The only problem I see (for defensive builds), is that in general a fully defensive Necro doesn’t offer what a Guardian would. A fully defensive Guardian is just straight up unkillable. But a Guardian that is as difficult to kill as a fully defensive necro still brings tons of support, way better than the Necro does. That’s the problem for me; fully defensive Necros are totally selfish.
Same with the general glass cannon build. Sure we can do massive damage, but its also because we have no reasonable middle ground. There is no way to decide “you know, I feel like I’m not living long enough, I’ll swap in a defensive utility/trait/weapon at the cost of damage”. But there is no such choice. You have Spectral Armor, thats basically it.
(Ignoring MM)
We can only get reliable defense right now through one trait essentially, 15 in SR, or utility skills. We don’t have good defensive weapons, our two defensive trees are subpar, and even within our utility skills we have very few options.
What we need are more options.
Generally speaking in PvP or WvW the Necro is the best to focus because they fulfill every single qualification:
High damage threat (can easily wipe your team if allowed to free cast)
Only one effective way to deal with concentrated focus for any period of time (Plague) and only melee at that. No escapes, invulnerabilities, etc.
Most builds are very squishy
That said, a friend and I were doing 5v5s in WvW a few days back, and the other team had a Necro, two Guardians, an Ele, and a Warrior. Obviously knowing that Necros are #1 priority almost all the time, I called target on him the first time. He didn’t go down. Not only did he not go down, even being focused by a whole group of 5 he never got below half, just with a little “peeling” in the form of protection and healing from the guardians, and Spectral Armor into DS. He was unkillable, and we got wiped before we could down him.
Next round, we focused the ele. A tanky support D/D ele. He dropped like a rock. It took a little bit of time because he mist formed and tried to heal, but we just trained the hell out of him. Now, unfortunately we kept losing (we essentially threw together a random comp of 5, no prep or anything, just kind of winged it, and couldn’t secure stomps at all), and every time we lost we’d try a new target. And every single target, even the guardians, were easier to kill.
Not to say our defense still doesn’t need help, but just blanket saying “always focus the Necro” can and will get you destroyed in a fight, because quite a few are playing off that idea, and going full Soldier’s, which can destroy people.
I totally agree that they need to address a few of our cast time issues. I think we’re very close to a decent place, but a few spots are just sad (focus 5 is insanely long), especially considering some of our skills have very obvious pre-animations.
Thanks for the feedback. Wasn’t sure whether it would be worth it to try to run conditions along with the minions, sounds like that isn’t the way to go.
Its not so much that conditions can’t be run with minions, in fact conditions with minions is a very good setup in sPvP (both damage types, plus with spirits/guardians/venom share thieves you get a lot of on-proc conditions for the minions), the problem is more that conditions just suck on their own in PvE compared to direct damage.
I’d say something like this:
Reduce damage and healing by 25%.
Now attacks in 2 second intervals.
So it’d be 695 healing every 2 seconds. (347) Still not as good as healing signet, but it gives it more chances to actually hit/missing isn’t as harsh.
And add: Every third leech removes a condition from the master.What about that? Leave the sacrifice the same.
I like this, for the reasons you listed. Plus when Necromatic Corruption eventually doesn’t perform terribly (or gets buffed in some way) this will indirectly be more useful. Also means a very slight buff to the Vampiric Master proccing.
But these changes I think are pretty small (so not in danger of suddenly OPing it), and make it more reliable and competitive.
Honestly, I understood if they had nerfed it to 3-5 from everyone, or more from you than allies. But it seemed really heavy-handed (when you consider ANet tunes very, very slowly) for them to go from a potential of 55 (11 conditions right? Idk, too lazy to check) conditions removed per cast… to 3. It was just too dumb to have no been an accident.
Stop saying this. i dont want THEM to notice that and stealthnerf dagger#4 to kitten aswell.
Let’s be honest here. What actually happened was they somehow royally screwed up while trying to sneak in a small nerf, bugging Putrid Mark, and have absolutely no idea how to fix it.
Necromancers are okay in melee in PvE. You’ll be wanting to use dagger/wells, and death shroud. Generally 30/0/0/0/30 is your best bet, throw the 10 where you need it. Your DS 1 spam does really high damage, with the benefit of being able to pierce and stack might and vuln. You won’t do warrior damage, but in most groups there won’t be much of a noticeable loss in damage.
Survivability is just fine. Its not hard at all to stay alive.
We do have support, but it isn’t as good as the “PvE trinity”. Conditions still help against bosses, wells can still offer good support, and Plague will make a melee-stacked party pretty safe.
It still deals AoE direct damage.
But almost everyone agrees its just not a great skill anymore. OH Dagger 4 is a better skill in almost every single way (shorter CD, blind, and better transferring).
However, the reality is that they allegedly (according to Tyler Chapman) stealth nerfed the hell out of the skill, and accidentally took four months to let us know. The tooltip will be updated in a few months, most likely.
I still think an improvement could be:
“If blood fiend is killed (read: not sacrificed), heal for 1.5x the sacrifice heal”
Play/counterplay. Does your enemy target the hps (health per second) minion and try to get him down to prevent your hps but give you a heal or does the enemy just let him stay up?
Remove almost any remote sense of skill in using the minion? No thanks. The MM build has enough “if I just sit here pressing 1 I’ll probably win” already. They need to promote more active play in it, and this wouldn’t help at all.
The problem with Blood Fiend has little to do with how “easily” it is killed, except in WvW zerging (why are you bringing minions to a zerg?). In PvE it has over 30k HP traited, and will either sit at 900 range, taking only the random AoE damage, or it will stack with you, making your group far more resistant to the boss’ damage.
In PvP it is almost never focused, because wasting all the damage (13k or 19k) to kill the minion, especially when any respectable MM will get the sacrifice off in most situations anyway, has just made the minion more efficient. It dies due to random AoE/cleave.
The problem with the minion has far more to do with the lack of condition cleansing. CC is a massive part of our cleansing in most builds, and while we have the option of taking another source of cleansing from a utility skill, they are all vastly worse.
I’d say Berzerker for PvE, with the minimum defensive stats mixed in to keep you alive. You really don’t want to be running condition in PvE in general, and minion traits synergize better with power innately.
Ignoring balance, I think the cast times in general give a proper feel to the Necromancer class. How much sense would it make for the slowest class in the game to have a ton of instant cast abilities? There are two professions with a lot of instant cast/effects, Mesmers and Elementalists. Both of which are very combination heavy classes, who rely on fast reactions, bursts, and rotations to do anything.
While we could probably argue a few of our obnoxiously long cast times should be reduced by 1/4 to 1/2 of a second (1/2 I can only think of 1-2 skills for) for balance reasons, the overall “feel” I get from those longer cast times actually makes sense from a gameplay point of view. It just feels right to have a slower pace of combat.
If we had other really reliable methods of condition cleansing in MM builds, I’d take Blood Fiend a lot. I only don’t take him because CC is way more flexible, and the only time you can actually spare the lack of cleansing is PvE or in PvP when you have Lyssa runes, 30 dumped into BM for the trait, and staff/dagger offhand.
Also, again, different classes different needs. What they do need to do about Blood Fiend is add in scaling on his healing per hit, and give us some more reasonable sources of condition removal to make up for the massive one we lose from CC. Either a chance on hit for Blood Fiend to remove, or w/e.
But really, the loss of cleansing is the only reason he isn’t in my builds. His HP is as high as Flesh Golem, the healing is crazy, and he benefits from minion traits.
The game is warrior-biased. Anything that reaches near the power of warrior must be nerfed. Necros are currently mediocre(maybe the worst because of one viable build obligation), nerfing them would make them one of the worst classes for spvp. Use your condition-cleanse abilities and ta da, no condi necro can deal damage to you. This is just ridiculous. Other classes already have so much cleanse option, you have to nerf their condition cleanse abilities, not our conditions. They still nerf mediocre classes while warriors(hammer build) and guardians are clearly op. We are expecting buffs to necros to be on par with them, not nerfs !
The idea that the game is warrior-based, when any warrior that showed his face in PvP (unless his name was Hmann) for nearly a full year would have been laughed at until he re-rolled to any other class, is hilarious (if wrong). Almost every tier list had a special tier, generally along the lines of: Trash Tier – Quaggans, Below Trash Tier – Warriors.
They have, essentially speaking, gotten rid of any connection already, with their most recent suggestion. It still resembles Enfeebling Blood, but in no way are they connected anymore.
Random blind procs are praying to the RNG gods to save you. You might get lucky and blind him right before he backstabs, or you might blind an AA. But weakness is a guaranteed overall reduction in damage.
Also, weakness has much less counterplay. If you’re facing a smart player and they get blinded, they will use an AA to clear the blind before going for their real attack. You can’t just “wipe” weakness like that, except by cleansing.
Well, In my opinion, here is what would fit us :
Death magic minor 5 : Gain more lifeforce on death. (15% instead of 10% right now)
Death magic minor 15 : Gain 3 seconds protection when one of your minion die (15 seconds ICD)
And for falling damage : I think, grasping dead coud could be way more interesting then anything else (cripple, bleeds and damage fit us. Not to mention that this kind of trait are usually designed around skills that the class already have).
Your 5 idea is a stronger Gluttony, and your 15 idea still has the issue of only being remotely useful to MM builds (the protection amount would have to be very small to avoid abuse).
I know. Just saying, that swiftness really won’t do much helping you flee away from focus. One or two leap will already catch you. I run Swalk but mostly for the stunbreak and longer spectral uptime.
That is true for any class though. This isn’t a Necro problem, a warrior will catch up to everyone except a thief with all his shadowsteps available, or another warrior with one less leap or some other minor handicap.
If Lich Form ever hurts your DPS, you either shouldn’t be using Lich because your build isn’t remotely useful for it (aka your build has no power damage) or you aren’t using lich form right.
The second is a decent idea, the first I feel would only work if they added more sources of jagged horrors (you know, like Pistol shooting jagged horrors) into the game. As is, the plan is for them to add Reanimator into Death Nova when they are ready to replace our minor traits, so Jagged Horrors would only be used in three situations, none of them all that strong on their own.
If I had more of a green color scheme for my Necro I’d probably use these, and as it is I will probably still pick them up for the PvP skins, but I don’t see myself using them in PvE/WvW.
yeah, but Life blast just sends them one by one and if the conditions have shorter durations, u might not be able to get them all off… eh idk, maybe Bhawb is right
True, but none of the conditions really… matter. Any damage they do to you is negated by you being Shrouded, any mobility loss usually isn’t a huge deal (you can create plenty of distance with the ridiculous underwater 2 skill). You take the stuff off your team, and even if you don’t get the insane 25 bleed transfer, it still takes all the effects from everyone else, concentrates them on you, and you are far more capable of dealing with them as a Necro (Gathering Plague → consume conditions).
Mark of Horror is pretty good, which shows that the problem with the Jagged Horrors we are used to is in timing, not the minion itself.
This. Was doing some 1v1s in WvW today and the little guy (just one) stacked 4 bleeds all on his own.
I know legendary’s do that, I was just surprised something so easy to obtain would have the same effect. (Not complaining though it looks really fitting for Necro.)
Well, its a gem-shop skin, so I imagine they want it to be a bit above normal quality. Which has been the case with almost every gem store skin, they are really, really well done.
I’ve heard this is the case for other skills as well. This could be intended, as it is how certain weapons (Incinerator) work. Not sure though.
You do realize that Life Blast underwater transfers conditions and fires rapidly, right?
This. Gathering Plague right as you get into DS actually turns your 1 skill into a potential deathball of death.
Chilling darkness turns plague into a giant clusterkitten shutdown mechanic. Especially in PvP where a team needs to stay on point, a chiling, blinding plague is nearly impossible to deal with.
Not to mention that Because he has such massive Chill duration, if you get stuck in the full duration of Plague, that is 32 seconds of Chill, 24 seconds of poison, and 20 blinds. There is no way you are going to be fighting on point effectively like that.
I don’t know that any good reason has ever been given for it.
my take on the replies is none of us are really confident or sure about what we might get out of the(any) future patch updates.
There are many ways that ANet could take it. They could go like Lily said, and try to introduce more of the less popular and used weapons first. Or they could go the route of trying to fill in the biggest playstyle gaps first. Or they could just put in what is the easiest in terms of getting it out there for us to start playing with (balance and design wise). Most likely it will be a combination of this.
But overall, I want to see them start re-exploring some traditional (GW1) Necromancer playstyles. And I also want to see at least one or two new off-hands that introduce minions on our weapon sets, but minions with fill in the playstyle areas that minions are currently missing.
You’re wrong, that’s simply all there is to say. Minion damage does not scale with your own power, toughness, vitality; the only thing that they scale with is minion-specific traits, and indirectly they scale with condition damage and duration (any conditions they inflict use your condition damage/duration).
Are you looking at the tooltips? Because those are wrong.
Edit: Yeah, you must be looking at tooltips. The tooltips currently list very false information about minion damage. At level 80, with almost no investment, the damage is listed as being sub 100 for each minion, when in reality they hit for 200+ at the weakest. Also it is showing scaling with power, which just isn’t accurate.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
- Changes we suggest and exhaustive bug lists we compile go largely ignored.
- Stuff is added we never asked for.
- Undocumented stealth nerfs are slipped into almost every balance patch (with revisionist history and tool tip edits used as lame excuses to cover them up)
- The class is far from being the embodiment of attrition and sustain
- Then – to rub salt into the wound – we’re condescendingly told in so many words to L2P.
Terror as it is now was suggested by Nemesis
Torment was one of the many conditions we came up with
Dhuumfire was based on PvPers knowing we needed a way to get conditions to actually deal damage (which is one of two reasons engis outclassed us at the time)
Greater Marks moving up a tier and the radius becoming base was an idea that Tenderly expressed on a Podcast (in fact a few ideas have been said on the podcast that were later implemented, though many ideas weren’t ours)
And if you ever talk to people on the alpha (or w/e they call it) and that talk with the devs, there are a few ideas that they gave that the devs took at went with.
The reality is they do listen. But sometimes they have to take charge, because at the end of the day it is their game, not ours.
The game should not be balanced at level 20. It makes absolutely no sense when you can get to level 80 in a week, and the majority of content is designed around level 80s.
Also, no control bars. The only thing we need is an added (optional) UI for them.
Lich Form destroying minions is unintended and a bug. The tooltip acknowledges this interaction not because it is supposed to happen, but because it was an annoying, confusing interaction, and they don’t have the resources (currently) to go about fixing us. So they’ve just set out Warning signs instead.
Yeah, the MOB nerf is going to hurt non-condition Necros who use it in WvW… A-net hasn’t even considered this. A-net is nerfing a skill based on the assumption that everyone using it is a Dumbfire Condition Necro.
Lucky I’m one of the few who run Axe/Dagger.
It isn’t changing in WvW, unless they have suddenly decided that all the wording they have used before is out the window.
Dev terms – PvP == sPvP =/= WvW
I’d differ anything I say to Ascii, who would know this way better. But imo, it doesn’t really matter what class your on, as far as commanding goes. You don’t always have to be first in-last out as commander.
As for what you are asking:
Self-sustain – probably Necro, I feel, for WvW, because of the insane LF generation and defensive stats you can get there
Mobility – basically tied even for none. They are both incredibly immobile classes
CC – Guardian, which is why they can take part in the melee/CC clusterkitten train
Group Support – Guardian. Both can do this, but Guardian does it easier and better
Overall Tankiness – in WvW I’d tend towards Guardian being overall tankier, if you consider every situation, although I feel like Plague’s ability to make you essentially invulnerable for its duration brings Necros above for some situations. It just depends on what situation you are looking at as to who will outperform.
Assuming we can only pick from existing weapons.
Existing weapons are the only ones confirmed to be being looked at by the development team. They also make the most sense from an economic standpoint (for ANet), because it takes away the otherwise added work of making a whole new line of one or more weapons (which would have significant cost to even bring a new weapon up to par with the least plentiful of the current ones).
The only weapon that makes “little” sense to me is Rifle, simply because I’m not sure how they’d make it fit into us, but I’m sure it could be done.
Otherwise, I think all of the weapons have possible setups they could use.
And as always, I want pistol off-hand to fire Jagged Horrors.
They are combining Reanimator with Death Nova
Why do you need Spectal Wall? We have an inherent fear in the form of Death Shroud skill 3. Bone Fiend…that immobilizes, right? Death Shroud 5 does that too.
Wall + Projectiles = Confusion
What you’re seeing is the Vampiric Master power scaling. The minions themselves don’t scale with your stats, but Vampiric Master does.
Death Magic 5: gain aegis when you enter DS (with an ICD, probably a pretty large one)
Death Magic 15: X% of the damage you take is taken directly from your LF instead
The reality is that devs are that way for every class though. There is no way that a developer would know as much as even someone like myself, who spends fairly limited time in game, about a class, because everything I do that is related to the game is about Necromancers.
I sit around here forum-warrioring, I go in game and do testing, I do podcasts, community stuff, etc. And this translates through to the community; though various means we all are very connected to the profession. This is good and bad. Its good because obviously we have a very intimate knowledge of the class, we know things that many devs don’t (especially when it comes to strange interactions of skills, or under-used builds/skills/traits).
However, this isn’t always good, because we also have a strong attachment to the class. It isn’t good for the developers to be as attached as we are, because they’d make terrible balance choices (worse than now, however hard that might be for you to imagine). It is why its important that they have the forums where people like us can voice our more knowledgeable and nuanced views, and then the devs can take it and work with it.
Also, I think Powerr (the person in question) has stuck his foot up his mouth a few times when it comes to Necros. I have a lot more faith when I have talked to Sharp, and I get the same feeling from others that they have a great concept of what the Necromancer should be in the end. The problem is that they have a lot of trouble getting there while retaining our incredibly unique mechanics, and not over or underpowering us.
“We could probably add a max range”
no.. just.. No.. never… just the thought…. No..njet, nee, nein, nada, niente, no, non..
I don’t actually think he knew what he was talking about. Adding a max range to Walk wouldn’t change this “bug” at all, because you can just quickly double tap it right before you land. In fact, even if they added a max fall range, it shouldn’t apply either, because the reason this works is that the second activation of sWalk resets your “fall counter”.
ANet isn’t making WvW about power. WvW just isn’t a consideration except in more extreme cases. Don’t ever expect the game to be balanced for WvW, its impossible.
Like flow said, it had its duration halved in sPvP only.
No. Minions proc their own life stealing trait but no others.
You’re essentially asking about a generic Necromancer, not what a GW2 Necromancer is. It looks to me like you played WoW or something similar and are thinking that is what Necros should be.
They only have one general build type in every single game mode: tanky support. And actually, they really don’t ever get changed, all that happens is things are slightly shifted around, and the best tanky support build changes. But that is basically all Guardians have ever been, a tanky support.
Also, I’m not sure if we want minion traits across multiple trait lines. I kind of like having most minion traits in Death Magic. Then again, diversity is nice. It may encourage more different flavors of minion masters. I just don’t know for sure.
How about this improvement: Every minion automatically receives any boon that the necromancer himself has.
As it is now, its nice that the minion traits are constrained to Death/Blood magic. But if they made minions a bit more suitable for a damage-based condimancer, then it’d be nice to see some in Curses, same thing if they made them make more sense for Soul Reaping. Death Magic should always stay the main tree, but it’d be cool to see some specialized things in other trees, if the style was supported.
For the improvement, it’d have to be a master/GM trait. Simply because already it is very easy to keep permanent retal up on yourself with just axe 3 in many fights, along with regen, and if you’re with a guardian you’d see things like a lot of protection. It’d get scary, imo, really quickly. But maybe as a high level trait, a counterpoint to Death Nova, a trait that increases minion’s sustain to keep them alive.