That is the only reason it has stability, its just so that you don’t cast your stunbreak and then get interrupted, putting the skill on full CD but not even casting the well.
I do agree we need more stability, or at least some way that being CC’d doesn’t hurt us nearly as much as others (but SA is not the place, that utility is already amazing).
Well of Power is not instant cast. The stability was added when Well of Power was taken from its launch form, and given the function of stun-breaking. Since it has a cast time, it was given 1s of stability so that you would get stunned while casting your stun breaker. This was done with a number of skills across all classes.
It was literally listed as such when they made the change.
Or just take away pulses and make em a channeling kind with damage overtime ^^
They aren’t going to start completing changing a set of skills that are just fine…
With all the ridiculous statistics I’ve posted before for how insane wells can get with siphoning, do you think Anet would just go and make it even worse?
To be fair, nobody has the ability to actually do anything based off of conditions or boons on them anyway when downed. Only ones that might have counterplay (sorta) are snares on a downed ele.
Really the only important thing would be poison/blind, imo. Blind because it matters a lot for your interrupt, poison to tell your team if you’re in TS. But blind is really the only big one imo.
It would be great to just be able to trap someone into the well for 2-3 sec, or maybe a real cripple (not conversion). Warrior need to be in close combat we can’t make him stay there even with spectral grasp. So duration on wells is not a problem it’s mostly about the effects.
I can trap someone in a full WoS pretty easily. Bone Fiend is really underrated for this.
Would be far too strong. All a condi build would have to do is put on poison before you went down, and the ability to carry over conditions would essentially guarantee your death 9/10 times.
Our wells would be amazing in PvE if PvE content was mind-numbingly easy in general. Being able to blind groups of mobs, and siphon a lot of HP (as well as more damage) would be really helpful. But, again, PvE is too easy right now. As long as PvE is easy the only thing that matters is kittenloads of damage and ways to make that damage even larger.
Wells having longer durations isn’t the answer. The issue isn’t if a Necro is the one standing on point, but if they have focused-rituals and can drop wells (which do significant damage or utility) on the point. All they need to do is, again, a slight reduction on some of the CDs, mainly power/darkness.
Minions are fine with condition builds already. The only real problem with the combination of builds is that scepter, dagger OH, and staff have the worst synergy with minions of our weapons.
Conditions will always be slightly less desirable in certain PvE fights than direct damage that will mainly instakill the mobs. Thats the point of debuffs, they take time to ramp up. If someone in a raid was asking for more DoTs, they aren’t asking for a big instant damage attack, they are asking for damage over time, which by its nature needs to ramp up.
Also, it really doesn’t take time for bleeds to be stacked to a decent enough size. This is why Condi Necros are/were so scary in PvP, we’d burst you with enough bleeds to be lethal in a very short period of time. It takes a little time to max them out, but you can get more than half of a full stack in a very quick rotation.
The problem with conditions in this game is I’d say three-fold. The first is that big bosses will get very easily capped out on conditions. This wouldn’t be as big of an issue, if it wasn’t for the second problem: condition stacking has nothing to do with the damage. A new bleed will push an old one off, even if that old one would deal 1 million damage, and the new one will deal 40. And the third problem is that PvE has been designed to be so easy that debuffs aren’t really useful. Why do I need to make the mobs weaker when an optimized group will completely wipe every group before I’ve even gotten through a full rotation of debuffs.
They can fix the first and second problems just by increasing the stacking limits on dungeon bosses. The third problem is simply an issue of design. The harder a fight is, the better conditions are. But right now very few boss fights are hard enough to even need conditions, when zerker warriors can literally repeatedly smash their face on their keyboard and not worry about anything.
Life force doesn’t need to be changed into a resource pool, our health should be turned into the pool, with Deathshroud actually allowing us to potentially float at lower HP due to sacrificing and then jump into DS to cover us if something bad happened.
This was one of the biggest things I really missed about GW1. I really miss the conditional abilities and the ability to use HP as an extra resource.
I don’t believe the Curse survey is over yet.
If they differentiated it from elementalist/engineer by making them all full transformations, as in fairly long CD without the ability to just hop in and out at will, I think it could be really cool.
OH. MY. GOD. I want to be able to double Unholy Feast. 200% retaliation uptime wouldn’t be OP at all.
I’ll go through this in detail, but I have to debate something you said:
I may be in the minority, but I really do not enjoy the way minions are handled in GW2, especially since it was so incredible in GW1.
Handling Minions in GW1 was kittening horrible. You had exactly 0 control over what they did, summoning/maintaining them required both corpses (so they were entirely barred from a lot of play), and generally a massive HP drain on your party (MMs often required near-dedicated healers, although this was fine). It was fun because you could have 10 of them out (12 with boosted Death Magic, infinite pre a patch) and because of the pretty intense microing and feeling like a god when you were snowballing. But it really had little to do with the minion-mechanics themselves, and more the mechanics that were used after minions were summoned.
Also, it sounds like you are misunderstanding a few core things about Necromancer minions in GW2. We are not Rangers, they aren’t pets. In fact they are basically worthless to us: expendable servants that we can and will readily replace when they expire. Hell we even blow them up because we need a little HP. Also, we do not raise zombies. Yes they look like mobs, but that is very likely because they are re-textured mobs: lore-wise though they are just golems of dead flesh.
Honestly, you are asking for them to completely not just change, but essentially do a 180 on everything that minions are right now. This would arguably be okay, because there are plenty of ways to do the “summoner” approach. But at this point in the game’s development, it is far too late to fundamentally change how an entire set of skills function.
At their core, minions are fine as they are right now. They could use some tuning, and as Sikari has proposed in the past they could probably due to have slight reductions in their (fairly high) single target DPS and be given cleave. But any changes that they do need (and they do need a few) and any additions that are made (like new minion types/expanded playstyles) are just expanding on/perfecting the current system. No need for an entirely new system when ours is just fine.
Your idea was also one thing that they have said they consider doing (both Dumbfire and Terror as Curse GMs), but there were a lot of options they put out there that they hadn’t decided on yet.
Ehm, just an idea, but if Dhuumfire would be moved to Curse GM trait, wouldnt be better to make it to the pre-nerf state with 4s duration on a 10s icd? Same with Terror of course.
They are allegedly going to be diong a heavy-ish rework of Dhuumfire. They said a while ago that they didn’t like how it was implemented (both its strength and being on-crit in a non-precision tree), and the nerfs were just to keep it from being broken until they could do that.
Grenth is only a human god. Someone better than me at lore can correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure only humans worship (at least widely) Grenth.
You have LF generation through the 3 skill, Staff 1 and deaths, and you should always have one spectral equipped as a condi build.
As for which one, depends on sPvP or WvW. I believe its fairly easy to get 100% condition duration (or close) with food and stuff in WvW, so Master of Terror isn’t as big as it is in sPvP.
You can’t do that with SW
It won’t stop them from moving, but it is significantly easier to deal with someone when they have 0 control of their character.
I am terrible at landing it, although I’ve managed it by cheating with stuff like chill. I do know people like Tenderley, Zombify, and whoever else is a top tier Necro these days can land them though. Its obviously not 100%, just something fun and stupidly strong.
Bhawb your on my server aren’t you (Dragonbrand)
We should group some time
No, I’m on Isle of Janthir (I might have guested on DB though). But we could group for anything not WvW.
I got a question. Is it worthwhile to keep bone minions alive or its better to blow them up?
They have significantly higher DPS blowing up (even untraited), but unless you have Death Nova I’d suggest keeping them alive until they are lowish in HP. Personally though, I don’t even use them in PvE, and I wouldn’t use them unless you have Death Nova.
Humans. You know that race of people who sometimes make mistakes.
I agree that the DPS isn’t bad, but I don’t really run minions for the DPS, although you could argue its a good reason to. I think they are much more useful for the tanking quality, and that the damage is a bonus (but thats just an opinion). For PvE that is. sPvP the sustained damage is totally a big factor.
Depends. You can use it just like the Guardian’s equivalent, to block off an area. This can be used offensively to keep someone from running away or defensively to stop people from chasing you. Also it can be used as a chain fear, by fearing someone then putting the wall behind them.
In defense areas, where people need to stay in a certain area (like sPvP points) just dropping the wall in the middle of the point is massively annoying because the other person needs to really pay attention to their placement now, and you also get the protection.
You can also lock someone into a corner with it, by fearing them into the corner then keeping them there.
And finally, although this is really advanced and I’m bad at it, you can actually fear someone through it twice. Fear them (reaper’s mark or some non-Doom fear), then place the wall in the way. Dark Path to them so you are right behind them as they run through the wall, as they run through the wall dodge in front of them then Doom them back through the wall.
Actually, that’s a good point, it really isn’t amazing except when using a scepter, and even then is a bit meh.
What if they buffed it to be similar to Axe Training, but scepter-version? So it also reduces the CDs of scepter skills, in addition to the auto attack buff (which honestly is the biggest thing of using a scepter).
Like Drarnor said, VP requires a massive amount of proccing to be worthwhile, so it is effectively barred from MMs due to the very nature of what it requires: a lot of setup to have high chances to proc, whereas an MM is going to spend that setup time instead setting up minions and combos with them.
I’d love to see BT/VP buffed, but they will always stay a subpar choice for MMs compared to MoE, or Transfusion, unless ANet does something really crazy.
You can still shroudstomp. Its just an issue of a really weird timing.
Flesh Golem has 33k HP and around 2800 armor when traited. Blood Fiend has the same HP (lower armor), the rest of the minions sit around 25k HP. That is a crapload of meatshielding, even if that is all you use them for. Essentially every 24 seconds you can summon 83k HP worth of shielding for your team, and that is only three minions.
That’s why they are good in PvE right now, its got little to do with their damage (full 6 minions deal only like 2k DPS).
Unless listed I have no issue with the trait:
II – Toxic Landing – Lets be honest, the falling traits are just not that great. This one is terrible. Can we please just get rid of it and get a real trait?
IV – Weakening Shroud – Bump the weakness on this up to 3s and it would be a much better trait overall.
IX – Terror – not a bad trait, but it is so good that it completely dominates this entire tier. I think it’d make a lot of sense to put this into the grandmaster tier
XI – Lingering Curse – with the way this trait currently works (it only affects scepter 1 base durations, nothing else), it isn’t worth a GM trait. It literally just increases the duration of a single chain of skills. Swap it with Terror.
XII – Withering Precision – just a bad trait as it is now. It needs to be upgraded into a much stronger defensive option, to counterpoint Terror.
(Minion) Siphoning isn’t really worth it in PvE, regardless of build.
This is my MM PvE build. If you’re using minions in PvE, they are really only useful for tanking damage while you go some kind of all-damage build or being a support build. This means at most you should have two minion traits, CDR and +HP (3 in a support, throw on Death Nova). The rest should fit either personal damage or support, whatever you are going for.
Imo, the only reason to use minions in a full-damage build is if you are going for the DS LB build. It allows you to stay in DS way longer, even solo. Dagger Necro builds don’t go minion at all, they just sometimes slot a minion or two for a little damage/tanking.
20/0/30/20, II+IX/0/III+X+XI/VI+VII/0
Axe/Focus Dagger/Warhorn with Force/Leeching Bloodlust/Leeching
Soldier Amulet/Jewel 6x Lyssa runes
Consume Conditions, Bone Minions, Bone Fiend, Flesh Wurm, Flesh Golem
MMs don’t take VP not because it requires precision (although that helps), but because its just plain worse than the other options. That’s it, it is literally just an issue of math, VP is worse than the other options in that line. Even if it were buffed to the point of being useful to a standard non-MM build, it would still be subpar on MM builds. They could literally take VP as it is right now, double its effectiveness, and it would STILL remain subpar to Mark of Evasion.
To show what I mean: Mark of Evasion applies 2 stacks of 8s Bleeding. Even with 0 condition damage, that will total around 80 DPS. VP deals around 40-50 damage per crit. This means you’d need to get 2 crits per second to exceed the damage of MoE, with MoE at its worst possible use. Not only that, but the regen on MoE will just flat out always out-scale VP’s healing, not only to yourself, but to up to 4 extra targets in the area (you know, minions?).
This will remain a fact as long as the MM “meta” stays as it does and Blood Magic triats remain balanced. VP is flat out bad in any full MM build, end of story.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Oh I’m sure someone takes it, the same person who takes Banshee’s Wail without a warhorn equipped.
But it stands: there is no good reason that an MM should have those traits. I keep having people say “well what if an MM takes Vampiric Precision!!1!”, and its just an annoying and ignorant statement; like asking what if an MM takes Vampiric Rituals. It shouldn’t ever happen because it is an incredibly subpar trait to take. Same with Bloodthirst.
No one ever takes that ever ever, period, ever. If they do the minions should turn around and slap them.
Vampiric Master is actually pretty low HP/s right now. Its 72 per minion hit, which in your general situation averages out to 96(ish) HP/s.
100% poison uptime is achieveable in a minion build solely through Death Nova’d bone minions. That’s it, just that one skill = 100% poison. Anything on top just helps cover cleanses, and there is plenty more.
Weakness uptime is about 75% with again the same skill. So just using Death Nova with bone minions can give you 75% weakness and 100% poison uptime.
In addition to that, Flesh Golem gives 100% cripple uptime through auto attacking. A full MM CC chain is 12-15s of hard CC, rotating between non-condition hard CC, immobilize, and fear, which is a really hard combination to deal with. After that full CC chain (which is up every 50s, smaller versions have half the CD but are harder to land), its easy to apply a lot of chill and cripple.
Those are done through the minion skills synergizing with the traiting. Scepter can be used in a minion build as well, it is a weapon not a build.
Condition builds do have decent attrition using the same basic mechanics, but cannot really trait as defensively as an MM can, so they can never reach the full level of an MMs strength (but deal a lot higher damage in return).
One thing to note, if Shade comes back into the game, in-DS stomp/res will never exist. It will always stay like it is now, if not get nerfed. Just saying.
Hybrid builds are fine, as long as you are good enough to stay alive through the content. You’re going to deal a lot of damage, but you don’t usually get much room to make mistakes.
That said, once you really understand the content its not too bad at all, and the dual damage types is really nice.
You are okay running condi, but it is not really the best build to run in PvE, imo. You have less DPS on structures than a single minion, and a fair bit of your damage in dungeons against bosses will be overridden by basically everything.
Good luck deciding whether Death Magic or Blood Magic is the worst :P
But yes, I think for the purposes of this thread, its probably best to just get opinions and then move on, and if people want to do similar to the Death Magic thread, then it’s probably best to open that up as a completely separate thread, so that its easier to manage.
Terror is a pretty large amount of spike damage. I’d say its pretty much necessary for any PvP damage-based condi build.
MMs have attrition through:
Decent sustain via siphoning
Good sustained DPS (relatively low burst)
Strong hard and soft CC
Great poison/weakness access, on low CDs
High base defenses (HP/toughness)
You restrict it from MMs by making it trait-based. MMs are pretty stuck into a few trait lines if they want the sustain that comes with the build, so by adding it in to basically any slot except for Spite 10, you restrict it from doubling up with MM builds.
Hammer 5 doesn’t need to only scale off Jagged Horrors, but can take additional effects from them. Honestly I’d prefer it to heavily depend on them though, but thats optional.
For example: Smashes the ground, knocking enemies down and consuming the essence of up to 3 (or some number that is reachable with just the hammer) Jagged Horrors. Gain a stack of (insert cool name here) for each Horror sacrificed. Stacks are then consumed through re-activating the skill.
Re-activation (1 for each horror killed): corrupt a boon, taking it for yourself and your allies, and gain LF (boons would not be stolen at their duration but applied with some base duration, like WoP).
Obviously the activation could do different things. But I think it would be good to give yourself a consumable stack buff (involves counterplay), and that the activation gives you some support benefit.
Actually, a large number of things added onto our class (can’t say others) have been due to suggestions.
Dhuumfire, like it or not, was added because at the time Burning was a huge thing keeping us from pure-condi viability in sPvP.
Terror was basically taken straight from Nemesis.
Torment was a Necro-forum idea, I don’t recall if Tainted Shackles was or was not.
The new Weakening Shroud change was based on feedback.
The changes to all siphon skills now scaling with power and healing power, again things taken from the community.
Reanimator and PotH being changed: community.
There might be more, but those are the ones I remember off the top. All taken from the Necromancer forums/community. So yes, community input is important.
That said, I feel like the Soul Reaping discussion has mostly run its course. People got to get their say in, and I think any further discussion would be stretching it.
We already see attrition on Necros; MM builds. Its really not that difficult to turn current non MM builds into attrition, if they added in traiting that would allow power and condi builds to mirror what makes MMs strong, but in their own non-minion way.
It was way too strong. Being able to not only remove everything someone has, but also turn that into conditions was insane. If you just waited for Lyssa, you’d apply burning, blind, weakness, 3x vulnerability, poison, 3x confusion, fear, cripple, and bleeding: basically giving you a free kill.
It is still strong, the only big issue is the way that boons are chosen.
+1 to what Rym said, zombies aren’t lore-accurate (we are technically capable of doing it, but that would put us on the same “level” as Zhaitan, which as you could imagine might cause some issues with our already low popularity).
However, gem-shop skins should be added, lorebekitten ed. I want to summon a rabbit then blow it up (Bone Minions), and a giant Tibbers-like bear that can charge.
http://www.kittenoftheweek.com/kitten-rabbitpouncing.jpg (gotta love the censoring)
If they just fixed their animation system this wouldn’t be necessary at all. Cast bars were better for more static games where casting was just raising your hands in the air like you just don’t care for the cast time.
But if they made the Oddjob class bigger in sPvP, fixed a lot of the visual clutter by toning down a lot of casting effects (especially the weak ones) and then gave skills animations/effects appropriate to the strength and type of effect, we wouldn’t need cast bars.
At this point in game design, asking for cast bars is like asking for us all to stand still while casting. Its an archaic mechanic from a period of game design that should not be revisted in this kind of game.