Guild Wars 2

Tman.6349:

And that is why I agree with the 100% proj finisher sentiment for Reaper’s Touch. And even went so far as to argue that it (adding 100% proj finisher would be as good/equal to reducing the CD by 15+%). Surely you aren’t advocating adding a blast finisher to Spinal Shivers? That would make one hell of an OP, ‘must have’ skill (not to mention traited CoD O.O).

Bawb, are you in the right thread? I think the 100% proj finisher idea has already been driven home…

The quote chain that put me on that directly said there was no need for a finisher because we can’t use it.

I actually think the idea of total active mitigation is great, it is one of the major things that made the Demon Souls/Dark Souls franchises work so well as hardcore games. Nearly every mob could kill you in a single combo/hit, it was entirely impossible to “tank” through hits in the traditional sense (unless you hid behind shield, but let’s be honest anyone who did that is a wuss). So you relied fully on active defense, and it ended up with a pretty deep combat system.

The problem with GW2 is ANet applied this only halfway. They didn’t go all-in like DS did, they had a hybrid of old MMOs and active defense. That, piled on top of an unequal distribution of active defense, and just flat out bad encounters lead to what we have now.

Blast finishers are literally the basis of entire sets of play in every game mode. WvW coordinated fights are heavily based around coordinated fields and finishers, just as much if not more so than any other buff. There are also entire PvP builds that exist solely because of field/finisher interactions, like D/D ele. And fields/finisher group buffing are a huge part of PvE, they provide both pre and during fight buffs to the team, plus things like Engi have heavily depended on the use of combos to fill their niche (engi’s use as a meta build was partly due to it being able to fill a certain level of stealth in lieu of a thief).

The combo system is inarguably a huge part of the game. It goes beyond just being a way to express skill, the game wouldn’t be remotely the same (in a bad way) if it were not for the existence of the combo system. Yes there are other ways to buff allies, but combos heavily dominate coordinated team support. And that is ignoring the very large addition they have to individual play.

You forgot the biggest anti between guardians and Necros, they have always been useful, we haven’t.

robertul.3679:

People keep saying projectile finisher this, blast finisher that but it’s extremely irrelevant since necro doesn’t have proper fields to benefit from it.

No, dark field life steal is not good enough. Neither is 3 seconds of weakness.

Whether or not our fields have the strongest finishers is absolutely irrelevant (and wrong). Finishers are a huge part of expressing your skill in the game. Any moron can press buttons, but combining skills in such a way that the result is more than the sum of the parts, which is exactly what finishers provide, is a way for the game to have depth to its mechanics. Not only is it important for solo play with your own build, but it is the biggest contributor to group play. Completely denying that from Necromancers is bad design.

Also, a dark field + Reaper’s Touch would provide up to 920(0.12 scaling) extra damage, and 808(0.4) healing.

A skill that gave a window of defenseless wouldn’t be broken in PvP. Yes some builds rely on Blocks, but there are already a ton of ways to get around them, this just introduces another that is more directly team-oriented, over Wail of Doom which interrupts blocks.

I think its a cool idea. I would say it should probably be constrained to just one or two skills though, not at all something as accessible as a field finisher. Something closer to the access levels of Revealed.

Genesis.7693:

Considering PvP is what I do exclusively its really hard for me to trust you on this simply cause your proposed change was PvE focused. Yes, necros have ways to hit through unblockable but not with direct damage.

Marks (traited), wail of doom, all wells, spectral wall, CPC, corrupt boon, epidemic, death nova’s field, dark path, grim specter, NCSY.

Stand The Wall.6987:

1. is fine as is. You guys are asking for too much. That skill hits really hard, gives tons of vuln and life force. Yeah classes should have ample oppurtunity to dodge it.

Reaper’s Touch is passable as is, that doesn’t mean it actually functions as well as it could. The Mirror Blade comparison is valid, and slight improvements to the skill in order to increase its combos with the rest of the class (finisher) and further improving focus’ identity as a damage/debuff weapon (regen to something else offensive) are large QoL improvements without making large power changes.

Dunno why I thought it was 40, but probably due to never using it.

With only 2 minions (Blood Fiend doesn’t count, it sucks and needs to die in a dark hole somewhere) I wouldn’t so much say its a condi MM build. It is basically a corruption build (already a bit suspect) with some minions and minion traits.

If you wanted to go for the “full” condi MM hybrid, pick up another minion over BiP, which is really weak, drop Blood Fiend for a real heal, (both of these changes it sounds like you figured out on your own) grab Death Nova, and then move around a few traits. Something like this would likely work much better without overall changing what you’re doing, just picking up better traits.

The problem is Suffer is strictly a weaker Plague Signet in every situation. The only thing it has is use in shout builds, otherwise it has no stunbreak, removes less conditions except in ideal conditions, has a longer CD, with the only benefit being damage/chill baseline. I honestly can’t see myself ever using it, since Trooper/Soldier runes are amazing on shout Reaper for the condi removal spam.

Cool idea, all it’d need is a debuff to convey what is going on.

Condi is a great choice for roaming like people said, but facing a zerg as any condi build is pretty much like bashing your face into a wall. Or fighting D/D ele.

Assuming corruptions actually worked in the first place as a theme, the idea of having a trait designed to push them even further into the high risk/reward territory is great. Master of Corruption would then make sense, the self-harm is even more dangerous, and in return the skills are even stronger.

Of course, like Corruptions as a whole, the implementation itself falls flat. Would still really like to see something like a Witch Doctor like elite that made the core concept of corruptions into a full spec with complimenting traits.

zapv.8051:

The regen is bad, it’s clearly an offensive weapon with two skills that hit relatively hard. Regen is probably the least desirable boon on focus.

This. Regen has absolutely no place on the skill, regardless of whether or not the healing is nice. It is a fully offensively focused skill, with a defensive boon slapped on.

zapv.8051:

Also, spinal shivers would still be bad at a 1 second cast. That’s just a 1/4 second reduction, which is not enough to make it hard to dodge at all. I’d suggest they remove the trait chill of death, which is cheap auto proc BS that carries our burst, and compensate by taking spinal shivers down to a 1/2 second cast or less.

The point isn’t to make it impossible to avoid, which is what 1/2s would be, at that point it only has a cast time so you can’t cast it at the same time as other abilities/while CCed. It changes fights in a very big way, it can’t be less than 3/4s, and even that is pushing it for an impactful ability. If any change would be made its to bump up the damage to push it more properly into the roll it is meant to full.

Jerus.4350:

You mean like Farnaz with confusion in Arah? I’ve seen 60 confusion before gotta be quick on the cleanse

Somewhat yeah, although Confusion is one of the worst conditions to be able to transfer back. But something like that being more prioritized in boss fights/dungeons overall, since the only dungeon I know of with heavy condition focus is TA (though I’ve never done Arah exp), and it isn’t done in a compelling way to encourage anti-condition mechanics.

Sagat.3285:

Okay it seems this hasn’t been said enough. Anything works in PvE/WvW. Lack of significant condition mobs in PvE is a flaw it doesn’t take advantage of a major part of the combat system and most of necro is useless there, there could have been possibilities for necro to contribute to dps by transfer and getting conditons off allies. What good are the additional conditions really bringing? Cripple on CPC is meh but that’s it.

Actually that brings up another good point, why aren’t there any boss fights where the boss doesn’t one shot people with a huge direct damage attack, but with a say instant 25 stacks of burning with 5k condition damage? Or a huge burst of conditions on a single target. There would be a lot of ways to deal with this (condition removal through runes, sigils, support builds of all kinds), but it would also allow Necromancer to uniquely do something. There are so many things they could do with condition transfers from bosses that inflict “OP” conditions that have to be dealt with, and that’d give us a niche.

Spinal Shivers should probably have a 1s cast time, just due to the fact that it is such a huge swing in the flow of the fight; the enemy goes from fairly strong (3 boons) to taking a large amount of damage + boon stripping and chill in one cast. Might want to look at the damage a bit as well.

The other thing that has to happen is Reaper’s Touch needs to be a 100% projectile finisher, just like the Mesmer equivalent, with a better boon.

I’d definitely prefer we had self harm in some form, because it could be really unique. However, I think a properly built self-harm Necromancer setup would require the attention an Elite spec brings, with dedicated traits, with a weapon to support the playstyle, with a shroud (or even changed LF mechanics) built around it, new utilities that have been built from the ground up to support self-harm, etc. Without that attention, I don’t think they can do a proper job of it.

The problem with Corruptions, even if we change them to be meaningfully powerful with meaningful self-harm, is they would dominate a build, and we don’t currently have the trait/weapon/utility based support to deal with that. As it is now all but Blood is Power have a unique “flavor” in that they are condition focused skills that have unique and strong impact, but in a fairly narrow setting. Keep that, fix BiP, remove Corruption from Consume Conditions, change Plague, remove self cost, and leave that theme for an elite spec where it can be properly pulled off.

vicious.5683:

you can transfer those conditions to enemy, you know that?

Or I could not waste valuable resources just to make sure I don’t neuter myself to use my own skill.

Rishnock.6230:

I had no idea they were projectile finishers…. It’s not written in the tool tip.

Yep, unfortunately minions’ functionality is really hidden, for whatever reason. Bone Fiend and Flesh Wurm each have 100% projectile finishers attached to every projectile they fire off, which in the case of Bone Fiend means every attack is 2x projectile finisher. Then the Bone Fiend active just modifies the normal Bone Fiend attack (similar to how turrets work) and deals more damage + 2s of immobilize per projectile, for up to 8s total.

Many of these suggestions take things that are already fine and makes them support for the hell of it, which isn’t good design. Sharing random heals doesn’t really make sense, these are skills that are used so that the Necromancer can heal themselves, and adding random heals to them does nothing but inflates the skills power levels without actually making the skill stronger in its own use. Basically, you end up with skills that do everything at once, but they do all of them badly, so you don’t end up with skills that are used with timing but just… used. This is why its so hard to add support to the profession right now, because you are forced to add it only to very underpowered skills and changing traits that aren’t taken. So you are really limited in what you can play with.

That said, Signet of Undeath and Spectral Wall are both great possibilities for support.

As a side note Bone Fiend is already really strong. 8s of immobilize broken into 2 individual sets of 4s immobilize, and 4 projectile finishers over the total effect.

Ilharn.6813:

25 Stacks Might +150 Power + 170 Power Banner are not too strong?

Nice strawman.

Decimate Defenses is at least 5x better than spotter, as an example. Most if not all of the listed traits are already strong enough being balanced around only 1 person getting them, and you’re going to argue that them being made 5x stronger is balanced. Good luck with that.

They could, they could also do a lot of things, but there is no reason to believe they will.

Jarvis.9540:

It stands to reason that we’ll eventually get an elite well skill now that they’ve changed categorizations of the elite and healing skills to match the utilities. With that in mind, what would you guys like to see in an elite well skill? I myself would like damage to enemies + invulnerability to allies inside the well.

Your entire premise is off though. We didn’t get new skills to fit every utility type, we got changes to old skills so that (almost) every skill has a utility type. There is nothing to suggest we’ll ever get new elites outside elite specs, which would have their own utility type.

It highly depends on what PvE content ends up being. As of right now? No real use for any shouts. However, if they make PvE different then the shouts could be very useful, YSIM has potentially the highest healing per second, NCSY can provide long-duration unblockable if there are enough mobs that block, Rise! would be great for defenses against groups of enemies, CttB provides a strong AoE CC/Stab, and YAAW provides might and weakness. These are all potentially useful if ANet changes PvE situations. But yes, Shouts are currently geared more towards PvP/WvW than PvE.

These are all too strong to share. It is far better for us to get dedicated support options instead of kitten hybrid changes that end up with weak support and weak self buffing. Things like Blood is Power becoming real support. But overall the biggest problems we have with support is we just don’t have places to “fit” it, and also we technically CAN bring lots of support, it is just in forms that are currently worthless in PvE or builds that can’t function in PvP.

Corruptions as they are don’t need any drawback at all, period. There is absolutely no good reason for it, they aren’t strong enough to warrant it, some aren’t even strong enough to warrant use even if they had no drawback to their use.

Captain Unusual.9163:

CPC is what all corruptions should be. Extremely powerful, but with a significant downside we need to deal with. None of this 3 stacks of self vuln business, that’s negligible in literally every situation.

If you removed the self-weakness it would still be balanced, which by definition means the skill isn’t done well.

Cogbyrn.7283:

Also, definitely give as much info as possible with bugs at all times. Even if it doesn’t seem like it matters (such as if it happened in PvE vs. WvW vs. sPvP vs. sPvP lobby).

Especially since once details were given it was obvious the trait was working just fine like we knew and they just didn’t know how it was supposed to work…

Just remove the stupid self conditions.

Warscythes.9307:

How much damage would minions do if you take them? From the vale guardian fight, the player pets/summons do not take aoe damage it seems and they can survive for basically the entire fight. How much of a boost would it be?

Rough values assuming no time wasted between attacks and against 2600 armor:
Blood Fiend: 80 DPS
Bone Fiend: 191 DPS (slightly higher due to cripple attack)
Bone Minions: 177 DPS (assuming you immediately summon and blow them up no time wasted)
Shadow Fiend: 233
Flesh Wurm: 238
Flesh Golem: 589

That’s with no buffs or anything like that, just their base damage. I’m not entirely sure how well they scale with might/power boosts, but they have a 4% base crit chance and base 150% crit damage.

If you have blood magic their DPS increases by roughly 27-78 depending on the minion used due to large attack speed differences.

Warscythes.9307:

I am pretty sure players take priority over minions when taking boons and healing. If you just stick reaper into their subgroup then it should fix your concerns.

Party>Player>minions (might be some other steps)

zapv.8051:

1 stack of aoe stab every second for 5 seconds while standing in a circle is not that strong. If this skill is fine, how come I don’t see it in competitive play? It certainly doesn’t provide enough utility to justify it in pve the overwhelming majority of the time either.

It isn’t seen in competitive play because

1. You don’t see Necromancer much in competitive anyway
2. The builds Necromancers use in competitive play don’t want this skill

Signet is the most common build afaik, which obviously uses signets. Well of Power is best used on a support build, which Necromancer doesn’t have. That isn’t a fault of WoP but the rest of the profession. Also I’m pretty sure flow uses/used this skill a ton and said it was solid.

Atherakhia.4086:

Would simply applying chill when entering death/reaper shroud to a minor trait alleviate the problem of lackluster minor traits for non-greatsword builds?

It’d be nice maybe, but I think spoj is right a damage modifier would be really preferred to help PvE problems.

Hey look, its this thread again. WoP doesn’t need this, it is way too much power to just add to a skill that is pretty much fine (or was I don’t remember if they screwed up its effect a while back or not).

Kodama.6453:

As far as I know it used to be a water combo field but they changed that because it was too strong.

Yeah and then they gutted the healing of the skill to be a mere fraction of its old values a year or two back so its got plenty of room for healing.

Dristig.9678:

That isn’t totally true. The chill is there to keep them in Melee range instead of your fear moving them out of range of your melee skills. So it is basically a requirement if you ever plan to shatter RS3. I agree it could use an additional effect but the current part has to stay.

I agree that part is fine, but it isn’t enough.

I too really miss pre-trait-patch Necromancer where we were even worse and less enjoyable to play.

Grymlocke.1067:

you really think people are stupid enough to NOT know how this works ? No offence you must have a very low IQ to think people are beyond basic understandings….

You must be new to the forums, people don’t have basic understanding of a lot of things. I literally just had two people tell me that Moa doesn’t kill minions anymore, and someone said Soul Spiral gave LF. And to follow up on not understanding “basic” mechanics we have a quote from someone familiar…

Grymlocke.1067:

Skill 5 was ready
Skill 6 was on 15 seconds CD
Skill 7 was on 18 seconds CD
Skill 8 was on 6 seconds CD

Skill 5 Pressed and it didnt affect Any of the other skills on CD, now I cannot say if this was the same for my mate I can only give my own results

That… isn’t how it works. Each time you cast a shout, it checks how many people you hit, and reduces the CD of that shout you used by 7% per person hit. So you might want to go and correct that last statement about low IQ and not understanding basic mechanics.

I mean, I’d love pulls, but I don’t think it fits on Axe, and it’d cause Axe to lose potential power from its damage/other stuff. At 900 range pretty much the only person who would be outranging you is Mesmer and Ranger, and at that point a single pull doesn’t really accomplish much.

Oh, and I completely forgot to mention this.

Shivers of Dread is completely worthless to far too many builds. If you don’t bring staff, rely on RNG corruptions, or a very select set of skills, you have an entire set of minor traits that give, in total: +20% chill duration, 10% reduced damage from Chilled enemies, 3s AoE fear every 28s. That’s awful, like, approaching Death Magic minors level of awful.

TheLastNobody.8319:

I would just like it if axe gained some kind of a pull. >_<. Is that too much to ask?

What possible reason would a ranged weapon like Axe have for a pull?

There is no need for a cap, because an MM with large number of minions isn’t a balance issue in any mode where it needs to be heavily considered.

In anything short of Dungeons/Fractals/Raids in PvE balance is irrelevant (nor would this overpower us), and in those three things Rise! would never be capable of maintaining minions for any period of time, if it could even generate them in the first place against trash mobs. Even if larger numbers of minions were sustainable, it wouldn’t exactly propel us into god-mode.

WvW isn’t balanced at all, and these won’t create such an issue that they’d need a cap in order to cut back an overbearing build. In small groups the minions couldn’t do anything special, and in large groups it would be very difficult to sustain any large number.

And PvP, where balance is arguably the most required to be fine tuned, Rise! really has no opportunity to be abused. The minions will die, you won’t be able to prevent it, and due to the way generation works any situation where you’d be able to spawn many (teamfights) they’d also die the fastest, whereas any situation where it would be overbearing (1v1/2v2) they won’t generate enough numbers.

Now sure, if this ends up becoming an issue we can discuss a cap, but there is nothing to promote that idea right now except Wooden Potatoes getting over excited like he does every time anything happens and making an entertaining video about a mechanic that is irrelevant. If anything, you should be rewarded for devoting your entire build towards maintaining a bunch of minions, because that’s all that build will do.

I disagree with refreshing CD if the target is dead, it makes it so that your only “punishment” for screwing up is wasted cast times, whereas in any other situation it simply fizzles. I think Epidemic’s cast time could absolutely be looked at, especially since it is possible to counter it in two ways (both avoid the initial cast and also spreading), but any changes that should be made should be empowering players to make good plays, rather than reward players who fail to do so.

For PvE basically just stick as much damage onto the build as you can with two trait lines, add on Death Magic and minion related traits therein, and throw minions on the bar. It doesn’t really benefit you to build “around” them in PvE like it does in PvP. For WvW roaming you’d want to take a fairly standard Cleric MM but probably without Flesh Wurm and with Quickening Thirst, since it is mostly the same as PvP but without the cap points.

Flesh Golem doesn’t die just when entering water, it dies if it goes into water deep enough to trigger yours or its underwater state. That gives a bit more leeway with water issues (though still a major annoyance).

Golem is the best for leveling and random PvE running around though. Lich is overkill for normal mobs, Plague just doesn’t really do anything (why stall the mobs when you can just murder them), but Flesh Golem basically acts as a distraction and extra damage.

Brujeria.7536:

This are the most overpowered suggestions we have seen in this forum for a long long time. The only suggestions that are somewhat good are the GS skills. Somehow this seems like you copied some warrior traits and mechanics and slapped them onto the reaper. You cant compare lifeforce and adrenalin. You cant compare buffing shouts to damaging shouts. You cant give an adept shout trait a ton of different functions, putting it into line with the warrior shout trait. Thats not going to work.

This.

As for high level PvP, 1v1s are really bad for Reaper. The specialization as a whole wasn’t designed to 1v1, quite the opposite it was designed for teamfighting. Beyond that, I had done a lot of 1v1s using an actual 1v1 Reaper build and did extremely well, but I wasn’t using any shouts or GS, just RS plus traiting, because the rest is really awful 1v1. Now, will Reaper necessarily work in the highest PvP tiers? At the moment they won’t likely be meta (at least not in any special way except using the traitline as an improvement in otherwise “core” necro builds) simply due to the overall lack of teamfighting. If teamfighting ever becomes meta Reaper will meta-ize quickly.

And I used it all weekend without it ever noticeably bugging. 5 people can absolutely be wrong.

You have to check the image after you use it, because what it does is not reduce the tooltip CD, it automatically sets it at the correct CD timer. So if you use YSIM and hit 5 people with Augury, it automatically sets the timer at the 13s mark appearing as though it had already been on CD for 7s or 35% recharged already. I could see people not noticing this. It is also possible some other combination of things caused a bug that your guildies happened to have in common. But, saying “doesn’t reduce CD of shouts at all” is not only incorrect but completely unhelpful, it doesn’t say situations where it wasn’t working, what game mode, if you noticed targets being hit and receiving damage, etc. Just “didn’t work”.

Yeah, Necromancer has really bad offensive condition stacking relative to basically every other profession in the game. We have amazing overall condition access, far more than anyone else, and great non-offensive condition access, but our offensive stacking is really mediocre.

Did you have Chilling Force equipped? It could proc off Soul Spiral.

Also, Augury is niche, it requires you having shouts and wanting to be involved in teamfights, neither of which are required to Reaper. Just like Chilling Nova requires a fairly high crit chance and chill uptime to trigger.

Relentless Pursuit however will never not be useful in WvW/PvP, since snares are extremely common. With food in WvW it makes you completely immune to snares while in Reaper Shroud unless your opponent has condition duration, and with Melandru runes it reduces condition duration to a mere 9% (meaning anything with less than 10s duration won’t even last a second) while in Shroud. This not only makes you basically unstoppable in RS since you can’t be snared or CCed with Infusing Terror, but it also significantly improves your effective condition removal since snaring conditions have such low (or no) duration that they won’t stick, and can’t cover for other conditions well.

Depends on how their proccing is lined up. But they’d function the same as you’d expect, Shrouded Removal will proc every 3 seconds to remove a condition, and Unholy Martyr will trigger once every 3 seconds to take one condition from an ally and transfer it to you, giving you 7% LF. The only question would be whether they coded their specific order of proccing in a way that UM always procs first, drawing the condition, with Shrouded Removal always proccing second so that it can then remove that condition immediately. To that end I’m not sure, but it’d be easy to test with 2 Necromancers, one using BiP and the other with UM/SR.