Access to invulns, stability, and combo finishers are definitely needed, and needed via skills. I should be able to give something up and in return get useable defense (like block/invuln), I should be able to get a few combo finishers that aren’t minions.
Its just a lack of “completeness” that a lot of people complain about. Certain aspects definitely feel half-complete, and our defense is a major one.
The axe, Scepter 3, and maybe focus 4 changes are the only ones that aren’t blatantly OP.
How do you feel about the new healing skills? Are you happy with the implementation, and feel they are balanced? If not, can you make public any plans to change them that you have?
What are your current plans towards adding new content via weapons/skills? Will it be any time soon?
And what’s the plan on Necromancer’s traits? The majority of the community still feels that Blood and Death magic trees are essentially useless to non-MMs, Dhuumfire is still very badly balanced, and Curses has a number of issues. Soul Reaping really is the only tree that feels satisfying. And I’m sure this isn’t an issue with just Necros. When do you expect the next big trait go-through?
That’s the one I was forgetting, I knew there was a 4th.
The three most basic and easily used ones are:
20/0/30/20/0
20/0/20/30/0
X/X/30/30/X (10 can move around on what you like)
Mostly with Clerics gear or Soldiers, most runes are Vamp/Melandru/Lyssa, sigils Hydromancy/Leeching/Bloodlust/Endurance/Force/random condition duration ones
In general, you’ll run CC/Bone Minions/Bone Fiend/Flesh Wurm/Flesh Golem and any combination of weapons that work for you, except Scepter.
There is obviously a lot more variation you can do, but that is the most basic set of cookie cutters.
It is the same in GW2. By the time the customers find a new game and walks, it is too late. Everyone know it is much easier to keep existing customers than marketing to find new ones.
Except GW2 already makes plenty of money, and there is no “real” competition out there for them in the forseable future. Which has been a problem for the last decade: there’s WoW, and then there are games that pick at the scraps that WoW left in its wake.
D&D failed (god did it fail), FF isn’t that great, Wildstar might as well just be the new SciFi WoW expansion, WoW is consistently losing players, and there isn’t much to look forward to beyond that. Everything on the market is either WoW, is based on WoW, sucks, or is GW2 (which some would argue could fall under the sucks category). There isn’t much for people to leave for, unless they swap game genres completely (and many have). That’s one of ANet’s saving graces right now, by the time any decent competition comes out, they’ll have had 2 years to put out a lot of content, and hopefully get their act together.
Just have fun playing the game. If you don’t have fun, stop playing. There is plenty more that you can spend your free time doing, and there is literally no loss to not playing GW2 while it isn’t fun. If, in the future, ANet has made the game enjoyable for you again, you come back. That’s the beauty of f2p.
Actually ANet has owned up to their mistakes quite a few times.
But posting as a dev is absolutely dangerous. Not because of people complaining back at them (and realize that devs get far more hate back, and they are still people), but because everything said is taken as a promise; a promise to do what they said, how the person hearing it wants it to be done, and in the very next patch.
If they came on and said
“Sorry guys, we really messed up on implementing SoV, and we realize that the skill just isn’t up to the standards we should have as a dev team. We’re going to look at ways to bring this skill up to par, and we’ll go from there.”
What 95% of the forums would hear is:
“We kittened up, we suck. We are going to completely fix SoV by the very next patch and make it every bit as awesome as you want it to be. This includes implementing every single little feature that you want on it, how you want it, and with the numbers you want.”
Not only that, but they would then have to say that to every, single subforum that feels their skill isn’t up to par (aka, every subforum), otherwise there will be 7 forums in complete uproar, and 1 forum in only a mild uproar. Oh, and god forbid that they aren’t able to fix the skill immediately, and exactly how you want, because the fact that they posted now means that everything that does or does not happen is now their fault and WILL be used against them.
No, posting will not help them at all. It will only make things worse, if not right now, then in the not distant future. There is a reason developers of large games don’t post regularly except in very controlled environments, and its because it can and will very quickly make things many, many times worse than if they had just shut up.
No thanks. More damage, less sustain, and making us even more snowball-y is not what we need.
Drarnor is correct. Those abilities go completely through stealth.
And the comparison isn’t if people could knock you out of wells, but if someone could knock you out of DS. Even then, stealth is more important for most thief builds than DS is for most Necro builds. If you could knock a backstab thief out of stealth, not only will you easily be able to kill them in the few seconds left (I guarantee every MM build I run would have a 100% murder rate against any thief with a reveal mechanic), but you completely void their main source of damage.
This change is just like what has happened with Diamond Skin, only it wouldn’t take us 30 skill points in a subpar tree with a mechanic that is either OP or useless.
Well, they could post “We screwed up a couple things on this patch and definitely dropped the ball on the new healing skill for necromancers. After the holidays, we will be looking hard at how to fix these problems.”
And what would that actually do? Do you honestly think it would change anything? People will still complain, people will still complain that they “don’t get it”, people will still complain about the patch, people will still complain about them “not posting anything meaningful”. In fact, I’d almost guarantee that would increase the amount of complaints and negativity.
Saw them post on mesmer forum a week ago so no.1 isn’t true. I haven’t even looked on the other boards though.
They’ve posted here before. Its not a hard rule, but in general they do not post on profession forums with any kind of regularity.
Vampiric Master has not been skipped in any MM build I’ve ever seen. They either don’t go 20 into BM and can’t get it, or have 20+ in BM and have it.
You are absolutely certain that if VM were to be left alone, and that VP and Vampiric were buffed up to a level that would make them useful to non-minion builds, that Minion Master builds wouldn’t trade in Transfusion, MoE, Fetid consumption, or even Bloodthirst for VP?
I mean, Vampiric is picked up by MM Necros regardless, so if it got the buff it deserved, MM’s would get a buff either way, very possibly pushing their self healing into crazy land.
And like I said, you can just drop Vampiric Master’s HP/s down by the same amount Vampiric’s was buffed.
And yes, I’m sure. Fetid Consumption isn’t even a guess; if they got rid of it for a little more siphoning they should uninstall now. Bloodthirst is rarely taken, and is just a straight math equation: is Vampiric Precisions healing > 20% of Vampiric/Vampiric Master. In the majority of MM builds (at least the ones where balance matters, AKA PvP) no, not at all. In fact Bloodthirst is strictly worse in most builds than Mark of Evasion.
Mark of Evasion and Transfusion (especially transfusion) are just too good to give up. Why would I take a bit more HP/s from crits, when I don’t even want to waste stats on crit chance, and can take a skill that will heal my minions or allies for 5k? Mark of Evasion does the same thing, but spread out via regen, and with a cover condition/damage. Again requiring no crit chance, which again is a very rare stat on MMs.
So yes, from my very extensive experience as an MM, I highly doubt any sane MM would ever slot Vampiric Precision, Bloodthirst, or (god forbid) Vampiric Rituals.
No, but nerfing Vampiric Master changes nothing, nor does buffing the other 4 siphon-related traits unbalance MMs.
I’m probably going to face the Wrath of the Forum for saying this, but I feel Vampiric Master limits build diversity, and makes siphoning harder to scale. Then again, I feel our defensive trait lines need some work in general.
In general I don’t. Vampiric Master is what makes MM siphoning work. Without it, MMs in PvP would be vastly less viable. And 99% of MMs don’t take any other non-mandatory (aka Vampiric) siphoning.
So if they buff Vampiric/BT/Vampiric Precision/Vampiric Rituals, they’d only buff a single trait that MMs take: Vampiric. If this unbalances MMs, simply shave the additional HP/s off Vampiric Master to compensate (so if Vampiric gets an overall buff of 50 HP/s, take the same off Vampiric Master’s total with 4-5 minions up).
im wonder what’s keeping them from making any statements ? since the patch
Few reasons.
1) I can almost guarantee its a company policy to not post in the Profession forums
2) Nothing they could post would accomplish anything positive
I think a minion would be the ideal “anti-stealth” mechanic for a necro. Having a single minion that would continue to attack through stealth would be nice. It wouldn’t remove or deny stealth, so all traits and abilities would still be fully functional and the stealthed person still couldn’t be targetted, but it would let you keep track of position.
Unless they have fixed it, FLesh Wurm already does this. At the very least, I know for sure that he used to ignore stealth. It was actually really funny, because he hits most thieves hard as a truck (over 1k per hit). It was pretty common when I would duel that if I caught a thief with Axe 2 while they went into stealth, then DS 4, and Flesh Wurm all combined would very often down him, and a few seconds later I’d find a downed thief unstealthed.
As for the main point of the thread though, I actually think this is really dangerous. We already have a number of abilities that effectively ignore stealth (our channeled abilities, one minion, all our AoE), being able to fully pull a thief out of stealth would feel cheap. Just like being able to pull a Necro out of DS (not by doing the damage, just pulling us out and putting it on CD).
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
I don’t think any Mesmer (or anyone else) would be against getting rid of this skill and replacing it with a useful elite.
…. no one running zerk?
I use a combo of zerk/soldier for PvE MM. No point in going full soldier (l2dodge) in general, but I felt that full zerk also left me a bit too squishy.
So atm I run soldier on my armor, zerk everything else, and it works wonders. 20/0/20/0/30 build, nearly 100% crit chance while in DS, something like 80% crit damage (my build isn’t finished yet, nor is anything ascended). I’ve solo’d certain boss fights after my teammates died; I healed everyone back up while my minions distracted and tanked the boss. Also did a 4 man fractal run with that build (pretty easily) when one guy left randomly.
Full MM builds in PvE aren’t really worth it, imo. Yes its fun, but it is overloading on unnecessary defenses in general.
Sarcasm aside the minion names blocking out the sun thing in tpvp right now IS getting old fast. I haven’t seen like anything but MM’s all day lol.
Options menu OP?
Just look at MM Necros. That is what Necros were advertised to be, the entire thing feels just like what we were promised.
High HP? Got that
Craploads of poison? Check
Both direct and condition damage? Sure
Interrupts? Hell ya
Movement disabling abilities? Just look at Flesh Golem
Ways to win attrition? Definitely
Yet somehow they took everything that went “right” with minions (despite plenty of other issues) and didn’t translate any of it around. I very rarely “feel” like a Necromancer in any other build, not because I lack minions, but because the entire playstyle feels wrong.
A major part of the issues is that they have us relying so heavily on conditions. This either means that the important conditions to keep on need to be low-duration, often-applied (to keep them up while still allowing the big damage condis to be removed), or they need to separate removal. If X class/build is having trouble because of bleed stacks, why the hell do you just say “well lets give them some more generic cleansing” instead of giving them a cleanse that specifically targets the issue. This way classes like Necromancers can still apply their control (which can still be removed by your generic removals), but classes can also manage to avoid certain problematic conditions through more specific but weaker cleansing.
I still don’t really get ‘how’ this was sooo OP.
Other class’s can maintain 100% weakness up time, from weapons. Thief even on auto-attack.
And? Its not like it is all that difficult to maintain high uptime on our own either, if you want to look at actual builds.
Look at the Thief trait that causes weakness, since its the only other reliable weakness on-trait (that I know of) that isn’t our GM trait (which, btw, is strictly WORSE than the 10 point for uptime, even now). It is base of 27% uptime. Ours is a base of 20% uptime, with a bleed thrown in as well. Very comparable uptimes, especially considering theirs is slightly more expensive and ours can be significantly buffed.
But this trait was too good in sPvP, which is where balance happens. Every high tier Necro I’ve talked to since the patch agreed that it needed a nerf (and we all agree we’d have preferred they drop the ICD to 9s and upped the base weakness to 3).
This trait was far too strong and needed a nerf. The only problem is they balanced it assuming NtD.
Bump weakness up to 3s, make ICD 9s (to bar NtD being an issue) boom good trait again.
Torment is just harsh physical or mental pain, something that most classes are arguably capable of inflicting. Thief, Mesmer, and Warrior, the others that get the condition, are very capable of inflicting one or the other, no more or less so than a Necromancer: Thieves through poisoning them, Mesmers through illusions, Warriors through sticking a sword through them.
For me, the entire thought of the Necromancer is built around conditions. To see them forcing necros towards power builds is just depressing. I think a lot of this is because the necros were as vocal as any class about the bleed cap. They are just going to make it so conditions are irrelevant.
Conditions =/= condition damage. Don’t need to spec condition damage to be a condition class. Power builds arguably rely on conditions just as much as our “condi” builds.
I feel like its a bandaid, and kind of a bland one. I don’t think there are any core base issues with the Necromancer. The problem is we have 0 defensive traiting, and (besides Spectral Armor) few great defensive CDs on either weapons or utility skills.
Fix those issues and Necromancer is in a much better place, and they’ve essentially already said they are looking at the defensive traiting issue when we get new DM minor traits.
I mean if it was ever talked about with the devs about overhauling the condition system to splitting damaging and controling conditions?
No, very unlikely they’d do that. I’m just asking that they incorporate more specific cleansing, which wouldn’t require a split at all.
What saddens me the most is that life stealing was always underpowered in Guild Wars 1, and never got fixed. So many years of experience with that unbalance and then they do the same thing for Guilds Wars 2. Boggles my mind.
I think we can confidently say that it will probably never be fixed. Give up on life stealing fellow necromancers.
Same issue in GW1. Life stealing remained underpowered for Necromancers because Rangers could abuse it (quite well, I might add, until you ran into a Mesmer) because of their mechanic. I ran a Touch Ranger a lot, and it was unholy what you could do by pressing 12121212312121212123. Literally just press 1 and 2 until out of energy, use w/e the skill was called to sac some HP for more energy, repeat pressing 1 and 2. If you really got in trouble, use a heal. Press 7/8 for stances to run between points.
It took 0 skill to play the build well (perfect for me), and was completely broken unless they had interrupts. But, again, they needed to balance to that case, because if they had buffed it for Necros my Touch Ranger would have run around soloing entire groups.
@Bhawb
Has this ever been mentioned or talked about? Like if they were prepared to change the condition system for this.
Change in what way? What I talked about was all stuff that is loosely in the game, just something that needs more focus imo. A few thief traits and a heal I think all have specific condition-removals, and also that one all-professions PvE heal.
You’re talking about a total game rehaul with every class then, there’s a lot of traits that work on specific skills/weapon skills.
Not minor traits, which is the problem. Major traits are fine to work on specific things, because if you don’t have that specific thing… just pick something else.
Mesmer and Guardian are the only classes that have specific minors like this. Mesmers get it on Phantasms (which are in every build anyway). Guardians get it on symbols, which aren’t forced into their builds (if you use sword/X scepter/X, only), but are still much more standard than minions.
So no, no need for a full redesign. Its a pretty unique problem to Necromancers, probably left over from when they planned on minions being a lot more core (and back when the traits were… less bad, PotH used to be %damage, not just toughness).
Edit: also he responded. Two separate issues, both unique to Necros.
hurr we’re gonna give the rogue class of guild wars 2 more access to torment than the freaking necromancer.
No one said Torment was Necro only, ever. It was specifically going to first appear on us, not only on us.
Outlier results should NOT form part of the base skills balance…
That’s how game balance works. You cannot buff something that is completely broken situationally. You leave it under-tuned until you have the ability to remove that outlier situation from being a problem, and then properly buff it so it is appropriately balanced.
That is very standard game design protocol. The only debate is whether the “outlier” for these skills is so situational that in practice it will not happen with enough regularity to matter. But honestly, Vampiric and Vampiric Precision as they remain now are unbalanceable for any spec but the one that procs them the best. Even if they buffed them enough to be decent for dagger necros, they’d still remain utter crap for any setup that didn’t match that proc rate.
Because changing one stacking damage condition to another changes nothing. You just change the name of the problem from “too many bleeds” to “too much torment”.
In fact, the more variety in conditions we can use to damage our opponents, the better. Unless they swapped all our bleeding to torment, then we’d have our damage split over 2 conditions, meaning it’d take you more cleansing to get rid of the same damage as before.
The real problem is that they have developed a game that doesn’t discriminate between conditions. Necromancers need to be able to keep targets perma-conditioned, and those targets need to not be. But in the process they’ve created a situation where Necromancers, unlike everyone else, can have a main defensive mechanic countered by another standard defensive mechanic.
They’d get a lot better design if they started introducing more cleanses that were specific, like the thief has. That way people can choose to slot a cleanse that helps mitigate only damaging conditions, or a cleanse that only takes away movement impairing conditions, etc. That way Necromancers can still be able to keep defensive conditions on their targets, but their targets don’t end up drowning in 20 stacks of bleeds wrapped up in 10 cover conditions.
Don’t get your hopes up though.
MM Necromancers will only ever want access to two siphon traits: Vampiric and Vampiric Master. Anything more will be at great cost to their entire build (not getting Rituals, Vampiric Precision is vastly subpar to at least 2 10 point options).
Wouldn’t do much of anything if they actually made non-MM siphons good, as literally only one trait would be affected (vampiric).
I’ve done it plenty of times. All of that assumes they are paying attention, which I have found to very often not be the case, especially when you’re talking about big ZvZs in closed areas. People just do not pay that close of attention, they press WASD in random sequences while rolling their faces over their keyboard until either they die or the enemy dies.
I’m sure it is sometimes different in the very high tier (although I have played at that level long ago, and it wasn’t any different, there were just more idiots to fill the BGs than at low tiers, and a few organized guilds to do 95% of the real work), but in general I find your run-of-the-mill WvW player in a zerg to behave as intelligently as a normal PvE mob.
Or I could keep whining about it. I’m a Necromancer, whining seems the obvious choice.
Situations close to what I outlined are not hard or rare to setup in PvE (although they are meaningless in PvE), or WvW.
I swear to god I hate how they designed these forums. Second post in a row that got thrown out for a stupid error
/rant
Only traited siphoning that the Necro themselves does would count, simply because allowing others would end up with them balancing around those. So if food/sigils/runes were allowed, then it’d end up being the only viable way to make the trait work, and all others would end up very meh (just like our siphons suffer from now).
I like your second idea though, to include DS. Adds more active play on both sides of the fight.
Well, I typed a response then was timed out (because that makes sense, thanks) so it went poof.
Anyway, developers balance towards max-potential, not lower. That much damage is just too much for the investment, and general game development protocol says that you don’t buff something that is already ridiculous in niche situations (LoL devs have state similar things when they changed certain mechanics).
Essentially, the traits are currently balanced assuming something close to that situation happens. That is why they need ICDs, so they get rid of those insane situations and lower the stupidly high max-potential cases, and at the same time overall buff the traits so that the lower cases are brought up to par.
So theoretically an S/D build would be able to siphon similar (though slightly lesser) amounts to a D/WH using Vampiric/Vampiric Precision.
If that doesn’t explain it better, I blame the bad forum design.
So 6 days and they are still pretending this didn’t happen? No response no nothing?
And this is a surprise… why?
Give me a fully armed and operational battlestation to compensate for the nerfs and we’ll call it even?
Well of Blood
Well of Suffering
Well of Corruption
Another well
Locust Swarm
Dagger 2
With the following assumptions (to show perfectly ideal):
Wells/Locust Swarm hit 5 targets per second for full durations
Dagger 2’s full channel hits
All hits are crits
30 Blood Magic gives you Bloodthirst, Vampiric, Vampiric Precision, Vampiric Rituals. All calculations done off base damages with the BT boost (meaning its actually higher when you have real stuff equipped). I did not test to see if those listed values are accurate, it is entirely possible one or all of them is bugged.
Well of Blood – 55 Procs of Vampiric, 55 Procs of Vampiric Ritual
Well of Suffering – 35 Procs of Vampiric, 35 Procs of Vampiric Precision, 35 Procs of Vampiric Ritual
Well of Corruption – 30 Procs of Vampiric/Precision/Rituals
Other well – 30 Procs of Vampiric/Rituals
Locust Swarm – 50 Procs of Vampiric/Precision
Dagger 2 – 9 Procs of Vampiric/Precision
209 Procs of Vampiric, 124 Procs of Vampiric Precision, 150 Procs of Vampiric Ritual
Total procs: 483
According to the listed base values, that is 209*(1.2*31) + 124*(1.2*39) + 150*(1.2*50) = roughly 22k damage and healing, from only the Blood Magic traits.
There were a lot of assumptions made, both that the listed values are accurate (probably false, but I’ll assume that it is their intent to be those values), and the obviously unrealistic assumption that this impossible situation would ever happen. The point isn’t to show a realistic situation that would ever happen, but only the math that ANet probably passes around every time someone brings up “so guys… Necros still have bad sustain”.
snip
I already said that it has 0 to do with being viable. But the sheer ability to be able to deal 22k damage and heal for the same in 10 seconds OFF OF TRAITS ONLY is too good. I can have a fire sigil too, all of those wells are taking effect; all of that is besides the point.
The point is that semi-infinite scaling is bad because of that situation. That isn’t even “fully” optimized, it is literally just rolling your face over the keyboard once with the right traits equipping and 5 idiots standing around in them. But with such scenarios possible, why would they buff us? A 50% buff allows us to deal 33k AoE damage and healing, again solely from 30 traiting. Do you think even a 50% increase to siphons would bring them up to remotely good enough?
As it is now, siphons will never be more than viable in a single build; the one build that makes the most use of them. Every other build won’t be able to proc as often, and will therefore have subpar healing from them. That is the entire point of why I did that math.
@Kraag
Your first idea was what I was meaning.
Also, due to the current nature of their traiting, it wouldn’t be possible to be fully selfish and still heal your team. You would need to forgo one of the three (minions wouldn’t proc it) siphoning traits. So it is a trait that literally adds no selfish healing than if you just sat with 20 points, much like how Transfusion turns a skill from selfish to non-selfish.
It might not work directly as-is, but the idea of turning selfish into team-support is something I think needs to be added.
I’ll go through your final thoughts as if they were numbered
3) This just… isn’t true at all. High single hit damage, 1200 range means he almost never dies except to focused fire, incredibly useful active.
4) Not true at all. 30% increased damage = 30% higher damage. This trait is worthwhile if you just run Flesh Golem and Bone Minions, frankly
5) Not at all
9) No.
you know what would be cool?
A little red tag on the left of this topics title that doesn’t belong to a mod.
HAHAHAHHA, funny joke man.
Many competitive PvP teams still run Necros. You can say Necros are doomed when Zombify, Posi, and all the other high tier necros can no longer find spots on a team (hint: it hasn’t happened yet).
It is good in every game mode. You double the amount of time you can stay in DS compared to without the trait.
Let’s say you only had the LF to stay in DS for 5 seconds before; 20% LF. That is now 10s worth of LF. It is a significant boost to anyone who can actually sit in DS for any period of time.
I’d like to point out that while everyone QQs about Necros in sPvP, half of the competitive teams in high tier tournaments… still use Necros.
^Not worth it unless you have god awful healing power. Well of Blood would work far better, because minions get 0 benefit from SoV, whereas WoB heals them just like normal.