Guild Wars 2

My thoughts:
This patch pushes necros even further away from rewarding skillful play:

• Dhuumfire is here to stay? Maybe even made more accessible?
  Please for the love of god no. It’s so mindless, it’s unavoidable, it’s a ‘high’ damage cover condition. So even if you get the bleed stack cleansed somehow you have burning ticking. It’s zero fun, it scales really well with #1 spam. It’s outright horrible – whichever way you look at it.

• Reapers Protection: … really, more passive effects? Could be fun on a +100% condition duration 30/20/20/0/0 wvw troll build for minimum skill / maximum trolling. That can’t be the design goal now, eh?

• Spite: Good traitline for power and for condibuilds. 30 Spite is a must-have for every single power build, which makes sense I guess. 30 Spite being incredibly strong for condimancers – in combination with 20-30 Curses being obligatory – leaves little room for experiments and creative builds sadly.

• Curses: I agree that the curses trait line is flooded with amazing major traits. Which is a good thing imo, you can pick the traits you like best, but you always have to make tradeoffs. That’s what every traitline should be like imo. Curses is amazing!

• Death Magic/ Blood Magic: I won’t go into commenting on Death/Blood, as I have too little experience with them. For my intents and purposes necro has 3 traitlines, plus the chance to go 10 points into either death or blood. That’s how worthless I think those two lines are. Did I mention they are zero fun and mindless? E.g. what is the point of unblockable marks when you can just dodge-destroy them?

Soul Reaping: I think this traitline has a lot of potential for skillful defensive play (spectral cooldowns, foot in the grave, strong but passive: last gasp, etc) and making our class mechanic actually fun and strong (foot in the grave, larger hp buffer, quicker recharge etc). Plus it offers some fun or cheesy builds: 30/10/0/0/30 DS build, 100% crit well bomber. This traitline suffers heavily from being outshone by must-haves in Spite and Curses in my opinion.

• 30/20///20 is the obvious condimancer pvp build choice, while there could be more skill-sensitive builds out there (I’d love to see 0/30/0/0/30+10 work, full curse plus foot in the grave). +100% duration terror plus dhummfire is just needed to even have one viable build.

• Keep Spite + Curses + Soul Reaping the pve traitlines. There is no future for Blood/Death (the defensive traitlines) for damage. How shall they be balanced for damage, when they inherently offer better defense? It is just not possible, so please don’t waste further time and credibility trying to make it (look like it would) work.
  If that means siphoning has to stay bad, then that’s what it is. Siphoning can never be good sustain, good damage and balanced at the same time; why pretend it can work?

• Weakening Shroud. The ICD change will make necro even more susceptible to burst-disengange-finish tactics than it already is. And it doesn’t touch the bleed burst potential, it just increases the time in between bursts. Plus it weakens one of the last defenses necro has against being trained – not that it was particularly effective in the first place.

• Please look into the bug where upon exiting death shroud the normal skill setup takes ~1 second to load.

• If you are out to make staff unusable, at least offer a second weapon set for condition builds.

• Can we get some dungeon utility? Maybe some projectile block tied into an untraited minion skill, or something along those lines? Or weakness uptime?

+ 10% is another poison tick on scepter auto and another dhuumfire tick in wvw for the standard terrormancer. Not worth the 25+ silver imo

Abramelin.7356:

Come on guys, at least they have n’t nerfed Siphoned Power.

This just in, we will be reverting the recent changes on bloodthirst!
Big changes, everyone!

To me necro is a high CD one-trick pony – for the niches where it’s viable:

• wells in wvw (~40s CD), make it wells + deathly perception for extra one-trick lulz
• fear combo in pvp (each fear has like a 40s CD untraited, I never trait more than spectral wall if at all)
• epidemic in pve (12s CD traited)

In the down-times necro is anything but spectacular – considering it brings nothing but autoattack damage in any build that can even be considered a damaging build.
I’m not even gonna mention pve wells as amazing pve aoe, kitten .

It brings immense front-loaded damage, which is cool in pvp settings (where necros is viable). Its sustained (non-cleaving) damage combined with no support at all makes necro suck in pve.

But maybe I’m just too unexperienced to know better!!11

Yeah, that’s what I thought. As soon as you start getting hit the change is pretty much non-existant.
I kinda like that, I find 30/10///30 more enjoyable than 30/25///15 anyway

Bhawb.7408:

In what way are we the worst? Its been shown that we have comparable direct damage DPS to non-warriors, with a much easier time going full glass than pretty much anyone and still being self sufficient. And that is just single-target. We are easily one of the strongest classes at dealing with mass mobs, so long as they can’t ping-pong CC us.

Delusional is a big word, but…

Ascii.9726:

• Soul Reaping II. Vital Persistence. Increased reduction of life force drain from 25% to 50%.

Let’s talk about this part. The one aspect getting buffed is DS uptime in DS zerker builds, right? As far as I can tell this doesn’t change the damage soaking ability of DS much.

The weird thing is; 30/20///20 is the main (only?) problem. And every single change they make to bleeding stacks further reinforces it as THE viable build by cutting away damage left and right until dhuumfire is necessary to keep a viable amount of damage. The build that is the most problematic is the one getting hit the least (by comparison).

So finishing map completion then leaving for good it is.

I feel like anything after hitting lvl 80 is complete and utter horse sheet. It’s almost like there is 2 companies working on this game. A really talented and creative one was responsible for the core game, graphics, lore, exploration, 1-80 content.
And the other worthless, uninspired, kittenty one is responsible for the patches, endgame content and updates.

It’s mind-boggling how kittening amazing 1-80 content is, and how kittening unbelievably kittenty everything that comes after is.

Ontopic
Spite X is a nice change
Curses IV makes sense from an integrity stand point, sucks for game play. I’d prefer for them to take away some of the bleeding stacks/duration and keep the ICD.
Death VIII… just wow… more skill-free fear spam. I have no hope for this game’s future. at all.
It’s so apparent what they are trying to do (make blood/death ‘more attractive’) and yet the changes are so random.
Can we talk about nerfing Dhuumfire already?

DarcShriek.5829:

What ever happened to the calls for more permanent content? Be careful what you ask for, you may get it.

To me it’s like their retribution for asking for permanent content. Showing the community how kittenty their permanent new content is, so we’ll never ask again.

Then again this is prolly just me being sad this map is ‘gone’, so yeah :P

Hate it.
It was one of my favorite zones, now it’s just another grey dark kittenty map. Oh, and a mindless zerg going on there. Can’t pretend I like one single thing about this change.

mergi.1407:

The zerg train only exists for those riding it, there is no game mechanic or event that entitles individuals or a group exclusive use of content period.
I enjoy doing the zerg train occasionally for daily and monthly achievements but I also support openly in map chat other players rights to do as they please even if they are deliberately trying to derail the train.
The way I see it the very people that want to keep the train running will ultimately be responsible for its own demise if they do not adjust their thinking and behaviour towards others.
I would rather be able to do dynamic events in a live and populated world instead of a train, zerg or dungeon path grinding however that is a whole different topic of game design and implementation.

amen
+1

lvl 80 necro: finished personal story (asura infinity ball <3), slowly going for map completion which is lots of fun on the first char, tried pug dungeons and HATED it as a necro, joining wvw to see if there’s a competent leader on the map at the time or go roaming for a bit until I’m kitten ed of with all the blobs, recently discovered spvp – not sure i like it yet

lvl 23 engi: wanted to try engi for the grenade build, but it’s just no fun leveling up again. Only thing going for this char was the norn/drunk accident story (loved it!!), but I figure that’s finished now. It’s weird, my necro is at 100+ skillpoints left from all the world completion/wvw, but I can’t find any joy in playing low level chars. Plus i feel disadvantaged for not being some korean 300apm kid

lvl 2 some other stuff: can barely force myself through the intro to get them into spvp

Wethospu.6437:

Bit off topic but could someone explain why stuff is always so expensive in in-game shops? Buying everything can easily cost thousand euros (especially ftp games).

At least I would spend much more if I got more in return. Now I rarely bother.

My theory:
At one point it was established amongst game creators that it’s more profitable to go for ‘whales’ and regular buyers than target a wider audience. Apparently a lower price isn’t compensated for by a higher number of buyers, so they are trying to get as much money out of the relatively ‘unflexible’ (can’t remember the correct term right now) amount of transactions they get.

I could see myself buying inventory slots and the like for real money, but i sure as hell won’t do it for the current price, so yeah.

NargofWoV.4267:

2 blues, 20 merit’s, some ascended mat’s, a finisher, some blueprints.

Would be my guess as well. Greens for finishing top of the tier

Wethospu.6437:

People are stupid.

99% of the gw comm. in a nutshell

Charak.9761:

Because they want you to use real money, but in the end the results are lackluster.

RNG boxes need to go, its getting insulting.

MAYBE you find it insulting because you can see through the concept. There’s people who can’t, who are paying kittenloads of money on the gamble.
It IS insulting, and rightfully so. There are people walking this earth whose stupidity you couldn’t grasp in one lifetime.
I’m torn between finding it sad and finding it funny as hell.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Zackie.8923:

the threshold is a bit high in my opinion

The threshold is less than 1% of the gate’s total health. If you can’t meet that threshold, you can hardly claim credit for tearing it down.

because the incentives the current implementation gives are totally worth hanging onto some weird ego trip rawr rawr ‘logic’

I wonder if people that post here actually play the game once in a while, or just use the forums. No offense

Yeah, so hard to gauge if people find certain activities fun.
You have to go lengths such as taking away rewards and see if people still do it. Oh wait, sounds rather easy if you look at it like this ._.

flow.6043:

Tyler Chapman.1832:

We are changing the tooltip to clear up the confusion for this skill. It is a 3 condition transfer from self to foes when they trigger it. None of the other issues are bugs.

Hope this clears things up. This skill has undergone major balance renovations.

It will no longer cleanse teammates and it will always give a full cooldown when interrupted because its one of the best skills in the game.

Great success! We got an answer… not sure I like it though xD

Woot! I was actually sitting in the dev meeting when that was decided. From what I recall it went something like this:

A: So I heard Putrid Mark has been broken for a year.
B: It’s kittened
C: … like really kittened.
A: So what’s up with that?
B: Can’t get it to work as stated.
(C: You had one kittening year, christ O_o)
A: kitten!
So…
B: Leave it be? It’s necros we’re talking about.
A: Naaa, that’s getting old. Peeps might see a pattern.
C: Gotta go, warrior speed runs tonight, don’t miss it!
A/B: Haha, like we would Laters!
B: So, label it a balance decision and change the tooltipp?
A: LAWL
B: No seriously, makes it look intentional and like we know what we’re doing. Plus it leaves little room for discussions and ridicule.
A: Aahaha, trying to sound sophisticated Good sir, thou art a genious amongst men, that shall be the decision!
B: That will teach them DON’T MESS THE WARRIOR, BOIS!

Back then I thought they were joking :/

Is it not a group heal? Been only wvw solo roaming today, so I didn’t try it out, but iirc that’s what it said.

//edit: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Antitoxin_Spray

I guess it comes down to the game’s concept: Leveling a char for the first time and experiencing the world for the first time is breath-taking, there’s lots fun and beautiful content.
After that it turns to complete kitten imo; and the community that sticks around is not motivated by fun, but other motives – to put it really nicely. (braindead farmers, hardcore addicts, ragers)

I was gonna write a lot more, but all that would’ve been left of it would’ve been kittenkittenkittensonofakittenkitten plus infractions worth multiple life time bans anyway, so yeah.

this game really has one of the brightest communities ever. and im not talking about the troll op

Andele.1306:

The cool thing about the new heal is if you are a norn warrior in mostly SE armor colored blue yellow you can channel the spirit of SPHAZE MAREEENS and Garen the spin2win king in their full glory.

That is a very specific scenario right there. Guess I will keep CC for now .____.

I see. Thanks!
Guess I’ll make sure I not only start the groups, but more importantly open the dungeons myself. The more you know indeed

Casmurro.9046:

The person who enters first is the instance owner. So next time you make a group enter in the dungeon first then post on lfg.
If i make a lfg post and one of the pugs rush to enter the dungeon i always leave the group and post again, i’ve already got a lot of headache because of these kinds of pugs.

Usually these types of pugs that enter in the dungeon first without being the group leader have around 1k AP and always ragequit or leave the group before the final chest.

I’m one of the 1500 AP newcomers myself. Atm I’m trying to find groups to figure out the dungeons by ourselves, without youtube’ing for the correct way to do/cheese all the ways. oh boi.

There’s a lot of nice players, both beginners and vets, don’t get me wrong.
But you get many speed runners that are so short on time that they don’t even have time to read the description that states that this will SO not be a speed run. And then quit 5 minutes in because ppl don’t know the mechanics by heart. Totally surprising in a beginners run, right?
You get 1k APs that are just not willing/able to communicate. What’s up with that? I get how you can not know the mechanics, and I hate looking mechanics up on the internet; I’d much rather figure them out myself with my group… But how can you not know the tactics/mechanics – and then not be willing/able to work on understanding.
/endrant

Props to all the vets that are happy to reach out a hand, and props to all the newcomers that are willing to learn I guess

Okay, so the one that enters the instance first, becomes the ‘owner’ of the instance, so to say?
And once he/she gets kicked, the rest of the group stays together, gets ported out of the dungeon and has to start over?

And does it really only take 1 positive vote for a kick to go through?

Wouldn’t that be me, considering i started the instance?

Ok, so here is what happened:

I started a group for ACp2 in the dungeon finder (stating that it’s a beginners group, and ppl that joined were cool with that, quite a fun run).
Three ppl join, then another one.
We start the dungeon, get to the final boss.
Just as we figure out how he’s supposed to be killed, someone has to go to bed, and leaves the group.
I ask if we wanna continue, i get two positive responses.
Someone suggests kicking the forth player (she never communicated, basically just did random stuff all the time, etc).
I accept the kick vote.
— and here’s where it gets weird —
Next thing I know is I’m standing outside the dungeon.
Another player joins the group.
I zone back in, the dungeon has reset (as far as i can tell, mission objective changed to ‘Find the camp’ again).
Another loading screen, I’m outside the dungeon again with only me and one of the other players in the group.

So, can someone tell me what was going on there? Because I’m confused as hell…
Thanks in advance

I recently tried it in a few dungeons (30//20/20/ or something along those lines, full zerker) and was pleasantly surprised… until they decided to mess with some of the cheese tactics (lol this game/community).
In CM they worked really well

so much fun to look for animations on wurms when their head is 50m out of your field of view

5 races, 5 slots… 5 WARRIORS
and see which race you like best

just being honest

yeah, if you play on sfr please don’t use zerker :<
else, zerker all the way, knock yourself out

If you time it right, it’s actually not that bad (oh how I would love to get reliable information on the animation times ._.) It’s just that there are 2 power based offhands available :/
The lacking (crit (damage)) scaling is the problem of dagger#5 (imo). The base damage of the bleeding isn’t too shabby.

//edit: according to my calculations it is a dps loss compared to dagger#1, the gap depends on the actual animation times. I can’t see it overtaking wh or focus ever. Reaper’s touch only has to hit the enemy once per cd for it to destroy all the other OHs on single targets.

you should use zerker in wvw. 10k hp is all you need.

greetings, your friendly necro next door

5 bucks say it will never happen because of lore

You’re welcome
Glad to spell out the tooltips to you
It’s been a pleasure to hear all the interesting ‘opinions’ on how the mechanics work. I was actually amazed at how the spells actually do what the wiki says they’d do. Wish you a nice day!

I don’t think I’ve ever taken axe training outside of the 30/10///30 DS build to push DS#1 damage.
Axe on a necro is just… weird. #1 is low dps and stacks vulnerability (could synergize with minion builds). #2 is just… why… #3 is amazing for wvw zerging in my opinion and I use it before going back into DS in pve if there’s something like protection on the target.

I just recently joined gw2, and maybe axe was good at one point, but atm it feels like a weird utility weapon more than anything.

not like the first three pages are filled with threads like that. i can totally see why you would ask others to do the work for you, considering there’s so little information available. plus condi necro is really really hard to figure out.

You do realize that I agree with that, right? I love oh dagger, still it is not something that I would consider to be the go-to offhand for mainhand dagger.

It’s a defensive weapon. You can’t use it to pressure all by itself. You need someone to attack you first – specifically with (dmg) conditions – to be able to retaliate.

Then again, if the OPs would start to mention the context of their questions maybe they could get useful answers right away, but yeah… n/c to that.

I agree with pretty much all of the above, and setups like this are what makes pvp interesting imo (I played resto shaman in wow for the longest time. It’s pretty similar in that you need your mates to peel for you 24/7. Once you find the right mates you can pull off ridiculous plays though).
Still it is extremely frustrating to know what’s coming, thinking ‘now would be the time for an immunity/block/…’ and the only thing you’re left with is hoping death shroud holds up.
I dunno, maybe I just don’t know the right people ingame to make condi necro work in mid sized groups.

Drawing Guy.3701:

Oh come on, just because blocks, evasions, and invulns block infinity people while our survival abilities can be cracked instantly by a train doesn’t mean that mass pvp is stacked against Necros…

I know, right? :P

When I started gw2 a few months ago and saw epidemic I was like ‘This is going to be SO MUCH FUN’. Looks like it’s a bad time to roll condi necro and expect ginormous epidemics on the regular.

Bhawb.7408:

However, Shadow Fiend has a ridiculously long windup.

Always wondered what’s up with that. Feels like 3 seconds for it to activate. I tend to spam it on CD as long as there’s no blind up atm, if I even bother at all.

Stubie.5834:

See that’s what I’m saying. The above poster said danger off hand is a defensive weapon. I fail to see how a spell that does DMG and blinds and a spell that does DMG and adds multiple conditions is more defensive then a spell that does no DMG and dazes and a spell that does aoe DMG and gives a swiftness boon. I have an off hand dagger and I’ll pick up a focus and try them both out against my oh wh. Nice discussion though. Thanks for the input.

… just wow. I just realized why most of the respectable theorycrafters stopped posting here. My brain cells are dying just from reading this crap.

How does an attack that BLINDS and does less damage than mh dagger auto attack make oh dagger an offensive weapon?
‘adds multiple conditions’… what the kitten is the inherent offensive nature of ‘adding conditions’. The damage part is condition based (it’s rather weak on a power build) and the other condition is kittening weakness.

I’m not even gonna go into the difference between ‘offensive’ and ‘direct damage’ (which is not exactly the strength of necro OHs). Not that I’m surprised, but you didn’t even mention the (arguably :P) best dps OH: focus

Stubie.5834:

Dagger #4 does a bit of DMG and removes conditions.
> actually what it does is blind and transfer conditions. The damage is only there so on-crit abilities can trigger. Sounds pretty defensive to me

WH #4 does a bit of DMG and dazes.
> wh#4 doesn’t do a bit of DMG. I don’t know about you, but with the current necro playstyle the daze is 99% offensive for me, to lock targets in position (wells, locking them out of position, blocking access to defensive skills, stopping heals).

Dagger #5 is and aoe DMG and condition spell
> dagger#5 is used for the weakness and the condi aoe. Weakness is defensive, aoe damage is condi-based.

and WH is an aoe that adds swiftness spell.
> swiftness for you, inflicting cripple to the target. You will not outrun your opponent as a necro (once wh#5 is down they are back in your face), you won’t do damage with a mh dagger while ‘kiting’ with wh#5. This spell is used to keep in range of your target (necro being the aggressor) and/or to gain lifeforce and for traveling longer distances.

I don’t see how one is more defensive then the other I guess.

Conclusion: wh is used offensively, oh dagger is used defensively
If you can’t see that then there’s nothing I can do for you.

While answering a different topic I found a term that pretty much describes the problem I see with the concept of necro attrition at the moment:
Necros damage mitigation is largely focused around
a) conditions like snares and weakness to reduce incoming damage
b) soaking damage with the lifeforce hp bar
c) limited teleports
and that’s about it. The scaling with player numbers in a fight is HEAVILY stacked against the necro:

a) Application of damage-reducing conditions is linked to cooldowns. In small scale skirmishes the cooldowns and counters are (arguably) balanced. Once a critical mass is reached condition removal outpaces condition reapplication, at which point the necro is bound to facetank the incoming damage.
b) Again, (arguably) balanced in small scale skirmishes. Once more than a few enemies decide to train the necro, that second hp diminishes in split-seconds and refilling it is harder than ever. Necro has no (?) damage mitigation that scales with group size. Most noticibly necros only have access to dodge every 10 seconds, no blocks, no immunities. Necros are ridiculously limited at outplaying incoming damage once they get targeted by a group and their first two dodges are down.
c) Teleports, for the sake of completeness. You can disengage for a bit, you can troll tards, you will get chased down. I r underwhelmed. Still, spectral walk is one of the better life-savers for me.

I don’t have a solution for this that fits the necro theme (and so does anet if im concerned). Would you agree with my assessment of the situation?

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

JonathanSharp.7094:

I say play it a while and then see how you feel. (emphasis mine)

We did a big set of improvements to Necro recently (this is in reference to the Dhuumfire addition and Tainted Shackles; again, emphasis mine), and we want to make sure we don’t over improve their defense capabilities.

We want to shift more focus to death shroud throug main hand skills, but, again, we don’t want to do this too fast, ESPECIALLY with a major Pax tournament right around the corner.

So death shroud gains may not be as high as you would like, but we’ll keep monitoring them and looking at further improvements to make.

Well, we’ve played it awhile, Mr. Sharp. I don’t speak for every necro out there, but all I can say is the removal of our sole means of one-hit-kill damage mitigation sucked then and it still sucks now. With still – almost 3 months later – nothing to compensate the loss of such a critical defensive mechanic.

Bump, Amen, 10chars

Unless attrition means getting trained into the ground and having NO means to ‘outplay’ incoming damage, necro is the exact opposite of attrition right now.
You will NEVER EVER have a balanced attrition class if you center it around skillless damage soaking abilities (like… DS maybe?!). And don’t even try siphoning, it sucked (balance-wise) in every game I’ve played so far and it would suck in gw2 as well.

There’s just so little synergy in necro hybrid builds. Why would you take a vulnerability-stacking weapon with kitten dps, when condis bypass armor anyway. Weapon scaling either HEAVILY favors power or condidamage. The only exception – the staff – has the worst dps of all the necro weapons and is usually taken for utility or wvw tagging.

(Oh, and pure conditionmancer already is a crit build, just saying :/)

OH dagger is a defensive / condition-based weapon. Why exactly would you use it in a dps focused power build? O_o
In pvp it’s not super-uncommon to see dagger offhands even in power builds.

Bring a better stun warrior? .____.

Tarsius.3170:

Another entertaining video Amins – glad you are back in the blue bubble!

akamon.2769:

nice JI stomp. ; )) i still haven’t come across the oportunity to do that yet. XDD

You’ve got no thieves/mesmers on your server? :O
Nothing beats a good telestomping… well almost nothing

The one I haven’t managed myself yet is the Ele mist form tele stomp, that requires better timing than I have achieved yet.

rofl, that video is hilarious, love it!
now to fit a charr in there ._.

1-5 = 1-5 because that placement is actually intuitive
6 = c because heals have quite the cooldown attached to them anyway
7-9 = t,f,v utilities mostly don’t need really fast reaction times, or you can guesstimate when you will have to react fast
0 = x again, long cooldowns, still quick to reach
weaponswap = q enables you to somewhat reliably hit on-swap effects, plus after weaponswap I can easily hit 1 again
dodge = e still an old habit from WoW. I put the skill with the most critical timing on e (used to be dispel in wow)
F1 = r made sense for warri and necro, turned out to be good for guard as well
F2, F3, F4 i haven’t used on my chars so far. I put them on F4 and F5 for now, which i kinda like