Guild Wars 2

Bhawb.7408:

Frankly, I almost hope it doesn’t happen because now everyone is going to think its okay to run condi in groups when it is still massively subpar in almost every situation. All of a sudden we’ll have people running condi Necro talking about how they are contributing, as though they aren’t doing half the damage of a proper build.

Its a nice change and it needs to happen eventually, but they really need to fix PvE design at the same time.

Your take on this is quite correct. Power will still be better for burst damage as conditions are incapable of doing such. They actually function quite the opposite by building over time.

However if this change sticks and is universal, there won’t be a group cap of 5-7K condi damage per second (that’s not counting lower dps condi procs by power builds), which is what made it so inferior to power.

In elongated or non-stationary encounters, condi damage may become superior in that once it’s applied and built up, enemies are consistently being hit with condi DPS no matter how mobile/defensive they are (unless they remove condis).

This change definitely closes the gap considerably between condi damage and power damage in PvE.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Will probably only be the case on larger bosses, but that is most excellent news. Condition builds might finally be wanted in dungeons.

That said, I notice Vulnerability is still just 25. That is the one stacking condition they really should just leave alone, though.

Why? I don’t see any problem with allowing Vulnerability to stack up to 100+… ;p

On a more serious note for Necromancers, Epidemic may become a lot more useful in boss fights with adds etc. Even if they capped the amount of condi stacks at 25 per Epidemic cast.

moi.4398:

It’s not about the perplexity itself , It still works on daze . As Balekai self hear is maybe reverted back to a non-interrupt AND because of this the synergy between fear and perplex is broke .

Yep, because before they patched fear to officially interrupt, using fears didn’t count towards interrupt daily nor did it activate interrupt procs.

I haven’t noticed any interrupt procs with fear myself now that I think about it. It may be that I just wasn’t looking for them.

I wouldn’t be surprised if fear was accidently reverted back to being a non-interrupt, since Life Transfer last patch reverted back to the bug in which it stops channeling when LF runs out.

Maybe when Anet was fiddling around with the Necro bug fixes to downstate, they accidently used some old necro code/scripts that pre-dated the fear interrupt change. Code that included the issue with LT as well (so just after the change to DS allowing actions to be performed in it like stomping).

Edit: Also when did Unholy Sanctuary get implemented? I can’t remember, but was the regen on it the original feature or was the enter DS on fatal hit? If it was only the regen in the beginning, this may be further evidence they used old code because Unholy Sanctuary wasn’t entering DS correctly after the 16th patch.

To warrant being a GM trait it really needs to be either pulsing, or grant more initial stacks and uptime. If it were pulsing I would make it probably 1 stack with a gap between uptime and the next pulse (to differentiate and make it less effective compared to elite stability pulsing).

I like a few other ideas in this thread too like area stability or making other on-enter DS traits pulsing effects too.

I have always felt that at least self-buffing stability should have been a feature of the Necro class. It seems to be the missing link in much of our functionality and was likely kept out of our design, because of what appears to be Necro + Boons = Bad mentality.

That’s true and was thinking of that as a solution, but came to the conclusion that when it comes to an ICD life steal, trying to artificially account for only the loss of spike siphon healing has issues too. It runs into a similar problem as the damage side of things, where you basically have a high regen effect that’s difficult to counter. So it becomes too powerful in 1v1 situations, because it’s balanced around encompassing life steal potential against 5+ targets hitting them with multiple proc skills.

The easiest thing to do would be to ignore that loss of burst regen and hope the consistent life steal (including more focused damage) over time makes up for it.

Or, like you suggest, leave the ICD out of the equation. That way we never encounter that high damaging condition-like life steal, because siphon damage is still diluted over many hits/procs. The healing portion can naturally scale with the amount of targets hit. The only problem again is that you need to make siphons viable for single proc builds, while not making them too OP for multi proc builds.

Either way, it probably would be best for Anet to drop the parity between power and healing power base/scaling on our life steals more if necessary. It may look a bit wonky or artificially tweaked, but life steal mechanics are one of those things with so many variables that it has to be considered.

Assuming life steals get addressed again.

Hmm if they could get it right, balancing around the mean without the ICD would be ideal.

Again I have a hard time thinking of a way around balancing an ICD siphon after taking away spike life steal, without making the siphon too high that it starts acting like a high damage irremovable condition-like effect, that heals the caster…

Then there’s the issue of losing that ability to spike steal in of itself. Right now being able to spike multiple life steals at one time when you need it, is sort of the saving grace of those traits at the moment.

Honestly it might be better to try increasing the life steal without an ICD first and see how it goes. If it turns out just increasing life steal amounts further without ICDs is too powerful, then I guess the nerf bat or ICD function is never too far from the tree. :P

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Okay, time to re-calculate single-target siphoning with main-hand Axe and Axe Training. This actually hits faster than main-hand dagger, and cooldowns are different, so I will be adjusting a fair amount.

Restating the above values on hits/second casting:
Locust Swarm: 30 h/sc
Well of Suffering: 24 h/sc
Well of Corruption: 24 h/sc
Well of Darkness: 24 h/sc
Rending Claws: 2.11 h/sc
Ghastly Claws: 3.56 h/sc

Same priority is in place: Locust Swarm->#2-> wells-> auto.

Locust Swarm’s timing remains unchanged.

Ghastly Claws is cast at the .5, 9.25, 18, 26.75, 35.5, 44.25, and 53.25 second marks. This is 56 hits, with 28 crits, siphoning 4004 life/minute.

Order for wells is changed up, casting Well of Darkness at the 2.75 and 53 marks, Well of Corruption at the 3 second mark and 43.25 marks, and Well of Suffering at the 3.25 and 38.5 second mark.

Rending Claws cycle time is .95 seconds. 18.5 seconds are spent casting other skills, leaving this 41.25 seconds to cast for 43.42 cycles. This is 87 hits, ~43.5 crits for 2392.5 life siphoned per minute.

Total is 17413.5 health/minute or 290.23 health/second. This is the absolute max from a 50% crit chance build on a single target, and it does not include aftercast delays aside from axe auto. Actual healing/second is lower.

Average hits/second with max optimization? 3.583. Vampiric absolutely cannot trigger more than that/second on average against a single target. Including aftercasts, this drops to 3/second or lower. Including opponents who don’t let you just hit them as you please, this likely drops to 2-2.25 hits/second or lower.

For that amount of optimization of gear, build and skill use, what Drarnor originally stated still holds true after his new calculations. In a perfect world of 290.23 health per second as an absolute max benefit, it’s too low. Considering Regeneration in the same build/gear is 263 health per second (if 1054 healing power in original build link still holds true) whenever its up.

To get viable use of siphons by investing 15-30 points in Blood Magic, we shouldn’t need to perfectly use every single quick, multiple hitting skill in our possession to get an 30-40 extra health per second over regeneration (on paper). Especially when by doing so, we’re sacrificing ways to apply regeneration or get better effective health/regen over time through other means.

Whether you’re for an ICD or not, it’s pretty clear that siphons need to be buffed further if they’re truly going to be an attrition alternative for Necro. An alterative that can be fully invested in.

I would still like to see the one second ICD with the much bigger siphon, to eliminate all that micro managing involved and the vast difference in effectiveness based on what weapons or skills are used and when. It’s not as exciting or interactive, but its definitely more dependable and would make blood magic useful for all builds and attacks. Other profession mechanics aren’t that undependable or incorrectly designed to the point where investing in a whole trait line for it’s main feature is utterly counter productive.

Edit: I guess the question to ask is, if Anet ever intends or intended for life steal to be a viable attrition that we could rely on over DS use and investment? It’s possible its purposely designed as a supplementary attrition mechanic, which would be unfortunate.

flow.6043:

Bhawb.7408:

Without an ICD Vampiric will never, ever be useful to a non-wells build, and that is absurd to bar a major function of a tree to any build that isn’t wells.

And with ICD all vampiric traits will never, ever be useful.

Also, do the extra Vampiric Ritual procs seem really that outrageously good to you?
First of all, the max amount of siphons would be an exception to the rule. You might get those in zerg fights in WvW more regularly, but especially there they will pale in comparison to all the aoe healing from your allies.
Secondly, 6 points in Blood Magic. I can’t stress enough how much of a compromise that is. Even 4 points really. You either give up Soul Reaping, which is much better defense with or without healing through DS. Or you give up a huge amount of damage and other useful traits.

The way I see it, there needs to be full healing through DS, there needs to be more aoe scaling of healing and life force regeneration (that means no icds among other things), they should introduce completly new sources of healing that are baseline to every build like a #6 DS skill, there needs to be a doubling or trippling of every siphon value, and while they are at it they could double the amount of every main healing skill we have.
You think that sounds too much? Well, I think most necros are just too used to having absolutely no way of sustaining or recovering from serious pressure, and they are too chicken to admit to themselves how much of a significant healing buff we actually need.

It’s too much.

I don’t think it would be balanced to double/triple every necro life steal, double the power of all our self healing skills, add new sources of healing and more life force generation.

We would be unstoppable.

Vampiric Rituals could be kept off ICD and buffed by increasing the siphon, since rituals by there very nature are only area of effect and said trait has no impact on single target procs like vampiric/vampiric precision.

ICDed vampiric and vampiric precision could be very useful. Lets say vampiric/vampiric precision are stealing for 45 with no ICD currently in a siphon build you have. Say anet puts a 0.95 ICD on it, and buffed the healing from both to essentially what it would be for hitting 5 targets. Instead of 45 life steal it’s now 225 each with both on separate 0.95 ICDs.

So now your auto attacks are stealing 225 damage per second if you only use vampiric and 225-450 with vamp precision. Staff marks life steal for 225-445 health if you stagger them, to make up for the .20 seconds for ICD just in case. However, you don’t need to hit 5 enemies anymore to do so.

If this isn’t enough regen to make up for the investment in blood magic, increase the siphon to account for the fact burst regen wouldn’t be provided by vampiric or vampiric precision.

Sagat.3285:

Necro is the dedicated slow casting aggro of pvp, those in practice situations won’t happen in any fights even vs noobs never not even in TDM , ICD is what makes SoV useless other than it not working in DS, the pool is first to change reduce it and allow the heals, we can adjust from there. I haven’t paid much attention to them but don’t they have test servers??

Necro is much like a pve boss, a boring hp sponge , major reason I dislike power necro and try to avoid Soul Reaping ,reduce the pool increase the regen to fasten the paste. I can’t emphasize enough how DS’s pool size is reducing the efforts of this thread and all the previous ones like it.

Reduce the pool!!!!

ICD in of itself doesn’t make SoV is useless, but it would be overall a much better skill if SoV was proced on our hit (although I use it for on enemy hit in those stunlock/interrupt heavy situations), did passive damage and buffed you and nearby allies with the active life steal stacks rather than the target.

You have a point about trading pool for increased LF gain. It would fix a lot issues with LF management and our overall attrition. It really doesn’t matter how big your LF pool is. If you’re stuck outside of DS with little to no way to generate LF, then DS isn’t going to be of much use.

flow.6043:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Balekai.6083:

Which is why there needs to be more thought when reworking things like DS mechanics and life steals, to keep barely viable builds from becoming crazy OP due to oversights. To balance one end of life steals (normal single target hits), you sort of have to nerf the other (area/channel hits) and bring them closer together. That’s done through a much bigger life steal with an ICD. The downside is that one big life steal per second adds counter play issues. To enemy players, life steals may feel like an un-removable burning effect (“cough” Dhuumfire on steroids).

Why? Why should area lifesteal be brought in line with single target and have very little, if any variation? Area lifesteal requires multiple foes, and multiple foes means more incoming damage. No ICD is a self-built scaling mechanic, which Necro sorely needs.

I agree. Aoe scaling of healing and lf regen is the only thing we can hope for with nothing but health as a damage buffer. Introducing an ICD (like the one on Vamp Signet) would be the worst they could do.

Balekai.6083:

Life Transfer alone would net heal me 1935 health over 3 seconds hitting 5 targets

Seriously, 2k healing from a 40 sec cd skill that is more likely to be interrupted than Consume Conditions while facing 5 opponents…. that is NOTHING.
Same goes for the rest of your numbers, they simply won’t work that way in actual fights.

Balekai.6083:

What I’m was saying is that there are mechanics already in place that makes these builds workable if not viable

Sorry, I don’t buy it, I’m 100% with NeXeD here. Your build doesn’t do any damage at the cost of having slightly better sustain than the meta. Yes, just slightly, you are still suffering from all the same sustain issues as every other necro build without being able to dish out any counter pressure.
And why on earth would you take a healing skill that doesn’t even work in DS when the build is supposedly all about tanking in DS with Unholy Sanctuary?

You’re missing the point on the life transfer. Yes 2K heal is peanuts when you have a normal health bar. However, when you’re in another health bar that you can almost instantly refill and you’re taking lots of damage, a net 2K heal is more like a 6K heal in effectiveness outside of DS, when looking at it from an effective health perspective.

How do the numbers not work that way in fights? Would not Unholy Sanctuary+SoV+Regeneration from the stats pulled from in-game, not heal me 882 base health per second while in DS if all healing was allowed in DS? It’s not hard to see how this could become overpowered.

Edit:

SoV is an experiment in healing while locked down. You use the passive as much as possible in combination with Regeneration from MoB/MoE. You can always count on it to proc without CC nullifying it. Only time I use the active is for an emergency when I know I can kite long enough and mitigate long enough to recover for the passive to come back, counting on Unholy Sanctuary and Soul Marks to keep from downing until then.

NeXeD.3042:

@balekai

You don’t actually pvp do you…..

There is so much wrong with what you said…. please try pvping outside of hotjoins before saying a build like this works in practice. Maybe bring it to the AG tourney on monday, or just do some ranked games. people aren’t the same as golems, they move they dodge they CC the living kitten out of you and they focus fire you.

Oddly enough I’m actually in agreement that full healing in ds could be horribly OVERPOWERED. But that’s mostly due to my experience that I don’t even have to trait for sustain to survive if I’m good enough.

You seem to be under the misimpression that I actually believe its somehow optimal and super competitive. I experiment with it in soloq and hotjoin.

The point was that even as things are now, you can see where necro mechanics could be better with good changes or outright abused with too good of changes. In some circumstances, Necro attrition already works and based off that, we can see where it needs to go from what it is now.

Even though I used it as an example, I don’t think we will ever get full healing of course. It was just an extreme to show what such a basic change would do to certain builds, if not all builds because of DS mechanics.

As for playstyle, I agree Necro right now can sustain through proper kiting and smart use of skills, DS and positioning. I’m more concerns with a few changes to DS to make it more useful in spike situations on par with evades, dodges and the like. But if full siphoning is ever to become a “thing,” it has to be buffed compared to what it is now, since going that route always feels inferior to similar non-siphon builds.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Balekai.6083:

Which is why there needs to be more thought when reworking things like DS mechanics and life steals, to keep barely viable builds from becoming crazy OP due to oversights. To balance one end of life steals (normal single target hits), you sort of have to nerf the other (area/channel hits) and bring them closer together. That’s done through a much bigger life steal with an ICD. The downside is that one big life steal per second adds counter play issues. To enemy players, life steals may feel like an un-removable burning effect (“cough” Dhuumfire on steroids).

Why? Why should area lifesteal be brought in line with single target and have very little, if any variation? Area lifesteal requires multiple foes, and multiple foes means more incoming damage. No ICD is a self-built scaling mechanic, which Necro sorely needs.

Please explain this to me.

Also, I realized I goofed a bit with my OP in the thread. Will be editing it. Analysis is still accurate, so no worries there. However, for single target, highest proc amounts actually come from axe, not dagger. I’ll work out a new analysis for axe siphoning and post it here.

Also, average procs/second from max investment (with dagger mainhand) is 3.06. Not sure how I calculated 1.7 before. In typical combat, expect that to drop to 2-2.kittens/second. Still a value that can be balanced around and currently isn’t.

I’m actually suggesting the opposite. Bringing single target life steal in line with AoE/Channel, which life steal is currently balanced around. So that all attacks no matter the skill or weapon, are hitting/healing at what life steal traits are currently balanced for at optimal procing.

Unfortunately an ICD would nerf burst life stealing, so I’m not sure how that could be taken into account while balancing, since making ICD life steal too powerful may turn it into a dhuumfire-like effect.

But my issue is that by greatly buffing life steal traits in order to make single target siphoning more viable, it will push area/channel procs to become too powerful after 3-5 enemies when you combine it with other mitigation and regen. There may be a sweet spot or enemies may still be able to counter with enough CC, but going overboard may just lead to builds that may abuse damage reduction amounts, regening and essentially never die as long as they keep plopping down Marks, AoE, Wells, channel skills etc.

Again, by making it ICD with a much higher life steal, you’re normalizing life steal by making single target vampiric application just as useful as area/channel application. It doesn’t matter if it’s 1 enemy or 5 enemies. Take Vampiric Master, which is the only life steal trait that truly works as intended, because minion attacks are plentiful enough to make the healing/damage potent and the number of foes doesn’t change its effectiveness. Just as long as your minions are attacking something and aren’t dead. :p

NeXeD.3042:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNArYGn0ISRNWTD83YinhS6JIAa2JDhUgyfYHA-TZQbAAQZAA

Here’s your build minus sigils and runes And a 3rd utility slot which either uses a stunbreak Or the build is even worse than I originally thought. So you’ve got a condi build rocking toughness and healing power with no condi duration nice anyone with hoelbrek pretty much is immune to your build so you are useless against engineers and elementalists. You don’t have enough conditions or duration to do anything against a Shoutbow or guardian. Ever class even traited as bunker is going to out dps you.

Youve basically created a walking nerf ball.

No it doesn’t work in practice, the other team can literally just ignore you and kill your teammates while you flail around hitting people with 2 seconds bleeds.

Just because you ran around for 10 minutes in hotjoins slapping people with a piece of spaghetti does not make your build decent, viable, etc.

You’re very close. Geomancy/Renewal or Leech sigils, Undead or other condi runes of course. Basically this:

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNArYWn0ISRNWTD+0A7Nm4ZokeCCgmdyQIFo8H2BA-TJhHABPVGw2zAwL7PAwjAAA

As for the condi duration. That is the weak point of the build(s) and trust me its really hard to keep DPS up when solo. You have to cycle through every skill you have to keep pressure up (fortunately that’s natural to condi builds). However, it’s highly unlikely that skilled players allow conditions to run more than 10-15 seconds at a time without condi clearing. The trick is to keep applying them so it doesn’t matter until they run out of condi clear. Necro bleeds in of themselves are fairly long durations around 7-10 seconds. 20%-35% reduction in condi duration puts them to 5-7 seconds. Not a huge difference.

The reality is that in most cases, you’re doing about 500-1K damage in bleeds, 250ish in poison, and the usual torment, bad normal damage etc. You get to transfer all the extra burning, bleeds and poison they apply to you back easily with Putrid Mark/Deathly Swarm. You get extra condis from WoC as well. Testing similar power based builds, it’s feels better to have that area conditional damage like the above than just doing 1K damage to one or two targets with 2-3K bursts here and there. There’s just not enough pressure there on the power side to keep enemy players at bay or kill them, unlike condis.

Allied players still benefit from your area regeneration, renewal swaps, area protection, area weakness, area poison, your area blind spam, area boon corrupt and area condi convert. You are also fairly good at ressing people through heavy pressure and the use of doom while in DS. It’s not all that easy to just ignore, especially if on a point your trying to contest.

This isn’t my point though. That somhow there’s a super awsome viable Necro attrition build that surpasses everyone elses and is most optimal that everyone missed.

Far from it.

What I’m was saying is that there are mechanics already in place that makes these builds workable if not viable, compared to impossible 1-2 years ago. Having tested and played around with the mechanics you begin to see the potential or the risks for future abuse of Necro attrition depending on how it’s buffed.

For example. If the fix to necro healing was just allowing self heals in DS, how would that affect the above build? Well for starters in addition to Unholy Sanctuary (236 healing per sec), I would be benefiting from SoV and Regeneration (646 per second) for 882 net health regen, while using a completely different healthbar. 10 seconds of DS would essentially be pausing the fight for 10 seconds and healing 8820 base health without using a heal skill, without mitigation or real counter play. Just popping DS and laughing at people. That would seriously swing fights and burst. If you made life steals work in DS as they are now, then Life Transfer alone would net heal me 1935 health over 3 seconds hitting 5 targets (which it can do easily), while also restoring a lot of my life force. Increasing vampiric traits too much without ICDs would just allow the build a lot more regen in addition to all the damage mitigation, making it a lot easier to pull off not being wackamoled.

All those combined would be somewhat ridiculous.

Which is why there needs to be more thought when reworking things like DS mechanics and life steals, to keep barely viable builds from becoming crazy OP due to oversights. To balance one end of life steals (normal single target hits), you sort of have to nerf the other (area/channel hits) and bring them closer together. That’s done through a much bigger life steal with an ICD. The downside is that one big life steal per second adds counter play issues. To enemy players, life steals may feel like an un-removable burning effect (“cough” Dhuumfire on steroids).

flow.6043:

Balekai.6083:

NeXeD.3042:

So full of absolute dookie. I’ll burst right through that on any class.

Oh it can definitely bursted through by skilled/smart players, but there are many cases where you can multiple people that just can’t kill you if they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t coordinate or their builds just don’t have the spike. To the point where people are left wondering what’s going on taking so long to kill a necro. :p

So Death Shroud shouldn’t be improved because bad players who don’t know what they’re doing can’t kill you. kay.

No what I’m saying is that in practice sustain can be achieved against good and bad players, but can be countered with good play and counter play. I’m concerned that certain buffs to Necro life stealing or regen (such as allowing all healing in DS or greatly increasing life steal amounts) would have unintended consequences many in the community don’t think about.

There’s plenty of things that can be improved, but they have to be in a manner that takes into consideration all of our abilities, not just the necro meta of today.

NeXeD.3042:

Balekai.6083:

NeXeD.3042:

Balekai.6083:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

flow.6043:

If that’s really what you believe than I honestly don’t understand why you are so much against ally healing through DS.
And I don’t understand why you would allow regen applied by allies, but no other healing skills.

Unrestricted healing combined with death shroud’s uptime is far too likely to be overwhelming. That’s the problem with health being the sole defense of the profession: it’s too little or too much, with a very, very thin line between.

Full healing in death shroud is a good end goal, but if the balance line gets crossed before we reach it, then we should stop there.

This. For example, combining Unholy Sanctuary, good healing power, armor class and quick LF gain already can be overwhelming effective health. With my own sustain builds it can become an unending game of wackamole, if enemies don’t have enough pressure and spike damage to get through SoV+Regeneration+Unholy Sactuary+Soul Marks+Mitigation revolving door.

People forget that while in DS, health bar healing is way more effective than normal healing outside of DS. You’re getting 100% of the net benefit of the healing, while taking damage to an easily replenished secondary healthbar (life force) with benefits of its own. Nothing like hanging out in DS for a couple seconds and letting a group of enemies expend their spike on it, healing all your health in the process and exiting DS only to use something like soul marks to get 100% LF back then repeat.

Edit: On the gating issue. If life steal is not gated and normalized, then builds that abuse constant area hits and sustain may become too too powerful in their regen and with very little vampiric trait investment (essentially just vampiric).

So full of absolute dookie. I’ll burst right through that on any class.

Oh it can definitely bursted through by skilled/smart players, but there are many cases where you can multiple people that just can’t kill you if they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t coordinate or their builds just don’t have the spike. To the point where people are left wondering what’s going on taking so long to kill a necro. :p

Let me put it this way:

I have a weird Well/Unholy Sanc/Condi sustain build I play around with spvp. Firstly it combines SoV passive (410) and constant Regeneration from MoB+MoE (236) for 646 health per second in most cases. 20K health, 3000 armor, 14K LF.

Then you have Marks, Grasping Dead, and if they’re hitting five targets, are healing 215 per cast. The Marks are also giving me 3% LF buffed by Soul Comprehension, giving me 575 LF each time I hit something with them. So each cast is essentially giving me 890 effective health on up to 4-5 marks at a time if I make it into DS of course.

Then since i’m using a condi spec, I have plenty of area weakness for 50% fumble, which is essentially 25% less damage over time.

It also runs Wells specced for Ritual Mastery and Ritual of Protection. So when someone tries to spike me outside of DS, I just throw down WoC to corrupt them and/or WoD to completely counter their burst. They usually by this point have more Weakness if I WoCed them, and I have also gained 4-8 seconds of protection (-33 damage).

By this point the enemy or enemies are ready for their second burst. They’re weakened, I have protection up, I usually have a full 14K lifeforce bar, healing what little damage I took to health I didn’t mitigate at 236 net health per second. Vital Persistence allows me to stay in DS for quite a long time, but usually 5-10 seconds does it (and is preferred). By this point I usually have full endurance as well. Exit DS, throw down more marks etc. use dodges to evade 4-5 second of damage, re-enter DS, exit and by this point more Marks/Wells should be up to mitigate another large burst by the time I run out of LF.

What I’m trying to say is that Necro sustain can already be achieved through mix and match of high healing power, armor, little to some vampiric traits, DS traits and good use of mitigation. If the effectiveness of vampiric traits were greatly increased and/or allowed in DS with no ICD, these builds which have recently become almost viable, could become very powerful if not OP.

I’ve tried every combination of every kittening trait of every kittening amulet every kittening sigil everything. The best option for sustain is a spectral build but it’s still sub par to just killing your opponent.

I don’t need anyone to explain well your not counting on my weakness uptime and my traiting for protection on wells and my sustain blah blah blahh. Your numbers may look ok in THEORY. In practice I promise you against any decent player you won’t do any damage and they will kill you.

They work in practice.

NeXeD.3042:

Balekai.6083:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

flow.6043:

If that’s really what you believe than I honestly don’t understand why you are so much against ally healing through DS.
And I don’t understand why you would allow regen applied by allies, but no other healing skills.

Unrestricted healing combined with death shroud’s uptime is far too likely to be overwhelming. That’s the problem with health being the sole defense of the profession: it’s too little or too much, with a very, very thin line between.

Full healing in death shroud is a good end goal, but if the balance line gets crossed before we reach it, then we should stop there.

This. For example, combining Unholy Sanctuary, good healing power, armor class and quick LF gain already can be overwhelming effective health. With my own sustain builds it can become an unending game of wackamole, if enemies don’t have enough pressure and spike damage to get through SoV+Regeneration+Unholy Sactuary+Soul Marks+Mitigation revolving door.

People forget that while in DS, health bar healing is way more effective than normal healing outside of DS. You’re getting 100% of the net benefit of the healing, while taking damage to an easily replenished secondary healthbar (life force) with benefits of its own. Nothing like hanging out in DS for a couple seconds and letting a group of enemies expend their spike on it, healing all your health in the process and exiting DS only to use something like soul marks to get 100% LF back then repeat.

Edit: On the gating issue. If life steal is not gated and normalized, then builds that abuse constant area hits and sustain may become too too powerful in their regen and with very little vampiric trait investment (essentially just vampiric).

So full of absolute dookie. I’ll burst right through that on any class.

Oh it can definitely bursted through by skilled/smart players, but there are many cases where you can multiple people that just can’t kill you if they don’t know what they’re doing, don’t coordinate or their builds just don’t have the spike. To the point where people are left wondering what’s going on taking so long to kill a necro. :p

Let me put it this way:

I have a weird Well/Unholy Sanc/Condi sustain build I play around with spvp. Firstly it combines SoV passive (410) and constant Regeneration from MoB+MoE (236) for 646 health per second in most cases. 20K health, 3000 armor, 14K LF.

Then you have Marks, Grasping Dead, and if they’re hitting five targets, are healing 215 per cast. The Marks are also giving me 3% LF buffed by Soul Comprehension, giving me 575 LF each time I hit something with them. So each cast is essentially giving me 890 effective health on up to 4-5 marks at a time if I make it into DS of course.

Then since i’m using a condi spec, I have plenty of area weakness for 50% fumble, which is essentially 25% less damage over time.

It also runs Wells specced for Ritual Mastery and Ritual of Protection. So when someone tries to spike me outside of DS, I just throw down WoC to corrupt them and/or WoD to completely counter their burst. They usually by this point have more Weakness if I WoCed them, and I have also gained 4-8 seconds of protection (-33 damage).

By this point the enemy or enemies are ready for their second burst. They’re weakened, I have protection up, I usually have a full 14K lifeforce bar, healing what little damage I took to health I didn’t mitigate at 236 net health per second. Vital Persistence allows me to stay in DS for quite a long time, but usually 5-10 seconds does it (and is preferred). By this point I usually have full endurance as well. Exit DS, throw down more marks etc. use dodges to evade 4-5 second of damage, re-enter DS, exit and by this point more Marks/Wells should be up to mitigate another large burst by the time I run out of LF.

What I’m trying to say is that Necro sustain can already be achieved through mix and match of high healing power, armor, little to some vampiric traits, DS traits and good use of mitigation. If the effectiveness of vampiric traits were greatly increased and/or allowed in DS with no ICD, these builds which have recently become almost viable, could become very powerful if not OP.

I wouldn’t complain about having a bone wall/shield skill, GS or not. If it were to be a bone wall maybe it could both absorb projectiles and block movement until destroyed (by melee) or until its duration is up.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

flow.6043:

If that’s really what you believe than I honestly don’t understand why you are so much against ally healing through DS.
And I don’t understand why you would allow regen applied by allies, but no other healing skills.

Unrestricted healing combined with death shroud’s uptime is far too likely to be overwhelming. That’s the problem with health being the sole defense of the profession: it’s too little or too much, with a very, very thin line between.

Full healing in death shroud is a good end goal, but if the balance line gets crossed before we reach it, then we should stop there.

This. For example, combining Unholy Sanctuary, good healing power, armor class and quick LF gain already can be overwhelming effective health. With my own sustain builds it can become an unending game of wackamole, if enemies don’t have enough pressure and spike damage to get through SoV+Regeneration+Unholy Sactuary+Soul Marks+Mitigation revolving door.

People forget that while in DS, health bar healing is way more effective than normal healing outside of DS. You’re getting 100% of the net benefit of the healing, while taking damage to an easily replenished secondary healthbar (life force) with benefits of its own. Nothing like hanging out in DS for a couple seconds and letting a group of enemies expend their spike on it, healing all your health in the process and exiting DS only to use something like soul marks to get 100% LF back then repeat.

Edit: On the gating issue. If life steal is not gated and normalized, then builds that abuse constant area hits and sustain may become too too powerful in their regen and with very little vampiric trait investment (essentially just vampiric).

Great post. The only way to really fix this issue is to make life stealing traits trigger in a more uniform manner across all weapons/skills. Something like making them a single target proc with a 0.5 to 1 second ICD, but upping the damage by about 3-5 times as well.

The reason being that all traited life steal seem to be balanced around burst skills hitting multiple times a second, or Wells, Marks and other AoE skills consistently hitting 5 targets. When we’re not fighting 3+ targets as you show, then vampiric traits become seriously less effective and not worth the investment. Right now it’s better to invest in some LF gain/DS traits, which are better overall at increasing effective health instead of all out siphon.

Changing vampiric traits to single target proc with an ICD would also greatly improve the effectiveness of life steal DPS. Instead of dealing miniscule amounts of damage portioned over multiple enemies, we would instead have all our life steal damaging one enemy in a consistent and significant way (except for AoEs which would likely randomly hit people).

The only vampiric trait I would probably keep the same is Vampiric Master, since it works just as well against 1 enemy as it does 5. It could also be abused by just taking one minion like golem if it was single proc.

I’m going for something different by using pact fleet weapon skins right now, in addition to buying a pact fleet GS skin for the future Necro specialization.

My Sylvari Necro’s theme has always been a ghostly or spirit oriented one. The pact fleet weapons are a nice mix of nature+tech+magic, that goes really well with my character’s blue/cyan glow, t3 cultural armor, toxic arms/shoulders, wraith mask and dynamic blades backpack. It also kind of adds to the whole Commander of the Pact theme as well.

Not to mention I always had a soft spot for the flagship at the end of the arah story path, which the pact fleet GS is of course designed off of. :p

If I had another race as my Necro or a more evil theme, I would definitely be picking up that new Shadow GS skin (probably the scepter and dagger too).

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I think that’s a record for a Necro bug.

Almost under 24 hours.

ronpierce.2760:

Now if only they could be this hasty to fix Moa and minions, amirite guis?!

Too complicated. :p

NeXeD.3042:

Actually pretty happy with this bug, now when I see another necro on my team I know he most likely won’t hit like a wet piece macaroni (I know the saying is noodle but a noodle has more dps)

Fixed yay!!! Back to the macaron… I mean my very effective attrition build…

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

By the way, folks, Well of Corruption loooooves the pulsing stability elites.

Yes it does, yes it does :p

Nightshade.2570:

Right, You know I think if you we just tweak our play style, we can use the change to our advantage.

It comes down to changing when we avoid things and when we attack. That push and pull, knowing the tells of the elites (which are really obvious) ect ect.

Or popping our elite when they pop theirs, its almost like a riddle to solve if you think about it.

Yep it already shows. Better than remove stability with boon hate or bust. Which was the case pre-patch. The stability change promotes more stability counterplay and smarter use of stability overall.

Save against elite forms like Lich when soloing, cc in general feels a lot more effective in wvw and pvp.

Stability no longer stacks in duration, only in intensity. So no more 20 seconds+ of stability until removed.

Instead having 5 guardians shouting “Stand Your Ground!” lets say for 5 area stacks each, would give up to 5 allied players 25 stacks of stability, but only for 5-7 seconds or so.

Difference?

As a solo condi necro you only have to wait 6-7 seconds if they blew all their stability at once to affect them with cc. Before you had to wait 25 seconds or more without boon strip.

On top of that the only stability application that’s harder to deal with (using boon hate) are elite skills. The only normal stability buffing skills that got a buff are pretty much group application ones. Self stability (most skills) only apply 1 stack of stability.

Now if a team intelligently applies group stability over the course of a battle by staggering application, you’re going to have just as hard of a time ccing said group as you did before (solo). If in a group vs group or zerg vs zerg situation, cc/fears are a lot more useful because of the sheer amount of cc being used naturally, that was nullified pre-patch by duration stacking stability without massive boon hate.

Yep can confirm it’s bugged out

Bhawb.7408:

This is a buff in any situations where you would have lost stability, which was pretty much any time you would have used Lich against competent players. Yes new stability is relatively easy to get through, but to chain CC Lich you end up “wasting” a lot of extra CCs, whereas before you would have just removed stability and done it better.

I agree with this. Whenever I went against another Necro in pvp that I knew was power/lich form, I always kept by boon strip(s)/blinds handy. When they popped lich I would just strip them, chain cc and they would usually die, run away in panick and/or pop out of lich form.

Although it’s not as important to get that first boon strip off from the get go, It will definitely be harder to solo-counter lich pressure over 20 seconds (6-7 pulses of stability). Having to boon strip or cc a lich every 3 seconds to remove stability, in addition to keeping them cced and not DPSing, is definitely a buff overall against players that actually know/knew how to counter it.

Of course it’s a nerf in all those situations where players never try to strip lich stability and just take lich DPS in the face until they hit the dirt. Now players will be able to “accidently” strip lich stability through use of cc skills.

nekretaal.6485:

It should break stun on activate.

The active sucks. If you are in the situation that you have to be in to get a decent heal, you are dead anyways. Plus, you’ll never be in that situation on a conquest map.

Not always. Against engies, mesmers, MM Necros, and pretty much any pve content, it becomes comparable to a full heal now (with either bloodthirst and/or healing power) every 32/40 seconds, without using your actual heal. Even when fighting rangers it can be an ok 2-4K heal when you hit them+pet. SoL can also be worked into Necro sustain builds, especially with SoV (as an emergency heal without using SoV active). It works quite well post patch for that.

It’s still really undependable though. All it takes is poison, blind or blocks to utterly ruin using the active. Then all you’ve essentially done is wasted your kiting/speed ability until it recharges. This is why whenever I had SoL in my bar I never used active before its buff, because I got more out of the irremovable speed buff for kiting damage than a heal that’s going to fail 95% of the time.

Now it feels like a completely different skill… to a point. :p

It could really use a stun breaker on it due to how easily countered the active is.

maddoctor.2738:

I wonder all those people who like playing roles like Healers and Tanks what do they do in other RPGs? Or they don’t play non multiplayer online RPGs at all.

Is there anyone that is asking for a “Healer” or “Tank” in Action-RPGs, games like Diablo and Torchlight, and “real” RPGs like Mass Effect or older RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights.

From my experience, none of the above games have the concept of a pure “Healer” or “Tank”, so I guess those people that are looking for those types of roles are only asking for them because they enjoy them in MMORPGs

And I guess when they say there can’t be interesting encounters without defined roles, they mean all those games do not have interesting encounters.

I didn’t know anyone was asking for pure healers or tanks? At least in the last couple of pages (unless I skimmed over it). Only those who want to completely redo game mechanics/classes and replace with heavy trinity are asking for such a thing.

The way GW2 is designed is that pure healers and tanks are not necessary or even possible in how combat unfolds. There are no skills that allow for someone to heal at range without attacking for example 24/7. Everyone is expected to DPS, self heal and self mitigate damage. There are support, manipulation and bunker roles that play differently than pure DPS, that “help” mitigate ally damage and improve overall team performance. They work in PvP/WvW, but don’t work in PvE because older PvE design was lackluster and pure DPS has become the rule because of it.

Funny that you use Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights in your example of CRPGs without trinity. Both of those take place in the Forgotten Realms and are based off pen and paper DnD, where the trinity was invented (Healer, DPS, Tank) and the first debates around it evolved back in the 70s. The games themselves get away from Trinity because they’re designed for solo play of course (although your NPC companions are definitely designed to fill those roles). Unless the GM was super creative, the best way to ensure victory so your chars don’t perma death was making sure you had at least a tank (fighter), deeps (thief) and a healer (cleric).

The Diablo genre is hack and slash where gear randomly generates stats where the most important ones can all be rolled on each gear piece. There’s only one role: DPS and its designed for that from the get go. There’s no group heals or group support except for cc. When I played Diablo 1 my first impression was “This is like DnD dungeon raiding, but no rules, just three different classes.” :p

Mass Effect 1-3 and DA2/DAI are all action RPGs. Although many classes are imbalanced and OP compared to others, Bioware delving into MP has sort of been a success, in that Mass Effect 3 and DAI multiplayer manages to accomplish having different trinity roles without an actual meta (DPS Tank, DPS support, DPS control) forming. I think it was mainly due to the fact their combat design went full active defense, with gear having little to no impact save for your weapons. Most of the power comes from your skill choices and how you play.

Guild Wars 2 is stuck though. They implemented a system with plenty of active defense, but tied everything else including DPS output to preset gear sets that make up about 50%-100% of a stats’ effectiveness. Then added a time gated tier of armor and weapons that made flexibility of having multiple optimal alts and gear sets a lot harder.

Ezekel.6394:

Would make Zerker even better and defensive stats even worse. Would also make conditions even worse because they only even out over longer fight duration. Also nobody is arguing for conditions not being better in PvE, but all that would do is add Sinister to the meta.

Wouldn’t make defensive or support stats any better because CC isn’t bound to stats. The only way to make defensive stats better is to add so much unavoidable damage that people can’t run Zerker and that just makes classes that are innately squishy be horrible.

CC has nothing to do with stat distributions so it wouldn’t change anything and like I have said already would make classes that are innately squishy bad.

Most of what you addressed is only cc, which is only a very small part of what I stated. Just for clarification, active/passive defense and better AI/pathing, refers to more than mere cc. Active defense includes trash/boss self/group heals, condi removal, boon stacking, AoE weakness, higher base armor etc. Better AI refers to more common, more reactive use of mob skills and specials. Better path finding refers to making range attackers strafe into line of sight of players, react to AoE etc.

To your points though:

Halving health in of itself would do exactly what you say in your first counterpoint. Cutting health bars is merely just the first important step to making defensive/condi builds more attractive, but must be coupled with my following points due to obvious mechanic reasons and consequences for doing so. The math on runaway time gaps due to gear type is hard to argue with. If very high health bars aren’t addressed no other gear will get closer in viability to zerker meta, as larger and larger hp pools come into play or in timed DPS content/phases.

Cutting hp while adding more base armor, boon usage, weakness usage, or mob self healing wouldn’t make those stats more useful, but they would be more competitive. Instead of always having to bash through pure health, players would be able to save time and effort through proper skill usage. Without getting too carried away here’s my thought process:

If it originally took a zerker team 10 seconds to take out some trash and the “other team” 30 seconds, if you cut enemy health in half the zerker team would take 5 seconds and the other team 15 seconds. Just doing that cut the time difference from 20 seconds per trash encounter to just 10 seconds. More competitive.

Now add in the active/passive defense. For this example the trash get stability stacks, area weakness, group heals and protection. Both player groups need to mitigate and strip these defenses if they don’t want to take 30+ seconds killing trash. If both teams pull it off perfectly they should be taking about 5 extra seconds each. Zerker team is still doing it in 10 seconds, and 20 seconds for the other team. An area condi applier in the other team may be able to get a head start on that damage, shaving off another two or three seconds because condis are armor/protection ignoring.

Now add in the constant pressure. Lets say there’s a mobs that cast an massive area firestorm, that also causes burning on hit. The zerker team may need to heal during the firestorm to make sure they don’t die from a stray trash hit or two. The other team might be defensive enough to just ignore the firestorm and do what they did before. The zerker team loses about 3 seconds of DPS time.

So in my contrived example., the zerker team finished killing the trash in about 13 seconds, while the other team with the condi guy finished the trash in about 17 seconds. That’s 4 seconds between them instead of the original 20 second difference.

The meta is a lot closer than before.

Jerus.4350:

Remember, you can swap gear while out of combat. If there were indeed short cuts you could only utilize through a lot of sustain people would just swap quickly then go. Is this the gameplay you support? carrying multiple sets of gear just to utilize certain short cuts built in?

With that pointed out, you’d basically have a scenario with your analogy where you can drive your sportscar on the road to where you want to go, then hit the short cut, jump into a jeep, power over the muddy terrain, then hop back into a sports car waiting for you on the other side.

It’s simply not a reasonable request, at least not without bending over backwards to hand things to the more defensive setup, in which case new meta becomes super tanky and still finish in the same time rendering less tanky builds obsolete. Pretty terrible game design if you ask me.

I actually do the gear switch thing already sometimes. I always have 2-3 sets on my main characters and if a zerker pug starts failing (or any team really), I switch out to whatever fits the current situation if I think it will help (usually does, easily). So it’s definitely a possibility that could happen. If you “absolutely” couldn’t do something without using x defensive gear sets and the other parts could be DPSed with ease, we would start seeing multi-gear checks.

To use the sportscar analogy you guys are having fun with (your point reminds me of something they would do on Top Gear lol), is that the trick is to design the course in such a way, that you don’t bother jumping in and out of different cars because you’re not really saving time doing so. Just a lot of extra headache. Instead of thinking of an off-road shortcut, think of making the entire track a bit slippery due to rainy conditions. Where extra traction and vehicle control begins to become just as or more important than pure speed to win the race.

How do we make the track conditions a bit poorer for the drivers (make it so speed/DPS is less important and active/passive defense, cc and condis more important)?

Cut base overall health of enemies.

This has to happen if defensive and condition stats are to become more viable. There’s already content that breaks their use (hp scaling for difficulty like fractals and timed phases on bosses).

Think for a second: For arguments sake lets say it takes a defensive team twice as long to kill enemies on fractals 50 than a pure DPS team. What would happen on higher fractal levels when health doubles or triples again? If they were completing 30 minutes slower due to mob health, the defensive team would automatically take 1 hour more if health doubled. An hour and a half once it triples. That’s a lot of extra time just because of what gear sets people are using.

Replace high health with counterable passive/active defense and better AI/pathfinding.

If you sliced an enemies health in half then gave it a protection boon and heal casts every 3-10 secs, you basically just made lower DPS and condis 100% more effective from a time completion point of view. As long as the lower DPS team properly ccs and mitigates mob skill use. Zerker can do this and would end up being even fast if they did so, which is why…

Add more constant pressure an player damage mitigation, but counterable, to encounters.

Obviously the sticking point on this thread to say the least.

This addition fills in the rest of the time gap I believe. At least a bit. The advantage of running more defensive stats and support builds would be that a more defensive oriented team wouldn’t have to worry as much about countering AI pressure, while glass cannon teams would (rightfully so). So they could spend an easier time countering active/passive AI defenses and getting their DPS up. Zerker meta and other glass cannons would be forced to “do or die.” Countering both AI pressure as fast as possible, while also avoiding extra damage, countering active/passive AI defense and spiking down enemies. Remember though, that enemy health overall has been severely reduced, meaning if glass cannons do everything right, they have a lot less health to cut through compared to the older mob design.

Multiple metas should appear where it doesn’t matter what gear you’re running. As long as you know how to play the game and use your skills/class effectively.

It’s not easy to get this right. The risk is that by trying to do so, you make the track too slippery and the danger of driving the poor handling sportscar just isn’t worth the effort. It needs to still be worth hopping into the sportscar to win the race… if you’re a pro-racer.

Lazaar.9123:

I’m going to laugh when more difficult content is actually going to affect the people using defensive stats in the first place, because of them not having the skill level to complete the content. There’s always people that cry for nerfs when anything remotely difficult is put in the game.

First of all, hardly anyone is one is calling for nerfs. We’re calling for the further buff of PvE content from its original sad state.

However, the crying is definitely going to happen when you have more difficult content and better AI. If it’s done right, anyone who uses passive defenses as a crutch to not use skills and active defense properly, will be forced to do so in better PvE content.

The same way people who use very high DPS as a crutch will cry, because enemies aren’t statues of health to DPS down, or the fact their glass cannon builds would actually have to manage pressure. You know, be actual “glass cannons” rather than just “cannons.” :p

pandas.9450:

Astralporing.1957:

rotten.9753:

First of all, gw1 had no gear stats. So any comparison to gw2 prequel is invalid.

Any direct comparison, yes. It is however an example, that the optimum meta does not need to be a single build, as some people in this thread seems to claim.

Gw1 was as meta as gw2 hell even worse for oganized pve content and pvp

In organized PvE it wasn’t too bad. Mostly because there were 2-3 metas per high-end content and all or almost every profession had a role to play in at least one. If you didn’t, it was really easy to get a character to level 20 and gear it up to whatever content you wanted to meta in 2-3 days.

The issue was always waiting around for specialized monk builds more than anything.

ODB.6891:

xDudisx.5914:

Lol people complaining about making AI better and content harder.

Right now there are bosses that you don’t even need to dodge on full zerker because you can just walk 2 steps to the sides and avoid all dmg. The most common example is ac p1 final boss.

Some other bosses are so underpowered that a simple wall or reflection makes the boss do less dmg than some elite mobs. Example: CM p1 first boss

Also several cheap mechanics like Frost from CM where you can avoid almost all the dmg jumping on the beam or rock. SE p3 carier where people can sit on the ledge and range it…..

If you have even read prior posts….you would know that is not even the discussion. The discussion is constant requests to find ways for incoming damage to overwhelm zerk geared players …so that they will be pressured to switch to different gear…or to have to back off/hide to try to recover. The discussion also has suggested adding in unavoidable damage to accomplish this effect…which explicitly means make zerk die…unless they switch to different gear or have someone healing them. Zerk players have no problems with making content difficult…the problem is trying to make it where it is no longer feasible to try to complete content in zerk gear.

It’s fairly easy to balance this then. If there is to be “unavoidable” pressure on the offensive end of mobs, then the unavoidable pressure should be designed in such a way that over time, it’s a little less than the average self heal and/or one group heal. So about 4-5K damage over a 30 second period as either direct damage, damage over time, or a mix.

No one (at least most) is saying it has to be overwhelming though. Also it doesn’t have to be unavoidable either. Adding lots of condition pressure for example wouldn’t be unavoidable. There is such things as condition clenses etc. along with a whole list of other combat features that Zerkers have access to just as much as any passive defense build. They should be required to use them more than more passive defense teams. Use them correctly, you survive and still wipe out content at record paces.

The reality is that right now, there’s almost no such thing as pressure in older PvE content. Many people here are suggesting that there be at least some pressure using existing game mechanics, so the fact that you run glass cannon builds has a side effect, a downside. If the other part of your argument is valid (that speed clearers etc. are very skilled at avoiding damage and mitigating it with active defense, which I agree), Zerker meta should be able to overcome anyways.

I think what is frustrating many people with some of those arguing against implementing more pressure and better AI implementation, is this defensive attitude that some try to defend what’s been universally seen as bad AI and design pretty much since launch. Some who are defending it and being against any AI/pressure buff to mobs, mostly because it would actually make things more challenging, more engaging and less predictable and won’t admit that’s their main issue with such changes.

I think it’s a valid point to worry about having pressure being too high to the point where the simple math means that a full team of glass cannons cannot keep up with enemy damage. That could be a very hard thing to balance and could be a real issue. However, to suggest that any pressure and better AI implementation alone would lead to a zerker meta death is not true.

Late Edit: Typos :p

spoj.9672:

Other options are already viable. I seriously dont understand why people have a problem with this. Please explain to me what is wrong with a system where everything works.

The reason we cant have a decent discussion is because there is a major failing in understanding of the other side.

If you are argueing to make other methods socially acceptible. Then fair enough. But theres no discussion to be had there. Because thats a people problem and unrelated to the system. You also cant fix people. This thread is about changing the system not the people. So i believe you are in the wrong thread.

The social acceptance or non-acceptance of builds is based on realities in game due to PvE design. People just don’t “feel” that Zerker is most optimal. It “is” the most optimal in PvE. It’s the most optimal due to offering the most DPS, because the design of most PvE content in GW2 lends itself to only DPS mattering in the end.

There is a big gap between viable and optimal. I could “viably” run a team through an instance with pure defensive builds/specs. Why would I when the PvE is designed in such a way that we would easily survive anyways in full glass cannon and complete the same instance 40 minutes to an hour earlier?

Why would someone then who’s used to realistic completion times, accept defensive/support build(s) into the team that only pushes the completion time back considerably?

This question is where the “social” non-acceptance of anyone not adhering to the zerker meta comes from in many pugs/teams. The gap between viable and optimal is too great between zerker and other gear sets. So the answer is:

“No change your gear, the instance will take too long and your build offers nothing in return. We want to stack on that boss too and burn down that healthbar before it shifts into the next phase.”

When it should be more like:

“Support role? Oh were all DPS, but that should take some of the constant pressure off so we don’t need to perfectly time everything. Sure keep your build.”

Now requiring different builds and dedicated roles could definitely be an issue. What I want to see are design choices that make PvE content more challenging, while bringing what’s viable and optimal closer together. Both in effort required (with different teams struggling with different aspects of PvE combat) and completion time.

Zerker should in my opinion keep the top spot as most optimal if the team is good enough with active defenses.

DeathPanel.8362:

Actually in EQ it was all about the trinity system taken to the extreme. You needed a tank, puller, slower/mezzer/debuffer, healer, dpser(main assist), secondary tank/secondary assist or else it’s a no go. It would take 30-60 minutes+ sometimes just to get a team together and sometimes not at all. This is obviously not the right way to go but that is the ultimate result once you start pushing content requiring different builds in a party for the sake of diversity since the only way to incentivize/force people to have different builds is to make them absolutely crucial to success of a party and that’s guaranteed to turn off a majority of the people.

Which is why I’m not too warm on absolutely requiring certain setups to complete content (like making some things totally immuned to x or z stat), because that can lead to exactly what you describe, or multi-gear set checks.

Luckily in GW2, roles are over multiple classes and multi-build. Everyone can heal themselves, most classes can boon hate, remove condis, reflect etc. Not to mention we can swap gear/builds/skills on the fly, which definitely would mitigate the time looking for groups if that were to be the case. Remember many MMOs has it so the build you had was permanent over years. If you built non-optimal you would have to wait for some reset offer from Devs or retire that toon.

My personal opinion is that by lowering overall mob health while maximizing their use of pathing, boons, condis and active defenses, would promote build diversity alone.

Take condition damage for example. The big advantage of condition damage is that it’s a DoT that bypasses active and passive defense, save for condi removal and temp immunity/resistance. When going against players it’s great, because players depend on a lot on active/passive defense to stay alive instead of lots of health. That means condis can pressure players to death and is very viable that way.

It suffers the most in PvE because there’s no need for a DoT-like damage when in most cases, you’re focused on bursting down enormous health bars on enemies that have no active or passive defense. On top of this, you have the condi cap that limits it to about 5-10K damage max for the enite team/zerg. If you take two classes into a dungeon that both stack to cap, it’s as if you have 4 players instead of 5. This can easily add 10min-30min to completion time.

Now instead of insane hp, what if the trash and bosses started constantly using protection, applying area weakness, removing condis and using self/group heals in conjunction with one another to protect their hp?

Condis looks a lot more appetizing when the base health of mobs is much lower and normal player damage is reduced by a large amount without boon stripping, condi clensing and target priority. Condi pressure and poison may be enough to make enemy trash seriously misuse their heals and clenses, leaving an opening to prioritize the rest of the team’s DPS on select mobs. Having two condi builds may make sense as the new enemies are able to condi clear regularly, so keeping up the condi pressure may take more than one player.

DeathPanel.8362:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

If the difficulty on enemies went up, some people would switch away from Zerker. Statistically speaking, they may be an insignificant portion, but it would still be a drop. I never said that some who can’t run zerker now would run zerker later. I said some who can run zerker now could not run zerker later.

And not all mobs in dungeons are skippable, so it’s quite possible adding Retaliation would make a difference. The impact of any change depends greatly on where the change is made as well as what the change is.

Not meaning to offend but are you new to MMOs or something?

Making content harder is not going to make people switch over to zerker. It’s going to make zerker even more important. It will make elitism go through the roof and gear checks the norm. Unless you specifically change content to nerf zerker somehow, which just means the next best thing become the new meta and few months later you end up back here complaining about that meta build. It’s an needless and endless cycle.

Any kind of elevation of difficulty naturally leads to these types of results. I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ original and this is the one trend that is consistent in all MMOS that raise difficulty in that way and it’s corrosive to the player community and discourages pugs.

You either have not thought out the consequences of your ideas or your analysis is flawed as many people in this post as well as myself have demonstrated.

What games like UO or EQ did to raise difficulty was simply increase mob health and damage by 1000%, which led to content 1 hit killing and players taking too long to kill stuff before dieing without optimal DPS/ganking. Those Devs at the time didn’t have much choice due to the technical limitations in 95-2000. So the meta was kill it asap before it killed you (at least in UO which is what I played). That’s when just going pure DPS thrives and that isn’t what anyone is really arguing for who want to open up the meta.

This isn’t the 90s anymore and there’s plenty of ways to increase difficulty without designing content that favours one playstyle over another.

My last post a page or two back shows an example of exactly how just increasing health and damage of mobs for difficulty begins to widen completion times depending on how much damage you do, not how skillful you are. So much so that non-DPS teams (well even the difference between balanced and glass cannon), in say a fractals setting, become less viable as the % health increases to a point where its not worth ever running lower DPS. Again that has nothing to do with player skill if damage/pressure is easily avoidable, just widening time gaps.

Giving mobs better AI, changing up encounters to require more than just DPS, lowering mob health, giving them more active/passive defense in replacement, and increasing overall damage over time on players, all promotes build diversity because defensive stats become more effective in encounters and less detrimental to completion time.

If increasing difficulty and pressure on players still led to glass cannon builds being the most optimal, then the places where there’s the most pressure on players would reflect this (wvw/pvp) and they would be full of zerker teams. They’re not and zerker doesn’t always win, because the combination of player active/passive defense and damage over time burns out the glass cannon’s poor defenses. You can make a bunker build in which zerker DPS power builds bounce off it, but a condi build with some boon strip destroys it.

The trick with future GW2 content is to design it in such a way that full glass cannon teams really feel the heat and have to rely on timing active defenses and manipulation almost perfectly to make up for the lack of passive defense, or die. However, with enough player skill they should still be running optimal times compared to other team makeups.

On the flip side, running a member or two as something a bit tankier, or with support/counters, or plain running a balanced team of whatever should be just as viable if not more so. Especially when the players are just as skilled. Of course, it should take longer for them to complete the content (which naturally takes care of itself since they’re not magically getting more DPS unless a glass cannon team keeps dieing).

Basically, you want to get rid of gear/DPS impacting completion times too much. Instead you want skill usage and player skill governing that instead.

Easier said than done.

One thing is for sure though. Trying to design new PvE content along the same lines as older GW2 content, isn’t going to solve anything or keep the interest of the player base too long.

hybrid.5027:

Balekai.6083:

However, it’s a false choice to begin with as gear, trait and weapon choices aren’t mutually exclusive. The majority of build power and diversity comes from gear stats in GW2. There are many traits and skills that are useless unless you gear for them correctly.

This isn’t true. GW2 PvE build diversity comes from weapon choice, traits and utility skills. Build effectiveness comes from stats. Wall of Reflection still reflects regardless of your gear. Shake it Off removes the same condition in berserker gear or Knights gear. Are we even playing the same game?

To a point. I noticed in your example it was pretty much a best case scenario for warrior between optimal DPS and tougher build. Using two gear sets that accomplish the same build priority (power). One using a tougher set and the other a lesser set. Not to mention all classes have completely different access to traits, play styles and design that doesn’t translate as well set to set. To state gear doesn’t matter is basically ignoring the reality of the game we play every day. There wouldn’t be the vast time/effort gap between zerkers and identitcal builds using different gear sets in PvE if that was the case. I definitely feel the difference in PvP/WvW going against people with similar builds but different gear/amulets. To the point one can be really easy to disposed of and the other not so much. Gear matters and defines viability of builds and performance ingame.

Of course many active defenses (blocks, reflects, dodges etc.) are independent of stats, but active defenses do not make an entirety of a build or playstyle. Especially for classes and builds that have little to no access to said active defenses.

Now the fact that these active (and passive) defenses exist the way they do can be used to fix PvE, because good PvE design should have enemies exploiting these and we players having to counter them and vice vera. Make it so the difficulty of content isn’t how fast you can burn down a boss’s health or not, but how successfully you as a team can counter AI active and passive defense in addition to countering AI pressure and spike damage (and again, vice vera). This would take less important away from pure DPS.

For example, what’s a better PvE encounter that promotes more fun, combat engagement and build variety?

Current way of things:

Trash mobs throughout a particular instance are made harder by giving them 100% more hp and 100% more damage. Because trash active/passive defenses are non existent and AI skill usage limited, the only thing that really changes for skilled players is the hp/armor. The skilled zerker team originally killed each trash mob in 10 seconds and now it takes 20 seconds. The skilled defensive team took 30 seconds and now takes 60 seconds (3x slower). If this change adds another 10 minutes to the time it takes to complete the content for the the zerker team, then it takes another 30 minutes for the defensive team.

Without changing gear/builds, that’s 20 more minutes in the instance for the defensive team, still using the exact same strategy/builds as zerker team, because the mobs have 100% more hp and they’re simply not as fast in their gear. Now what happens when the trash gets 200% more hp, or 500%?

Or:

Trash mobs in a particular instance are made harder by gaining the ability to cast protection, aegis and heal themselves 20% hp, instead of getting a flat 100% more hp. They also use weakness now and throw some AoE pressure out there instead of 100% more damage to easily avoided attacks. For simple arguements sake, lets say the new pressure and active/passive defenses make the zerkers and defensive teams take the same amount of time as the example above. The same amount of time because they’re still focused on avoiding that simple attack they were accustomed to. The zerker team still comes out on top and nothing changes (10 minutes more for the zerker team, 30 minutes more for the defensive team).

But what if both teams strip that protection/aegis and interupt the trash heals? Or clear the weakness and mitigate the pressure, completely negating the fact the trash gained those abilities? All of a sudden the 60 seconds it would have taken the defensive team to kill the trash still took around 30-35 seconds, but more challenging. The zerker team takes about 10-15 seconds instead of 20 seconds, but more challenging. Zerker meta maintains its time advantage as it should, while the defensive meta holds its ground time wise, instead of getting worse at completing the content as mobs get more and more health.

Now gear matters less and builds with active and passive play matter more, promoting build diversity because the gap between completion time failed to grow based on player skill. That’s just addressing artificially high health being used as a replacement for difficulty.

DeathPanel.8362:

That incentive structure is simply how MMOs work and GW2 is no different. MMOs are all based on rewards and loots and not on the PVE gameplay. PVE gameplay is basically a time sink to make people waste time in order to achieve the loots and rewards.

Replayability is strongest in pvp/wvw because it’s always unique against other humans rather than a predicable AI and the same exact encounters 1000x times over. The replayability of pvp is why games like LoL, DOTA2, Smite, and COD/BF4/CSGO are so popular and played so much.

Absolutely true. However, it’s much different depending on whether it’s monthly or not. Monthly subscription MMOs are pretty much required to prolong all content and make rewards the absolute time sink, with enjoyment taking a backseat to obsessive/addictive play. Half of what keeps people playing is that they feel like quitting mid way through a subscription would waste it or quitting would completely wipe out all their investment if they miss something.

A game like GW2 with no subscription can settle with keeping players interested in the actual game itself enough to buy extra content from ingame stores. Even if they just log on 20minutes to an hour a day. As long as they see “ooh shiny!” in the gemstore and buy it for 5-10$ very couple of days/weeks.

So it’s in Anet’s interest to make PvE content more engaging and accessible like WvW/PvP, by simply making PvE more varied with enemies and encounters that use more interesting mechanics, rather than artificially high health pools and super stomps promoting highest DPS only.

hybrid.5027:

/snip

A second point I’d like to make on variety.

You are looking for variety in gear. Why not look for variety in traits? Or weaponsets? that all exists. There are plenty of PvE viable builds using weapons that aren’t strictly meta. Or trait set ups that are completely viable and outside the meta builds. Why is gear variety the goal you wish for? Ask yourself this: would the game be better if more gear types were near-optimal, or if more trait choices were near-optimal? which answer would result in greater playstyle and gameplayer variety: more gear prefixes, or more viable weapon/trait choices?

Think carefully before you answer that.

Yes to allowing more variation in gear use being better for the game. More gear prefixes to a point. However, it’s a false choice to begin with as gear, trait and weapon choices aren’t mutually exclusive. The majority of build power and diversity comes from gear stats in GW2. There are many traits and skills that are useless unless you gear for them correctly. It’s just the way the core game mechanics are designed. Compared to lets say Diablo 3, where optimal base stats are acquired by making each piece of your desired items an OP version of GW2’s celestial gear to the best of your ability/luck.

There’s multiple builds that many people play and really enjoy playing in PvP/WvW based off those different gear stats. Many of these people also play PvE or want to play it, but find it hard to access and boring because it’s one dimensional compared to the combat mechanics used in the other modes. There is a major time and effort gap between optimal and viable that is too wide on top of that. The main reason (I think) is artificially high healthbars on bosses in absence of concrete and engaging combat mechanics, allowing high DPS teams to significantly finish content faster with little or even less effort than alternative, lower DPS teams. This makes variety a hindrance as every boss is a simple nail that is best nailed with Nailgun (zerker meta) before you go into needless extra phases etc.

There’s obviously room for improvement in PvE and with some common sense changes, would allow these people to play more the way they desire as GW2 was initially advertised to accomplish. Meaning more variety, less need to be “optimal,” while still getting a challenge through use of varying game mechanics in PvE.

WvW really falls into your first theory due to so many variables. GWEN, the roles within it and tactics/strategy are going to have more of a say in success than a snowflake build here or there. Servers can try and do find the optimal gear/builds, only for the meta to change in their respective competitive tier due to other servers countering their meta. Same for PvP.

PvE will never have that evolving variation, but that doesn’t mean you have to design encounters in such a way that the answer is always find out what to dodge two times and DPS down the huge healthbar during damage phase. A lot more can be done in between those two things, allowing Anet to forego the huge healthbar period and even up the time/effort gaps between zerker and non-zerker meta.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I’d say the reason Necro bunkers don’t really exist is because they lose the point to the first knockback. Too vulnerable to hard CC to bunker that well.

Yeah exactly. If we don’t take precautions (like properly identifying/dodging knockbacks and blowbacks), the best case scenario is using our one stun break (if we have one on) to get back on point before the last tick for losing control. Then followed up with some lucky fears to get 1-2 ticks back only to be followed by more hard cc knocking us off the point 20-30 seconds later. Eventually though we’re going to either lose the point or keep it only neutral.

It really shouldn’t be that hard for the professions intended to be " the light armored attrition class" without mobility.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Just point out that we do have the option to spec for sustain. It just involves using skills and traits that people keep touting as “bad” simply because you can’t slap them in a meta build and have sustain.

Life Siphon now is like having a second heal skill. Signet of the Locust can produce massive heals now (with very good scaling). Reaper’s Precision extends death shroud extremely significantly. Unholy Sanctuary can easily offer a 2k heal each time you go into death shroud.

For example, this build : http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBIhZakjmKbrpxnG2bTgLITm8K0LC0KyPnA-TFDCABofIAm4IAgz+DXp0zLlBjpEEgTAAp6AKV9nC1EUiWAIeAABAQAuZs5ND4m38o38o3sUAPNGA-w

Puts out pretty significant damage. With the birthday cake from the blaster, Life Siphon heals for 4,509 total (including Vampiric) every 15 seconds (including cast). Signet of the Locust heal for 1795 per target struck (max of 8,975). And it has utility beyond that in boon corruption and condition conversion while still maintaining decent damage.

Then there are spectral builds, which have pretty good sustain as well. A lot of variations on those, though.

What we don’t have the option to do is make a bunker spec.

We can make bunker specs with Unholy Sanctuary now, but the lack of stun breakers, stability and vigor makes it sub-optimal. When playing around with Unholy, SoV and SoL lately with support gear, there’s been many instances when I have 3 players on me in PvP and they can’t take the point because of the revolving DS/HP pool door. All it takes though is someone with good command of their pressure and hard/soft cc to come along and ruin your day. Like a very good engie, mes or warrior (usually a skilled engie or mes +1 add for me).

Sorry for the double post, couldn’t fit this into last post because it was at max characters. I actually wanted to list more stuff that should change for necros like making DS more condi friendly too in application, but ran out of room.

Edit: Just something I noticed watching the Angryjoe interview again. When he asks about whether or not specializations block off features of the existing classes (around 5:40 mark), Colin says no then goes on to say at anytime out of combat you will be able to switch back and forth between ranger and druid for example. Prior to this he talks about specializations completely changing your skills and traits.

Unless he explained it wrong, that means specializations will block off the vanilla class until you change back out of combat. Any balance done through the specialization won’t affect vanilla except that our Necros toons will have access to a spinoff class however good/bad it turns out. So rebalancing of vanilla Necro seems very important if it’s to be more viable in its pure form.

About a year ago when they stated their design philosophy, the main idea behind Necro is to be the light armored attrition class that controls an area of control through mainly Death Shroud, followed by crowd control, life steals, condition manipulation and boon manipulation. The drawback was that once a player either exits or out maneuvers our zone of control, we would be at a disadvantage.

In actual implementation, our advantage doesn’t exist in practice while our disadvantage does. In all game modes Death Shroud has issues fullfilling its attrition mechanic when heavy spiking is involved and Life force becomes increasingly finite as a fight progresses. Unholy Sanctuary fixes a lot that’s wrong with DS usage and LF gain, but it’s a GM trait that only works with defensive and support builds. It doesn’t help or add anything to a majority of builds and doesn’t address the lack of self/group support we lack because of DS access.

Also in all game modes, the lack of mobility (to create our limited area/zone of control) severely limits play in many cases. Against players with heavy mobility, they can exit and re-enter combat at will with necros, bypassing our attrition by waiting us out or waiting until we make a mistake. For some reason we don’t have more hard CC when we have the least amount of mobility. In PvE, the lack of mobility for Necro hurts getting from point a to b and means we don’t have access to finishers that are usually tied to such skills.

Many classes also do a better job at controlling a fight in the 0-600 range we’re supposed to command and control. Although condis and boon hate comes in handy in PvP/WvW, we usually aren’t in “control” of anything when stun locked and bashed around like a pinata. When you say PvE, condi/boon manipulation and trash/boss mobs in the same sentence what do you think of? I think of the fact that 95% of mobs don’t even use boons/condis. Instead they have artificially high health bars and periodical, but avoidable spike damage that’s best countered with pure DPS and evades rather than any manipulation and DS.

If we’re not going to get a healthy access to self/team buffs in the way of boons or gain access to mobility like other classes, than we need more acess to unqiue self/team support in non-boon form and get a lot more access to soft/hard CC so we can control our active area of control with more stopping power. Off the top of my head and in my ideal world:

DS Change: While in Death Shroud, you can only lose up to 20% of your total Life Force bar per second except to falling damage. This would prevent the problems that DS has with overwhelming spike damage that makes it useless for spike attrition compared to evades, blocks etc. in similar curcumstances (thus elminiating our attrition role). Guaranteeing 4-5 seconds of DS with a 100% bar would solve a lot of problems, while not letting an army of Necros artificially survive 10+ seconds to opposing zerg DPS in say WvW. Or allow of healing or self healing to effect health pool at a reduced rate. In that case maybe even be able to use our healing skill in DS.

PvE Rebalance: Get rid of artificially high health pools and periodic spikes from mobs for more boon, condi and interesting pressure design. Make it so manipulation of enemies isn’t just helpful, but is something that in many cases changes the direction of PvE encounters in the player’s favour.

Revert nerfs to condi stacking in PvP due to Dhuumfire: This should have been done the instant Dhuumfire was moved to LB only. The fact that so many builds were nerfed for a trait they didn’t access was bad enough. Keeping the nerfs which didn’t fix the problem, even after eventually solving the problem another way, was even worse.

Staff (Make it a true control/support weapon): Turn Mark of Blood’s area regeneration application into a non-boon effect with a bit less healing. That way it can stack on existing Regeneraton applicaton of other classes (extra team support). Give Putrid Mark the ability to transfer condis (or 1 condition at least) from allies to enemies again. OR give Putrid Mark area Taunt as an anti-escape making enemies hit run towards us, thus solving some of our control issues.

Axe: 900 range, spash damage on AA.

SoV: Active should apply life steal in a similar fashion as Orders skills in GW1. 5 stacks of siphon for self and up to 4/5 allies with a 5-10 second duration. New utilities that add group extra “damage buffs” like GW1 order skills would be a nice niche as well.

WoB: Fix Healing Power scaling to pre nerf levels and/or make it a water field.

More access to Vigor, Stability and stun breakers: If we’re an attrition class we need to be able to stand our ground. To stand our ground we need to be able to hold off stun locks. The only way to do that is with these two boons and stun breakers.

Combo field hate? Never thought of that one.

CPC is now better.

- 1/2 second casting time now compared to RF’s 1/4 second cast time. Was 1 second. This feels like the most important change because of the amount of times CPC used to be interrupted etc., which made the skill feel like a waste to even try casting for what it was.
- 30 second base cooldown compared to RF’s 60 second cooldown. Was 40 seconds.

Combined with CPC being unblockable and similar uptime durations, CPC comes out on top.

ODB.6891:

Balekai.6083:

…snip…

One major reason for ANET staying away from the whole “constant anti-player pressure” idea would be that implementing this would automatically switch the meta to survival gear and drastically slow down the pace of the game. If this constant incoming damage was unavoidable, it would immediately invalidate any gear set without toughness/vitality…especially on low base hp professions. I don’t see how that could possibly be a good thing. Currently anyone can clear the content…that change to adding constant unavoidable area damage, would break that truth.

The pressure should not be completely unavoidable, but it should be constant like PvP/WvW. That’s not what I’m talking about. Constant pressure doesn’t mean constant damage, but at the very least the constant threat of damage. Nor does constant damage in of itself necessarily mean that zerker teams will fail. They still have access to all the same skills and abilities other builds have, they would just have to use them a lot smarter and defensively than they already do in order to survive.

The idea isn’t to switch the meta, but to universalize the meta by bringing zerker meta and other team metas closer together when it comes to speed and difficulty. At the moment Zerker meta wins both in speed and difficulty (easier) by such a wide margin that it’s the answer to almost all PvE problems.

Again, the key to doing this is to get away from easily telegraphed, high DPS, sporadic boss/mob abilities with massive health bars governing difficulty. Instead it should be replaced by much lower healthbars on trash/bosses, but greater use of boons, conditions, counters, evades, heals and sustained pressure to make up for this. Similar to players.

A skilled zerker team should still be able to use their greater skill at positioning, while using utilities and mob priority to get through the challenge fast and efficiently. Instead of just DPSing a huge healthbar down as efficiently as possible, they would be required to strip defenses and use debuffs/cc to their fullest to mitigate incoming pressure. Then DPS down the much lower and now unprotected health bars of new trash/boss content. Just as zerker does in PvP/WvW and many zerker already play this way for efficiency sake in PvE.

If they don’t then their glass cannon builds/team fails. That’s supposed to be the benefit and consequence of glass cannon builds. Outplay and out DPS the enemy before you die.

Non-DPS focused or balanced teams would and should quite frankly have an easier time countering and surviving such encounters, just like PvP/WvW. If they have the same skill as a zerker team they should be able to complete content in near similar time frames, but at greater ease because they struggle less with pressure. Survival based teams that don’t counter AI countermeasures should end up dying to attrition or getting stuck in perpetual battles (taking much longer to complete). The same way zerker teams that don’t counter AI countermeasures would end up likely dying to mistakes or pressure if they go in randomly blasting off DPS.

As the game stands right now. A zerker team and a balanced team could apply all the same strategies at the same skill level, with the only difference being DPS output due to gear. Because large unprotected hp pools are used as defensive difficulty for simplicity (and probably server performance) sake, the zerker team is rewarded for super high DPS taking mere seconds to kill most content. While the balanced teams are punished in the same instance taking minutes to get through that same insane healthbars, because they lack crazy DPS to limit the phases and keep ability use of trash/bosses to a minimum (one or two extra boss phases can add 5-10minutes to a fight alone).

Like my example in my last post. If you had a team in PvP that consisted of enemy players standing on a point mostly immuned to cc, with access to only 1-2 long CD specials attacks, auto attack and a gazillion hp, the counter meta would always be zerk to get them off point. Instead in PvP/WvW players have much lower hp pools but use combat mechanics to their fullest to counter their enemies. Which is why there is build/gear diversity. Zerker geared players still win in WvW/PvP game modes when they play smarter and focus fire.

The only way introducing more challenging mechanics would slow down the pace of the game, is if they introduced more challenging mechanics while still keeping high hp pools. That would kill zerker/glass cannon since they wouldn’t be able to survive the attrition capabilities of AI long enough to kill enemies before mistakes were made or pressure simply kills them. Balanced/defensive teams would be required, but artificially large hp on mobs would make things very slow. That’s the big danger of attempting to fix PvE and why it’s so hard. Balancing that out.

Zerker should definitely remain along with other glass cannon sets, the fastest ways to complete content in conjunction with player skill and DPS focused builds. The following should hold true in all modes for glass cannon builds:

Play Well or Outplay Enemies/Content —>DPS down --> Win
Play OK/Poorly or Outplayed by Enemies/Content —> Get DPSed Downed --> Fail

However, the vast difference in time and energy it takes to complete content even if you have 1-2 non-zerkers in a zerk group, can be staggering or at the very least noticeable. So much so that most content gets harder, not easier the less Zerker DPS builds are involved. That’s why Zerk meta is so prevalent and overwhelming in all PvE content. The blame can be squarely put on the actual design of trash/boss AI, bad pathing, timed ability usage, lack of condi/boon manipulation and the lack of constant anti-player pressure.

It would be like having an imaginary class in PvP that has light armor, no heals, no cc, can’t be affected by cc, no boons, uses no conditions and mostly uses an easily avoidable auto attack. It does have 100-300K hp and two AoE skills that are easily telegraphed every 20-30 seconds. If there was a team of this class trying to hold points in PvP what do you think would be the most optimal meta to combat it? Zerker meta. Anything else would just be “wasting time” as the PvE boss-like class stands on points winning games through attrition.

Instead in PvP/WvW players use classes that have a whole host of different abilities, pressure and manipulation to counter a variety of builds. Thus player skill, build and strategy determines above all if a glass cannon build comes out on top or vice versa. Meaning more build/gear diversity and acceptance.

What most people who are said to be “anti-zerk” are really asking for is trash mobs/bosses that are less dependent on massive health bars and periodic large DPS attacks. Instead they should be more dependent on much smaller health bars, but constant pressure, evades, boons, condis and interskill usage (like trash/bosses healing/supporting eachother and themselves). Skilled Zerker teams would still be able to complete all this content the fastest through smart prioritizing, skill/debuff usage, positioning etc.

The difference would be that other team makeups doing the same with similar skill would be much less behind the eight ball on speed. They would be able to bring an attrition mindset to completing content without it taking 30min-hour extra time, or failing because there’s not enough DPS to kill a boss+trash before teammates start making mistakes and start getting one or two shotted (Zerker meta is very good at avoiding this due to the very speed of encounters and lack of constant pressure over those short time frames).

HoT is being advertised as being the most challenging content yet in GW2. The above is what needs to happen if they want more challenging encounters that also promote gear/build diversity. So far we’re seeing signs of Anet moving in this direction with things like the new defiance, but whether it will be successful is anyone’s guess. Making enemy AI use combat mechanics to their fullest isn’t only difficult for developers to design, but I would guess it’s difficult on server performance as well. Which may be the main reason why we have never seen a lot of boons/condi/pressure usage by AI in PvE.

The redesign can’t be situation either where say one part of a dungeon can only be done by zerker and another by lets say apothecary (heavy pressure situation where you need to heal a lot of allies, NPCs, yourself and only condi damage works). What would end up happening is gear checks for both zerker and apothecary for that dungeon path and people would be expected to switch sets accordingly.

spoj.9672:

It would save time though. Fully stacked beserker builds do not do that much less condi damage than a condi build. And the whole idea of doing it all together is you can do it all at the same time. You can burn, run kegs, fill dye containers while clearing the mobs. Because an optimised group is going to do those things fast and most likely pull them all onto the wurm for the burn phase (you save time by not waiting around, you literally go prep and burn+clear as soon as possible). They are going to melt fast. Trust me.

But yeah this is going off topic. And thats only my ideas of how it would work in an organised group. We cant actually test it properly currently. So its kind of pointless speculation. x)

And yes the new defiance opens up better possibilities with encounters for future content. Its nothing to do with necro though. And for old content we are probably going to see a drop in content quality and less value for CC than currently. Which is a shame.

I’m wondering how they will address older content with defiance. Are they going to completely redesign older dungeon/open world boss fights? Or just smack on a defiance bar and give those old bosses a 10-20 second stun/DPS phase after depleting it? I’m guessing the latter due to development time constraints and the focus being on actually creating new content (fractals may get as much love as new areas though). Older vanilla content seems like it will be perpetually one dimensional as always and Necros will still suffer for it.

I did like a couple of Dev replies I read last night on the main HoT Defiance thread. Specifically that duration and duration boosting effects such as Master of Terror will impact defiance bar depletion. It could lead to more usage of condi duration over a variety of builds via consumables, runes etc.

Chill, Cripple and Immobilize not affecting Defiance is a net plus as you and others argued on that thread. I would rather have the effects of things like Chill affecting bosses at any time, rather than over depleting Defiance bars too quickly to the point of absurdity. Or worse: Being counted towards defiance but having little impact due to balancing, thus making soft cc completely useless during defiance phases. That wouldn’t be good for Necros. I’m hoping we get good access to slow as well and that it doesn’t affect Defiance for the same reasons as chill.

The other thing I saw on that thread and was replied to by a Dev, was the idea of using Dark Fields for blast/leap finisher blinds (which I completely overlooked/forgot about personally). It seems Anet is on the fence about it, leaning towards leaving things be because it doesn’t feel OP in testing. Having natural access to three Dark Fields could be useful vs Defiance if this remains the case. If only we had more ways other than Putrid Mark to trigger the blinds ourselves. Well of Darkness pulses + leap/blast finisher combos could also be interesting.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

What if the axe auto did both Vulnerability stacks on the first hit, then stole endurance on the second? As in, target loses some, you gain some.

That would be an interesting mechanic and would actually fit the axe design/feel in a weird executioner way.

As a way of avoiding the “problem” of Necros having too much boon access, I’m a proponent for Necros having access to abilities that accomplish similar things as boons, but less effective to make up for not being as easily countered.

Like I always thought Mark of Blood should apply a non-boon area heal that stacks with regeneration, just less powerful. Or instead of retaliation for Necros, we got some defensive life stealing effect instead (like pre patch/nerf SoV passive for x seconds).

spoj.9672:

Balekai.6083:

Edit: Except you still need condi teams since husks only take like 40-50 damage from power. It would be a pain to kill them even with a zerg, since it would be like trying to kill mobs with a Vampiric trait when time is not exactly on your side. 5 condi users > entire zerg focus that needs to be focusing on other things.

Just stacking might and using bleeds on berserker builds is enough to kill them fast. As i imagine it we would be managing everything as a single group. Whereas in open world people split the roles into groups. If players can efficiencly multi task everything that is needed then it becomes more efficient to clear mobs, prepare for burn and block grub spawns together. And trust me with 20 full optimised glass players working together with full buffs and proper rotations. The mobs are doing to die so fast that having a dedicated condi team is going to be rather pointless. It would be easy to clear mobs inbetween preping burns and even while in the middle of a burn phase.

However, it’s just as pointless if more so organizing all that, when you could just have 3-5 guys as condi handling it at considerable ease. You still need to run kegs, time burns, colour coat dyes etc. that takes more or less the same time. Easier to just have a condi team without trying to prove something and wasting time you would have made up for with “optimal people.” Even if you had a team of say 20 glass players stacking mediocre/might buffed bleeds as well, you still need 15-30 glass cannon toons doing 100 damage per second to match the stacks of 1-2 condi appliers doing 25 stacks of bleeds (not counting other condis).

Some things are just not worth the effort. Like running a power centric zerg into killing enemies that reduce normal damage by literally 99% (Think of it this way. A 50 man zerg essentially does the same power damage vs those husks as a 5 man zerker team would do vs normal mobs), but are easily killed by 5 people running alternative damage because there is no reduction. Leave out the 20 people rotation onto husks, get more or less the exact same DPS with 3-5 people setup as condi and viola, record breaking TT.

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This thread isn’t about TT though. To get back more on topic, I would like to see the differences between the unique post defiant stages and dynamics they said they’re planning. Or better yet if Anet gets creative like making defiance bars YOU DON’T want to strip down, because it triggers a berserk phase or some such. It will be interesting to see how they play around with it. In any case, the new defiance is better than the old one for all CC users including Necros, since we more or less ignore current defiance in most encounters.