Guild Wars 2

Josh Davis.6015:

Just wanted to hop in and mention that we’ll also be talking about a few of the balance changes for each profession in addition to looking at the healing skills.

It was great to see the Necro portion was essentially “hey guys, we added an ICD, a cast time, made the CD longer, and got rid of the passive damage from the healing skill. Well, time to get to ranger!”

Necromancer heal is an issue of a good idea that was destroyed by details.

The passive is essentially a 300ish damage reduction on every hit that comes in… oh wait, no it isn’t, because there is an ICD. Not only did they nerf it from being a life steal (aka doing damage) and having an interesting niche where we could essentially choose a healing skill that did lots of damage, but had otherwise low healing, but they threw an ICD on top to make completely sure that it wasn’t helpful.

The active is just… wow. You can not only avoid getting dodged, you can avoid all of the extra proccing, which, again, has ICD to make sure it isn’t good.

“But it’ll be good for supporting!” Yeah, because we see sooo many support Necromancers.

I’ll try it out in PvE so I can turn our really easy boss fight into a slightly easier boss fight. Other than that, 10/10 job ANet, you’ve managed to make it quite obvious its a personal hobby of yours to get Necro hopes up, only to crush them back down with nerfs.

Its sad, really. We had multiple threads in the Necro forums that already thought the skill would be really niche, and then it turns out its been nerfed since then. But, of course there either won’t be any interaction with Necros as per usual, or they’ll tell us to L2P again.

phaeris.7604:

lollers, venom share

You know venom share has a radius of 350

how many times is your whole team in a 350 radius.

Stand next to an MM, boom full effect.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Turns out, no retal damage from this signet.

Yep. The passive part of this skill is basically a flat damage reduction for however much its listed as, at the low low price of not getting a healing skill.

ronpierce.2760:

I’m going to tell you now, unless you’re getting carried by the passive, its not going to be worth using. At ALL. The 1 second ICD means Blood fiend passively heals you for more. Yeah, no one’s using this BS.

This skill is absolutely pathetic compared to what it could have been, holy kitten.

Steal health when hit? Nah, that’s too cool, you just heal (essentially a flat damage reduction).

The one good thing I see from the skill is that since they added an ICD, maybe they finally realized that siphon effects generally need ICDs, and they will do it on Vampiric/Vampiric Precision soon, along with a large buff to the amounts. The skill itself though is really sad.

2) No ICD, every hit = siphon
3) No proccing while in DS, most likely, so no passive damage

Just see what you enjoy more and play that. The game is not “hardcore” enough for class choice to matter, and if you’ve played MMOs before, you will know that what is strong now will be useless a few months later, and then good again. Its all cyclical.

Just play what you like. Try them both out in sPvP to get a feel for level 80.

The scaling on the healing is a lot too, at least for the active. Mine was reading for nearly 700 in sPvP.

I don’t actually know how strong the Warrior one will be, considering that a lot of current warrior builds totally rely on Healing Signet, and this thing’s healing is… pathetic comparatively.

Bellamy.9860:

Should’ve probably made that clearer, i meant the signets passive, leech life whenever you are hit, might only work per skill activation against the signet wearer. So it would be like a reverse ele signet heal, which only heals per cast and not per hit.
Or it will be somewhat of a hard counter to multihit abilities (your example about necro mirror).
Also, 8k dagger2(Edit:+10k damage)? Yes pls.

OH, that will be interesting to know, but it sounds like per hit, not cast. Obviously its all just assumptions at this point, and the wording isn’t exactly clear “from enemies that strike you”.

Monoman.2068:

This sounds extremely interesting. I will probably use this even if it doesn’t work out this way to fight fast hitting classes but will it work against rangers, mesmers, and minion masters?

It would work against these. Which actually brings up an interesting point: 3/6 minions will actually give the attacker a net heal per time they hit, in addition to taking damage for the effort. Same with clones, which hit so weakly they might actually heal you overall (though for a small amount).

Bloodthirst affecting this heal would instantly put Bloodthirst as an amazing trait again. It would boost the damage and healing of the passive part by 60ish, and active by over 100.

Bellamy.9860:

Maybe the passive proccs per skill used? That way it would only heal/leech once if you are attacked by a channel.
This sounds like a balancing/effect trigger nightmare…

No thanks, I want my 8k healing dagger 2, pls.

Ghostextechnica.3270:

Despite how much I would love if it did, It honestly just can’t work like that.

Allies, 6+ minions, multiple wells, Warhorn 5 swarm, All the staff marks, and Axe 1… I can’t even work out how many hits those would all do in 5 seconds.

The damage alone would be ridiculous.

Minions won’t proc it, in all likelyhood.

ronpierce.2760:

What about axe 2? It’s like what 6 hits in 2 seconds? inc like 1.8k retal damage from a heal signet :P

Well, an Axe 2 vs a Necro with this signet and retal would be around 500-600 damage per hit, and Axe 2 is 8 hits in 2.25 seconds. So it’d be between 4k and 4.8k damage returned, with a 300 damage reduction of every single hit.

This skill has promise man, I NEED to get my hands on it.

ronpierce.2760:

18×500 damage = 9000 damage on top of the dagger damage/minion damage, every 20 seconds. They’re not going to allow that. :P

Ugh, FINE MOM, ruin all the fun.

But yeah, it’d be crazy if they allowed that. I really want to see what good Necros in teams do with this skill. Because that damage you listed is possible, and exceedable, by a team of 5 focus firing someone in PvP.

Ironically, I think this skill will make Necromancers immune to the AA of other Necromancer’s with axe, lol.

Roe.3679:

I could see this meshing well with a near perma retaliation build, and I wonder if you could heal a lot using the active with say, axe or dagger 2? This could potentially open up a lot for a soldier/siphon necro build.

Like I said, I’m very interested in this.

Well, Axe 2 for example hits 8 times in 2.25 seconds, so at just 500 healing/damage, that’s healing of 4k, but more importantly damage of the same. Meaning a total health swing of 8k.

Yeah, with how high the numbers are… lol.

kyubi.3620:

did they ever plan to make damage increase to pets depending on player stats someday?

We will never get true scaling with pets. The one thing that quite a few of us are hoping for is that they’ll either flat buff all minions in PvE to comply with the new Ascended tier, because as they are now they are “tuned” to Exotic.

The active is 5s on a 20s (16 traited, which is really easy to access) CD, which is pretty good.

Also, for a passive effect, a flat 300 damage reduction on every single hit? That is huge, especially for high toughness builds. Plus perma-retaliation, without taking up a retaliation slot, meaning you can be dealing something like 500-600 damage to enemies per hit.

This is one of those skills that is sitting on a razor’s edge. It could be amazing, could be terrible, it all comes down to the very small mechanics and numbers.

Edit: What’s the chat link for this?

ronpierce.2760:

Because the tool tip specifically says “Allied PLAYERS” steal health from the target. And If you link it in chat ingame its passive heals/deals about 320 health/damage per hit taken, and the on use lasts 5 seconds and siphons 550 hp per hit, and that’s if it hits at all, and doesn’t include minions. :S

Is there any skill in the game right now that doesn’t treat summoned creatures like allies?

ronpierce.2760:

The necro one isn’t going to get much play at all. Its not enough healing to compensate, plus there’s no “going back up” with it. AND if your signet use is blocked/evaded, then what? And it has no synergy with minions. I couldn’t see it being useful to really anyone. It needed to be “on hit” plain and simple.

Do we know the actual numbers on it at 80? And the scaling?

Also, how does it not work with minions?

Our signet is going to actually be fairly strong in coordinated play, I think, if you can make do with the loss of CC. No ICD on being hit, even if its say 100 per hit (which seems low), for 5s (the listed duration), realize that just us as a Necro alone can hit around 15 times channeling two skills. A full team of kittenting 10 times in that? Plus minions who you can get 10 hits out of as well? That is a lot of potential burst damage and not-bad healing, with a very short CD.

The things that will keep it niche is its weakness compared to being a “real” healing skill, and needing coordinated play for full use. It won’t be a soloQ pugging heal for most people.

Its possible for them to do whatever they want. Its a question of resources though, and using a significant amount of resources for a “small” issue in the grand scheme of the whole game isn’t something they can afford now.

victornajduch.4859:

So is the stat scaling expected to get fixed with this upcoming patch or future patches?

Wasn’t confirmed. They were going to try getting it in this time but no promises, IIRC.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I would like to think, if it were possible

That it would be technically 2 heals:

1 would be equipped and then as you go into Death Shroud it is replaced by the Death Shroud version, kind of like how some skills work different under water.

A very interesting idea, and could at least potentially fix the issue with other Transforms (make the skills uncastable, but still equipped like this). Unfortunately they’d still need to make it possible for DS to be healed through.

Just a note, Vampiric Master is still bugged, and is not properly scaling with Healing Power. You can check it in game, but with 200 healing power and 1123 (Cleric amulet) it heals for 72 per hit.

I had told Rennoko in some other thread that I would check it, and then totally forgot. So hope he sees it here :P

Also, just so everyone knows, I did report it a while back, and it is supposed to be changed soon™, I got a dev response that it was known and being worked on.

ANet has done a number of coding things that are really weird, and I’m not sure if they could make this one work. Not to mention it would also need to be coded so that it actually healed you while in DS, since even if the passive “worked” while in DS, it’d still try to heal you when you get hit, and be unable to.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

Yeah, but that could surely be changed for ONE heal.

A heal that involves damage reduction/life force regen while in Death Shroud could be an option.

It isn’kittens an issue of coding. DS is a quasi-transform. When you are transformed, you have an entirely different set of skills. As in, all of your normal skills are unequipped, and the new skills are equipped (along with w/e other effects). This is why Transforms kill minions and signets. (All of this is just my understanding, please correct me if I’m wrong).

Which would make it hard to make this skill “work”, because as far as the game is concerned, when you are in DS you have no healing skill equipped.

I’m okay with this change. It never really made sense that Putrid Mark just… magically removed conditions from you no matter what. It makes it consistent with MoB, and gets a nice buff to compensate (allied cleansing).

And let’s face it. Its not like its all that rare for a Necromancer to be close enough for this to work on themselves.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I think the above sums up all of the problems with the necro very well. And ironically, none of those issues are addressed in this upcoming update. This annoys me a lot, they keep giving our class none-fixes. They switch some numbers around, fiddle with some cooldowns, or remove a bleed somewhere. But they don’t fix anything about our class.

Also something that could be added to that list: Change Defiant/Unshakeable so our control skills actually pull some weight in PVE.

They have stated a few times that the biggest problem with Necros are that we have, well really big problems. Our problems aren’t simple number fixes like other classes. What does that mean? It takes 10x more resources for them to fix one of our issues, than it does to fix an issue for someone else, because instead of just, say, changing a small mechanic to help fix the issue (like they did for Ranger spirits), that doesn’t work for us (Dhuumfire). They need to completely axe the problem-causing things, then completely make a brand new mechanic to replace it. That involves coding, testing, idea iteration, blah blah blah. It all translates to a lot of time and other resources, which for us translates to: It’s going to take a while.

They’ve stated that Death Magic needs help. They know Blood Magic needs help. They know we have a lot of sucky traits. They are aware of a lot of our issues. The problem is all of these issues aren’t just “X is a little too weak, let’s bump up its strength by 5%”, its an issue of “X mechanic is badly implemented at its core, we need to completely remake it”. Death Magic can’t be fixed without adding at least 4+ new traits, and reworking others. Blood Magic can’t be fixed while Vampiric/Vampiric Precision work as they do. Dhuumfire can’t be fixed as is.

If you love the Necromancer class, you just need to realize that it will be a very long process for us to see these issues fixed.

Knighthonor.4061:

I believe its for specific use. for certain builds that focus on support of team.

Basically this. It’ll be a support skill.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Any ideas on how necro can survive post patch?

Yes, we’ll be just fine, just like we are right now. Not perfect, but fine.

Unless you are trying to get onto a competitive team for the big money in #eSports, there is absolutely no reason to care about if you are “viable” or not.

Dark Path needs to be more reliable, if that means a slight change in its mechanics, then I’m all for that. I’m not sure about this because there is no counterplay, but then again most leap/mobility skills have no real counterplay so…

Rennoko.5731:

I sure is shooting hope so, because otherwise this is going to be complete garbage in PVP without some really nice scaling.

I can see it having some use on my minion builds, otherwise I don’t see it seeing high level use, just because the builds that “would” use it aren’t currently viable.

Rennoko.5731:

Here you go….

Can anyone confirm this was fixed? Or should I retest it?

I’ll retest in a few, but I did report this at the time and it was confirmed as a bug that had a fix in the works.

Swagg.9236:

I can understand though. The whole situation with necromancer being overpowered is like someone being given a mansion in a house give-a-way, living in it for many months and then being told one day that the more quaint and average house down the street was actually the house that he was supposed to win. It’s difficult to go back even though it’s the correct thing to do.

Most Necros want to go back to where it was. We liked the challenge of actually having to outplay our opponents. Many Necros post quite often about ways to scale back the things that broke the class. Its like what’s happened to Warriors recently, the majority of people fighting against justified fixes are people who jumped on the bandwagon.

And its not like I’m having to give back my big present. I’ve never played condi necro, I have been protesting staff for quite some time, and give it up in most of my builds. I play MM, I always have, and I always will, these changes will do nothing to most of my builds.

But you’re comparing things that are incomparable. Skills with really easy to avoid animations have big effects. This is the MO of a lot of Ele skills; gigantic animations and effects requiring heavy setup to make it work, for the payoff of damage that Necros could never dream of. Compare things like Fire Grab, Meteor Shower, Dragon’s Tooth, Churning Earth, or even skills from other classes like Backstab, Killshot, 100b, etc. They all can give you absolutely massive payoff for skillful use, but on the other hand require a lot of traiting, setup, skill, or some combination.

What do we get for staff? 3 bleeds, (sorry, 2 because MoB is one of the strongest skills in the game) a poison field, a strong condi removal (that was stealth nerfed by Thor’s nerf hammer 4 months without a kitten word), and an AoE fear. You want attacks that can deal 50k damage when properly set up? Don’t look to Necro. Want abilities that 2-shot most players? Not Necros.

Staff is already easy to dodge. 3/4s animation is enough time to get the hell out of the way. If you can’t dodge them, l2p. The problem isn’t dodging staff, its knowing what to dodge. So again: make our casting animations better, because staff 2-4 animations are way too similar, and problem fixed, without making it impossible to ever hit an aware enemy with a mark. Its not like we get some massive effect from hitting you when you screw up (BEWARE MY 3… sorrry BEWARE MY 2 STACKS OF BLEEDS BEWWWWWAAAAAAARRRRRREEEEEE!!!!!!).

Kiriakulos.1690:

Am I the only one really confused about this?

If the passive heals you when you are struck it means that either:
a) you never take damage, since you out-heal incoming or;
b) it just mitigates damage, meaning you can never passively get to full HP until combat ends.

The only way I can see this signet working, as it’s currently worded, is if either the active heal is huge, or you can recover the passive HP while in Deathshroud.

The skill will mitigate X amount of damage per hit, X being whatever number it siphons for, while at the same time being a perma-retaliation like effect as well. I’d assume it’ll be similar to the HP values of the other “siphon” like signets, maybe slightly lower because it has a damage-coefficient that they don’t.

Essentially the skill will require you to be focused to be killed, because the random AoE spam will not hurt you very much, and hurt others quite a bit (especially if paired with retal, you could be hitting back for 300-400 just by being hit).

The active will be there for “burst” healing/damage. Again, probably won’t be a ton of healing, because it will deal damage, but if you drop it on an important target, you’re giving every ally that hits that target an armor ignoring damage buff, plus healing.

Obviously nothing can be determined until we know exactly how it works: ICD (or not, hopefully), values, scaling, CD on the active. However, I can see it being a strong skill for certain PvE fights (trash mobs and LoS stacking boss fights), WvW zerging, and tanky/support PvP builds (including MMs).

It’ll have a few niche uses, most likely. It’ll work well for any build that either won’t be taking a lot of focus/damage, or already has a lot of passive healing.

Remember that with the heals we already have, any new heals are most likely going to be more along the lines of niche heals, since CC is one of the best self heals in the game.

Andele.1306:

That is why i said a worse vampiric, think of how many times and how much damage goes in pve (as in its rare to see 40 hits that do 60k over the amount of 1 hit 40k damage skills on mobs).

It’ll be (gasp) a niche skill in certain situations. God forbid.

Swagg.9236:

snip

Your entire argument is based off of false ideas, and as long as you stick to the idea that Staff eles are good, Necros have short cast times, and aren’t easy to dodge, everything you say is based on things that just aren’t true.

Staff ele isn’t good. Necros already have long cast times, plenty of after-animations, and if you don’t suck you can dodge anything you want.

The only thing we need is better cast animations on a few of our abilities that are too similar.

vicious.5683:

maybe I’ll wait for the red post to tell me that, not any random forum user.

Have fun waiting forever. I’m one of the longest-standing forum posters here, I’ve read every red post that’s been posted here. All 10 of them. You won’t get anywhere if you demand red posts; sure it might happen, but 99% of posts asking for a red post don’t get one.

Lorelei.3918:

Resource runs are boring. PvE is boring. That’s work. Why the hell do I want to work in a video game? I work 50 hours a week in the real world. So I can come home and work another 20 hours in a video game?

I’m sorry, but you do realize you’re playing an MMORPG right? GW2 was originally criticized for not being grindy enough. Gold sinks and grinding are absolutely necessary parts of the game.

What do you need gold for anyway? A cosmetic item? Well guess what, just like in the real world, you need to work for it. Every single meaningful grind in this game is either for a very small and unneeded stat boost (ascended), or for looks (things like cultural armor). You don’t need money for anything. If you want those things though, you have to work for it.

They’ve actually done something no other MMORPG (to my knowledge) has done, and that’s removed grinding as being necessary to being able to play the game. You can very easily play GW2 without needing to grind at all.

spoj.9672:

Thats what I was thinking. But it depends on the cast time, the cooldown, the duration and the heal numbers. Quite a few factors that could make it a very bad skill.

Every skill could be bad depending on those factors :P

MMs simply don’t want the trait. Using the argument of overpower Vampiric Precision is completely moot and pointless, you could say that for any trait. If Reanimator spawned 500 jagged horrors per second, I think we’d suddenly love it. But right now, its still a kitten trait.

Vampiric Precision, barring it being OP, will not be desired on the vast majority of MM builds. MM builds only have one open spot for a trait, the 10 point trait (20 will always be Vampiric Master over Precision, 30 will always want Fetid Consumption over it).

What else is in that 10 point trait?

Bloodthirst: 20% stronger siphons. This means that for an MM to want Vampiric Precision, they need to be able to get over 20% more siphoning from that trait, with their current build.

Mark of Evasion: Better for condition builds than just normal ones, but does well if you want perma Regen on your minions. If this isn’t wasted on high regen time already, then you’re looking at at least 135 HP/s while its up, with 60% base regen uptime; better than Vampiric Precision due to AoE healing/damage, at a higher rate while up

Transfusion: The best 10 point Blood Magic trait, hands down, no arguments. Its godly. No build that’s gone into Blood Magic can’t look at this trait and say “man, that looks good”

3 traits that, in the majority of minion builds, result in either higher healing, or higher healing and damage. Few MMs even want precision at all, especially because of what it gets paired with. Even Rabid, the only stat setup that takes good advantage of all the stats you need (precision and toughness, toughness scales far better with MM builds than vitality), still probably looks at Mark of Evasion fondly in more situations.

Our signet, depending on how much the Siphon is for, has very strong potential.

Perma retaliation like effect, and the healing every time we are hit is essentially straight damage reduction. For example, if we siphon 100 HP every time we get hit, its like reducing every single hit by 100 damage.

I love the idea of this signet, although I need to see the numbers if the siphon is remotely significant, I can see it being good in all game modes depending on build. PvE builds would allow us really strong group support for the LoS stack and face-kitten boss fights. WvW will be proccing, EVERYWHERE. PvP will be good for builds that don’t necessarily need CC or WoB. I just really hope that it scales well with healing power, because it’ll work best with Blood Magic support builds that also have self-healing.

One worry… Blood Fiend is getting even MORE useless as a heal.

A 10 point trait will reduce the CD by 20% as well, and a 10 point trait that has little competition.

There are already data-mined skill ideas out there. I didn’t look at the other classes, but Necro looks interesting.

Then what about a visual cue when endurance sigils proc? Other sigils give some kind of noticeable info that “hey X just happened/will happen”. At the very least, you can learn that the person has those sigils, and next time you can try to keep track of that and make smarter decisions. As it is now, the only way you can know if they have energy sigils is if you are perfectly tracking their endurance mentally, and know if they do/don’t have any other hidden endurance gain.

vicious.5683:

Guardians got a red post when they asked for buffs on scepter. I don’t see why necros should be different.

I’m guessing you’re new here. Here’s how the Necro forums work

1) Make a great discussion with lots of potential
2) Ask for red post
3) ???
4) Get a red post 6 months later telling you how to play your class, because you obviously don’t know how

Street Peddler.2638:

PvE amounts to “who can hit the training dummy the hardest”. How do you fix that easily?

Make it harder, and not all about just one-shot mechanics. It becomes less about hitting the dummy hard when the dummy hits back.

Generally speaking for the difference as to Doom and Reaper’s Mark:

Reaper’s Mark tends to be better for AoE fearing (like fearing people away from a rez/stomp), offensive fearing (when you don’t want to Doom), and starting a chain fear. I also find it really useful when running away from a group.

Doom is better defensively, better as an on-demand fear, and better to use as a fear if you’re just going for fears as part of combos, like the now-standard condi “bomb” rotation with bleeds. Its also really easy to chain fears with it, since you can get double-fears off Spectral Wall using it, and it is instant, so it can be used right as another control effect wears off.

Stx.4857:

If Vampiric and Vampiric Precision got the buffs they deserve(in order to make them a viable choice over other trees/traits), then the combination of those plus Vampiric Master would make the Necro basically unkillable, it would be worse than heal signet warriors.

The well trait I don’t really care about, because in PvP, players don’t stand in wells, so it is pretty irrelevent in my mind.

Ah yes, everyone will fear the unkillable Bunker Necro using… berzerker’s amulet?

MMs will not take the trait, ever. There are three traits in the exact same slot that are better for any MM build.

Nagato no Kami.4980:

Just turn Well of Blood into a water field. The light field is unusable for rally stacks and the heal pulse is too slow to be used for anything else.

How the kitten did we get a kittening light field anyway?!!?!?!? Is that some sort of kittening joke?!?!??!?!?!

Balance. I believe it used to be a water field, but to my knowledge its already the strongest healing skill in the game if you just consider the sheer max HP healed it can achieve, so having it as a water field just made it even more ridiculous. Plus the Light field’s combos actually make a lot of sense for us.

nekretaal.6485:

Rumor is that we are getting a lifesteal signet with no burst heal on activation. Sounds pretty sorry unless the lifesteal base values are huge and we all know they wolnt be.

I don’t know the mechanics of it, but I have heard indirectly through people on the alpha servers that it is a life-steal of some sort.