I’d still consider the Engineer setup to conform, while they use the 1-5 skills to use the finishers, its still based off utility skills.
Rangers only have 3 skills on their utility bar that are combo fields, like I said there are exceptions, but they tend to be very small compared to their “real” source of finishers. Rangers for example can get more finishers off LB than they can if they took every utility combo field they had.
Same with Thieves, two combo fields on utilities, whereas most of their fields/finishers are on weapon sets.
You could make axe auto 300000 range and I still wouldn’t use it any more than I do now. Range isn’kittens problem.
The idea could be implemented on a new minion, as well. Introduce a new tank minion with really high eHP but lowered DPS, have the active make the minion take all damage/effects from skills used for X seconds or until it dies, or something to that effect.
The current way “stealing” works is it copies the duration, just like Epidemic’ing a 10 second Bleed copies that 10 second bleed (no condition duration bonus).
But I do like the idea of it applying set values, maybe applying the same boon that was stripped, but at a set duration? For example if you strip any boon, it applies that same boon AoE for 2s. So even if you corrupted a 30s long protection, they’d only get 2s (and thus would limit anything super strong, like stealing a huge stability duration off an elite).
As for the healing, it wouldn’t add much to the Necro. Assuming even the highest amount I put down which was 500 (with really high investment from healing power), that is at best an addition of 100 HP/s, assuming your minions are all auto attacking constantly, never missing, and the enemy always has boons on to corrupt. I do see your point though.
As of now, Necromatic Corruption is a 10% chance to remove a boon with each minion hit. Even assuming you have your full 6 minions out, all of them magically attacking without any kind of interference, that is a 60% chance to remove a boon every full attack rotation, which averages out to every 3 seconds. In other words, every 5 seconds, on average, a condition will be removed in ideal situations.
And lets face it, it isn’t often that your minions will be getting free hits in perfectly. Your enemy is going to kite them, they’ll eat CC, your opponent will dodge/stealth/block/other damage avoidance, they’ll be killed, they might even kitten . So you’re looking at even in still pretty good situations, a 30 point trait that gives you comparable boon removal to Spinal Shivers.
Basically, not much, especially not when you compare it to the contender for the Grandmaster slot: Death Nova. Death Nova applies poison, leaves poison fields that self-combo with the entire build to apply even more poison and weakness, and deals around 1.2-1.5k direct damage per pop.
I think most people tend to agree, this trait is lack luster. It isn’t terrible, but its subpar. So I’d like to open a discussion on changes to it.
My own suggestion would be to expand its uses, not necessarily by just making it a higher % chance to hit, but by giving an effect when it does. This trait synergizes best with sustain-based MMs, ones that want a lot of minions, and want to keep them alive. I have two basic ideas, both of them playing off keeping the minions alive, taking effect when a boon is stripped (to maintain the general play/counterplay of MMs and opponents).
Suggestion 1:
Add in an AoE heal when a boon is stripped. The minions “eat” the boon (just like CC does) and share its essence with surrounding allies, healing them for a small amount, base 200-300 with a healing power scaling up to maybe 500 max with really high healing power builds.
Suggestion 2: Minions steal the boon and share it with allies. For balance reasons, I think this might need to be limited to less than 5 recipients, but in general I think it would be removing the really quickly re-applied (and low duration) boons, and so not too strong.
Reasoning for both is to make the “MM mini game” more pronounced. The mini game is the game you and your opponent play while you are an MM; you try to CC them and otherwise get your minions in range and attacking to maximize their DPS, while your opponent tries to keep them from attacking through CC and block/dodge/etc.. This rewards you if you can keep them in range, as the secondary effect will proc more, and also rewards the enemy for not allowing them to land attacks.
Anyway, what do you think? Both to the idea of changing it in general, and anything I put myself.
If you absolutely don’t want to lose a minion, then run Fetid Consumption along with Lyssa Runes, that should be enough.
Dropping Blood Fiend from your bar is pretty common, and not that bad. You lose the 300 or so HP/s, as well as a bit of damage, and any minion-related effects (like Death Nova).
On the other hand, you’ll be taking CC, which is similar HP/s (Blood Fiend wins out when activated, but its unreliable). And then you’ll be getting all that condi removal.
To anyone trying to make Blood Fiend work (as far as conditions go), you can use staff + dagger OH, Fetid Consumption, Lyssa Runes, and an option if going Fetid Consumption is to take WoP as well (drop a minion). Mix and match those options until you are satisfied.
Problem with this tier list is you are listing professions when the things that you’re really listing are meta builds. When you put Necromancer in tier 1, we all know it is a single build type – Dhuumfire condi Necros. That is the case for all the classes, you are only going to consider their most common builds within the current meta.
Why is that a problem? Because then you aren’t looking at the full picture of balance. Let’s say you nerf necros by nerfing some of their condition spam – you’ve just nerfed the entire class, because that is a majority of their strength; using conditions. So now you have an entire class that was already not considered viable, and then nerfed it to lower a single build. Same thing for every single class, you have to make sure to target the right things, because everything is interconnected.
Cool to know thakittens being looked at, at least.
That isn’t how programming works.
Fear: Longer duration should be applied, when you scare you just dont get better in 3 seconds.
I think fear should have a secondary effect called Soiled Pants
Yeah, they lowered it to 6 seconds base, from I believe 10 (66% uptime to 40%).
I don’t think people realize how large-game development works. They aren’t saying its impossible, nor that they will never do it, what they say every time something is difficult is: there is too little benefit for the relative cost of actually addressing this issue as of present. What does that mean? In this case it might take them, for example, 100 man-hours of work to fix this (just a number). That is 100 man-hours they are taking away from meaningful things, like real bug-fixes that are impacting the game, to do something that really isn’t that big of a deal.
What i think they will dis is remove glory gain from custom arenas. FIXED!
So if YOU are grinding in these servers you better do it for as long as you can. it will end soon!
Why punish people for not bothering with an essentially useless soloQ tournament?
honestly I wouldn’t want any existing weapons especially not greatsword except maybe torch. I think torch would not only synergize well with our current trait system but also the lore so it wouldn’t seem so ridiculously absurd as a necro toting an obnoxious greatsword.
We could wield everything in GW1, while it had pretty much no reason to, you could have been a sword/shield necro if you felt like it.
Pretty much what Brando said. The only other thing I’d do is if you are already hitting 100% (or really close) condition duration without hemo, then weakening shroud is better.
I’d like an elite ability that allowed us to resurrect enemy player corpses to fight for us for a short time. They would just have to sit and watch as they killed their teammates.
Not going to happen, because its entirely against our lore as a class.
Eh, there’s three (four if both bone minions count) and one’s on the staff. At that point it could be theme or coincidence.
All of our finishers, sans staff, are on utility skills. All of our fields, sans staff, are on utility skills. That is nearly exactly the same thing on every class, they get fields and finishers from the same source, either weapons OR utility skills (with each class having their few exceptions, like our staff). That is done for, I would imagine, balance reasons, it means to have tons of finishers you are giving up fields to use them on, if you bring tons of fields you lack finishers, or you can balance it out.
That said, I would love to see a few more finisher options from our utility skills. I don’t know how they could add them into what we have now, but as we see more skills added I’d like to see them added.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
It doesn’t fit well with the current them of majority of fields/finishers are accessible through the same means. Ours are utilities.
I realize we don’t have small condition cleanses… its because our “small” ones are full cleanses. Deathly Swarm is a small cleanse that only has an 18s recharge, Shrouded Removal is low CD, as is the minion one, and Putrid Mark is fairly small. I know it feels wrong using an entire cleanse on just one condition, but that’s a luxury you get when you are the condition class. Those low CD options are available, people just don’t generally find they need them.
And yes there is a bit of an opportunity cost, which is fine. Sure if I blow Deathly Swarm on one cripple it is far less useful than if I waited till I had 25 stacks of bleeds, but that is just because so many of our skills have that high scaling that others don’t. A skill that only removes conditions can only scale up to… removing really long cripples, which is pretty small. A skill that can copy any condition to an enemy while removing it from you though, that has high scaling, because using it on a long duration burning/high stack bleed suddenly turns the entire fight around, they went from having an 8k damage dot (at full duration) to having it on them. That is something unique of our “removal” skills, they don’t just remove, they actively punish the enemy for even having applied them. But gain, Deathly Swarm is still just as useful for removing 3 conditions as any other low CD 3 condi removal, we just feel bad because we keep that ideal in our mind.
Essentially we don’t need any of those small removals other classes have, because our small ones are equivalent to their big ones. Its all relative.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
The other could be just Fear… over and over, again. (^_^)
Plague 5: Clown Plague, particle effects of spewing out balloon animals, red noses, assorted clown-related items, and causes 1s of fear every second.
Minions aren’t really worth supporting with AOE regeneration. You can basically maintain regeneration on them with mark of blood alone, ignoring any support the rest of your party gives you.
In PvP your blood fiend’s passive auto attack heal is more valuable to you than your minions getting AOE regeneration.
I’ve made fairly successful PvP builds based entirely around 100% regen uptime along with WoB giving my minions and myself a ton of healing. Also, staff isn’t a required minion weapon, frankly if it wasn’t for the regen I’d drop it out of almost all my minion builds right now.
Again, if you are not the cause of Blood Fiend’s death you are playing wrong. I don’t see why this is so hard to understand. If you do not kill him, you aren’t using him properly. So since you are going to kill him eventually, 14s of regen AoE is fairly nice.
icwutudidther
New spells I want are new minions to satisfy a few things that I think could be expanded upon: condi-based minions, self-sustain minions, tank minions, and mass-produced minions. Not necessarily needing 4 of each, but even a single skill that addressed each of those areas would be nice, so minions could have a bit more variety.
And I want Orders.
@Lastday (didn’t want to quote the whole thing).
Elementalists have strong cleansing with that build, of course, and it is AoE; the main reason it was viable was because of the team-wide cleansing it could do (most of the cleanses are AoE), and thus by having that ele on your team you can bring a lot less condi removal to teamfights. Between them and shout-Guardians you had massive team-wide condi removal.
Otherwise the problem is thakittens a single build you’re listing. No one has the vast amount of easily accessible condition removal that Necromancers do. Can Shout Guardians or 30water/30arcana eles remove comparable (if not maybe more) conditions? Sure, but they take an entire build near entirely built around removing conditions to do that; Necromancers just slot very commonly used things that they’d probably take anyway.
I’d say try a necro. If you don’t like it, delete it. As simple as that.
Pretty much this. Play a bit of PvE on it, go into PvP and screw around a bit in hotjoins, if you like it stick with it, if you don’t move on until you get that 8th slot.
Stability on SA would kill it’s use right now (as it’d be nerfed in other aspects). They either need more accessible stab traits or new utilities with stab.
Healing power isn’t worthless when the only time you’re using Dwayna runes is when you’re keeping minions alive. More healing power = stronger healing effects on minions = minions alive longer.
You should always be the cause of the minion’s death, if you aren’t then you have wasted healing. Every time that happens, you get two Dwayna procs, one on activating his death, the second on summoning him, which is 14 seconds of AoE regen.
Even a 1 second condition is going to be affected by condition duration.
You’re not going to sacrifice it, but when you use it, it is going to proc it anyway, and you should be killing the minion yourself.
I’d be happy if they left marks untouched, just toned down the necro lifeforce/death shroud mechanic. It has currently become a true secondary health bar.
Gasp, you mean the class with no vigor, no blocks, no invulnerability, no stealth, and no instant movment to escape actually has a working defensive tool?
Seriously, DS isn’t even strong enough yet overall to compensate for basically 0 other defensive tools.
I don’t think many people want to lower the skill cap of this game even more.
You’re listing Grandmaster traits that give comparable condition cleansing to a single off-hand ability.
Plague Signet is a full transfer. Consume Conditions is a full wipe. Well of Power is 6 conditions flipped. Dagger 4 is 3, Putrid mark should be full. Then a single adept trait gives us the same thing that your 30 point grandmaster does, 1 condition removed every 10 seconds.
If we want to remove craploads of conditions, I can remove 5 conditions every 10 seconds by slotting 5 minions, and then going 30 into Blood magic, and I can still carry 2 full cleanses and a 3 transfer.
Anyway, you’re trying to compare a single build that specs a crapload towards condition removal, to stuff that we pretty much always take anyway. It isn’t a remotely good comparison, you’re forced into a single build to deal with conditions that quite literally any of our builds could handle.
Putrid Mark removes conditions regardless of where you are. Anyway, I’m pretty sure Necromancers have the most condition removal of any class in the game.
@Sepreh, don’t get me wrong, I think it could potentially be a great skill, but it would need to be its own separate skill, probably a utility skill on a longer CD with few other effects (maybe a stability skill? like 5s of stability and damage sharing on a long CD), its just adding it to DS 5 that would be too strong.
Well I know this is completely off topic, but wouldn’t it have been awesome if:
Tainted Shackles: all damage dealt to you by shackled player is dealt to them as well.
Make it very easy to tell when a player is shackled. Promotes intelligent gameplay from both sides. Cap damage dealt when used on characters with defiant.
Way too strong.
+1 to Lopez. Spectral Armor is amazing in PvP because of its ability to pretty much invalidate damage during its duration. We have the most ways to deal with conditions of any class, why would we need more?
Stability would make it too strong. They’d need to nerf it in other ways to be able to buff that aspect of it, and that isn’t worth it.
THings have changed for sure.
PvE Necros are fine. Anything short of serious dungeon/fractal running we are perfectly capable of doing, and are arguably the best at (between minions for solo farming and mass AoE for event farming). In serious dungeons we aren’t bad, you can complete any dungeon and fractals just fine, but you will be slightly sub-par in the DPS department to what people are looking for. Again not a huge issue, but its there.
Minions are a lot better. They have gotten a bit of HP/toughness increases, AI has been vastly improved, and Death Nova now does direct damage on death as well.
PvP we are great. Condition and Power builds both work great even up into the highest levels of play (even though condi is favored in the meta), both max-DPS setups and tankier ones, and if you are just looking at hotjoins/yoloQ then even minions are a good setup. Just build more selfishly than if you were on a team.
My first run through I never bought new armor. Whatever drops I got I compared to what I wore, if it was better I put it on and recycled the old stuff, if not it was sold/salvaged. The only time I’d worry about actually buying armor is if you start doing dungeons pre-80, in which case you might like better armor.
There would be no problem for both spec, simplicity and complexity, co-exist in the game IF AND ONLY IF, people play simple spec will NEVER EVER can win another people play in complex spec. Right now, as I see it, people play simple spec can easily out-do people play with complex spec which is stupid.
That doesn’t make sense. If I enter a game with a complex spec, I shouldn’t instantly win because of my build loadout. I should win, however, if I take an incredibly complex spec that is very difficult to play perfectly, and then play it perfectly against a very simple spec. That is the point of risk-reward, higher risk gives higher reward only if you are successful.
I think the problem is mostly about skill in < Power out.
If some thing is easy to do and can match or even out do harder plays then the problem is everyone runs the same easy method.
And people who play things that take more risk ore are more difficult to pull off feel cheated for the lack of reward.
True it’s perspective. Anything is essentially easy to play once you got it down. Some learn quicker than others ect. But I can understand the feelings of the people rather indignant about it.
It’s not that something can’t be countered it’s that a side has a clearer advantage for nothing.
(On a mobile device waiting in a line, getting consistent server errors excuse the lack of editing)
I would summarize it as risk vs reward. A well designed game will have setups that span the spectrum of how risky it is, vs how rewarding it is to succeed. There should be viable low-risk low-reward builds, these should be builds that are not only easier to play, but have very consistent output; you can always rely on them to do their job. Then on the other end are high-risk high-reward builds; builds that cannot be expected to function perfectly every time, even in the hands of a skilled player, but when a player does play a really great game, they are rewarded for it.
By nature higher risk builds should be stronger when played perfectly, and then the balance comes from the inability to play them perfectly against a smart team, while lower risk builds should be slightly weaker in ideal situations, but have very consistent performance. The game isn’t quite there yet.
It is fine as is. It is a very small amount of guaranteed damage (nothing to warrant a 40s CD), that then brings up a number of play/counterplay decisions for the Necromancer and their affected targets. The point of this entire skill is playing with positioning and movement, something the Necromancer is very much about.
Jasher, Phantasm mesmers were/are very easy to play.
Anytime AI does the majority of a classes work/damage its easy to play. Passives are in the same boat.
It is still on you to properly use the phantasms, and the other parts of the build to full effect. Same thing with the old way spirits were, it was still up to you to summon them, keep them summoned, and then use the rest of your skills to good effect. In general people find these builds really easy, but that doesn’t mean everyone finds them easy.
I think the better point to take from this thread is that simple isn’t bad. There should be viable specs in the game that aren’t super nuanced and hard to play. There should also be specs that are very difficult with high skill ceilings, and they should accordingly have the potential to make plays that a simple build can’t. Draw the parallel to LoL, where champions like Lee Sin can make very strong, very rewarding plays, yet this are still really simple, strong champions for others.
Both should be viable in the game, not just one, and there shouldn’t be an elitist mentality against simplicity.
Why are people saying torch is fitting. Its not. In lore necro has always been about death and ice. Burning was something they added which didnt really fit the flavour of the class. Now that we have it everyone thinks its ok to have a torch. Even if the torch doesnt have burn on it I still dont think it fits. It can be made to fit but thats the same for every weapon.
This is why I dislike the idea of having burning on torch. Now that we got Dhuumfire, people seem to think it fits to just throw burning all over our skills (it doesn’t).
That said, it would not be hard to make torch fit as a ritual weapon, and not in a forced way, but in a way that actually felt right. Instead of using it as a source of burning, warmth, and light, we could “corrupt” its uses towards the opposite, instead freezing, chilling, and darkening. Give our torches a blue-black “flame” (a-la staff’s particles), and we could essentially use anti-torches, which would completely fit us.
Honestly there isn’t a weapon that can’t be made to fit the Necromancer because of how we work right now; everything we use is a ritual tool. As long as they keep up that theme of us not actually poking stuff with sharp objects, but using it as a tool to enact magic, then I really can’t see anything that doesn’t fit.
On a side note, if we do end up with access to all weapons, realize that means we can use the legendaries. I know everyone has noted this for Twilight, but it also means we get access to the bows :P
I think the idea is that adding a torch would be accompanied with the removal of burning from Dhuumfire (or removal of Dhuumfire).
That said, our bleed stacking is really weak outside of scpeter/dagger. If necros got a mainhand torch, then it would preclude good bleed stacking if they wanted burning.
Our bleed stacking is far from weak, our bleeds are what kill people, Dhuumfire, Terror, and all our other conditions only serve to cover the bleeds so they take full effect; but the DPS from Dhuumfire (while nice) doesn’t compare to the 15 stack of bleeds that it covers.
I think they are going to give other classes more tools to deal with us before they start flat nerfing our damage.
This is a 7 month old thread, make a new one if you want to discuss it please, all the info here is outdated pretty massively.
To me the necro is a caster class, so adding more melee weapons that act like melee weapons is going down the wrong path.
But if they do it in the same vein as offhand dagger (which really acts like a casting weapon), then I think it would fit. So instead of a melee cleave on a sword/hammer/etc., it would be an AoE (or pbAoE) effect.
But please: no GS laserbeams.
Caster classes in this game =/= wimpy, old, frail man casting spells from miles away from the fight because the first actual attack that comes his way kills him. Necromancers are from the school of Aggression, having melee range options makes complete sense.
Btw, I think they should keep up the current design of where every weapon we use is just a ritual tool to cast spells. I don’t actually think we should hit something with a big sword or hammer, but it is still thematic towards the effects it would cause.