Guild Wars 2

Troll.4237:

The new heal annoys me but… The changes to weakening shroud kitten me off.
12 seconds to 2 seconds of weakness… Really? Why not just remove the trait if that’s the way its going to be?

The trait was too strong on its own for the adept tree, so they were going to nerf it to be on a 25s CD (like the actual skill). Instead we have what we have now.

The problem is is that they balanced it with NtD and high condition duration, assuming you consta spammed it, which is something no one does.

Wintel.4873:

No, WoW hardly counts because it had a fairly short run during MLG and then they ended it because balance was a joke.

Not only was it a joke, but it only made to to MLG and was “eSports” because Blizzard forced it by paying insane amounts of money.

Bawi.9541:

Ah, which good pvp game doesn’t need a bit of hardcountering

Rock-Paper-Scissors agrees completely.

I voted 1 simply because the skill appears so terrible I refuse to waste the skill points on it until someone proves otherwise.

I would use bloodthirst to boost it a bit, but with Vampiric Master’s healing skill bugged, whats the point compared to Transfusion.

A bit under regen alone.

Arvid.3829:

Great potential heal smashed to pieces from every direction conceivable

What heal? Didn’t you know? They only added 7 to the game, the one you see for Necromancers is actually a bug… cough.

Good news, that one is getting replaced as well :P

Chaotic Storm.2815:

I don’t know… If necro has so much trouble trimming off 10% hp on a class that is famous for being squishy and having the lowest HP pool of all classes there might of other more urge matter to be focusing on.

It isn’t about trimming 10% HP alone.

Its about trimming 10% HP when the other class is immune to all of your active defensive mechanics (bar DS), immune to all your CC, and immune to the majority of your damage. Conditions are the very core of the entire Necromancer class, regardless of build, and condi Necros not only get shafted by being unable to use any of that defense, but also have most of their offense removed.

Eles suddenly aren’t that squishy when you get hit once a second for 200 and are immune to CC.

They already know it and have said they are replacing it, keep up.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Right so from the change it will cause enemies to “explode” into Death Nova and then summon a minion?

Enemies don’t proc Death Nova…

Ya, I’m definitely picking it up. I have minions to keep mobs off me too, so I can stay in DS quite long.

Requiem.8365:

From my testing so far this trait seems pretty useless in actual games and perfect for trolling condition classes in 1vs1. Not great. Id have prefered something like -50% condi duration while over 75% hp.

This is the problem. The trait is either awful or OP, and in neither situation is there any real skill involved with the trait.

Its good :P it is a straight buff to Death Nova, which was essentially the only skill that made Jagged Horrors really good on their own. Other than that they aren’t that great (though not terrible).

They’ll probably replace it with an actual defensive skill, for the defensive tree.

ThePurpleGhost.5216:

Is it true that minions can’t trigger the active part of the signet? I was thinking that it could be used as a way to heal them.

Allied players

No, they simply add the functionality of Reanimator to death nova. Death Nova would then cause Death Nova as it does right now, and summon a jagged horror on enemy death.

JonPeters.5630:

We will talk today about changing duration on weakening shroud instead of cooldown .

Also we have some plans for death magic including merging reanimated with death nova, and moving Protection of the Horde to be a major trait, and then reworking the minors in this line. This kind of change is not going to happen for dec 10 for 3 reasons.
1) testing time
2) implementation time
3) most importantly: if we rework this we want to make sure it is correct the second time around so we will take our time deciding on the “right” design.

Point 3 is something I’m happy to discuss here to list some ideas and break down some pros and cons.

Thanks,

Jon

Which is why the trait is being combined into Death Nova, and we’re getting a whole new 5 trait, which I said originally.

Rennoko.5731:

Might want to add in it is unavoidable. Goes through Block/evade. Can’t proc charges on a blocking or evading target, but the effect still hits them.

Think DS 5.

The effect of stripping stacks is unblockable? Or the marking?

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

This I can garuntee is not the case. I’ve had 10 jagged horrors from Lich Form alone.

Reanimator has the max, not lich form.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Tying aspects to it, such as the heal idea would mean that MORE different builds would actually then WANT to use it.

This is part of the problem, to much of the trees are just too un-useful for other builds.

The one build that wants it the most would have no standard access it, that doesn’t make sense.

Rennoko.5731:

I tried this too….. I went rabid against an ele…. with no minions it is literally impossible to get them below 90%. Don’t give me that "just life blast them " crap…. as if we have spare life force to just sit in DS and fire off bolts they can outheal easily.

Amazingly problematic in small fights.

You mean the life force they can burst through while dodging the 1s obvious cast time LBs using vigor?

Literally no standard MM build runs any crit chance, why tie a trait based on one build to a trait that that build almost never wants.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I would rather it be a Chance on crit, Say 50% Chance on crit with 10second cool down. How much damage do they actually do?

On Crit traits in a non-crit giving tree, especially one like Death Magic where people going into the tree rarely want crit-chance, wouldn’t be good.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Now I want to see if I can get 18 of the little buggers up at once. I highly doubt it, but it could be a lot of fun to see.

I am 99% sure there is an internal cap of 5.

UltraHiDef.4809:

Stop spamming conditions with your damageless bunker condition build and you can win. It’s not like bringing elementalist down from 100% to 90% is impossible.
Stop whining, and learn to adapt.

We are going to adapt just like all the Eles had to before: by rerolling to Warrior.

Its okay ANet, we finally got the message, we’re all rerolling to Warrior now.

And then we wonder why our new heal isn’t good.

The point isn’t to show that this trait is OP, or that Necro is weak. Frankly, this trait will not be that great in many situations; besides the point.

It is to show how bad of a design choice this is. No build should be completely unable to do anything to another, no matter what. If I wanted to go play kittening Rock Paper Scissors, I’d go play it. But I should not have to change what is otherwise a good build just so I can get someone to 90% HP.

Lopez.7369:

I really want the developers to explain what they think a condition build is supposed to do against this build.

Die? Weep? Have the exact same emotionless reaction that the devs did when previewing our new “skill”?

Well, thanks for the info guys, my skill points are safe for now.

Moon.6371:

It is so disappointing that 12 pages of necro complaints since the introductionary video are not enough to at least attract a single dev reply to our concerns before they finally implement the heal.

Awesome community interaction, thanks for that, Anet!

I would not be surprised if Devs in general are not allowed to talk very much in class forums.

Well, 1 and 2 are not mutually exclusive. You can like the patch (which I do, I think its fine, although a bit disappointing in size), and still think we need more changes.

Bawi.9541:

Yes, necros NEED more work on the mechanics – and class concept if you ask me. What does it say about a company’s short/mid-term plans and/or financial/staff capabilities to completely ‘ignore’ part of the problems though. That is my point.

They aren’t ignoring them. We have gotten just as much work as any other class. The work has just been counterproductive, or hasn’t shown as much, because they need to work more on Necro to get the same results as anyone else.

What logical sense is there in investing the most work in the least played class? They have decided to give roughly equal time to every class (regardless of what that results in) that needs fixes (all of them).

RedSpectrum.1975:

SoV used to be akin to a perma retaliation, but they changed it last minutes so now it’s basically a pseudo protection? If thats the case all it does is soften blows now. I couldve sworn it was originally supposed to steal health too……

It was supposed to be a true retaliation/protection passive. Reducing all damage by X amount and then dealing X back.

It is now not even true protection because it has an ICD of 1s.

Being the first person focused doesn’t make the class bad.

tattoohead.3217:

Heh this turned into a QQ post… and im ok with that. You listening Anet?

You want the actual truth? The devs that designed the skill and are generally are responsible for the games design and ideas are painfully aware, and probably knew that this skill was subpar. But guess what, they don’t get to make the big decisions, their bosses do, and I am entirely convinced that it is their “leadership” that makes the bad calls.

Which, btw, is a sentiment shared by members within the own company, as shown by a rating service which was posted around a while ago. ANet has really bright people working there (just look at the concept of our skill), their problem is the higher ups who end up making the decisions and holding the rest back.

This was a nice buff to the trait. One of the other core issues still remains (they only proc after-death, which in certain places makes the trait meaningless), but that is fine now that they announced their plans to combine it with Death Nova and make a totally new trait for that spot anyway.

For now though, its nice to have a few more of the buggers running around.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

So, the balance team can see how often certain skills are being used right?
What is the policy if a new skill is used by not a single player?

We’re Necromancers, not real players, silly.

If they were Warriors, they’d get buffs (see Healing Signet), if they’re Necromancers… what are Necromancers again?

Does it still have an ICD on the active? It didn’t say so, but I don’t want to waste my skill points on it if it does.

D I V A.6018:

Hmmm there is an initial self heal of roughly 4k..Seems legit overall?!

Tell me if wrong asumption.

The total healing of the skill is the same as the base heal for Consume Conditions, and Well of Blood, on activation. Both of those skills then have secondary effects that heal for additional amounts, far and above what SoV can reach.

Blood Fiend has a similar active value, and is universally regarded as our least useful heal.

nekretaal.6485:

GW1 necro locked you into gimmicks.

I’d like to agree to part of this. Keep the nostalgia glasses off when we look at GW1.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

I miss how you could snowball the minions though and have a large army. I think they were trying to mimic this with the Reanimator fix with 15s cd.

I miss the ability to do that, but I don’t miss what happened in games where it didn’t happen. Unfortunately, GW1 MMs were way too hit-or-miss in many parts of the game. I remember dozens of ABs or FAs where my squad did really badly in our first engagement, and from that point on I basically was useless for the rest of the game, because I could never get a decent snowball going (you almost always snowballed by getting minions off the first AI camp and rolling through either one more, or the first enemy squad, otherwise it got hard fast).

Mia Crazymike.1780:

Maybe. Anet wants to see it in action before coming to a conclusion.

They did see it in action, last Friday. They were every bit as unimpressed by it as we were, and they were the ones who made the skill. In fact, I was almost impressed by how little of a kitten they gave when they were previewing it. We got the least amount of time of any preview. Warriors got a flipping duel to show off their skill, all we got was to watch Karl get his butt kicked by a golem, fail once to get any worthwhile healing, and then once get a max heal (the same as the base heal for our real heals).

And while they were being unimpressed by our skill? They literally barely talked about it. They mentioned every way it can be countered, they mentioned the point of adding all the support skills (aka, wasting time because they had nothing else to say), pointing out that the thing puts a giant “cool” red mark over the persons head… then moved on to ranger.

It was sad how unimpressed they were by seeing it in action, why would they want thousands of people to have that same experience?

nekretaal.6485:

Don’t we need 20 skill points per piece of ascended armor?

Well I wolnt have to worry about having enough after buy my heal skill now?

I think a lot of us have literally hundreds of skill points by now :P

But yes, for slightly newer players that’s a free piece of armor you don’t even need to work for the skill points for.

Nay of the Ether.8913:

Jan. 12th patch notes:
Necromancer gets a new elite minion Toaster Pastry Cat that, when it’s minion skill is activated, it transfers all allied damage to the master and heals all enemies. This skill has no cooldown and will auto cast immediately upon logging in.

I’d use it.

nekretaal.6485:

If nobody uses the skill, nobody whines about the skill and it stays unused and never gets buffed. For example corrosive poison cloud or signet of undeath, and those get much more use than this thing ever will.

Actually, this skill in the last few days alone has gotten more pure discussion and complaints than CPC and SoU combined in their entire lifetimes as skills. There has been easily 25 pages or so over multiple threads about this skill.

The difference is that while CPC is a bit weak and needs a little buffing, it still has niche use. Part of what is making the skill so weak is that it is a very sPvP oriented skill, but desires a Necromancer build-type that isn’t common at all in sPvP right now. But when you have space to use it, it can do really strong things. Drop CPC and WoS on a downed body in sPvP, and that person isn’t getting back up. If their team tries anyway, they’ll end up with 30s of poison and weakness, while taking a few thousand damage for the effort of still not getting them up. Niche, yes, weak yes, but still usable.

Signet of Undeath is even more niche, but again still has some slight uses for more difficult dungeons and fractals where stopping to res someone is not a good idea.

But SoV has nothing. I also urge people to not even buy the skill if it hasn’t changed. They do have statistics on this, and if they see Necromancers refuse to buy it, or buy it, equip it once to try it, and never equip it again, they will notice. And the forum complaints won’t stop very soon.

tattoohead.3217:

Im running 30/0/20/20/0 full MM with a similar play style. I pick up Vamp Master for the minor boost to minion DPS and I use dageer #2 and Axe #2 for dps. 20/0/20/0/30 looks like it would be fun though and probably push more dps. I have also been thinking of a 20/30/20/0/0 Dire build.

The 30 in SR lets me pick up Deathly Perception, which along with the two LB traits really helps push my DPS up there, especially since I can still have some Soldier gear mixed in and not lose much crit chance. And this upcoming patch is going to see some boosts to at least one trait for my build (the one that makes DS drain slower).

CMstorm.8679:

i suppose if u really want to build for it, u could just about get perma-retaliation with staff/ axe/x running spiteful vigor Well of blood, Bone minions(blasts) Flesh Wurm. meh….

You can literally get perma retaliation just with Axe 3.

I personally run Axe/Focus Dagger/Warhorn or Dagger, with a staff kept in my bag just in case I need it (I’ll rearrange my sets as needed).

Axe w/ Axe training makes Axe really good for LB builds, otherwise you’ll want staff, Dagger is pretty much a constant unless you won’t be meleeing at all.

A retal build? You mean, Axe 3, which easily applies 100% retal uptime alone? Yeah its fine.

Wooo!!!

I swapped over to 20/0/20/0/30 build using a full bar of minions (I’ll swap out Blood Fiend for other heals depending on content). Part soldier gear, part berzerker (eventually I plan to get Cleric’s gear), the build basically just uses minions to face-tank mobs and make your general PvE experience much easier on both yourself and the group, and I sit in DS using a fairly standard, though slightly weaker, LB build.

OtakuDFifty.2965:

20/25 stacks of SoV will do roughly 5000 armor-ignoring damage to one target. A Necro decked out in Clerics and Monk runes will NOT match that damage with a Blood Fiend and LB. Blood Fiend does, what, 200-300 damage every 3 seconds? That is NOT matching SoV.

Want extra damage, run Blood Fiend, want group heal, run WoB… Why not both?

GASP a whole 5k damage? That’s like, one whole LB!

So essentially, let’s narrow down when SoV will be useful:
Your team needs a little bit of healing, but not much
Your team needs more DPS
You are running Clerics
You need very little healing yourself

If all of those are not met, the skill falls short. If your team needs actual healing, this skill is blown out of the water compared to Well of Blood. Even Transfusion would double the healing.

Basically, this skill will only be useful in a low-damage Necro build while against bosses so easy that a real healing skill isn’t necessary, so you bring SoV to speed things up a bit. This is beyond niche, this is a skill that is entirely useless in 95% of the time in game, and provides a marginal increase in time to kill a boss. I’m sure your team will praise you for allowing them to kill the boss two seconds faster.

Roe.3679:

The current version offers little in active healing and I’m fairly certain the passive healing is less than given from warriors healing signet.

If you get hit every second exactly on the second, it is 80% of healing signet (approximately). Every single time you aren’t proccing the ICD on CD, you lose even more healing.

Muchacho.2390:

Merging with what? Do you mean by axing making it into a axe trait or getting rid of it?

Merge with with the Staff Mastery trait. By axing it I mean getting rid of it completely, put something useful there, preferably something that plays with non-damaging conditions we apply, like chill.

Stx.4857:

It should be 300 healing recieved and 300 damage dealt when recieving attacks, 1 sec ICD. And the active need to at least have a 25 sec baseline cooldown, with NO ICD on the active. I think you should siphon 500 per hit during the active.

Then I would play around with it to see if it was worth losing Consume Conditions.

I would say that there are two ways to take the passive. Either just like this, where it has a fairly high effect but on an ICD, or a lowered effect, but without ICD. But it need to have healing and damage on the passive.

The active can kind of be played around with. I personally feel like they need to split it into a chain. The first part of the chain instantly applies the mark with X amount of stacks, plus another Y amount per allied player nearby, up to some max of Z stacks. This is to limit its damage in 1v1s, and also to have it scale with team fighting, with specific caps to keep it gated (which, by definition, if it has stops on its power, should be sufficiently strong since they can control it, no worrying about stupid situations). The first active gives you no burst healing, it only applies the mark/stacks.

The second active is optional, and gives burst healing. It is available while the mark is still on the target, with a cast time. It removes some amount of stacks (cannot be “blocked” by the opponent), healing for you just the same as if you had proc’d them yourself, but do 0 damage.

The CD on the skill should be 30 seconds (which goes down while the second active is up), no ICD on the active, at least 900 range (1200 preferably), and 1.25s cast time on the second active.