Guild Wars 2

Honestly, although these changes are okay (neither here nor there), we need buffs to Death Magic.

I realize Blood Magic has kind of been the ongoing project, and it is getting better (not there yet, but butter), but Death Magic is still the redheaded step child of the trait trees. If you aren’t an MM, or don’t use staff, there is 0 reason to go here. We need good, meaningful traits here, including the minors (which just need to go), because as it stands now, we don’t have a single non-minion defensive tree, we have two half-defensive trees.

Btw, I’d like to say that I love that the ideas are mostly involving Death Shroud, I think we need quite a bit of buffing in that direction, if its going to be our main defensive mechanic (as of now the only time it feels good enough is with Spectral Armor up).

1) Fix the bug that causes marks to go on full CD.
2) Make Putrid mark transfer conditions off allies, but keep it at 3 conditions per person

It was just an idea, not that they should or shouldn’t hit spite (although spite could use more condition traits, imo).

I think that is an interesting idea. It would probably need to be more than just on hit (otherwise constant torment application would seem really strong), but I like the idea of offensive “defense” like that.

I’d also like to point out that Death Magic should be our big defensive tree. We essentially have three trees each with a specific defensive purpose: Blood Magic (siphoning), Soul Reaping (LF generation/DS) and Death Magic (which doesn’t have a specific purpose yet). So I’d love to see more good defensive traits in Death Magic.

1) I love it. It might need specific work, but I’ve always wanted something like this (although I’ve always thought more in the context of a skill).
2) Great idea to make Protection of the Horde better without axing it totally
3) This should be in Curses, although I like the idea for Torment on crit
4) Either a Curses or Spite trait

I like your ideas, I’ll post some of my own later, but I feel like some of them are actually much better off in other trees (namely 3/4), whereas Death Magic should be a defensive tree, even if some things have dual purpose (1 isn’t strictly defensive but would definitely fit).

Nagato no Kami.4980:

I might feel differently about Reanimator if:
1) The minion lived longer than three seconds.
2) It had more than half a hit point
3) If it proc’d Death Nova upon death
Other than that, it’s fairly awful.

1) Minion lives 40 seconds if he just ticks away with no help in any direction (traited, dunno about untraited).
2) It has at least as much HP as Bone Minions, which is base 5200, now 8900something in PvE. Not bad for a free minion.
3) It does.

Reanimator has plenty of issues, the Jagged Horror himself isn’kitten

Immunity is in League of Legends, I think we can consider league of a legends a somewhat successful game, and many immunities in that game are perfectly healthy.

Peow peow.2189:

so if they are at 70% health and get conditions on them and heal to 100%. DO all the conditions come off??

No, it would function just like the other condition immunities. Any new conditions aren’t applied, but any pre-applied conditions function normally.

Reanimator can be debateably useful for all builds. It summons a minion, however that minion will apply bleeds (condition necros), can potentially cover a better condition for a power necro, and just deals some damage. Those are all good things. Not great, its still a bad trait, but at least there is something there for everyone.

Protection of the horde isn’t even good for MMs. The trait either needs to be buffed significantly, and then put into the Grandmaster Major level or just gotten rid of completely.

Sepreh.5924:

But Bhawb, wasn’t he using the combo of chillblains/putrid mark for the AOE weakness?

That is skill

True, he probably even used Scepter 3 at the end for the increased direct damage.

Andele.1306:

I mentioned this before, unless its a big skill, internal cooldowns are a very bad thing for sustain skills. Like if vampiric procced once every 3 seconds siphoning for like 20% of the damage delt to the necro since it last procced, it would be fine, if it was every x seconds you siphon for x00% of the next skill without cooldown (so auto attack), it would be fine, but flat numbers+internal cooldown+current hit system = kitten.

They could do it much better, like a consumable buff (like how the sigil/rune siphons work) that comes up, like you said. But let’s not give ANet too much work now.

Tenderly and I came to the conclusion that Power (the person who said it) probably just made an awful mistake and didn’t actually voice the opinion of the development team as a whole. Power was a PvPer a while back that was a pretty terrible Necromancer. Think of this, they would walk into a team fight mid and this was their rotation:
Staff 2, 3, 4, 5, swap to scepter/dagger 2, 5, 1111111 (till staff CDs are up) swap to staff, repeat.

So we felt maybe this was a case of someone sticking their foot knee-deep into their mouth.

RashanDale.3609:

snip

You’re misunderstanding me.

New Vampiric/Vampiric Precision
1s ICD, applies on hit
Siphons 300HP per hit – way too much, but it proves the point that an ICD doesn’t mean anything on its own, besides the restriction to AoE, which is a necessary component if they ever want to make siphoning available to all builds semi-equally

Guess what, even with an ICD, these traits now work better in most situations for every single build, whereas right now siphoning is complete kitten for any non-minion build, or any build without 30 points invested, 4 wells, and dagger/warhorn (which makes no sense at all). They give you decent, but not overbearing sustain and pressure, which is something people seem to forget.

If you want scaling siphoning to be able to have decent sustain in team fighting, you have to invest 30 trait points, and be at melee range. If you don’t want melee range, that’s another 10 trait points, and you’re assuming that the target will stand in the well.

What’s being ignored is the fact that as it currently stands with no ICD, siphoning will always have to be balanced to what a dagger/warhorn build with 4 wells and 30 traits invested will do, otherwise those builds will become OP. What does that mean? It means anything that isn’t that build cannot be sustain. It makes no sense that one defensive measure should be useless to all builds but 1.

flow.6043:

I think it would make more sense the other way around.
Imo Target the Weak is in the perfect spot where it is atm, even for pure condition builds.

How about this though:
Shrouded Removal becomes the new adept minor in Death Magic and Siphoned Power replaces Protection of the Horde, but instead of might it gives protection. A trait that gives a defensive boon on low health, in a defensive trait line that also increases boon duration.

I like this idea +1

RashanDale.3609:

this would only benefit well users while leaving all other necro specs still in a bad spot in that scenario.
necro has quite a few AoE-attacks besides the wells, like staff, whorn and life transfer and shackles and with these, other necro-specs could get a good increase in sustain against multiple opponents via lifesteal.

an internal cooldown would also severely cut the siphons of dagger and axe. these weapons have lower range than staff/scepter so i think it’s only fair when they leech more. currently, they could do that thanks to their fast and often hitting attacks (some (more) aoe on them would be useful tho for more siphons); an internal cooldown would break that.

It wouldn’t hurt anyone unless they remained the same HP per hit (which they wouldn’t, the point is the ICD allows them to control HP/s, and then buff it now that they don’t have any ridiculous situations with wells/AoEs). It sets up Well specs as the only ones that can siphon AoE. Dagger specs could have the same or increased HP/s siphon gain that they have now, the only difference is that staff/scepter wouldn’t be sitting at half or less of the gain just because they attack slower.

Also, staff actually has very high siphon potential, because 5/5 of its attacks can hit multiple targets, as does the general scepter build because it will have multiple AoEs.

Nostredeus.3105:

• Dhuumfire: Now applies 3 stacks of Torment rather than Burning.
• Dhuumfire: Now a grandmaster trait in the Curses line.
• Withering Precision: Now an Adept Minor trait in the Death Magic line replacing reanimator.
• Dark Armor: Dark Armor now causes the user to be immune to damage whilst channeling, crowd control effects still break the channel and therefore the immunity.
• Dark Armor: Dark Armor is now a Grandmaster trait.
• Death Nova: Death Nova is now an Adept trait.
• Protection of the Horde: This trait now reads: “Summon a jagged horror whenever you kill a foe and +20 toughness for each minion under your control.”
• Protection of the Horde: This trait is now an Adept trait.
• Protection of the Horde: The ex-reanimator portion of this trait now has a decreased cooldown from 30s to 15s.
• Shrouded Removal: This trait is now a Master Minor trait in the slot that Protection of the Horde has now vacated.

Dhuumfire would be far too strong in the Curses line. You could get access to Terror and Dhuumfire with 30 points, whereas right now it takes 50.

Withering precision makes no sense to be in Death Magic, at all.

Dark Armor changes are interesting.

Death Nova would be OP as hell as an Adept trait.

PotH + Reanimator would still never be taken, ever. Especially not if it was in the same spot as Death Nova.

Shrouded Removal idea I love.

RashanDale.3609:

But 1v2/1v3 is one of the scenarios where necro has the most problems, since its main defence only blocks a fixed amount of damage, unlike said blocks, evades and whatnot (there are some suggestions to limit the amount of life force you can lose in a certain amount of time, but thats probably not gonna happen. just like the healing/leech while in DS).

And thats were lifeleech could help, especially because they scale with the number of enemies. Spectral had that too until it got butchered with that internal cooldown.

Only put ICDs on Vampiric and Vampiric Precision, because those are traits that most builds who want siphoning would want to take. That opens them up to far more builds, so any necro can have Blood Magic sustain. Then keep Vampiric Rituals as no ICD, because those traits are “gated” by how many wells you take and the duration of those wells; just like minion traits are gated by minions, and as such can have high siphoning without it becoming an issue.

Interesting point, and I tend to agree. Necromancer has been a pain in the balance team’s kitten since alpha, and I think it just keeps getting more and more problematic, because:
1) We’re over a year past launch, and we still see fundamental issues with a lot of things, but this iwouldn’t be a problem except for
2) It feels like in many areas our wheels are spinning in mud, so to speak

To address 1, lets face it, this game is still a work in progress, and to think or expect a one year old game to have better progress than GW2 is at is just unrealistic. However, we expect a certain amount of progress to be made.

Look at Warriors in PvP, for example. They had issues for ages. However, the things holding them back are being addressed. They were scaled way too strongly, and are being brought back, but if you play as a Warrior, you can see true progress in the class.

This is the same feeling that MM builds get. We’ve had problems, but we can see ANet slowly bringing us to better places. Siphoning feels better now. Minion skills are more responsive, as well as the minions themselves. There are issues, but they are more issues intrisic to the class that won’t be fixed until the whole class is better as a whole. We kind of see the same thing happening to Wells (who had massive CD reductions) and two spectrals (SA and SWall are both amazing now). And in my opinion, we’ve seen Blood Magic go in the right direction (though not “there” yet).

However, in many other respects things still feel like we’re stuck in place, and have been. Transformations remain bugged. Death Shroud remains a sub-par for a true defensive mechanic. Condition Necros got made terrible via OP buffs, and are now potentially facing nerfs that will force us into mindless 1 spam to be remotely useful (more so than now). Blood Magic and Support is still sub-par on Necros, and our offensive support seemingly gets swatted with a nerf-bat every time we turn around, because of other screw ups they did.

The problem is that every step forward with us is accompanied by a step backwards. We get torment and great offensive changes, and in the same patch get screwed by Dhuumfire. We get a massive DS buff, at the same time as having DS hit as a defensive mechanic. SA and SWall, as well as other utilities get great improvements, while we see things like SWalk and CB get smacked.

I’d really like to have developers take time out of their day to do one show, per week, for 8 weeks about each class. Not those silly guides, but sit down for 30 minutes to an hour. Don’t tell us anything you don’t want to, or would get you in trouble (like talking about things in iteration), but just sit down and say:
1) This is where we feel X class is, in each of the three game modes.
2) This is where we want them to be
3) Here are some very general plans to get them there

Just give everyone the hope that you guys have a vision, and know where to take it. I’ve talked to some devs before, some of them really understand where they want this to go, and it actually gives you hope when they say it.

But it would be massive to have a video where I can just point back and say “they know what they are doing, even if I have to wait a while”. People are okay with waiting, they just need to know that they have something to wait for.

I’d much prefer they change Death Magic’s minors, completely; or at the very least the 5/15 (now that 25 seems to be in a decent place with the Dec 10th patch). But I don’t know if they will.

I agree it could potentially get way out of control quickly. Although they could just make Death Nova not apply and it wouldn’t be all that much better.

If they keep buffing reanimator till when it procs at a decent rate (which it still doesn’t, it needs a 10 ICD and to proc on more than just enemy death), it will give good benefit to every build.

I agree with Sharp, this trait was too good for an adept trait. It’s only a problem because it hasn’t been this way since launch, and nerfs are always bad (in the eyes of most).

They are nerfing most of the builds we really needed the weakness against, and PvE doesn’t get any say in balance.

I agree that its strong, but they went over the top trying to explain why it was strong and needed a nerf.

All traits have disproportionate benefit to certain builds.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Ac*Note: please ignore the fact that warriors can do 20k damage on a similar CD and also in an AOE, that is not relevant to the discussion.

I get the comparison, but it isn’t the same. We do that damage at 1200 range, with 1 stat investment, and no setup at all.

It is currently 6/15, which with condition duration and other weakness inate to most PvP builds (only thing they usually look at) does equate to near 100% weakness.

I’ve posted this numerous times.

Change all on-death traits to have new triggers as follows:
1. Full effect on enemy death
2. Reduced effect on extra triggers: enemy down (sPvP only), ally death, minion death

OR make the full effect trigger no matter what, but reduce its effectiveness slightly to accomodate the extra triggers.

Reduced effects would either be lowered amounts of whatever should happen (spiteful removal only removes 1 condition), or reduced chances of happening (25% chance to summon Jagged horror). Tune the ICDs and effects as necessary, but it makes absolutely no logical sense that we only benefit from our enemies dying for our traits, but we gladly steal our allies life essences.

It also vastly improves them all. Reanimator isn’t bad because of Jagged Horrors, its bad because it doesn’t happen often enough, and often doesn’t happen when its meaningful. Same with Spiteful Removal.

Blood Magic Necromancers aren’t feeling good. I have no idea who you got that idea from (it had to have been internal), because I have never talked to a Necro that feels non-minion siphoning is good.

Also, can we get some clarity on the quote from Chapman?

It will no longer cleanse teammates and it will always give a full cooldown when interrupted because its one of the best skills in the game.

You do realize this is total crap right? That a 25 second CD ability that cleanses 3 conditions. How does that equate to one of the best skills in the game?

I feel like you say something really great (Death magic is way too minion focused) and then shove your foot in your mouth (making Dhuumfire even easier to acquire).

The only important part of this nerf is the nerf to weakness. And even then, I think its really only a big deal in PvE. I just don’t think it was used often enough on CD in PvP for this to be as big of a nerf as it seems.

Don’t get me wrong, its still a nerf, but I am not surprised by it.

Spectral Armor doesn’t need a buff. It’s already our best overall defensive utility skill.

I’d prefer to see buffs to others (and others could definitely need it).

Its been buffed, actually.

Sheobix.8796:

snip

Yeah, its a solid build. You only need 0/0/20/0/30 to make it work, the last 20 is up to you.

It was so that non-bloodthirst siphons are stronger.

Stx.4857:

My dagger #2 heals me a for a lot less than pre-patch, so I find it very hard to believe you.

Sorry, the one nerf was to non-traited siphons, which I forgot about, which did get indirectly nerfed from bloodthirst.

What they did was buffed all the bases of our vampiric skills gave them scaling, and then nerfed Bloodthirst. IIRC the design was that if you take bloodthirst, without scaling the siphons should be right where they were pre-patch (so 20% buffed siphons now == 50% buffed siphons before).

I believe there are some situations where this isn’t happening, I submitted it to the bug forums, and they did acknowledge it as a bug.

The Necromancer changes are a bit worrying, full feedback here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dec-10th-Balance-Preview/page/17#post3138558

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dec-10th-Balance-Preview/page/17#post3138558

Go read and upvote it if you agree with it. I’d like to know their input on some things, hopefully.

I like the idea of the Necromancer changes, but a few things worry me.

Condition Damage
1) Are the bleeding nerfs permanent, in a way that you want to push us towards Dhuumfire/Terror for damage?
2) If you are going to then nerf Dhuumfire/Terror (the only things that are actually still holding us up as a viable condition damage build), will you revert some of the nerfs we’ve seen since Dhuumfire was added? (not all, but some).
3) What about changing Dhuumfire to Torment? Its current method isn’t fun, the Necromancer has little control over it, the opponent can’t do much about it, its just sucky right now, and it only has 1 way to balance it (duration). Torment, along with a better trigger mechanic, has 2 tools for balancing (duration and intensity), and also has more interesting gameplay associated, since if the person in question needs say 3 seconds till their cleanse they can just sit on the stacks and take the non-upgraded damage.

Defense
You keep saying we should be low mobility high aggression. I 100% agree, we should be the “manliest” class in the game. However we need to all agree that it isn’t the case right now, unless you are an MM.
4) Do you agree that Death Shroud is still slightly subpar when it comes to a defensive mechanic because of its non-scaling with enemies (whereas a block is a block, no matter how many)? If so, do you plan on any good gameplay ways to fix this (such as a 1s block on DS entry as a trait)?
5) Can we agree that non-MM siphoning is still broken? I see the problem with it, it has really difficult balance because it scales with how quickly you hit. What about implementing a short ICD on Vampiric and Vampiric Precision so it doesn’t have the crazy AoE procs (wells can proc 15 siphons per second with full traiting, 5 targets, and critting)? This way even scepter/staff builds with lower attack rates can benefit, making Blood Magic a sustain option for everyone not just dagger/wells.
6) We need more love on Death magic. I’ll talk about reanimator just below, since I talked with Sharp(?) about this before. Death Magic isn’t a good tree unless you have a staff, or are an MM. We need a non MM Grandmaster trait that gives us some really strong defense for the investment, and Necromatic Corruption needs some big changing. Death Magic overall should be our main defense tree, with Blood Magic as our sustain tree, and Soul Reaping as our Death Shroud tree (hybrid offense/defense). As it is right now though, Death Magic gives no noticeable defense to non-MMs. Blood Magic is subpar sustain, and Soul Reaping outpaces both of them in any defensive effort.

Reanimator and On-Death Traits
7) Reanimator. Thanks for the ICD drop, this helps quite a bit. But it needs to proc more during fights. As it is now, it will never proc meaningfully in any PvP match (by the time someone is killed, you won the fight, his addition is meaningless), in PvE they don’t spawn on any boss fights without adds until the end. “Hey guys I just got here, who do I attack?” “Oh, everyone’s dead? I’ll just sit here until I die…”

What about extending it to apply on minion and ally death, and in PvP when enemies are downed (instead of dead, since enemies get downed all the time and come back up, he could help swing things)? The ally/minion activation shouldn’t be guaranteed, but a smaller chance, maybe 20% when a minion dies, 50% when an ally, whatever works. But this way we get benefit no matter what.

This could apply to all on-death traits, almost all of which aren’t great in PvP or boss-fight PvE right now. Allow them to activate on minion or ally death, or enemy down, but at a reduced strength for ally/minion. This creates a lot of internal synergy within the Necromancer class, and it makes sense (why would we only benefit on enemy death? All death is equal, we already take our allies’ life force, why not other things?).

To summarize, I’d just like to know the direction the Dhuumfire/Terror and other nerfs to damage are going. I’d like to know your plans and feelings on Death and Blood Magic as they currently stand, and how you will allow us to have more defensive options. And I’d like to know your feelings on making on-death traits more impactful with more triggers than simply enemy death.

Like people have said, even a pretty highly defensive ele doesn’t have that much HP, and 10% of even a high HP ele is still really low.

There wasn’t a single “nerf” to blood magic. The only nerfs resulted from incorrect scaling with the newly buffed siphons, otherwise everything was either unchanged or flat buffed.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

and im curious as to where this weakness comes from… because necro sacrifices a lot to obtain a decent weakness up time (especially when you factor in unshakable halving that duration)

Enfeebling Blood – 24% uptime
CPC – 37.5% uptime
Putrid Explosion w/ Death Nova – 50% uptime
Weakning Shroud – 40% uptime

If you have 100% uptime, those uptimes translate directly to unshakable durations.

But the real thing we do is put out poison fields, which give 5s of weakness per blast, and 8s per leap. And besides CPC, all of the things that cause weakness are things we’d already be taking regardless, so we aren’t “giving up” anything.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

And the “reanimating” necros actually don’t give a crap about this trait because minions are all about direct damage.

Literally one Death Nova will bring an ele below 90%, lol.

Like others said, dark path is fine, just needs a bit more reliability.

Right, because condition builds in PvE are just way too strong right? Everyone running those powerful condition builds and totally don’t negate each other’s damage the second any two builds have the same conditions, even if one isn’t a condition build at all but just generates secondary conditions that push off the ones dealing actual damage.

And we all know how often bleeds stack to 25 on players in PvP/WvW.

I’ll be honest, I “understand” the point of it. Necromancers in PvP (the only place balance matters to them, lets be honest here) are too strong because of our ability to stack a bunch of bleeds that get covered.

Problem is the bleeds themselves are 0% the problem. We were the same pre-dumbfire. Back then though, we were two conditions down, and our scepter poison was down. That means we had less cover conditions, and also our scepter 1 spam didn’t force removals like it does now.

So what is the logical thing to do after the recent patches changed us? Address the new patches. What did ANet do? Nerf things that are perfectly fine on their own, but only bad due to a new trait nobody likes as is. Allofmywut?

I get their through process: we need to nerf Necromancer damage because its too high, so lets nerf their damage. They just are doing it stupidly.

Also, pour some out to our dead homie, Putrid Mark. </3

@Kraag, you forgot the one that was a sledge hammer to the necro-marbles; “oh hey guys, Putrid Mark wasn’t bugged, we actually just nerfed it without ever telling you, lol, xD we will fix the tooltip to make it better ::kisseyface::”

He was responding to us not being the worst in PvE, where CC is pretty rarely an issue, compared to other things.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Well, unless you’re running MM, there will no longer be a reason to go into death magic for PvP, I think?

Reanimator is still 95% useless in PvP because he doesn’t prokittenil after a person is killed, which for 95% of MM builds mean you just won your 1v1. He’s basically a victory-trophy in most situations, and the ones were he isn’t (team fights) you have already won the fight if you killed someone, he certainly won’t tip the balance any.

In what way are we the worst? Its been shown that we have comparable direct damage DPS to non-warriors, with a much easier time going full glass than pretty much anyone and still being self sufficient. And that is just single-target. We are easily one of the strongest classes at dealing with mass mobs, so long as they can’t ping-pong CC us.

It’ll be nice in WvW’s larger gameplay, and it’ll be nice for general PvE stuff. My problem with it is it’ll still be useless in PvP, and it’ll still be mostly useless in any small-scale fighting (WvW and PvE boss fights without adds).

Honestly, they aren’t as viable in PvP anymore. Warrior meta is train-wrecking most Necromancers now, and we’re quickly going back to our pre-dumbfire amount of play on organized teams (ie, only good players like Zombify who know what they are doing still play them). Not that they are bad, but the new warriors hard-counter necros, and until they fall out of the meta more it’ll be hard going.

WvW we’re still pretty amazing, almost no zerg I know of doesn’t pick up a few Necros for their backline.

PvE we’re getting better, definitely not the worst but not the best. But then again, a 5 man Ranger team killed Lupicus in under 50 seconds, so PvE obviously isn’t the most challenging to matter.

Not a huge deal. No one in PvP stays above 90% health reliably. It’ll just give them a little chance in the beginning of the fight and a few times in the middle. 10% HP of most Eles is a single Putrid Mark (hey look, a use for it again, yay!).