Guild Wars 2

RS is a hammer (code wise), so it procs on “swapping” to the “hammer” and “swapping” back to your normal set, using whatever sigils you have on the set you have equipped. DS on normal Necro is some wonderland of spaghetti code that I believe is treated like a mix of downed state/transform/spaghetti, so it doesn’t.

Foverine.5342:

I think the idea behind it is that you’re supposed to transfer the additional conditions towards your enemies. Could the trait be better? Yes, of course. but just saying.

You are correct about the idea, and that idea is stupid.

Step 1) Remove all self-harm from corruptions
Step 2) Make Blood is Power worth taking ever
Step 3) Make Master of Corruption totally different
Step 4) Recycle self-harm as an elite spec

There are a few traits we can proc, but nothing at all meaningful enough to give it a 10s ICD. Necromancers just don’t dodge much, what with no vigor, so being able to immediately double up on those effects while still retaining the exact same effective “dodges per second” wouldn’t do anything. None of those effects are really bursty, a tiny bit of LF, a little bleed, some damage, even maxed out it doesn’t compare to other dodge traits.

Zetsumei.4975:

Thing is, im thinking couldnt you say its still balanced because one meteor from meteor shower does about the same damage as a mark?

I’d argue clarity is important regardless of power, though its hardly something that has been universally applied. But Putrid Mark/Reaper’s Mark definitely have far more impact in a fight than a Meteor Storm that hasn’t been channeled at all (plus the meteors have travel time, though I’m not sure how reasonable it is to see and dodge individual meteors).

Of those, only Flame Burst actually does everything at the beginning. Lava Font, Burning Retreat, and Meteor Shower all function as pulsing effects like wells; yes you might get hit by the first tick but you can move out. You can’t move out of marks once they hit.

Does this still proc out of combat? I thought we complained enough to get that fixed.

Kahrgan.7401:

Talk about not picking your battles.

I’m more concerned about axe being our WORST weapon. No one uses it, and for good reason.

Stop complaining about the animation, at least until they fix the weapon itself.

I’ve been using it for 2.5 years relatively well. Its pretty decent now, needs work yes but not that much.

I mean at the latest we learn on the 23rd anyway.

No need, weakness is a pretty big addition to a skill that is already basically a second heal.

Dhampyr.2813:

gotta hand it to the necro community calling for more nerfs on our class when nothing really changed. Its a QoL change for the better. We already have the functionality to place marks on out targets so nothing actually changed. If anything it will make it harder to zone someone by placing the mark in front of them. or even placing the mark so it will hit the most targets. I dont see how this makes us suddenly overpowering that a nerf is needed so the weak attacks of the staff

1) No other weapon in the game has 4 abilities on the same set that have no travel time, no activation time, no tell of where they’ll land, that can also be made unblockable, are entirely frontloaded, and can ignore a lot of LoS.

2) If reasonable counterplay makes staff too weak then buff staff. That’s part of the entire point, staff is kept so weak because it has such low levels of counterplay. That doesn’t mean that staff, and many abilities like marks, shouldn’t have better counterplay and be buffed appropriately.

This targeting change isn’t the only reason I bring this up, it has been an issue since launch that has been brought up. Staff has always had clarity issues, it took 1.5-2 years for it to even be reasonable to be able to tell between which marks were being cast. This isn’t good for a game that relies on tells.

If it channeled faster it’d be less of a DPS loss.

AI is fine now

Blue is fine, what with chill, and this is perfectly dark, it has an omen of death sitting on it.

No, but this isn’t a remotely new argument either, it just brings it up again.

Almost every other GTAoE skill in the game either has pre-casting effects (Dragon’s Tooth), pulsing effects, or a mix of both. There are very few things in the game which have no travel time, no designating animations, and no after-cast effects, where the ability just immediately hits an area with no way to know where that will be. I’d also argue any that do should have a similar system.

So the new camera and targeting system is really cool. However, I noticed a really big problem when he was showing it off on the Necro, and that is a massive lack of counterplay. This has been an issue for a long time, but with the removal of yet another small venue of counterplay (having to aim them), marks are now literally just press a button and they hit almost guaranteed. There is no travel time, just a 3/4s casting animation that gives you no tell of whether you’ll be hit by the mark or not. So in a teamfight of 5 people, all 5 enemies are under perceived threat of being hit by every mark cast, regardless of where you aim. This isn’t just an issue for enemies, but it heavily gates the power staff can be allowed to have because 4/5 of its abilities are extremely reliable, so they can’t do nearly as much as other skills.

Everyone knows I’d like to see staff changed away from marks, but at the very least I think marks need to show up as a red circle where they are aimed at the start of your cast, to give clarity to enemies on where they land. This doesn’t add any time delays, it just allows enemies to know they’ll be hit and act appropriately. Thoughts?

Not denying that it is bad, but it is a PvE only trait regardless. If it needs to be replaced that’s a side issue.

Tim.6450:

And what would be the PvE trait?

Parasitic Contagion is a PvE only trait, realistically (whether or not its good is up for debate), and Weakening Shroud is usable.

Yeah, I do think Terror swapped with LC would be good. It allows for PvP to have a “burst” option at the GM tier, while PvE still gets their PvE traits at each tier.

Agreed. I think part of the problem is I dislike weapon traits at the GM level, period. A GM trait should be either a huge improvement (stat wise), or a completely mechanic-changing trait, but tying this to a weapon means this is a huge improvement which is turned off a large amount of the time.

I think it makes much more sense for weapons to be adept/master. So drop this to master and replace it with an appropriate trait, and make some appropriate changes to both.

I’ll be curious to see it on Necro, but overall it looks pretty cool. I’ll probably pick it up because its better than whatever I have now.

Edit: just showed it on Necro, I’m sold.

All it needs is to have its channel speed increased to 2-2.5s

Rising Dusk.2408:

Everything power/condition related is balanced around these damage modifying traits not functioning for condition damage. Changing that would create a major upheaval that just doesn’t do any good for the game, and so I don’t support it.

This is why I think this is unrealistic. At the beginning it might have been a good idea, but at this point too much balance has been put in with this trait functioning as is.

Sigmoid.7082:

It was originally power and condi duration wasn’kitten

Yep. Specifically Spite should function as a power and debuffing conditions line, which it does quite well actually with a lot of direct/indirect debuffing in both every major tier and a minor.

Spite is a condition traitline, not a condition damage traitline, those are very different. That said, it has always been weird that % modifiers don’t work on conditions, but I’m not sure its something we should change at this point.

Loki.9412:

Errrm, sorry to go slightly off topic but i thought Robert Gee was the necromancer dev?? He usually starts these threads, why the change?

Karl seems to have gone through every subforum and either started or officially denoted one feedback thread if another dev hadn’t already done it so that we didn’t have too many threads.

Zania.8461:

Fun fact – while wielding dagger/offhand killing things with DS4 actually counts for weapon master achievement for the said offhand. Since its relatively low cooldown and decent AE damage, it’s great for achievement farming for focus/wh.

That’s probably the only good thing I found about not having DS weapon calculations using 2 hander base.

Yeah but with Reaper’s Shroud you can farm Hammer achievements without even having a hammer.

TheLastNobody.8319:

I say chill for for ranged, hydro for melee

This. Chill is better if you are worried about issues of getting in range, Hydro is better if you are confident you can get/stay in melee often enough.

He didn’t suggest you trait signets, no one is suggesting you trait signets just for one signet.

Linnael.1069:

Blast on spinal shivers apparently doesn’t fit the theme, but what if you just made spinal shivers aoe? Change the animation to something like churning earth, it can keep the current cast time, but goes up to a 15 target cap 900 radius blast. Now that would be a skill 5 worth having.

Spinal Shivers is much better designed as a single target honestly. It is meant to be used similar to Corrupt Boon, when the target has 3+ boons (hence the pretty mediocre effect without boons), and that really wants more single target so that you can see the person being effected. Having it be 5 target would just make it another skill you used on CD without much care, since someone will probably have enough boons to be worthwhile.

Would prefer they make it strong single target above anything else.

Not having high crit isn’t “niche”, nor is MM niche in any sense. And as an example, Blood vs Leeching requires you to be able to proc Blood on CD for it to be as effective as Leeching on CD (which you can do very easily, since RS gives you a way to overcome weapon CDs to proc onswap). The difference isn’t strength, but method of proccing.

And still, even if I screw up my on-swap rotation, I still have weapon swap. Go into shroud (proc), leave after 5s (no proc), wait 5s then swap weapons. I have lost nothing compared to just using normal swaps, in fact I’ve gained flexibility in how I decide to swap, since now I’m capable of proccing sigils and staying on the same weapon set after RS.

flow.6043:

Isn’t your MM build using leeching and renewal, which wouldn’t heal through Shroud anyway?

That’s one of the builds yeah, but not the only one I bring swap sigils on that doesn’t want crit sigils, and yes it wouldn’t heal. But I don’t really care if it doesn’t heal me, Leeching is taken for damage and renewal is to heal the minions. I aim to proc them basically on CD, so RS can be used to overcome an awkward weapon situation, or I go into RS and time myself so I stay in for around 9-10 seconds and then can proc my swap on exit too, which would affect me.

Right, let me just pick up that awesome crit sigil in my build that has absolutely no extra crit chance…

Because we don’t have good enough fields, or so they asserted.

There really isn’t any gameplay comparison between Astral Form and Shroud, except the fact that they are transforms gated behind a resource you have to build, like Berserker is. Otherwise, Astral Form is very different than Shroud. Don’t see any reason to feel shafted that Rangers also got something cool for once.

Proccing weapon swaps on RS was the best thing ever. It makes things flow far better, otherwise using Shroud completely interferes with your ICDs in the opposite way, you don’t have the chance to proc them nearly enough.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

risk/reward scenario

High risk low reward is awful design. At best, in very rare and ideal situations you can time your corruption skill to stack on a condition you already had so that your transfer isn’t wasted at all. But in the majority of situations you are wasting a condition removal just to be able to use a skill. That isn’t a benefit, you are weakening your build to use an at best balanced ability.

Caine.8204:

You can run warhorn, but doing PvP without staff? LOL. Now i KNOW you don’t pvp.

Staff is basically, THE required item, for ANY power/condi build. It dishes out massive power damage in addition to poison/chill… fear for interrupts. Condi cleanse.

If you want to try to make it some kind of kitten measuring contest feel free, but don’t make idiotic statements like staff deals massive power damage.

If you love Suffer, feel free to use it.

The legendary is Norn themed, specifically Raven themed, just like one of their elite transforms.

Aktium.9506:

I want a legendary dagger that isn’t a filthy charr blowtorch.

Amen.

Ravezaar.4951:

@Bhawb kitten the amount of WvW and sPvP required to the pve is like a fart in space…

We have no idea about that yet. We don’t know how many of the new things will be required of each, or how long they take to earn. We also don’t know how much can be acquired in each game mode without stepping into the others.

Been asked for a ton, would be a huge QoL change.

A few seconds is just dodges, or any other very short term defense. Do they have to change how they allocate their defenses? Yes, they would save dodges more for the Defenseless, and use blocks to absorb other hits.

But if Defenseless was going to be so OP we’d see everyone with moa, which does worse for 10 seconds.

mazut.4296:

They must implement color change on effects as well as weapon skins. There are many games that allow that. We dont even need all the dyes to work, put 64 and we will be happy.

ANet has already explained why they don’t do this.

Caine.8204:

Why would you need condi-cleanse on a necro?

Wat.jpg

Caine.8204:

Suffer can also remove conditions, and it applies Chill which is super important for maintaining 100% uptime on chill (which deals damage, already trumping plague signet). I hardly worry about getting stunned, because I have reaper stability and that when i deal most damage (and i know how to dodge a stun, thank you).

Because every build uses Deathly Chill? That is a niche use right away, and Condi builds would still prefer Plague Signet because our condi is all about burst.

Caine.8204:

Soldier runes amazing on reaper? each skill has a 25s or MORE cooldown. thats 1 condition removed every 25s baseline, or if you have all 3, its like 3 conditions removed every 25s. big freaking deal. you can remove them ALL from you with Suffer, up to 5. You can land it better than Plague Signet without drawing allies’ conditions.

A shout build would run 5 shouts plus traiting, and be able to remove 2.5 conditions every 10 seconds from every ally including themselves. You think condi is fun? Try killing my team when I passively double their condi cleansing. Or did you forget when Shout Warrior invalidated condi builds for months? And that comes at no cost to my build, I can throw a single rune set onto my build and go from no condi cleanse to so much that I get top stats for both conditions removed and conditions removed from allies.

Caine.8204:

Soldier runes are still worthless in SPvP. Your teammates will remove their own conditions, and the trade off for going down the Spite tree isn’t worth it imo.

What? Shout just needs one trait in Reaper, that’s all the traiting it relies on. Spite/SR/Reaper can do the shout setup just fine. And again, Soldier runes invalidated an entire damage type for months on their own, saying they are worthless is complete BS.

Caine.8204:

Staff 4, Dagger 4, and Consume Conditions and Suffer will be more than enough to remove all your conditions, and the Suffer will increase your damage (chill deals damage) and is an AoE slow. Plague Signet does nothing if you have no conditions, and has to be traited to be even somewhat worth it. If you trait it, you’re going to be running other signets, not shouts. If you just take the trait for Plague Signet you’re not a good necro…

You’re listing niche situations to justify a skill’s use widespread. Epidemic is an amazing skill if we do that, yet still it remains absent from nearly every non PvE hotbar. Also, you assume I want to run staff or dagger offhand. A Soldier rune-d Necro doesn’t need either of those, I can drop offhand dagger for warhorn, I can drop staff for a real weapon.

Caine.8204:

That, and using the healing shout in PVP is going to completely kitten your build. Consume Conditions is LEAGUES ahead of all the other healing skills currently. Being able to remove all the conditions from yourself and basically go from 20% to full health when your being bursted? yes please.

Untraited YSIM is better than Consume Conditions healing per second up until you remove 3 conditions. That is before LF.

Traited YSIM in a Soldier build gives up to 618 effective HP per second, not including the fact that LF takes half damage. That is 50% more than even a full wipe with consume conditions.

“Believe” isn’t accurate, it is a fact. PvE we’re in the same spot, but with better DPS. WvW we’re in a better spot, it is possible we’ll have a second build for zerging (one backline one frontline), and then roaming will have all the new builds that Reaper brings, which is a ton. PvP at anything short of top tier it is the same, tons of new builds all around, plenty of them strong enough to do well with. At the highest tier of PvP we’ll still be fairly mediocre but playable, Reaper won’t change much I don’t think, but if teamfights become meta a teamfight shout reaper will be meta as well.

Drekor.5217:

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Yeah, Necros by far have the most unblockable attacks.

Revenants have more actually…. they get them passively through traits too.

Revenants have a grand total of 4 (according to the wiki), plus a comparable amount of unblockable to NCSY via a trait. Which is less unblockable than we get, by a huge margin.

Zalaz.3105:

Whatever it is, I’d like to see it be something we have little to none of right now, such as burn or aegis.

You’re about as likely to see us get stealth as either of those suggestions. Which is to say it won’t happen.

To be fair, everyone has to do every game mode to get this. WvW and PvP are needed for the gift. And they removed the need to explore the entire core map, so thank god that soul crushingly boring task is gone.

Only problem is I absolutely hate staff as a weapon, but the Fashion Wars 2 speaks to me.

Sounds like you’re playing in PvE, so just a fair warning MM is really subpar for any kind of organized content. Not to say you can’t play it if you like it, just want you to understand that going in.

This is a sample build, you can do whatever you want in Spite adept, and you can use either staff or axe/whatever as your other weapon set, or just another dagger to proc swap. Basically just use the healing from blood magic/weapon swap to keep minions alive.