Guild Wars 2

Vampiric scales in leaching finally. Now we heal for an additional 6 points with enough healing power! Hooray for ultimate idiocy!

In terms of “activates on healing” effects like some runes or traits work it isn’t. These effects will only trigger on activating your main healing skill (slot 6) and that is how it works for necros and every other class. Reason behind it is balancing that stuff, probably.

If you want to know more about the mechanics around life steal then they probably work like two portions, the first one is the damage application, the second is a sometimes equal amount of healing.
Lifesteal in the game works differently depending on what source it is from. If you got a thief around you, sharing his via the trait “Leeching Venoms” enhanced venoms with you then every attack with venoms will deal an additional 325 dmg ( + some scaling with thieves power) and heal you for 325 ( + scaling with thieves healing power).
Then there are runes and sigils granting lifesteal proccs. Those deal a fixed amount of dmg and heal you for the same amount plus some more depending on your healing power. And lastly there is necro life leech which scales with power and healing power (dagger 3) or only with one specific trait as it is the case with vampiric, vampiric precision, vampiric master and vampiric rituals. These necro traits don’t scale at all with healing power (at the moment, patch might change that) and deal an equal amount of dmg in case of vampiric and vampiric precision or smthg like 10 dmg incase of vampiric rituals (they still heal you for smthg like 70 health per tick per enemy with bloodlust) or no additional dmg at all incase of vampiric master.
Hope that helps.

30/30/10/blubb works as a hybrid with wells. And since most of your times you will be standing on balconies throwing deadly goo on points, you get the 10% bonus pretty often.

I think a lot of people overrate the 20% dmg trait. If you dont go in as a full on gc with the intention to wellbomb someone in a “once-every-5-games” dark pact, Close to Death is only a nice to have trait, because necro, in contrast to every other class, has no real burst. There are only auto attacks and wells in terms of direct damage.
For everything hybrid related, the burn will be strong. 8-10 insta bleeds plus terror plus burning will put some serious pressure on people. Terror and burn on itself are a really strong “poke” of sorts.

Still, condi builds are lame and i want the sparkly vampire love.

Edit: Just an idea i had: are the 100% crit on weapon swap sigils still in the game? If so, they could make Dhuumfire be usable without high precision.

People get upset easily because some of the biggest changes for necro in the last 9 months were something like breaking focus skills or breaking marks. Not a lot happened and so its easy to start the rage but i agree, we are so close to atleast some adjustments and should keep our undying calm. hrhr

Soul reaping changes are pretty awesome. I am also ok with the Near to Death nerf, but man am i disappointed with blood magic.

Either they plan on a big surprise release in which they present the completely overhauled blood magic trait line or they just… did … nothing about it.
I will be so incredibly sad if they didn’t touch BM.

First of all, i don’t think the leaked notes include all changes that will come, or atleast i hope so since vampiric traits were absolutely untouched.
Then i’d like to point out, that the poison on the 3rd hit of the auto attack chain gets doubled in duration, so they kind of already included more poison on scepter. Also you should try some hybrid builds or zerker with scepter since the 3rd skill hits pretty hard and is pretty good in terms of cast time and a not so obvious animation compared to smthg like axe.
Also life force replenishement in wvw or pve is mostly a non issue since stuff is dying all the time. The change aims more towards pvp and i don’t think it will solve our LF starvation issues there.

Pretty sure it is with Unguent. Regen ticks for 300 at around 1400 HP. Add in signet of the wild at around 140 plus Natural healing for 130 more and you get around 570 hps. With 1400 HP Unguent ticks for 980ish every second for 10 out of 25 seconds, averaging 392+570 = 962 hps.

Necro can actually reach that level of hps with cleric amulett enhanced regen and an all out minion specc with Vampiric Master (Blood fiend is essential).

Scaling with vitality wouldn’t fit very well in terms of game mechanics. Healing power is already in the game and the current itemization options would favor already dps heavy builds. But i can see what you are trying to achieve since a bigger health pool is harder to maintain.

Imho the traits should be attributed differently. Vampiric rituals should stay flat (and maybe be merged with well cd). This trait favors wvw and pve and therefore it is okay to balance it around the maximum amount of targets.
Vampiric precision should become an on crit procc that siphons a fixed amount of health similar to the sigil of blood(~450 health, 5 sec icd). If the numbers are right, this would become a nice direct dmg procc for power and rabid condi builds alike.
And lastly vampiric should get to scale with healing power to allow better sustain with it because the current numbers are just abyssmal. I would also like to have the dmg part scale with healing power so that all other builds don’t profit too much from it (if it scales with power it will prolly be weak so zerker builds wouldn’t get even more increase in dps). Also this would allow cleric necros to be more of a bruiser with good sustained dmg, which i would find a lot more interesting then just some necro variant of a bunker guard. This obviously depends a lot on the numbers.

@Softspoken: we lack vigor and evades on weapon skills. so we would probably need smthg like 1500 healing per second to come close to rangers in terms of survivability (obviously this ignores DS and numbers are straight out of some place where the sun doesn’t shine)

I really like the information we got and pretty much agree with Bhawb in keeping the necro identity.
They also mentioned the possibility of making DS more melee oriented, or i misheard that part, by letting life blast hit harder in close range. That way DS 2 and 4 would make the Deathshroud kit more round.
I’m hoping for some lifeforce generation and lifesteal buffs and overall the show made me pretty excited (once again…).

Just some quick clarification about Soul Marks. Somebody said that integrating soul marks into basic staff skills would make it too strong in wubvwub. I’d suggest taking a second look at this trait, because the amount of lifeforce doesn’t scale with the number of enemies hit. It is 3% lifeforce per mark.

Apart from that i found Iceflame’s post about the difficulties of facetanking pretty interesting. I think this issue could be adressed by increasing the amount of life force generated and also increasing the degen in death shroud. As an example: an easy to fill life force bar, lets say around 5-10 seconds of combat, coupled with a strong degen (20%) but something like 40k “deathshroud hp” shifts the ability from easy-depleted-by-damage to a strong-but-time-limited-shield. By buffing the amount of possible absorption (40k hp) you get better results against multiple enemies, while maintaining a limit to its usability (5 seconds before depletion).
In addition the below 50% lifeforce “penalty” should be removed, because it feels like a kitten penalty to use DS < 50%.

Bhawb.7408:

Has nothing to do with how good we are in PvP, and everything to do with how people feel we are, and the current meta. Right now the meta is heavily towards tons of condi removal, which makes it harder for necros to do well.

Since nobody mastered deathshroud, people have to rely on their feelings…
But there are other options besides conditions. Maybe.
Powermancer doesn’t rely on condis and packs some serious omph but suffers from chronic necro issues. No in combat mobility and a pretty hard time recovering from burst. In that regard he is like a 100b warri minus the mobility.
Then there are hybrid builds – thinking lettucemode axe, terror stuff. That are pretty fun to play and really efficient vs boon heavy builds, which are part of the meta. But they also suffer from the same problems as the power stuff.
And then comes every other of the “many viable necro builds” (apart from standard condi builds ofc).
If necro had at least better sustain you might see more of them but with the way the class plays right now, it is inferior to so many other classes and needs some serious tweaks or some really deep hidden build synergy, nobody found till now.

Yeah, Lich becomes close to useless as a downleveled powermancer.
Atleast the auto attack still pierces and you can burn down trash faster. Yay!

Sprawl.3891:

Bellamy.9860:

Still happens in hotjoins all the time and there you got no level difference and somewhat equal access to gear.

thats just because people dont bother reviving in hot join so it’s effectively played as if there were no downed state and bad play gets punished.

If they ever add the option to turn off downed state in custom servers it will be the most popular game mode by far. Quote me on it.

We could let this evolve into a theoretical 1v2 battle in which i’d respond with cleave, poison, interrupt or smthg along those lines but your inital point was ~ leet vs scrubs and i don’t see how that doesn’t apply to the case i brought up. Especially since downed opponents can still cc, damage and get potentially up again.
I think you are just making too many exceptions why a won 1v2 is never truly won.

Edit: Also the point about adding a healer to a fight was certainly not that he arrives when someone is killed, but that he arrives when someone is close to beeing killed. Because that’s what downed state is, an extension of your health pool.

Still happens in hotjoins all the time and there you got no level difference and somewhat equal access to gear.

If it is enjoyable to watch or not is personal opinion.
And i think it’s kitten ejoyable with some good shoutcasting and POV switching.

Also i had my fare share of loosing and winning 2v1/1v2 vs worse/better players and there are multiple videos on the net showing that this kind of stuff is possible (remembering some teldo vid, where he 1v3 some “noobs”, just look it up).

And last but not least, if you find it troubling that with the addition of a support guy to a fight a lesser skilled opponent can get carried through it, you must really hate healers in other games.

It will trigger both.

If you also take vampiric rituals (wells siphon health) you can get 3 leeching proccs out of one well tick per enemy hit (if it crits).

The proccs are 25 dmg for Vampiric and 30 for Vampiric precision without bloodthirst.
The 90 damage stated by Panhauramix are probably from the 1s bleed procc from the curse traitline.

Just tested it with a steady weapon in the mists and the trait adds 15% dmg. This also applies to Life Blast

^The “pitiful amount” really made it sound like a necro trait.

Apart from that Dark Armor should probably be more like for example Nature’s Protection (Ranger/ Nature Magic/ VI), a trait that triggers on x amount of health gone in one hit.
It could be as easy as giving us frost aura in such a case. Fits thematically well with 10% less Damage and chill on getting struck.

Queued dodges need to go, plz revert the change, devs.

CPC is not condition damage. Poison scales so poor, that it should only be viewed as a source of healing reduction.

As for necrotic corruption: found it way too random. For it to have a serious contribution to a fight you have to have a standoff with a boon bunker for 30+ seconds. That is just not good enough for a grand master trait.
As for Death Nova: Poison is nice but instead of death nova i can just take Greater Marks and incorporate staff into my build. In my opinion the synergies between an axe and a dagger set are very small and dagger is still the superior weapon, due to healing, hard cc and higher damage.

Kardiamond.6952:

I still don’t think minion build are viable right now.

They just aren’t viable. You can do some good damage, but once they stop attacking because of the AI, you are done.

I can tell you that i don’t even care if one or two of them don’t attack. From a dps increase standpoint only flesh golem is a good addition (and to a lesser extent shadow fiend). I take minions because of the utility like passive lifereg, condition removal, as well as projectile block and a blast finisher. Every one of them, except bone minions, has an active ability that uses your current target. So even if they don’t attack (which they do after 2 autohits or using other single target abilites) i can use their corresponding skills.

Apart from that they are our lowest cd utility skills, so you can probably use them once or twice a fight.

And like Bas said, they aren’t pets. You don’t deal 40% less damage like a ranger if your pet dies. You deal exactly as much damage as you did previously with your dagger slashing, but loose condi removal and lifereg.

@Bas: Yes, i didn’t try them for a lon time because i dislike their appearance and the minion hate was strong in the community. But now that i have tried them, they are pretty awesome.
Also i didn’t listen to your 3rd podcast because it’s about wvw and i don’t do that much wvw. But if i had to guess i would say they suck because of way too much AoE?

@Bettadenu: I had pretty much the same experience as you in pvp. As far as your idea goes: Bone minions, as they are now, are one of my favourites. Traited on 16sec cd. Dealing 3k+ damage on active, which is easier to apply then a well and giving you stuff like condi removal and lifereg. So don’t know about your change.

I agree with 2 things: They look moronic and they require heavy traiting.
But required traiting is true for every single build in this game. If you would give some arguments i could probably try to understand why giving up utility slots for them is horrible design.

Ok so the necro has always had the option to go the minion heavy route but most of the community settled for s/d condimancer as the epitome of GW2 necromancy. And while minions were ignored for a long time due to a misunderstanding in their utility skill nature and some serious flaws in their AI, i think they deserve a 2nd chance from the community.

I always wanted to do some fun pvp stuff with my power necro, but all of the builds which people came up with or i tried to make work did lack on the “tough-and kitten kicking bruiser” departement. Well bomber was way too glassy for my liking and too much of an all in type with one removed immob pretty much denying all of your burst and wasting your utilites. DS centric builds (with or without spectral skills) just lacked the pressure appliance to scare anyone and i always felt like i had to go on the defense first and let my enemy try to apply their burst until i could start to fight them back. And my biggest let down was with every attempt to make a lifesteal build work. A death magic cleric type was just not viable and while we do have some nice supporting/healing traits, one of the strongest (transfusion) doesn’t easily apply its healing to ourselves and vampiric rituals has the same downsides as well bombing.

So after finally giving minions a try i feel like playing a completely different class.
1v1s that put me in the dust before feel like a fair fight. Condition management became a breeze, health management became a non issue. Utility skills with horrendous cooldowns and extremely pigeonholed uses are gone and instead i got some all around useful abilities. The whole minion master design seems to be build around letting the necro do his thing while supporting him in fights.
I can use a zerker amulett and still feel like the hulk instead of beeing a thief without burst and disengage (hulk lacks disengage too!).

I know that some people on this board preached the juicyness of minion builds for quite some time but i never gave them a fair shot. I was also turned off by the appearance of minion masters, which for me still look like a greenpeace activist trying to free a bunch of zoo animals. So what are your opinions on the matter? Did you gave minion builds a fair shot? Why did it fail for you (my problems with their AI are close to nonexistant)? After experiencing the carnage that is a minion build i have to say we probably need a change of mind.

Hi Moon,
you are looking for items with the hearty(vit, tough)or vigorous(pow, vit) prefix. The vigorous stuff is pretty sparse but there are plenty of hearty armors on the TP. At your level your trait allocation is kind of a huge deal in terms of stat gain. I would suggest grabbing some cheap armor and trating for death and blood magic first. If you get more confident in playing your nec, just retrait. It is pretty cheap.
For more information about possible stat combinations and the prefix i’d suggest visiting the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Item_nomenclature
Hope that helps.

Cooldown seems to be around 45-50 seconds. It definately isn’t at 40 seconds. 2 flesh golem charges on cd won’t trigger it and it also isn’t higher then 50.
Tested it the following way: get cdr trait for minions.
Summon flesh golem, get boons, swap out for lich/plague and reequip, wait for the cd and immediately resummon and you should get your boons again.
Cast time for flesh is 1,5 according to tooltip, so either casttime is around half a sec longer or the recharge is under 50 seconds.
If you want further testing, the next best thing that comes to mind would be basilisk venom without traited cdr (45s recharge). The last time i tested it(2-3 months ago) it didn’t trigger lyssa if casted 2 times in a row.

Has an internal cooldown of 60 or 70 secs, so its not like you will get the rune effect everytime.

When you get to the burrow part, just equip well of suffering, bone minions and flesh golem and activate their corresponding abilites as soon, as they stand at the burrow.
Then just use skills whenever they are off cooldown and you are at a burrow.
Once the burrow parts are done, just reequip your previous utilites.
Like gruvel said, equipping a dagger is also a good idea since its auto attack is one of our highest damaging abilities, but axe is also fine. Especially if you use its channel (axe2).

1) Will we see one big patch containing multiple adjustments to increase build variety or is the small and steady approach intended to adress these issues?

2) Any plans on bringing in more of the pve crowd? Like implementing some kind of daily/montly pvp tokens which can be traded in for pve stuff(gulps of karma/exp/gold).

3) Will the mists ever become a brigther place with more color in it or is it supposed to stay as a mildly depressing place. (yes, i know about the lore but it either needs more fog and moonlight or more sunshine and singing birds)

If you don’t like sigil of earth you can also give sigil of blood a try. It doesn’t scale with power and always deals around 450 dmg, ignores armor and heals for the same amount. Also it only has 2 sec internal cd.
Earth on the other hand deals around 100-200 more damage. (anyone knows the internal cd?)

As an additional info: If you select the trait – spiteful talisman- in PvE the tooltip changes to 14 seconds, but the recharge timer is not affected by it and it still takes 18 seconds to recharge.

Hi,
so i did fractals today and noticed the still mediocre damage from spinal shivers. This wasn’t the first time i saw it hitting for a pretty small number (around 400ish) after the patch. So i tested spinal shivers damage with and without spiteful talisman (tier1 spite trait) against some dredge in dredgehaunt cliffs and it seems to not apply the 50% dmg increase per boon removed if you got the trait for foci.
Is this known and i am late to the party? Would be the bug threat more appropriate? If not be warned in traiding 4s cd vs 150% extra dmg.

Edit: Did some more testing around this. If you use the trait, spiteful talisman, you definately not get the bonus damage per boon removed on spinal shivers.
Chill of death (cast spinal shivers on 25%) however works how it should even with spiteful talisman and also does around 15% more dmg than spinal shivers with 3 boons removed. I did not use close to death for this so i don’t know why it deals around 15% more. Maybe a downscaling issue.

pierwola.9602:

Poison (condi)
Deals damage every second; heal potency and revive speed decreased by 33%

Um, isn’t this already in place? I could swear poison affects revive speed and even sometimes causes things like signet of undeath to not fully revive someone.

Carrion is the one with power/vit/condi if i remember correctly. So you would get more power out of it then you currently get but lose pretty much all the crit chance.

And thanks for the condition damage explanation

Hi, i really like the concept around the build and got some questions.

Terror seems to be really inconsistent when i test it on dummys. For the most part it ticks only once and sometimes, especially when i got some bleeds on the dummy it ticks twice.
I tried to find the sweet spot and used 10, 20 and 30 points in spite maybe this messed something up? (i used nightmare runes and master of terror in all 3)

Another question: what’s your opinion on using carrion amulett and maybe combining it with geomancy sigils?

Order of whispers warhorn:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Whisper%27s_Secret_Warhorn

manveruppd.7601:

Rennoko.5731:

80% more healing from the blood fiend!!

Has anyone tested to see if this only affects the siphoning-on-attack it gives you? Or does it affect the base heal as well? Also, is the siphoning also affected by Bloodthirst now?

Only affects the siphoning. But the number doesnt fit in anywhere. Siphon was somewhere at around 260 and is now at 926. The siphon part is unaffected by healing power. The activate is roughly the same at somewhere around 4k healing.
The Blood fiend attacks roughly once every 3 seconds and the healing can be increased with vampiric master and bloodthirst by another 114. So the vampiric master is only a choice if you go all in on minions.

Bone minions are pretty good. They deal comparable damage to well of suffering minus the vuln, apply the damage more “bursty” and have half the cooldown. The rest is meh and really AI dependant, yeah, but bone minions don’t suffer much from the AI or low health.

Bas.7406:

Draegan.1472:

Didn’t Minions heal for 30 health before? Adding 50% to that isn’t that much health. We’ll see I guess.

That’s a good question, but even it it is that low 3 more heal per attack x 5 minions can equate to about 20-30 healing per second extra.

Minion heal was at about 80 for the flesh golem, dunno if different minions heal for different amouts

lorndarken.3702:

Necromancer
Bloodthirsty: This trait now functions with the Vampiric Rituals and Vampiric Master traits.

oh heck yeah . i do love my minion master and now we are getting that 50 % more siphon health from pets too alongside with blood fiend getting that 80% , can anyone say monster ?

I hope it is as good as it sounds on paper, but yeah thought about that too. haha

@mrmadhaze: atleast we got 10% more damage from ghastly claws…

focus was nice before but the damage buff on spinal finally justifies the cast time.

Hi,

i really like your epidemic + HGH engi combo. Too bad Teldo doesn’t like it.
For the most part i agree with your evaluations. Especially the disposable minion part hit the nail on the head. A probably pretty stupid idea i had for blood fiend was to let it heal on summon and on activation. For the active to become usable it needs to do x attacks. If the healing numbers would be worthwhile this could create encounters in which you want to kill the fiend in order to not let the necro heall for a significant amount. Similar to the good times when you struggle to interrupt the healing book wielding guardian.
Some things i would like to see changing which you seem to be fine with:
Reduced durations and cooldowns on wells. I would like to see them brought more closer to ranger traps. At the moment they really feel unforgiving if you misplaced them or someone blinks/dodges out.
I also don’t like how the 2nd effects of spectral walk and spectral armor are so counter intuitive. Generally you want to absorb damage/burst with Death shroud and while both of these skills have their uses in recharging DS they still require you to take a beating to use your absorb/defensive toolset.
Maybe those 2 skills should let a percentage of your received damage be applied to your life force bar?

Admired.7461:

Well, you’re trying to argue for Lich Form I assume, right? You want Lich Form to be better? Well, I took the damage of the Flesh Golem simulation and subtracted the Lich Form simulation from this. To rephrase what I said earlier, you need to do at least 18K damage with those little minions to surpass the damage effectiveness of the Flesh Golem simulation. Hope this helps.

Actually i thought you tried to compare damage with Lich and casting Mark of Horror vs damage with Lich and not casting Mark of Horror. So thats why i wondered where that 18k came from.
In regards to pro or against flesh: i personally do not use flesh golem in dungeons (except AC for buggy charge against burrows). Lich has just stronger “burst dps”, a high range auto and stability which is nice. Flesh golem on the other hand offers less control about your elite.
But there also is one downside to Lich that was not noticed once in this thread and that is how you have to commit to dpsing for the next ~30 seconds or you are essentially wasting a 3 min cd. From time to time people get downed and drowned in AoEs and you are not able to help or have to cancel your high cd elite to help them out.

Knew about the dagger chain because tooltips are lacking values for them and it takes an eternity to go through the whole chain but didn’t know about lich auto. So the cast time for lich auto is about 1.33 secs? I’ll take a look at that.
Edit: Took time with a stopwatch and yeah it has some silly delay. In 28,5 secs i counted 25 casts so it is roughly at 1,15. Bwargh, what a letdown.

Because its a different playstyle. If you are mostly into roaming i’d suggest sticking with thief, necro lacks disengages.
In smaller groups/ skirmishing scenarios power nec is fun, though you can get similar results with a thief.

Admired.7461:

IDK how strong Marked for Horror is, and they would have to do AT LEAST 18k damage for them to be worthwhile.

How do you get to 18k? cast time is 1,5 seconds so you lose out on 2 Deathly claws. Thats more like 6-8k.

And @ Taril: You need to divide through the time for lich auto attack Deeps. An attack that is casted in less then a second should have a higher damage per second then its actual damage per cast.

Ah okay got it, mixed things up with the 20% cdr

So i like playing with axe as a weapon, tested something in the mists and axe damage with and without traits felt kinda similar. So i used a steady weapon and it seems like everything states a different number. Tooltip says 20%, wiki says 15% and my numbers were close to 10% (soldier, 30spite, norunes i got 43->47 on AA and 328->360 on ghastly claws)
So what is the correct number and do steady weapons play a role in getting different results from the intended 20% increase?

Your target had stability, which nullifies every cc skill for its duration. Your options are either to wait for the buff icon to disappear or you try to strip the boon. The icon looks like a tower.
Stability also grants immunity to the knockdown component of bull rush. You can get it via 30 points in Soul reaping but need to use it proactive. It does not remove effects like stun or daze, it only grants immunity to them beeing applied.
Mesmer clones can be “negated” via reflect skills to some extend. But necro doesn’t have access to those. DS + Doom or standing on Mark of fear can help to some extend vs a thief trying to attempt a BS. Plague and blindspam can work too.

Why Valkyrie? Because it gives the same amount of healing power not because this is a suggested build. I just wanted to take a look at healing values and was kind of surprised about the healing output of Life Siphon and wanted to share it. It could potentially contribute to a huge amount of extra healing if its mechanic wouldn’t be that awful. Also it explains to some extent why Vamprici traits aren’t stronger than they are.
And thanks Bhawb for your insight.

Charr necro here too.
For jumping purposes i utilize attack or draw weapon command. If you are in “2 leg combat mode” jumping is not much different compared to a human.

And ignore the part about organized and asura. Beeing asura helps mostly in chaotic pvp encounters like hotjoin/frees/wvw where beeing Norn means you are big, you are a threat and people don’t call targets that often.