Yeah PvE
Bosses tend to also only go for me, while before they would switch targets constantly.
Did you change anything in your build or rotations? I used to always get targeted by basically everything because I would basically start every fight by rolling my face over the keyboard.
I’d imagine it is something that was changed somewhere else, and just happens to coincide loosely with the patch timing. If you’re having issues with bosses going after you, my suggestion is to let your allies start off the fights, hang back a little bit before jumping in (they’ll generate more threat than you on the aggro table that way), and also hang back anytime you’ve gotten too much attention, because distance is a factor as well.
With minions, try aggroing them without hitting the boss (using a targeted skill like Dagger auto, way outside range but within around 2k range), so that they run up and start hitting the boss before you. They have pretty decent toughness values, especially Golem/Bone Fiend, so they should generally take aggro away from you.
So I have a minion master build on my necro. Before the December 10th update, an enemy would attack whatever attacked it first. Now, they always attack me and never attack my minions with the exception of a few rare occasions. Is this a bug or is something behind the patch notes?
Are you talking about PvE? To my knowledge aggro is still acting the same.
The “nerf” to conditions was a single condition removed in PvP only, and Enfeeble being changed. Both nerfs that needed to happen, and basically don’t affect any other part of the game meaningfully.
So it would more than likely mean that transfusion would be lowered or do you think there could be a way to have 2 team heals and keep balance?
The 30 point trait would only turn your personal siphoning into team siphoning. To get both Transfusion and that trait, you would only be able to have 2 siphoning traits (vampiric and one of bloodthirst, vampiric precision, or vampiric rituals), making both your person and team healing weaker from that 30 point trait.
It has nothing to do with that. They are adding new skills as quasi-end game content to “farm” for. For those of us playing since launch, 25 skill points is pretty mediocre (many people have hundreds sitting around), but that is the general idea, that new skills will be things you can “farm” for.
You could still do that. If you wanted more selfish healing, then you still trait the same as you do now; it wouldn’t change it at all. It would simply drop it down a tier (it isn’t worthy of 30 points), and open up for a true GM trait.
1) I think our own personal passive healing should work through DS. Siphons at least, probably regen, but not other people’s healing, and not our own healing like WoB. I think this would be balanced as a base skill if they implement something else that is a response later.
2) This is simple to fix: ICDs on Vampiric and Vampiric Precision. A 1s ICD, significantly buff the values with it, Vampiric Rituals remains ICD less because wells have their own limiters via durations.
3) Bloodthirst is fine actually, I think. It helps gate certain issues itself, because to have a fully selfish siphon build essentially stops you from being able to also have a supporty build. Otherwise, you could have full siphoning and support options.
4) The only thing I think they need to do here is drop vampiric rituals to the 20 slot, and then add in a new trait at 30 that turns all your personal siphoning into AoE siphoning. Essentially, it takes all the selfishness that you got from the first 20 traits, and turns them into team support.
This way, there are significant options. MM necros will essentially stay where they are, whereas the rest will not only gain the ability to fully trait selfishly via wells/BT, but also trait supporty siphon via the new 30. Its actually not too hard to fix imo, via ICDs, a new trait, and some numbers work.
PvE is an issue not because of Necromancers alone, but simply their game design. They honestly cannot fix us properly within PvE; instead they need to fix PvE itself.
Minions will get a lot of QQ, and it is glorious. Make sure you practice one combo: Rigor Mortis, Charge, Dagger 3, DS 5, DS 3, DS 2, WH 4. In that order. Mix in damage when you don’t need to be directly casting them already, you’ll learn the timing. It should be somewhere between 12 and 15s of continuous CC, and it is every bit as fun as it sounds.
Look at wikipedia. There you will see that Necrophilia is commonly used for having a sexual attraction to corpses…
And i dont think that Necromancer normally have THAT attraction to corpses (some however may).
I love minions a lot, but not THAT much…
Just bring the passive back to the datamined version, but more balanced; considering that the datamined version would have siphoned 300 damage per hit (way OP). Base 100 damage, 200 healing, up to 100 additional scaling with healing power/power, no ICD, change the active to have a significantly reduced ICD or no ICD, but with more limitations via the stacks (apply stacks according to allies in the area, up to some max).
This skill should be sustained damage/damage reduction, to complement a highly aggressive build, with a high risk/reward active. It needs damage on the passive, and it needs a better active to be competitive with our other healing skills, and it needs those to not directly compete like it does now. The skill should be about damage first.
Like Stx said, the two main versions of MM are pretty solid, and are plenty viable in high tier yoloQ/team queues (just maybe not real tournaments). Clerics 20/0/30/20/0 just got some pretty big buffs in the last patch, actually, because of the new conversions.
All these thing should be in descriptions… And real damage should, Wurm hit for 1200~ when description says 194
Bone Fiend’s is slightly in his description, the cripple attack in the description does extra damage.
However, the tooltips are bugged, the listed damage is way too low.
Bone fiend and Shadow fiend have every 3rd/4th attack (usually at 80) and Wurm every 5th attack be a “crit”/special chain cast. Golem on the other hand has it guaranteed since its a chain attack so every 3rd attack is the double damage uppercut.
Shadow Fiend and Wurm both don’t have special attacks, they only randomly crit. Bone Fiend has one every 10 seconds that cripples and deals extra damage, and Golem’s chain.
Pretty sure that that is his actual dps vs a 2.6k armor target.
Their tooltips are way off. Just check out Flesh Golem whose tooltip says something like 200 damage. He hits for an average of 700ish every 1.2 seconds.
“…it will always give a full cooldown when interrupted because its one of the best skills in the game.” I can’t remain un bias when reading what they put down lol These dudes have no idea what they are doing.
He was corrected not too long later by another dev.
Regardless of how “bad” we might be compared to anyone else in an optimized group, rolling a Necro will not make your group incapable of finishing fractal content. It might take you a few minutes longer to finish a run, it might be a bit harder, but PvE is not innately difficult enough to demand the min/maxing of having the best class.
How about the still not fixed heal/util lockout when leaving ds…
This. I routinely die due to this in games where I 100% would have lived significantly longer otherwise (my CC regularly heals for 10k).
Its a mix, unfortunately. Some complaints are totally warranted, but I think a large number of complaints stem from being on this side of the player|dev divide.
Let’s just get some things straight right now. This is an MMORPG. No MMORPG has ever had “perfect” balance. Frankly, I don’t know of a single that has ever been remotely close. GW1 did not have good balance, it had playable balance only because they threw so much kitten into the game that SOMETHING had to be good.
So this idea that GW2 will ever have this magical “perfect” balance is just far too idealistic. And let’s face it; with very rare exceptions, if you want to play a class, it will not bar you from any content in the game. In fact, the only things that it bars you from are the very, very highest min/maxing of the game (setting dungeon records, tier 1 GvG, high level tournaments). And that is normal, because every MMO game ends up with slightly cyclical balance. If you want to be at the very height of play, then you will sometimes need to give up what you like playing for what is best.
For devs “not loving us”; this idea is just silly. ANet are the parents, and the different parts of this game are their babies. Necromancers have had the most issues of any class because we are “unique”. It means its going to take them a lot of time to properly “fix” us. If you dislike where we are now, play something else. Its f2p, you can just leave the game for 4 years and come back later, nothing really lost.
A lot of the things we complain about are just normal. Devs don’t have tons of contact because every post they make not only has to be very smartly filtered (look at what’s happened the last few times devs have posted about us), but they have to be very “diplomatic” about it. Every post that they make in the Necro forums needs to be reciprocated in every other forum. The exceptions are “neutral” forums, like sPvP and bug forums. Its also normal that not every class will be perfectly balanced; that is natural for an MMO. And its normal that we wouldn’t get 10000 fixes every week, because again, when all your balance work needs to be split across 8 classes, it takes time.
TL;DR, a lot of complaints are simply frustrations about completely natural (and sometimes healthy) parts of normal game development. It doesn’t make the feelings or ideas of the complaints any less valid, but simply put the majority of complaints I hear are a bit like complaining that your steak took time to cook and had meat in it.
Of course, which is why they need ICDs on those skills; aka limiters. If there is a 1s ICD on Vampiric, for example, then instead of worrying “what if it hits 10x a second” you can know exactly what the upper limit is, and control it very easily.
snip
No, you see that is just the numbers from the traits. I don’t know of many other traits that can cause 22k damage and healing in 10 seconds.
Well of Blood can add another 13k self-healing (35k AoE), WoS/WoC will be adding their own damage, etc. Those numbers are literally just 4 traits working together being activated as much as possible in a small time period.
I used whatever numbers are listed as the tooltips, I didn’t bother to test if they are bugged or not (they may be).
Looks like I picked a great time to return to this game… even after Anet buffed necros to the point where idiots could play them, there is still whining. Love it!
Even Warriors whine.
May want to factor in that only two of the wells even can proc Vampiric Precision, there.
I did. I didn’t show the math because it was too much work to type it all out, but I was careful to only include Precision on the two wells that proc it, LS, and D2.
And yet, Defiant Stance was put out where the potential truly is infinite.
Limited by duration. Yes it has “infinite” scaling, just like every block, invuln, and similar mechanic in the game, but they are all still limited by durations.
For example, compare Vampiric Master to Vampiric. Master is limited both by the number of minions you have out, their attack speed, and reliance on them hitting. So at most you’ll have 7-8 minions with an average attack rate of once per 3s (and they will of course die), so there are built in limiters due to the qualities of the minions. So the “max” case isn’t far from the standard case; balance is pretty easy and satisfactory for all sides. Also due to the nature of minions, you’re generally not going to see this combined with anything other than Vampiric.
Vampiric however, is only limited by how much crap you can hit at once. Vampiric, plus Vampiric Precision, plus Vampiric Rituals, throw down four wells, Locust swarm, then Dagger 2, you’re looking at up to 483 procs of those three traits. Including Bloodthirst and assuming an average (I did a weighted average), of 47 HP siphoned per hit that is a total of 22,578 damage dealt and healed, base (without any scaling). That is on top of any effects caused by the skills themselves, that is all additional damage and healing caused through the traits alone.
That is massive scaling, something that other classes don’t see. 483 procs in 10 seconds, 22k additional healing and damage just from 30 trait points. No wonder the devs are scared, in ideal situations it is insane what they will do.
Now, I’m not trying to say that that will ever happen. It won’t. And it sucks that we are balanced because of that insane top-end unrealistic math that will never be achieved in reality. But that is how it goes, and that’s why limiters are really important.
Generally speaking, vitality wins over toughness if you have more LF gain than healing, toughness wins over vitality with lots of healing.
In your case, toughness will probably do better, since you won’t necessarily want to be in DS often as the signet is inactive during that.
fight me in spvp. ill use the signet and win 10-10 hands down.
Sure. I’d love to see how well you use the signet when you get feared into a knockdown every time you use it. Although frankly I’d let Sikari do it because I’m pretty sure he’s a better player than I am.
Oh its very obvious that the skill needs some major fixing. I was watching Zombify’s stream, and even in a full team of very high level players on TS, the skill was just… sad. He could use it an call it out, and the person targetted would just spam two dodges (voiding 80% of the skill, leaving you time to proc it once), or use a single defensive skill like a block.
It was sad. Funny, but sad.
I’ll definitely try something out along the lines of this, although I’m going to swap it around because I’m bad without minions.
Again, don’t overlook “canned” dev answers. It is very unlikely that a dev would come out in a “public” (which is anything they say to people who aren’t under an NDA) and say “yeah this skill is kitten”. They’ll give you a very PC response like “we are aware many don’t currently feel the skill is viable, however we’d like to give it more time for testing instead of making a decision based on inadequate data.”
Except two 100b is literally just 2 100bs damage together. Epidemic though, gets a lot scarier.
For example:
One target has 7 conditions, 4 allies nearby with no conditions.
First epidemic spreads conditions, now all people have 7 conditions – effect of the conditions increased by 4x over the team
Second epidemic spreads conditions, now 1 person has 7 conditions, 4 people have “14” conditions (obviously stacked) – effect of the original 7 conditions is now 8x increased
The problem in his example was that they wanted to introduce a condition that needed to be balanced for 1 target application only. Being able to quadruple that condition would have forced them to balance it to that situation. That is how game design works, niche scenarios are very important to balance to, because while they might be rare, they still need to be considered.
This is actually an issue. The problem with many Necromancer traits/skills that remain unbalanced is due to semi-infinite scaling because they have no built-in limiters. This is why Vampiric and Vampiric precision will forever remain bad so long as they don’t have an ICD to limit them.
Yes, because hundreds of Necromancers telling you its bad, and literally every top tier Necro saying its bad isn’t enough.
Honestly, I just think they were giving you the canned responses that they are supposed to.
It should, if it doesn’kittens a bug.
It’s passive was also pretty OP before. You could siphon for nearly 350 on every hit, without ICD, and boost that with BT to 400ish per hit. With retal dealing around 200 damage per hit, something like Necro Axe 2 against a necro would have dealt 4800 damage to the enemy, while healing the Necro for almost the entire damage of the skill.
The problem is that, frankly, it isn’t worth all you give up to get high chill/vuln uptime. You essentially have given up Terror, 20 points into a sub-par tree, and have no defensive options, just to push a little bit more duration.
Your best bet is modifying a “standard” condi build a bit to give you what you need.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQNAW7djMaZ7tbWb87JAIF5ib0jiVOYKFwnOA-TsAAzCpI+R9j7HzPyfs/MAZBy2AA
You could also look to swap either Epidemic or Spectral Armor for Well of Darkness.
Note that with the build I gave, Spectral Grasp has a base 6s chill, which with your duration bumps that up to 9s every 24s, while giving you 22% LF and pulling them in range for your sigil swaps.
Note: there might be some better changes than that overall, but its a bit tighter of a setup overall. Vulnerability just isn’t that great for us to stack on our own unless you are a power build, but Focus will allow you to burst it onto a target, so if you’re on TS with your group you can use Focus 4 when they are about to burst.
Actually, in zergs many Necromancer builds have amazing sustain. WvW is where you can actually see the insane Necro sustain that we should be able to achieve elsewhere.
PvE we can also have really good sustain, but the situations where we do are pretty easy anyway.
All wells will siphon with Vampiric and Vampiric Rituals no matter what, so long as there is something to siphon from. However, a well has to deal direct damage, and that damage needs to crit, to proc Vampiric Precision.
Well of Blood deals no direct damage though, so it can’t crit. You can also notice this because dropping well of blood on a golem in heart of the mists won’t drop you into combat, despite dealing damage to the golem via siphoning.
We do not need Healing Signet from the warrior. That is the problem with this skill, it directly competes with Blood Fiend as is. That’s stupid, you should not have two skills that are in direct competition with each other for the exact same job.
What we need is for the old, ICD-less passive to be restored with different numbers. This skill needs passive damage and healing per-hit, it also needs a bit of work on the active to make it less kitten. But again, this passive should not be another Healing Signet, because that is literally what Blood Fiend is for us, it needs to be a damage skill.
A ran a dire MM build today in WvW, and I noticed a death nova field when I used the active on the bone fiends. Was it always like this or is this new?
They’ve always proc’d Death Nova, to my knowledge (or at least for a long time), the confusion is generally because they do not proc the additional direct damage.
Short answer, yes. A condi-MM mainly wants to use the minions as CC utilities, plus you’ll end up with strong hybrid damage.
You will 100% want Flesh Golem and Bone Fiend. If you are roaming and don’t want to worry about Flesh Wurm (who is incredibly strong), then shadow fiend better make an appearance as well, since clutch blinds/LF gain is really good for a condi build. Bone Minions also can be great if you have Death Nova, otherwise you want to probably leave them behind and bring something like corrupt boon.
inb4 “u warr, u no QQ cuz OP”
Could always propose a separate one for each Tree just to keep them a bit more organized.
Probably the best support for that group is spirit rangers. Adds in even more AoE limiting crap.
Actually, Blood Fiend will still be better. Traited BF is ~20k HP in sPvP/WvW, so if you are good and sacrifice it, not only do you still get pretty decent healing, but also he has just tanked 20k damage from you. That’s almost your entire HP bar worth of damage put on a minion that’ll be back in 16 seconds.
You don’t need all that high of crit to run Dhuumfire, and you can actually take Lyssa to boost it a bit
Weakening shroud just got smacked in the face with a nerf (if you didn’t know), so I don’t think its worthy of a ban from this to make it more fun. Don’t know how non-Necros feel about the new one.
I realize this isn’t a high-skill game like CoD where you need to aim, but I’m sure you can left click your target.
AoE Blind would work too, at a small range, and I agree would make more sense (more necroy)
Reanimator – Yeah i know we all love this trait // I would move this trait into Death Nova trait and give us here 2s of protecion when going DS
15 Trait, Gain Aegis on leaving DS (forced leaving included), with an ICD.
Uh… wrong forums?
On a side note: HAVE YOU BETRAYED US??!?!?!?! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!
Is this skill broken, or is everyone just now immune to our fear, as well as give us a stronger/longer fear?
What are you having issues with? It has worked for me.