Siphon skills do not scale with healing power… so yeah
Yes they do
Now that Putrid Mark is officially nerfed, and they are gung ho to nerf Mark of Blood, the other staff abilities need to be buffed. Staff was never overpowered on it’s own, and now it’s weaker and offers almost negligable support to a team. We have no other team support weapons.
How would you like to see staff changed?
Personally, I’d happily take a nerf to Putrid Mark (again) if they were to restore at least 3 conditions removed from my allies.
I want to open a discussion about our weapons. If you saw or took part in the trait discussion, I’d like for this to be similar, though it will obviously be structured just a little differently. Also, this will go into a BoC Podcast, planned for this upcoming Sunday, December 8, at 2pm PST.
If you can, for each weapon you talk about, list the overall “theme” you think they have, how well they achieve that theme, the skills you like/dislike, and how you would go about fixing any issues you have with each weapon. Also, please include the reasons as to why you think what you do.
As last time, please keep it civil, and format it loosely like so:
What weapons do you really like?
Which of our weapons do you really like, and why do you like them? These would be the weapons you just love, and feel are competitive choices in any build that could use them.
For example I love Dagger off-hand. It just feels right in any build. A more defensive-based condition weapon, it has a blind, condition removal via transferring, and strong AoE weakness, all from the versatile and safe range of 900 units. There isn’t a single thing I don’t love about this weapon, it has specific uses, and does them all well. No build cannot find a use for this weapon.
What weapons do you almost like, or like conceptually, but feel they have issues performing as well as they should?
This would be weapons that you like, but have issues with. Or weapons that you almost like, or like the idea behind it, but don’t like how it works right now, or how the idea has translated in game.
For example I love the idea of Focus. A strong power weapon, it has good damage, offensive support, and also sets up bursts really well. Synergizes with any power-based weapon set.
However, I feel it falls a bit short. Regen doesn’t really fit that well on an offensive support weapon, in fact I feel like every Regen bounce is a wasted bounce, compared to more Vuln stacks; especially when regen is a condition spewed out by a lot of traits and weapons already. Also, Spinal Shivers loses half of its usefulness against most bosses. Even in PvP, Spinal Shivers falls short because of the insane cast time.
Good weapon in idea, but falls short a bit. I’d like to see the 4 skill change to apply some other boon (might, maybe?), and the 5 skill have its cast time lowered slightly. Alternately, instead of making the 5 skill easier to land, reward skillful usage more, and give it CD reduction for each boon removed. If I remove a boon with the skill, make it come back up a bit faster.
What weapons do you feel fall short?
This would be weapons that you just plain feel don’t live up to their design, or just aren’t designed well.
For example: Axe. Its a mess of a skill. Somewhat weak single target burst mixed with sustain, PBAoE control/retal that fits better in a bunker build, vuln stacking on a very weak 1 skill. Its just… badly designed.
I’d like to see it changed to this:
1) Chain skill, the first hit is the same as now, the second chain is a very mini-version of the current #2, maybe a bit weaker, but cleaving in a small area.
2) Completely redesign the ability to be a frontal cone that deals high damage. A slowish moving “wave” type attack that starts at you, then moves out to its max range. Should be fast enough that it wouldn’t be avoided “on accident”, but slow enough that if it isn’t set up at all someone could dodge if they are paying attention and at range (if they are right in melee range, it should be impossible to dodge by reaction).
3) Same skill, its the only good one of the set, why change it?
So again: talk about what weapons you like, what weapons you almost like but think need improvement, and weapons you don’t like. Make sure to expand upon what you say. If you need to compare to other professions, please do so constructively.
Please keep it civil, and open. This isn’t the place to lament how bad we are, this isn’t a place to flame ANet, or any such thing, but have a good discussion, and one that ANet can look at for ideas.
Thank you for your time and input.
Blood fiends aren’t useful are they? its like if u like to solo roam u fight with it, ppl will take it down…the healing is good tho.. what u guy think?
It is good IF:
1) You have enough condition removal from other sources to drop CC
2) You have very limited healing power
3) You have at least 20 points in Death Magic with both minion traits picked up
4) You understand how to make minions engage at max range, and are capable of doing the “micro” of using his active before he dies
5) You aren’t doing something that has so much passive AoE that he dies too quickly
6) Having the meat-shield minion is worth more than a standard heal
Doesn’t this mean we need a buff?
PvE needs a buff so you can’t play warrior and aggressively roll your face over the keyboard repeatedly and still win every single fight.
Trust me, any group that says “no X class” isn’t a group worth joining, you can wait the few minutes to find someone else, you’ll be better off.
In that case they should revamp 100s of traits across all classes. You know its a weak arguement. :P
Could make it vuln/might on hit but then it would be op. Which is why even in the power lines of other classes they are still on crit traits.
I have less than 100 hours combined on all 7 of my non-Necromancer characters, so I can’t say I know their trait lines well :P
But in general, forcing on-crit traits onto a non-precision giving tree doesn’t make sense. This was part of the issue as to why Dhuumfire is stupidly designed, and putting it onto a Minor trait would be even worse, we don’t want to re-create the crap that is Reanimator/Protection of the Horde. On-hit can be balanced just fine on its own with ICDs, no need to force the on-crit.
I may try a MM build for this event. Has the current “standard MM build” changed much from the video posted by Nemesis in the sticky?
How does a MM build stack up against Necro Power builds?
Nothing against Nemesis, but I really never would have followed his MM build too closely, although I didn’t watch the entire 20 minute video to see everything he uses.
In general, Blood Fiend and not using Bone Minions is not good for an MM build, unless you specifically know what you are doing and your build is structure to make it work.
As for how it pairs against a power build, you really should never lose to a power Necro as an MM. You shouldn’t really ever lose to a condi MM either, unless you allow them to Epidemic your minions freely.
Ynot is correct. This also means if you drop below 25% real HP then hit DS, you will get the might stacks every single time you get hit, regardless of your LF. This was listed as why they thought Siphoned Power wasn’t as bad as every single Necromancer thinks it is.
Do we have another interrupt except fear ? just trident 4 i think
In addition to the ones Drarnor said, Flesh Golem’s Charge I believe counts as an interrupt.
Fear just doesn’t count as an interrupt. Don’t expect a fix any time soon.
If we’re lucky, in about 6 months it’ll be included as a tooltip fix, where it’ll just say that fear doesn’t count as an interrupt.
An on-crit trait in the tree that gives no precision isn’t good design. They already stated it was one of the many reasons Dhuumfire was badly implemented as a trait. Don’t start putting more badly designed traits in, kthx.
still not a red post in this thread?
Why do people still go around expecting red posts in threads when the only time we got them with any kind of frequency was during Peters’ initiative to talk more?
The Necro forums don’t get red posts, its just how it is, get used to it.
ANet has always been very lax about naming, unless they cracked down more than I realized for GW2. As long as it isn’t explicitly sexual or vulgar I haven’t seen bans for names very often.
Play whatever you like more. The game is about fun, if you aren’t having fun what the hells the point?
They have a blog coming out tomorrow on upcoming whatnots. Wait till then, then ask questions.
It takes your weapon’s damage. So staff is best, and I believe Axe + Axe training brings axe to close to staff’s level.
Certain matchups will always be difficult.
Necro will always be the best in a condition vs condition fight. And they kitten well better be, seeing as the entire class is based around Death Shroud and conditions. Without being the best condition class, they’re a giant useless HP bar. Its an issue of a major mechanic of how the Necro class works (being the best at conditions) being a strong counter to other players.
What utility is that under “W” on your bar? o.O
Necrotic Traversal, the Flesh Wurm active.
He’s talking about if you have Life Transfer going when DS expires. The trait tries to heal you, but can’t because you’re in DS, but if you let DS expire right as you cast it, it keeps channeling, and can then heal you (unless they fixed it).
1) The new Warrior CC builds
2) Shatter and/or Phantasm mesmers
3) Bunker Engis w/ bombs
That’s pretty much the only thing that routinely bothers me on my MM builds, besides being out-skilled.
It’d be nice if both condition removal/boon removal had a bit more… sense to them.
Also, isn’t this one of the reasons that Necros have been getting a lot of nerfs to bleeding? Because we could stack pretty decent bleed stacks that were “covered” by a crapload of other stuff. But if its the case of stacks removed first, wouldn’t this have not been an issue (or not nearly as big, if the bleeds always got removed first)?
It’d be nice to have some clarity given from a dev on this system, because I do know for things like boon removal, it actually depends on the skill itself as to how it removes boons (order).
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How about you wait to the blog post comes out next week and stop jumping the gun.
Staff elementalist cues are more than obvious and yet it’s still very possible to hit and kill targets with them with proper positioning. It’s about anticipating an opponent’s move and making counter-moves to derail his decisions. These changes are meant to teach players to learn a skill that actually can be a deciding factor in a battle. As necromancers stand now, it’s a very face-rolly profession with fear, dhuumfire and instant-effect, projectile-less, ranged abilities often being major factors in how they win fights.
And when was the last time a staff elementalist was seen in a serious sPvP environment? Never. The only people who play staff ele are for the giggles of being able to say “hey guys look, I’m using a staff in PvP!”.
You’re asking for changes that would kill these skills in PvP. Its not a matter of adding a little skill into PvP, anyone can dodge staff marks with ease, same with most of what we cast. If you get hit by a staff mark, its your own fault. If you are routinely losing fights because you don’t have the skill to dodge staff marks, you should honestly uninstall the game, because PvP is too hard for you, and PvE relies on the same kind of reactions, so you couldn’t even kill AI (note: not directed at you, but people in general).
The problems we have as a class being a bit too strong in PvP have 0 to do with our cast times, and everything to do with many of them being far too similar (pre-staff 5 change our marks were way too similar, and still are, in cast animations), that we can apply nearly every single condition in the game AoE on short CD, and Scepter 1 spam throws out 3 conditions and huge pressure just by jamming 1.
Most builds that people call “bunkers” are actually either bruisers (most side-point “bunkers”), or very defensive supports (most mid-point “bunkers”). They aren’t actually full-on bunkers, because in general that’s pretty worthless in this game in sPvP; its far more helpful to shave off defense for either more damage (to 1v1) or support (to support the team).
The easiest build for you to just pick up and play competitively is going to be a spirit ranger, most likely.
And Death Nova. Given that both are traits that give new benefits to minions, I figured it was possible that it could work.
I’d assume that the game “considers” Death Nova to be damage minions directly cause, but yeah I forgot to list that it works on Death Nova too.
Because there are 7 other classes than Necromancers, all of which can have multiple sources of invisible endurance regen, in addition to visible ones like Vigor, or signets.
My point was you picked the one profession that has no reliable self-caused endurance regen as your example of “skillfully” counting dodges.
Edit: Just to clarify, I understand why people are against it, and that’s fine, but the general examples for why we need it are professions like Thief that can have 4 or so ways to regain endurance, and you have no visible way of knowing that, and completely hidden passive things like that don’t foster good gameplay (as opposed to things that are fine to have “hidden” like stat boosts).
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no no no no
this would make counting dodges when trying to spike a necro etc completely useless and completely destroy the “skill” in this game
when it comes to thieves there are other ways to spike him for example daze/stun him when he is attacking with larcenous strike
please don’t add an endurance bar there
I’m sorry, but who actually thinks counting Necro dodges is difficult? They are the single class that even an idiot can keep track of 24/7. This is how it goes:
Dodge 1 gone
Dodge 2 gone, he’s out of dodges for the fight
Done deal.
This suggestion is aimed towards professions that have constant dodging. All it does is add an endurance bar. The person playing on the offensive still needs to bait out dodges and all other defensive CDs before they go blowing their entire burst into a block (which still isn’t shown), the defensive person can still do everything they did before, but they can’t play on the fact that its impossible to know some build’s endurance regen.
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On a related note, does it increase the damage dealt by Vampiric Master? We know it increases the damage dealt by Death Nova.
No. Training of the Master essentially increases all minion self-caused damage. That is, any damage that comes from their own skills directly. This means auto attacks, and their active skills.
However, Vampiric Master is not caused by the minions itself. It is similar to a spirit buff, it is an external effect applied on the minions that is proc’d by them dealing damage. But you are the source of that (which is why it scales with your power and healing power, not theirs), just like when they inflict a condition, it is actually you inflicting the condition through them, so it is your stats that matter, not theirs.
TL;DR No, TotM only works on the direct damage of their attacks and active skills, nothing else.
Does spite IX +30% minion damage work? The minion skills are not updated when selected… while VII +10% on marks are updating
Yes it does, tooltips on minions are complete kitten anyway, in many ways.
Some of us aren’t using those other methods though.
You don’t have staff, dagger offhand, consume conditions, well of power, fetid consumption, spiteful removal, or shrouded removal? Then maybe its your build?
Almost every other “siphon” is a healing skill, however, and needs to be treated as such. The only ones that aren’t (that I can remember) are for thieves. Our siphons are not directly competing with those healing skills because, surprise, we still get a heal. Not just any heal either, we get one of the best heals in the entire game.
Not saying that our siphons are by any mean great as they are now (putting aside Vampiric Master), because they aren’t. But it isn’t fair to compare them to the healing skill “siphons”.
“GW1 was the best PvP game ever in existence”
“Can we get this mechanic similar to GW1?”
“OMFG STOP DUMBING DOWN THE GAME”
Makes total sense.
Unlike a lot of other things that I do think should stay hidden (cast bars, enemy CDs to name the big ones people said), dodge has no way to reliably track regardless of your skill level. What the enemy is casting is something you can learn over time, same with their CDs, but dodging is impossible (unless you’re fighting a Necro, because they don’t get to dodge).
Vampiric Shroud? Allowing vampiric traits to work while in Death Shroud? While also opening up for healing from Transfusion and external sources (like Well of Blood or elementalist AOEs)?
Sounds like a interesting idea to me.
There have been a few ideas (all only active while in DS)
1) Allow all healing to affect our normal HP pools, but at a reduced value
2) Allow all of our self-healing to affect our normal HP pools (maybe at reduced value)
3) Allow all traited siphoning to affect our normal HP pool
4) All siphoning instead heals your allies (maybe not DS only?)
Or some combination of the above.
Does it really?
Death Shroud is 60% of your HP pool, so Necromancers get really strong scaling with vitality.
Your equipment doesn’t affect what the minions themselves do at all, except for the conditions they cause (which use your condition damage/duration). So your own stats don’t really matter at all.
The reason power is most common for MMs is because in general the power weapons and power traits synergize best with MM. But if you are doing fractal level 40+ just fine as it is, why would you even want to change?
None of those things are hard. You don’t need to “grind” dungeons, doing all of the easier dungeon paths is an evenings worth of “work” and grants you plenty of gold. Even if you’re slow, you can get in two paths per hour, and each path with AWFUL drops will net you 2g. Even a casual gamer can easily get 10g per day, without much work or farming involved. If you get decent drops, that amount easily starts going up a ton, depending on how well the salvaging goes.
And if you are patient, especially if you’ve been playing the game for a longer amount of time (not time in game but how old your account is) it just gets easier. Wait for a new patch, check out what is going to be added. Any skins that are added and are non-permanent additions will almost guaranteed go up in price. I’ve got over 1000g, at current prices (which will only go up) of things just by buying rare, limited time items while they were cheap, and then sitting on them for as long as I want.
When they abolished energy, they abolished tradeoffs.
Because the main tradeoff in GW1 was a lower energy cost for a health cost.
This wasn’t the only thing it was for. Self sacrifice was the trade-off for a few things: reduced energy cost, increased effect, lowered CD.
Game has tons of gold sinks, not to mention constant nerfing of reliable farming methods.
It is not remotely hard to make money in this game. Even my lazy kitten gets plenty of gold without even knowing the newest, greatest farming method.
There are people in my guild with so much money that they just randomly decide they’re going to make their 10th legendary, for funsies.
Healing in DS will not come to Necros as a base ability of DS.
I do believe, however, that it should be added in some form as a 30 point Blood Magic trait.
Stealth thieves are one of the harder fights for a lot of MM builds. It requires you to really play smart.
The stats are theoretically good for a Blood Magic necro, but honestly even then not perfect, because you’d prefer toughness over vitality.
Short answer: there is no real trade off. They got rid of all sense of Necromancers being able to sacrifice things for stronger effects.
I hope that its something they add in the future. They are adding more skills, and I really want to see the return of conditional and sacrifice skills.
It’s interesting that you say I ignore drawbacks, while you and the OP ignore the drawbacks of Healing Signet. It has a large weakness to sustained and burst damage, and coincidentally MM Necromancers are able to dish that out.
That is exactly the same thing Blood Fiend is weak to. Our issue with the skill is that it has every drawback associated with a passive healing skill and then more on top, while being strictly weaker than all of the others.
And how do you say MM would be OP? You do realize that currently no MM runs Blood Fiend seriously, right? All of the strong, “borderline” OP MMs (how strong are they if they’ve seen 0 effective high tier tournament use?) don’t run Blood Fiend, they all use consume conditions. It isn’t a strict buff to their build.
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snip
You are the one who decided to press the reply button, don’t act like anyone forced you to.
What you are saying isn’t wrong in and of itself. It is, however, completely unrealistic. You’re listing everything accessible to an MM as they decide to make their build. What you aren’t listing is what they actually end up with when they are done, because many of the things you bring up as issues are mutually exclusive to each other; I can’t have it all in one build.
And yes, Blood Fiend is bad in all but one very small set of builds, otherwise you’d see him more. Consume Conditions is generally better, because it frees up a lot of your condition removal, and cannot be denied to you nearly as easily, and Well of Blood is just completely better in every sense if you have the Healing Power to support it.
Also, stop pretending like Necromancers are some gods of defense. The only time that is said is when people are either asking for Necro nerfs, or denying buffs. There is a reason you haven’t seen a single competitive Mid-Point Necromancer bunker build for high level play. They don’t exist.
I think no.
You have less effective healing, however, what you do have makes up for it.
You have: Up to six minions, all of which can remove a condition.
Death Shroud
Great access to Fear
Condition pressureWarriors have: Well. uh. To be honest you only mentioned the Signet, you didn’t attach any actual build. We know you’re running a Minion Master build, though it must be a very poor one if you aren’t taking the trait that allows your minions to get rid of conditions.
You can’t only take into account the Signet, you have to compare the overall builds. You can’t simply compare one heal to the other and say one is broken because it performs better on paper. Each heal for each class has different functions and in the same way each class has different strengths and weaknesses, so do the heals.
Why exactly is it bad that Healing Signet slightly outperforms your Minion’s heal (do note we aren’t talking about your minions siphoning health for you) when you have access to Death Shroud, which by itself is better than our ability to block damage? If a Warrior wants to block they have to run certain weapon sets by the way, which means he’s gonna have to sacrifice some kind of damage potential. The only exception being a sword/sword+longbow Warrior, but even that build is sacrificing the ability to deal raw damage in favor of condition damage. What exactly do you sacrifice for Death Shroud again?
Also, the main reason I don’t use Blood Fiend on my MM Necro when I play is due to the massive condition spam in the current meta. Without that the Blood Fiend does pretty well in my experience, at least in combination with a proper build.
1) Minions can’t remove conditions. A trait does that costs 30 points transfers our conditions to our minions, which with the wonderful stealth nerf four months ago courtesy of ANet, means they sit there permanently, either to kill our minions more quickly, or make them even easier to kite, less DPS, etc.
2) Yeah, my power build has great condition pressure. You’ll really be terrified by my 40 DPS bleeds. MMs have vulnerability, poison (assuming Death Nova, which means no condition removal, or greatly reduced minion damage), weakness (again, Death Nova only, otherwise no), cripples, immobilize, and chill. Every single one of those, however, is dependent on traits, or weapon choice, and will not exist in a realistic MM build, unless you are going condi MM, which isn’t nearly as common as power.
3) Great access to fears? An MM build has 2 fears, Doom and if using staff, Reaper’s Mark.
You don’t even need to compare it to Warriors. Look at the Elementalist or Thief passive heal. Both are vastly better than Blood Fiend. Why are all of these better?
More reliable passive healing
Actually scales with Healing Power (Blood Fiend is absolutely worthless in any build with high healing power)
There is no point in taking Blood Fiend into PvP unless you already planned to run the one build he’s good in, which requires 0/0/20/30/0, Soldier Amulet, and at least one of: Staff, Dagger Off-hand, and Lyssa or Melandru runes. If all of those conditions aren’t met, you are better off running either Consume Conditions, or Well of Blood.
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Blood Fiend is never taken by non-MMs, and is even a rare choice for MM builds because of how unreliable it is. I think that’s evidence enough that it needs help.
i think the best way to rework axe is to make it melee :/ it would definitely give it a chain. i don’t see any reason axe 2 can’t perform similarly to 100b, i mean necro gets the only axe flurry.
It does perform “similarly”. The problem is that it cannot be as strong as 100b because of the differences in the skill. Making it melee doesn’t make sense. It’d be a direct case of either Dagger > Axe, or Axe > Dagger, and either way one weapon invalidates the other in 95% of situations if you make that change.
100b:
Melee
Roots you for channel duration
3.5s duration
Has a lot of back-ended damage (if you miss the very last hit you lose out on a ton of the damage)
Axe 2
600 range
You can not only walk around while channeling, but also turn
2.5s duration
Damage is equally spread over every single hit
Also gives sustain through LF
Now, obviously 100b works perfectly for PvE because if you’re remotely smart about using it, you can get off perfect 100bs almost on CD. In this case, the larger damage output from it makes more sense. Also you pair that with the fact that warriors have stronger self (and party) buffing, and their already strong 100b gets even stronger.
Making Axe 2 higher damage to match 100b is not going to happen. It makes no sense balance wise. What they should do is give it one of the many ideas that people have put out here, but most of which come down to: Axe 2 needs to be reworked in functionality, and Axe 1 needs a slight buff.
The logic here is that medium and heavy armour = more armor. Which means more damage mitigation.
Furthermore, being in melee means taking more damage from cleaves and other melee aoe skills.
Therefore, people wearing light armour are less well equipped to take the extra damage that is dealt fighting in melee range.
Compare old D/D bunker eles back in their prime, to warrior at the exact same time.