Oh, I don’t mind not being able to use skills 6-9, the problem I see with limiting that is it restricts design options for us. Imagine if our utility skills actually did something different while in death shroud then they did while outside of it?
A balance nightmare. It could have been done during initial design but right now that’d force them to add 40 skills to the game to one class, and balance a class having access to 4 new CDs. It also intrudes a bit too much into the Engi toolbelt mechanic.
I have no problem not having access to the active portions of my 6-0 skills while in DS. In fact our balance would be even more problematic if we did. What I would like to see is all the passive effects carrying over, and certain limited healing effects being allowed to pass through DS. This should include all signets still giving their passive effects, regen and our siphoning (maybe Blood Fiend, maybe the new signet) going through as well. It wouldn’t be any big increases, but at least we could duck into DS for a bit and get some healing back up. But as it is now we effectively lose HP/s by going into DS.
So what do you end up with? Very, very strict rules on when a dev can post, what they can post about, how they can word their post, and how often they can post. It is politics, completely and totally. Does it suck? Of course, but it is necessary to do when you deal with people.
Basically, this is when they can post: when it is very short, concise, and direct (like when Peter’s responded to Putrid Mark. Its a bug, it will be fixed in an upcoming patch, end of post), when it is in an official way about either specific things or general outlooks, and cannot be responded to directly (blog posts), or when they hold equally open discussions with every single affected community at once. Look at the most recent Dev-led discussion and you’ll see what I mean.
1. Like Balekai said, conditions. In every single way we are the best condition class in the game. We can spam nearly every condition in the game, spread them to everyone in a large area. We have by far the strongest and most varied condition removal, as well as almost all the removal including secondary beneficial effects like transferring or extra healing. All of this is usually done AoE as well. Even our power builds have been conditions than many other classes’ condition builds for control.
Basically, we are an AoE condition control class. Our strength is our ability to control our opponents and make them significantly weaker, through mass condition application and some boon removal.
2) Of course ANet doesn’t hate Necromancers. I realize it feels this way, but remember that this is their game. They want every class to be good. The problem is that Necromancers are very different, and they want to keep that difference. They refuse to “buff” us by giving us things that other classes have, because it goes against what we are. That is why we don’t get mass boons like other classes, or dodges and the like.
The problem is, that on the same line a lot of what draws the line between too “weak” and too “strong” is very small. And because our mechanics are so unique, they can’t just use things that are working for others. Every time they try to fix a Necro problem, they basically have to completely invent a new mechanic from scratch. We are really resource heavy to balance, and it has taken its toll. So right now, they prefer to keep us slightly too weak, because that is far more manageable and healthy for their game than if we were too strong.
3. They actually do support those statements. As I’ve said before, I talked to quite a few of the devs in person. I have had drinks with a portion of the PvP team. They do believe what they say in general, but it has to be “PC” (politically correct) when they talk in public.
Anyway, what they want is for us to be a hyper-aggressive sustain class that uses various debuffing mechanics to bring enemies down to our level, and then win through superior abilities to fight the “Necromancer” fight. We slow down people’s actions through control effects like cripple, chill, and fear, we slow their damage output by weakening them, we corrupt their defenses and poison them to slow their sustaining. And all this time that they are being pulled down harder and harder, we are aggressively keeping up a large offensive pressure, forcing CDs and keeping them on the back foot.
It is all about bringing every other class down to our level of strength through a bunch of conditions and mechanics to weaken them, and then winning because we are designed to fight at this level. Realize that we operate in the exact opposite way of almost every other class.
4. I don’t think you realize how hard it is to communicate in general. Not to say that they couldn’t be better, because we should have a little discussion from the devs, but it is really hard to for them. Everything they say needs to be really thought out, because it will be used against them for years. They also can’t respond to a lot because things need to be kept behind closed doors until its ready to go.
Just to show, here is how things work from their side. They work on tons of things behind the scenes. Sometimes things happen and ideas are scrapped, in fact it is very common that in the development process the vast majority of ideas are dropped. This is completely fine and normal. Unless they have made the idea public. Anything said in public is taken to be a promise.
If a dev says “hey, we’re looking into some of the issues of Death Shroud that we’d like to get into next patch”, the public translates it to “we hereby promise to fix every issue that you have with Death Shroud in the next patch. Not only will we fix it, but it will be exactly how you wanted it fixed, and perfectly balanced on day 1.”
Now, let’s say that a Dev really loves Necromancers. So they make a few posts across a few topics just to talk with the community and say some things. People from other classes see this, and start riots in their own forums because ANet is blatantly favoring Necromancers and obviously no dev plays their class and hates them all.
The number of skills available is already pretty low for an MMORPG.
I don’t understand all this QQ necros are making, you guys got an incredibly strong heal and if this one ends up being too bad I’m sure Anet will buff it.
The skill is directly weaker than every other heal we have.
WoB with high healing power in a support build will heal the group for 35k HP, this will do 6-7k at best, the same that WoB will heal one person for. And it is only 5s longer CD, with vastly better traiting available to it.
Self healing will be out-classed by every single other skill. Consume Conditions has a higher base heal and scaling on a lower CD, and it removes conditions for more “effective” healing. WoB can easily double this skills healing to yourself, with only 5s longer CD.
All of the above, btw, cannot be countered by the opponent dodging. Blood Fiend is the closest analogue, as it can be avoided. Except Blood Fiend is strictly better at base, and has a ton of traits that push it even higher up there.
Why are you complaining so much?
You and other few ppl are always saying that Necro is good, that necro doesn’t need buffs and that everything is OK with necro’s skills and even some of them need nerfs.
If you honestly think this is true of my opinion then you have never seriously read or comprehended anything I have posted in the Necromancer forums over the last year (and over 3,000 posts), or anything in the podcasts (if you listen to them).
I try to keep a positive note on things, otherwise the forums turn into an even more negative and un-helpful place. And I try to play Devil’s Advocate for ANet, because no one else wants to consider things from their side. Besides that I generally gush over how amazing minions are, and try to give some ideas for improving the class I’ve spent too much time and money on.
Unfortunately, this was one of those situations where there really isn’t much of a positive to look at. There is one situation where this skill is worthwhile to taking, and that is PvE boss fights where either you and your party can’t stack in melee, or the fight is so easy that the vastly superior WoB healing in a support build doesn’t matter, and the DPS is better. That is because you’d never use this skill in a damage build because you will deal more damage just attacking.
Other than that one situation, this will see no serious use.
Just some perspective, there are 11 different threads in the Necro forums right now in response to this heal, with 19 pages of content.
Since the preview, a total of 2 people have expressed a positive opinion of the healing skill, and both of those 2 are PvE players, where the skill will arguably be passable in a few niche builds.
Shows you how often I play underwater then.
I would say damage done to targets be at about 250 and Healing should be about 500, of course not accounting for Power and Healing Power. They should be reasonable scaling nothing to over powered and nothing that makes it pointless like the scaling on the current Siphon skills.
I was thinking a max scaling of like 100 additional healing or damage. So if you had a Soldier build with max power, you get 100 more damage, if you had a Cleric’s build, you only get like 50 more damage but 100 healing.
I couldn’t wait for the dec 10th patch till I saw the live stream,now im starting to look in to other MMO’s to play like WildStar.This Dev team has failed the game.
Except I know Wildstar isn’t going to be worth my time, because they are dead-set on re-skinning WoW, which I absolutely hated.
I realize that voting with your wallet normally works, but they don’t exactly have info on who isn’t paying. If every Necro stops paying, they don’t suddenly realize “oh hey, Necros are kitten ed I wonder why”.
If anything, removing monetary support of the game hurts you. It means they have less resources, which is already a huge problem with why we don’t get fixed. If they had more resources, they could make more aggressive changes with our class.
Sigils with ICDs generally block each other. So if one goes on CD, all the others are on the same CD.
Yes. They dont want a necro overbuff , especialy with a 2nd healing signet.
My hopes and guess is, theyre playing it safe with this one while making a solution for healing/regen in DS
I have to say out of every dev, I trust him the most with us. I talked to him (albeit in summer) but he had a solid grasp of what we needed (realize that you might not get it in “official” comments on forums because he has bosses watching him, and people who will hold him to it if it isn’t delivered as they want).
I honestly feel like there are two parts of the ANet team. The half that really just doesn’t get Necromancers at all, and can’t fix them to save their lives. The other half (probably smaller than half) knows exactly what needs to happen, but can’t get the resources to do it while fighting the rest of the team on their idiotic ideas.
It can’t be instant cast with burst healing. No healing skill in the game should be un-counterable like that. Go check my suggestion in another thread for how to fix that, and the skill itself.
All they need to do to “rework” this skill is revert it back to the old version, but with a few changes to make it a bit more reliable and less abusive.
Passive:
Siphon health when hit
Passive Damage: 200(ish)
Passive Healing: 200(ish)
No ICD at all
Active: 2 parts
1) Marks a target, allied player attacks against this target siphon health. Applies 10 stacks, plus 5 for every nearby ally player up to 25 stacks max. Instant cast, 30s CD
2) 1.25s cast time, castable for 5 seconds after marking the target (the duration of the mark, the 30s CD runs down while this is available). Removes up to 10 stacks from the target instantly, dealing no damage but healing for the same as if you had removed them yourself.
Both passive and active have no ICD. The passive numbers are obviously just thrown out there, but with damage and no ICD, they should be somewhat low. Also note that Bloodthirst would affect the values because it is life stealing again; if this is too strong they can re-word the skill so it deals damage and heals, but doesn’t count as siphoning.
The active has two parts. The first is the mark as we see it now, it is instant and scales up. This is because with a removed ICD, having a Necro able to “potentially” remove 25 stacks on his own in a 1v1 would be absolutely insane. So instead it scales up with allies, so the only way to get full use out of the skill is to have 3 friends nearby. This still allows the other person to have counterplay by evading afterwards. I removed the burst healing from this because no healing skill should have burst-healing without a cast time, and also this was a flat buff, so I needed a second effect.
The second effect is guaranteed healing. It heals you for the same as if you had consumed the stacks (up to 10), but doesn’t deal the damage and can be interrupted. Meaning the reward for the “best” case is all the added DPS. However, it cannot be dodged, so if you accidentally mark someone that then goes completely invuln for 5 seconds, you can still get some healing, but it will be very weak.
Let me know what you think, and also any numbers since I don’t know. I think there should be decent healing power/power scaling, with decent bases. Somewhere between Blood Fiend that barely scales with HP, and WoB which has insane scaling.
Could you guys please let the necro community know what you will be doing about this new healing signet fiasco?
Thank you in advance.
“This skill is really strong because it can add 6k damage to the target, so it must be completely balanced, now excuse me while I go nerf Blood Magic because its too strong atm”
“WARNING, SPAM ‘SKILLFUL’ DODGES NOW”
A 10 point Blood Magic trait outheals this skill anyway, so if you need underwater healing go for that, it not only heals for more, but it is much more likely to get the full healing off.
No thanks. Seeing as alot of people dont run Minion builds where as ALL Mesmers have to have Illusions.
At least a minion heal would have been useful to someone.
And my condolences to you too Mr. Squishy Thief. I still appreciate your venom-sharing in PvP that makes me look good when I destroy someone 1v1 because all my minions and I have venoms.
To me it just seems like if people dont see a giant initial heal they call the skill bad. Same reason skelk venom is getting so much hate.
No, in fact that was a completely fine function, I was happier with the skill when I originally thought it had no burst heal at all.
The problem is there is no situation where this heal will be desired.
Group support? Well of Blood makes it look pathetic, and can more than double the healing, at nearly the same CD, and with a better group of supporting traits.
Sustain-based heal? Blood Fiend, as bad as it is, will do better.
Anything else? Consume Conditions still is far better.
The only time this skill would be worth bringing is when you are doing content so mind-numbingly easy that you never activate your healing skill anyway, so might as well make it a little faster by using this for the mediocre DPS.
Why does every class forum think their class is terrible and super neglected? its pretty interesting.
Because kitten like this happens. Just watch the video, their complete lack of interest is so incredibly obvious its pathetic. They didn’t even pretend to be excited for it.
it was basically. “This is what the necro gets. NOW LETS MOVE ON TO THE REAL PROFESSIONS!”
This. It was the equivalent of forcing a kid to eat vegetables
Back in my day, we didn’t jump! We had to WALK around obstacles, and we didn’t complain! kitten kids grumblegrumblesomethingracistgrumble.
http://www.skysigns.com/index.html
…. I’m only half kidding. The cake didn’t seem to do anything though… and we’ve tried reason and communication, so we know those are out… singing telegram?
Maybe we need to start making passive-aggressive statements on Facebook where we don’t really name ANet, but everyone knows its them.
Like: “This ONE company keeps ignoring me and not returning my texts. I guess they don’t even know I exist anymore!” except obviously in much worse grammar and more spelling errors.
The good news is I got into the Hearthstone beta, so I can at least have fun while my GW2 is open in the background.
The next problem, and I don’t know if this was a bug or what, but it only seemed to trigger once per second for both being attacked from its passive and when it was activated..
There is an ICD on both the passive, and active (active is per-person), it only procs once per second because that’s the ICD.
You know, in case it was too strong already.
Just… reroll… Gaurdian and/or Warrior already, Bhawb. x.X
I have one of every class, actually, and something like 4 Necros.
Maybe I’ll try Spirit Weapon Guardians…
^the only way #1 would work as a skill is if it did more damage than it healed for, otherwise we’d have to worry about being OP unkillable monsters that are able to magically generate HP.
Can we use epidemic on it ?…
Can we transfer it?…
Can we consume it? …
Do we have to wait untill tuesday to know how it interacts?
It’s a debuff, not a condition. Like the system of buffs they have for things like Spectral Armor, or Spirit Buffs, but debuffs.
Not to burst your bubble but losing a heal to add 300 dps for 5 people for 4 seconds (because one second always gets clipped off) and then them having to waste several seconds of their warrior dps rezzing you isn’t a good trade off. JUST saying. :P
I never actually use a heal against most boss fights where you just stack, so it’ll be worthwhile. I’m sure I’ll hit the skill as a smash my face repeatedly against my keyboard, because PvE is so hard.
The good news is even if they kill the class we can just bring it back again.
Unless they nerf that too.
I actually feel terrible seeing you so negative. You always defended all the crappy stuff ANet did to Necros. Anet, You broke Bhawb! T_T Why did you do it?
I’m actually fine, its not like one crappy patch is going to break my spirit (seriously, I’d have quit before Christmas the year it came out), I’m just hopefully going to get all the QQing out now so I can do my proper job of defending everything ANet does. Stockholm Syndrome is fun.
Besides, at least now I can have the equivalent of J4’s ult. I can now use this to Mark someone and say “I’M NECRO, I’M HELPING” and then die.
Anyway, on a more Bhawb-like note. I do actually think this will be okay in PvE where heals aren’t really that needed for a lot of dungeon/boss farming where you just stack up and roll your face over the keyboard until the boss is dead. A decent DPS buff that will actually get almost full use off its stacks and keep your team alive without hurting you much at all.
Wait.. idea…
OH NO, I HOPE A NET DOESN’T NERF OUR ABILITY TO SUCK SO HARD. That’ d be a crying shame!!!!!!!!!
Okay sit tight, guys. We’re on the path to world domination.
+1. The comedy in this thread will keep me company tonight as I listen to some emo music, paint my nails black, and write poetry about how ANet hates us.
I have to say, to look on the bright side of things: there has been some great comedy coming out of this. The heal still sucks, but at least I can laugh about it before I cry myself to sleep tonight.
The ICD on the active is okay. In fact, I am slightly happy that they put it in because it shows they realize that Vampiric abilities need ICDs. I don’t know if this was the best one to put it in simply because it is already gated by its own CD/buff timer, etc., but it shows that small thing that I like, for the future of Blood Magic.
I’m not happy about the Passive ICD, and loss of damage. That, and the CD is what kills the skill for me. If the CD was a bit lower (30s base), with the passive healing slightly lowered, and put back the damage in some form, I’d see the skill being decent again. The key “theme” of the skill was being able to drop guaranteed burst healing that a heal would normally give you, and in return have an incredibly aggressive, damaging heal. High risk/reward.
Simple; swap to another class. Mesmer treats you pretty good if you want to play condition/support.
The problem is I absolutely love Necro MM, and no other class is remotely close.
I believe they have a few semi decent wvw players in their testing servers though dont they? And many spvp players do some wvw aswell afaik?
I don’t know of any pure WvWers that are on there, but yes quite a few sPvPers wvw for fun. But its certainly possible that some are there.
The active needs to be a heal or this is worthless.
10% mitigation doesn’t mean kitten when you have no heal.
There is a 4k ish base heal on the skill. It heals you for that on activation, then you can consume 4 (5 if you are Jesus Himself) marks of a total of 25 (1s ICD on hitting for the steal) to siphon HP. So in general, you’ll get around 5.5k healing if the other person is AFK, and more like kitten if they aren’t terribad.
I can tell you that they have no top end pve players in their testing servers or giving them direct feedback. And that goes for all classes and pve in general.
Not PvE, or WvW. Its all sPvP.
5.2k. You don’t actually get 5 procs out of it unless you have a perfect timing with your Locust Swarm pulse.
This. In the preview the best he got was around 5k healed. Even he sounded as excited as I was “it healed 5k…”, wooo… I know that I definitely want a skill that has worse passive healing than Blood Fiend, and worse active healing than Dagger 2.
It was terrible anyway so who cares. Who wants to heal by being hit? Completely illogical.
The passive wasn’t about gaining HP from being hit. It was a flat damage mitigation per-hit. If you got hit for 3k, a 300 siphon would have been a 10% damage reduction. That is quite strong, especially when you consider the perma-retal as well.
I’m going to contact some friends in game who I know have lines to the developers, and see if I can’t get contact info so I can personally convey some of our feelings, or at least make sure that those feelings have already been translated.
I’m kind of at a loss of what to say though. I’ve met a good portion of the PvP team in person. I felt like they were really passionate about the game and balance, and I still do. This is their game, its their baby, and they want it as good as possible, but I feel there is a disconnect between ideology and the final product.
This recent signet, for example. The idea was amazing. I and many others were really excited to see it in action, and to play around with it. A signet that gave up guaranteed burst healing for sustained/burst damage, with a lot of counterplay included for defending, and lots of room for skillful use/avoidance? Amazing idea. It had me really, really excited, not only for the skill itself, but the idea that “wow, Anet can come up with ideas like this? I can’t wait for the other skills they do.”
But then it gets previewed, and everything that made the skill really unique was stripped from it. They added a clunky ICD on defense for… what exactly? The passive damage was removed as well, both of these were key ideas for the passive. It was supposed to be something that applied passive damage reduction and damage output, to reward you for being in the fray. Then after you had baited out their defensive mechanics, you slap them with a mark, and your team descends for the kill. You save some fast-hitting moves to destroy them with a big burst, but the trade off is no burst heal at all. You’re completely trading away a guaranteed heal for passive damage reduction/retaliation, and a strong burst option, all with high counterplay.
But all the personality of the skill was stripped. The max stacks made sense (enforces a max-healing cap), but the rest of the changes completely gutted it. There is a big disconnect between what could have been, and what is, and it both saddens and annoys me. They butchered what could have been a great skill.
I’m open to ideas on how to get in contact, because I’d love to. I’d like to think they’d listen to me, as well as a few others, considering our history on these forums and in the community. Long ago I had been told by a dev that he’d really love to show up on a Podcast with me, but he got shut down by “higher ups”. I know for a fact that at least one dev watched a few of our old casts. But now ANet is completely unreachable. I’m honestly at a loss.
If they just took the feedback from players at the top end of each gametype more seriously they could avoid things like this. Sadly they cant seem to tell the difference and end up ignoring it all.
They do have lines of communication open to high level PvPers, or at least ones they have identified and chosen. The problem is that most of those same players have been doing what we do in the forums, except directly to the devs… to the same results as we see. They got even more exasperated than us, and most of them that I know of just gave up.
I wish they’d open up more formal lines of communication. They have forums, they can see people who get really highly rated posts, and who post alot. They have known of people like Nemesis for ages, but to my knowledge they never really go out of their way for feedback, which I think is lost potential. Its not like they need to massively increase people’s workload, which I realize is difficult, but if they had at least a few people from each profession who really understood what was up feed stuff to the devs, it’d help a lot.
I didn’t watch it all the way through the first time (I couldn’t handle it). But wow. Not only could they not muster up the slightest bit of interest, but they spent half the time not even talking about it.
Seriously, ANet, just grab some people who play Necro and are involved in the community, and get in contact with them. It is glaringly obvious that no one on the design or balance team has touched one, so at least get decent input.
My personal favorite moment was when the guardian burst healed for 14k…. and they were like “wow that was cool”. They had to work like hell just to get the necro heal to do anything at all, other than the cool icon over the golems head. They just kept chain resetting the skill and recasting it…. over and over…. and look at that amazing healing!
I loved the part where the golem absolutely destroyed him in 2 seconds, and they just ignored it.
I also like the part where they activated it, and we’re like “look, it has a red thingy… and uh… Ranger time now?”
Yeah, this has really annoyed me. They took a skill that could have been really fun, have taken a lot of skill/counterplay to use properly, and made it… this.
It made since for it to be lower than the warrior signet because it had the damage portion now it is just sadly weaker in every possible way.
This. Also, note that it is at best a bit weaker than the warrior heal. It still relies on getting hit. Its pathetic.
Oh, and apparently John thinks the skill is fine because it can “add 6k damage in a team fight to one target”. Yeah, next they’ll tell us Reanimator is one of the best traits in the game.
he said it would be super strong in team fights for spiking down targets, that it will add an additional 6k damage to said target.
The idea is there, i just dont think it will work right now.
So again, they spout nonsensical BS based on numbers that will never be achieved against decent players in realistic play?
This reeks of the same crap that was shoved in our faces when we were told we didn’t know how to use DS (you’re supposed to save it for right before you die, apparently), when we were told 4 months after the fact that Putrid Mark was indeed stealth nerfed and it could be put on full CD when interrupted (despite no skill with similar function doing that), wrongly I might add as he was corrected later, and more recently when we were told that Blood magic Siphoning was starting to feel right.
No one should be surprised though. The devs never post in the Necromancer forums, why should we expect them to have any idea what they are talking about or any sense of connection with the community when they actively avoid us?
Can we stop talking about thief on a necro thread. :P
We wouldn’t have the Necro forums if we weren’t allowed to complain about other classes.
Ok..but why would a thief be in the front line?
Because 95% of thief builds are either dagger or sword main-hand for damage.