Well i use staff in both power and condi builds (acutally i run staff in all my builds…), but you are right giving the marks additional utility instead of damage would be better. I only wanted to start a discussion about that trait.
Discussion: what to do with it.
Answer: get rid of it, either by merging it or axing it completely.
Done :P
It won’t ever make sense. Its a +% damage trait to a weapon that isn’t used for direct damage. Axe it and give us something better kthx. Or at least combine it with another staff trait.
If it’s a problem of manpower, I’ve sent my resume to them and really wish to help with the game.
I’m a computer engineer, just living in the wrong country I guess…
I believe one of their biggest issues is programmers, but maybe they fixed that one.
Anyway, if you want to move to Seattle, WA to work for ANet, have fun :P they have good reports of it being a great place to work, except that bosses are accused of being a bit stifling, and lower pay than “standard” (there was a rating by employee site).
I don’t know how you can criticize something being wrong/broken/whatever when you haven’t even had a chance to try it.
but hey, QQing about things that might happen is totally reasonable and understandable (/sarcasm)
Because the skill they previewed is at best the worst healing skill the Necromancers have access to.
In terms of group support, it pales in comparison to Well of Blood, which with Cleric’s gear can heal up to 5x more HP across the group, not to mention twice as much to yourself. And that team healing cannot be negated by something as simple as using a block, or dodging.
Consume Conditions base heal is higher than if you proc all 5 stacks (the max you can do), not to mention full condition removal, and an extra 700 healing per one.
Hell, even Blood Fiend, as useless as it is, will deal comparable damage and heal you for more.
If they introduced a new Elite into the game with a 100s CD that did 1 damage, could you criticize it without trying it? I hope so. It doesn’t take much work to do simple math to figure out this skill is worthless.
Hm. ill just have to give it a shot. and well of blood gives a fat blue aura so lol i mean, if they never seen a necro ide understand
That is not nearly as obvious when there are 18 other fat blue auras, 3131 fireballs from eles, 86123 red circles from random crap, and 50 players running in random directions. WvWers don’t pay attention enough to think “hey that blue circle, maybe I’ll hit that” because the entire flipping field is covered in blue and red circles.
I loved the GW1 necro for three main things. The Hex system, our support, and the ability to play with HP as a secondary, unique, resource.
However, the GW2 MM is vastly superior to the GW1 one. Not necessarily in how useful they are to your normal group, or how powerful they are, but the corpse limitation in GW1 made the spec innately niche. I hated that I could never run minions in a large amount of content simply because I needed to be able to kill things very often to make it work.
It’s actually frightening (for the future of the game) to see them allocating funds so heavily towards the classes that are getting played a lot.
Call me paranoid, but that leaves the impression that they are in a fd up financial situation and wanna milk the game for what it’s worth, just barely satisfying the biggest share of players with the lowest investments possible :/
I wouldn’t say this is true at all. Necromancers have gotten a ton of bug fixes and changes over time. The problem is not with the amount of attention we get, which in completely honesty is roughly equal (averaged over the whole game, regardless of buffs or nerfs). The problem is that we need far more work than the other classes.
ANet is here to make money, first and foremost. Why would they spend 2x the resources on one of the least played classes in the game, to get less out of it than if they spent that time on anyone else? We had the most bugs of anyone at launch. We then had more bugs introduced (it happens) as those first bugs were fixed. Things like Dhuumfire have almost been steps backward overall for the class. All those things take resources that would have gone towards things like fixing Death magic minors.
The game is hardly in a bad financial situation. I’d be very surprised if they aren’t making quite a bit of money off the game (PvE in this game is amazing for casual players, and PvE makes the money). Btw, the reason they haven’t done an expansion is because they don’t want to repeat the massive balance issues their GW1 expansion schedule brought on them. They want to fix what they have right now more, while doing the 2 week thing to keep content flowing, before they screw it all up by doubling the balance work.
Yes, because you can deal massive damage in seconds against completely undefended targets. We tend to call it “burst”.
We will, eventually. I realize it is hard to believe, but the core group of devs that actually come up with ideas are amazing. Just look at the concept behind the new healing skill. It is the higher ups, and the ones who make final decisions that are… not so much.
The problem is that they are forced into certain things by their bosses. They have very little resources to make the changes needed to fix the Necromancer class, and I would not be surprised to learn that they are kept from posting in the forums as often as they would otherwise.
for PvE the new heal is going to be amazing (for team dps more than support). and necro right now is pretty solid in pvp
No.
It was shown on the stream.
Frankly, unless the numbers have changed, I won’t even buy it. I’d prefer for their metrics that they see that I purposely leave that skill unbought.
@Luke, GW2 is definitely one of the best MMOs to be released recently, if you look at the game as a whole.
To be fair, it will act really good as a guild-wide, zerg-wide targetting system if you can land it. Sort of like a target icon for everyone instead of just your immediate party.
Overpowered indeed.
Maybe Necro commanders will use it then. At least until they die because they have a useless heal.
Tomorrow we get a great gift from anet! While all of the other professions have been burdened with a new Heal that they must purchase, wasting 25 precious Skill Points, we’ve been given the freedom to do whatever we want with those points. So what will you be spending them on? I’m thinking half of an Eldritch Scroll.
Same thing I’ve done with the rest of them. Look longingly at my skill list and silently pray to Grenth that one day I’ll see something new worth buying there.
I totally laugh at the dhuumfire and jagged horror jokes but necromancers aren’t in as dire a situation as this thread somehow suggests.
The issue isn’t that Necromancers are getting worse, because we aren’t. In fact, meta issues aside, we are closer to “balanced” than we were at launch. Are there still glaring issues? Of course. But we are slowly getting better when you look at the class as a whole.
The problem is when other classes get new presents, and ours sucks. Its the equivalent to waking up on Christmas day and seeing that your other siblings got cars, laptops, the new gaming consoles (except xbone, because it sucks), a smart phone, and you got… one sock. Not even a full pair of socks, just one individual sock. And its dirty, and already has a hole in it (in fact, it looks suspiciously like the sock your older brother lost a few weeks ago).
the new necro heal skill looks extremely powerful from a wvw point of view. why all the complaints about no healing in ds? we get an extra health bar for free with good control and damage. the cd isnt bad at all. imo ppl need to stop complaining.
We don’t get DS for “free”, we get DeathShroud at the cost of:
No vigor
No invulnerabilities
No dodges
No aegis
No stealth
One movement ability that can get you out of combat, and this must be pre-casted and can be killed
Very low access to defensive boons
All of our “defense” can be countered by stability and condition removal
Also, the skill isn’t good from any point of view. Why would I take a heal into WvW that heals my allies for 1/5th what Well of Blood can, deals less damage than two LBs (which don’t take much longer to cast and don’t make me have a god awful skill), and heals myself for basically nothing, compared to our other heals.
And thanks mods. 10/10 for kittening up again and obviously paying absolutely no attention to what you are doing. This was put in the sPvP forum because all changes are done due to sPvP. It is where a lot of discussion takes place because NO devs take part in our class-forum discussions, and we wanted them to, you know, actually see this. If they refuse to do discussions in our forums, and you refuse to let us discuss anything in the sPvP forums, what do we do, tweet at them? This is ridiculous.
If we don’t re-animate dead things, why dose Bone Fiend look exactly like a dead mob?
Design shortcuts. They already have the animations and rigging in the game, all they need to do is change the “skin”. We literally take the dead-parts that are around us at the time, and we mash them together to make our minions. They are literally golems of flesh.
The cast time on the active is so long that you can easily revive 2 people before it even goes off. Not sure why anyone would use the active on this either.
Not to mention in PvP they would have been stomped already if you’re screwing around casting the signet.
Didn’t the passive on the datamined version have an ICD?
No.
I would generally prefer Mark of Evasion, because it heals your minions as well as you, and generally will be able to outdamage and outheal BT.
Not exactly. The devs would only look at the stats UI to double-check values, not as a significant part of their job. What purpose could there be to memorize that layout when spending just a couple seconds to find what you want will do?
Devs will generally know the deeper inner workings of certain mechanics that we cannot see (a dev knew DS was 60% while we were still confused because of in-game performance), players will generally have more knowledge of what they do overall though (like their class).
I could pretty much guarantee that I have more knowledge of minions than anyone on the dev team. The same could be said of many “hardcore” necros, many of us know a lot about our class because it is all we deal with, for hours a day, whereas a developer deals with 8 professions all the time.
Blood Fiend is a better damage/sustain skill (god forbid you trait him, and he gets even better)
Well of Blood is literally 5x better of a support skill for team-healing (with high healing power)
Consume Conditions is just… better.
Gee, thanks.
<3, sorry, Zombify’s biceps are bigger.
You can’t be serious. In PvE, in high level fractals and some dungeons like a Arah, you can get 1-2 shot.
This signet will be the least viable in PvE where something like the Ascalonian mages in fractals can autoattack you for 8-9k damage each.
The concept of a heal that requires getting hit is just dumb. If anything, it should have been necromancers who got that warrior heal as “vampirism”.
Not all of PvE is hard, at all. A good portion of dungeons (the easier ones) have teams just LoS the boss and stack up in melee and roll their faces over the keyboard repeatedly (or just twice if you’re a warrior) until its dead. In those situations, I’ve often found myself barely even needing a heal at all, and it is possible that in certain very niche builds that activating this signet will increase how quickly the boss is killed by like 0.1%. (I’m sure you’re aware of all that)
I didn’t say it would be good. I said it would be passable in a few niche builds/situations. Very different concepts.
Compare the general difficulty of GW1 to GW2 and you’ll see why we fell off.
More play off chill would be nice, it has been more traditionally core to what we are than fear.
But what is a necromancer, then? What differentiates it from a Lich, or a Warlock?
Necromancers in “popular” culture have come to be simply summoners of undead minions. This isn’t the full scope of Necromancy, nor is it what Necromancy is in the Guild Wars universe (where we are banned from truly raising the undead, that is what Zhaitan does).
Someone like Lily or Andele could probably do the lore part of this better than I will.
However, Necromancy has three parts. The raising of undead (NOT zombies, but literally golems of flesh), the summoning of spirits, with their source of power being life itself.
The only connection Warlocks have with Necromancers is that both magics are considered “dark”, and depending on the mythology you are sourcing, there are some loose similarities in their powers. Warlocks summon demons while Necromancers summon spirits and make undead golems. Warlocks use fire magic while Necromancers (in GW) use ice magic.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
When two people run up to contest home point when I am standing there, then I guess it’s time to call for help and last as long as I can, hoping the reinforcements actually show up.
This is generally the case. Against equally skilled opponents you will never win a 2v1 defending a point. Its just a matter of certain builds not needing your opponents to suck quite as much as others.
No. Necromancers are not liches, we are not warlocks, this isn’t WoW.
Also, HP scales the best on Necros of any class in the game, and if you have to have one defensive stat over the other, vitality tends to outperform toughness.
So now it will heal you when you take damage? That makes it completely useless.
A flat 300 damage reduction on every hit (which is what it was pre-ICD) is far from useless. Especially on the old version, where it also returned that damage. The datamined version was, frankly, OP as a passive effect, and it was on-hit. It was OP because with retal up (easily done) you would have returned over 550 damage every time you are hit, and been healed for 350.
The problem with the new version is that it directly competes with Blood Fiend for passive healing (and loses), loses out in group healing to WoB (by a massive amount), and loses in self-healing to CC.
The whole point of this skill was having a retal-like passive that also had some slight damage reduction via healing, and then a very high risk/reward active that was again, very damage based. The real soul of this skill was allowing the most aggressive class in the game to give up reliable burst healing for sustained damage/healing. It was by far the most attrition based heal we had ever been (almost) given access to.
One of the traits will always stay Fetid Consumption. Ideally for me, the other GM should be a trait that turns the rest of your selfish healing (vampirisms) into group healing. There have been a few ideas on how to do this.
It is good. The only thing is that they are turning Blood magic into support, which is only half of what it is. It is supposed to be half life stealing (which is always a selfish mechanic) and half support (like the old GW1 Blood is Power).
No, redesigning PvE would help. We can’t realistically outdamage warriors, they just need to make PvE harder so it can’t just be 5x berzerker builds maxing DPS.
We’ve already answered that, Nagato. All you have to do is put a heal cap/second (Modified by healing power) or a cap on how many people the trait can steal from at a time. There are ways to adjust that, while having the ability in a good place. Their alternative is just terrible.
The passive as it was in the datamined version was fine, just needed number tuning.
The active should be gated by both debuff stacks and 5s. Unlike Vampiric which is kept low because of “infinite” scaling, this thing can only do as much as it has stacks. So make stacks apply based on some base number + X for each ally up to a max, and remove the ICD.
For example, if you are alone, 10 stacks, no ICD on attacking. With 1 ally, 15 stacks. 3+ allies 25 stacks (max). No ICDs, it is gated by the number of debuff stacks (non-infinite scaling), and by only having 5s to deal that to a target that is actively defending themselves.
I have over 1k gold (in items I could easily sell), and I barely ever play this game. I got my entire t3 human set off one exotic weapon drop in PvE. It isn’t that difficult, really.
I’d just say PvE for the gold (if you have a level 80 its not that hard) and it’ll be pretty easy.
Does the full set just cost 60g alone? Or does it cost glory as well (and how much).
Experienced minion mancers…
In sPvP, have you ever beaten two people at once in a fight with just the 3 of you skirmishing on a point?
I can’t imagine it.
Yes. I have only done it with specific builds before. I actually did this during a profession tournament against two hammer warriors (before they were good, mind you). They were both obviously inexperienced players, and I had a very strong build for doing it.
Death Nova kept them from being able to revive each other, I had Well of Suffering as well, which allowed me to get the kill without needing to stomp. The instant someone went down, I’d poison them, then drop WoS on their head and have my minions wail on them, while I CCed their friend. It wasn’t actually that hard because they did absolutely no damage to me, and even though I was CCed a lot, my minions were hitting just fine.
But generally speaking, it is entirely possible to survive 2v1s against non-burst builds. The problem is you won’t ever win them because you can’t secure a stomp, and your general minion build doesn’t have the cleave to allow you to cleave them down while ressing.
@Muchacho This is a problem, but frankly most experienced players can stay alive just fine, or as well as anyone else. The problem is that you cannot match the DPS of a Warrior
I am actually fine with the overall idea of the Necromancer as it is. It is still very much similar in idea to the GW1 Necromancer, which is actually the core basis of what we are as a class, but adapted to a much more active combat system with a simplified buff/debuff system and no “direct” supporting.
It is only the details in how they have executed on that idea that bother me.
Mostly due to the fact most of our skills SUCK and its pretty much our only defensive option. Cant really count Death Shroud as its melts away SO fast.
Spectral Armor into DS completely kills bursts.
No, please put the heals in the game. If we let the devs have even more time with the Necro heal they’ll find ways to make it even worse. At least if its in game they will see that absolutely no one uses it and maybe give it a 1% buff.
I want to clarify something, because I don’t think I did. And for that, I’m sorry. If I sounded like I said all skills should have a secondary mode in Death shroud, I’m sorry. My intent was to say some skills. That may have slipped my mind at the time, however I would like to state that I don’t think ALL skills should have a second “Mode”. With that said, I do think the spectral skills should have a different function in death shroud as they are used to generate death shroud, and having them active while it is being used can create a problematic build. Besides those skills I don’t think its 100% necessary to rework all the skills for death shroud.
OHHHH, well yeah that changes everything. If they had a few skills that had secondary effects or actives while in DS, especially the ones that most people feel are “subpar” currently, I could see that being totally fine.
For example, most people feel Spectral Walk right now isn’t really that great, giving it something extra via DS could help out quite a bit. But Spectral Armor is one of the best skills we have, so it wouldn’t make much sense to make it better with another skill.
I run a Minion Master (MM) build in PVE and im debating between using the trait Mark of Evasion or Bloodthirst. Which of the two traits will provide more healing?
Transfusion will.
remember http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Order_of_the_Vampire ? God I miss that skill. Why doesn’t the necromancer have something actually like that?
See, that is almost exactly what the passive would have been. They just included some parameters to fit the skill to this game, namely making it mark a target (as that introduces better gameplay for this game, imo), and then having a max-stack limit so that it couldn’t be too abused (I don’t recall GW1 having the same kind of attack timing differences like here).
That is half the reason why I was so in love with the original skill, was because its active was essentially Order of the Vampire, but fit to GW2.
How would anet introduce a game mode with different strategies for Early/Mid/Late game? I’m honestly not too sure.
Temple of the Silent Storm. Ironically it is by far the best map for viewing because of the buffs, but is never played. It is the one map that I think has a good chance of being an interesting watch, with Foefire being the only other that has potential.
The problem was that they killed the true identity of the skill. We already have strong group support via WoB, and the only use of this would have been the fact that you don’t need to stand in a well to get the healing. Except WoB can outheal this thing in 3 pulses of 11.
And we have a stronger passive heal in Blood Fiend.
The thing this skill had going for it was damage. The ability for the most aggressive class in the game to give up a large portion of healing for increased damage and decent HP/s was great, and it involved having to be hyper-aggressive to get full use out of the skill. But they gutted the damage from the skill, and turned it into a crappy mix of WoB and Blood Fiend that does everything worse.
There needs to be a few things:
1) Realistic investment. What I mean is that you need to feel that every second of the game is worth watching. You see the score board at 400-200, and yet you know that if the one team just does this one big play, they can still pull it out. That is something that League has, and it means that in most games there is always a sense of “if we just play well enough we could win this any time”, and that translates to the viewers. They stay invested the entire match, instead of seeing “well its 400-200, this game is over”.
2) There need to be more ways to make big plays, and they need to be noticeable and meaningful. As it is right now, this really only comes in from stomp/res mechanics, and a few very rare ways to make awesome plays on a secondary mechanic. Other than that though, there aren’t nearly as many big plays. Whereas again, a game like league can have amazing play after amazing play.
Except Well of Blood deals with that exact situation. The only difference is while the mark will only heal each ally for 2k HP, WoB will heal for 7k.
It just takes one professional necro to make a new build that works around this new healing skill. Then we might get a thread that says, “signet of vamp is too OP,nerf pls” haha!
give it time, good players will think off something to make it work, or at least try to make it work.
Yeah, I can totally see it now. Zombify will bring in an OP build using the signet to the next tournament, and the instant someone is marked they just use one of the 15 defensive options available to every other class to avoid it, and then he will get instantly focused and killed because he has the worst healing skill available to our class.
Ironically, this thing will only be great against other Necros, because they have exactly two ways to avoid it. Dodge #1, and Dodge #2.
are you too kittening dumb to count 1 set +3 = 4
Heal + 3 utility slots, each of them giving you an entire weapon set, in addition to keeping the 1 ability via toolbelt, gives you a possible 30 skills.
Feel free to QQ about Consume Conditions all you want, its amusing. You can get access to it the same day that we get access to mobility, a bunch of boons, and vastly better defensive abilities.
kitten off.
How about you lose your weapon swap as compensation for having a third full set of skills at your disposal at all times.
Seems fair
Engi toolbelt skills are 70% crap btw. Unlike yours….
kittening faceroll necros
Thank you for this constructive post. Oh wait.
The reason engi’s can’t weapon swap is because you have access to utility skills that are literally weapon-swaps for you. You can have the equivalent of 5 sets of weapons (more than elementalist, mind you), or a total of 30 skills on your bar (max).
Necromancers at current get 20. Even with this proposed change we’d be at 25, and most likely all of the added ones would be very weak, highly situational, or with massive CDs.
After the patch i really didn’t notice any discernible difference in the siphons – maybe because i don’t run minion-mancer. If i recall from your podcasts you run minion-mancer?
Siphoning is overall better imo, because of the added scaling and base-buff that they all got. It still isn’t enough. But my point is that Blood Magic isn’t limited to just siphoning; in that same patch they made Transfusion one of the best traits we have, and gave a small (although not enough) buff to Deathly Invigoration.
All of those things together do make the entire tree feel better to me. Did it fix everything? Hell no. But they didn’t say it did.
Let’s preface this entire conversation with this: this will not happen soon. I hope everyone who posts here realizes that. For this to go through, they’d need to add 40 new skills to the game, and that is a massive amount of resources, for comparatively little gain. They aren’t at the position now where they can afford that, unlike your example in GW1 (dervishes being fixed was years into the development cycle, after they had added most major content). Now, later on down the road? Maybe. This game, despite a lot of complaints, is still very new and there is plenty of room for major-fixes later on when it is more realistic.
It is just a balance issue, and an issue of encroaching on engis for me. I’m not saying they can’t do it, or that they shouldn’t. I don’t think it is necessary, however that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be done, and done well. My main worry is that introducing so many skills makes balance far harder on them (now every utility skill has two parts which need to both be balanced), and frankly we’re stepping all over Engi’s toes.