viable builds for SPvP.

The best thing we can do is to keep voicing our opinions. Despite whatever protest forum users may come up with, players who never drop by will continue to buy gems/play Necros, and players on the leaderboards are replaceable, so one or a few Necros deviating from the set path will not alter internal metrics.

tl;dr: I’m sure they’ve noticed how annoyed/angry/depressed we are, but several issues require very complex fixes, and they don’t put things out until “they’re ready.” Just keep trucking, and hopefully someday we’ll get the Dervish treatment and leave beta.

You also have ton consider that while stale, the WvW meta does experience shifts from time to time. Re-speccing a character based solely on WvW loot would take ages, while the average PvE’r can get enough gold to do in about 2-3 hours, excluding any extra special drops.

I wonder if we couldn’t re-purpose this thread into general trait suggestions/replacements for bad traits. Although, I guess that might get too confusing/out of hand…

Crimson Riddles.3892:

Codmando.7042:

There is such thing as server pride. Look at SoR. We have had Blackgate trying to buy our guilds since were their competition but very few to none of left SoR. All of our starting WvW guilds still stay and take 2nd place because we believe we can beat BG. For a time we did but BG bought more guilds. There is server pride some have it better then others.

lol what a terrible excuse, but can’t say i’m surprised seeing it come from someone in SoR.

Think of it what you will, but I know of more than one guild on SoR that was offered funds to transfer (not necessarily to BG), and politely declined.

Apparently we all get to be friends forever now since TC will only come up once every twenty matches.

Hmm, fair enough.
On second thought, it would also be broken in WvW, so probably not a good idea.
By the way, feel free to vet any of my suggestions, as I’m really just typing up whatever comes to mind.

In that case, maybe it could just be toyed so you gained an above-average-but-not-OP amount of Life Force on any ally death, so it benefits solo-play with minions.

EDIT: what do your asterisks mean?