Guild Wars 2

akaCryptic.2389:

I think a cheap solution would be to make pets and minions evade whenever their master executes a dodge roll.

Problem with this is the MM doesn’t really evade in a way they want their minions to. My minions don’t die to a single large AoE hit, they die to things like Ele fire field, Warrior LB fire field, meteor storm, wells, and similar effects that put out extremely high damage over-time AoE. And these aren’t effects I’m like to just dodge, nor would a dodge really affect anything here.

Yeah, Plague Sending is fun but not really well designed for such a crazy passive proc.

Atharian.7092:

I do think you guys are taking it in the L2P direction a little too far though, I must say. I have a sensitive keyboard for example, and holding the button down a moment too long or pressing it too hard is often considered pressing it twice. It does not need a cooldown, it just needs to properly register when it has actually been actively pressed twice.

So your argument against it being a l2p issue is “I don’t have good enough control over my keyboard so I want to nerf this thing for every other necromancer”. A half second delay is massive, we’ve argued over .25s delays on abilities before because it is a massive feel difference.

mistsim.2748:

reaper has way too much stab. incredible sustain and damage, hard to punish mistakes.

You mean except for where they only have stab on two sources? I won’t deny Reaper’s have solid sustain and damage, but what we’re seeing is Necromancer performing like they always should have, thriving in the heat of combat so long as they aren’t hard focused by the team to shut down the sustain.

Overall I’m loving Reaper right now. Super fun to play, lots of viable builds. I’ll post some nitpicky crap later, because I think a few things need changing (Suffer!, Soul Eater) on a non-numbers level, and I think some other things could use a bit of tuning. But right now I’m having too much fun to kill it by looking at numbers.

As a side note, consistently getting most boons applied to self and most conditions applied in PvP, which is pretty hilarious from a damage/bunker spec.

Oh thank god I hope something good comes out of this.

Figured I’d throw this build out there, it is the build I’m currently messing around with. I think it is pretty unique, I haven’t seen anyone really talking about something like it, though if you were listening to me last BWE it is essentially the same build.

The goal is to be a teamfighting raid boss, you want to be fighting multiple targets, and weave between Shroud (huge damage, time to heal up your HP with BB) and your two weapons (strong defense/CC/utility, build up LF). To exemplify that it can generate 100% LF in just about 3s using 4 abilities, YSIM->(while channeling)->YAAW->Grasping Darkness->Death Spiral. This is on top of it having strong allied and self cleansing via Soldier runes, which allow you to remove up to 2.5 conditions every 10 seconds from allies and yourself (you also get Shrouded Removal), and really strong cleaving damage while still being tanky.

It also has absurd stats, that go up to 3.3k armor, 2.5k (pre might) power, 100% crit chance in shroud, and 30k HP with 23k LF, which is very difficult to burn through. Really fun build for getting the “I’m an immobile kitten-you-up machine” that I always wanted from Necromancer.

Wintersun.9483:

Do death shroud traits (unholy sanctuary for example) work in reaper’s shroud too?

yep

While technically no difference, due to game mechanic differences between what Vulnerability affects, less effective health would make certain things significantly stronger (life steal for example).

If you added a half a second delay to any ability in the game just randomly people would complain because its not only a massive nerf but a huge hit to how responsive something feels. Yet you propose doing this to DS. Just press the button once.

Too strong like others said, especially with how much LF it gives and the utility added with Transfusion.

I prefer hydro, on Reaper if you have good timing you can get a really nice flow going with enter reaper (proc hydro), stay in for around 10s, leave (proc hydro). This allows you to tank for about 10s with Reaper Shroud, which makes good use of a lot of the skills without sitting in it for too long or using all your LF, and tank damage when you aren’t being pressured. Works really nice overall.

striker.3704:

I can’tell really think of any point in PvE where Moa morph is used at all on players. We also don’the see any minion master enemies.

All transforms kill minions. This not only means Lich/Plague (pre change), and Moa, but also any of the transforms that are used in PvE to do various things to the player. The problem there is Necromancer minions are uniquely mobile with no duration, meaning a transformed Necromancer that is meant to not be able to attack at all can have a swarm of minions that deal with mobs for them.

However, now that they can make exceptions Moa should just be included alongside Plague/Lich, and leave the PvE issues to PvE.

Silv.9207:

But, anyway, it’s made to literally destroy all the enemy skills mechanics, and it work as intended.

No, it isn’t. Only minions are destroyed, every other summon in the game is untouched. It is just meant to be an extremely long CC that can’t be removed that is “balanced” by being a transform instead of just a hard CC.

To build on spoj’s point, blast finishers are simply the strongest finisher type in the game. I would also like other types of finishers, but we have nothing to really give us leap finishers on our base profession (Dark Path is the only choice), nor whirl. This leaves projectile and blast, and while I think we should get both, blast finishers are clearly superior in every way in every mode. Note that I primarily play PvP, so when I mention blasts I’m not even talking PvE or pre-buffing. Also blast >>>>> projectile for me, as MM loves the AoE effects of blasts (which further increases the skill cap).

Don’t get me wrong, I think things like Reaper’s Touch should be projectile finishers, but blasts just vastly out perform projectile finishers, and we have a lot of skills to fit blast.

I think this trait is just fine. I’d much prefer Spiteful Spirit be changed to a debilitating condition trait to open up spite as a condition (non damaging) line.

caelaran.6250:

Just poking my head in after almost a year away – did the AI for minions get fixed so they are actually useful now? When I bailed they would stand in one place and hit air half the time….

Their aggro works basically perfectly now. The only “AI issues” left are just issues with the AI system in general.

Son of Urza.1692:

Note that in Reaper shroud that effect isn’t there – instead it bases damage as if you are using a hammer of the rarity of your mainhand weapon, IIRC. Death Shroud could stand to be updated to work more like that.

This is because Reaper Shroud is literally coded as a hammer, as in you get hammer kill credit for it. You also get weapon swaps for the same reason. Overall a really nice change and totally agree.

Well, if they wanted to give us a unique niche destroying siege projectiles is a hell of a one to get.

Or, how about we don’t keep a power weapon skill on a condition weapon, making the weapon bad for both builds at the same time? There was no logical reason Scepter had a skill that had almost no benefit for the primary use of the weapon, and now it does. Let’s not hold back balance for the sake of old off-builds that were questionable already.

Cecilia.5179:

The buffs are “baby steps.” I think Axe needs some more defining features in order to be valuable, such as might at the end of the auto chain or on axe 2. This would be really strong with Blighter’s Boon for Reaper while also boosting damage overall.

Worth noting that Blighter’s Boon gets up to 5% just from Holy Feast, which makes it the best BB proccing weapon skill we have.

Relshdan.6854:

i would only use axe if i absolutely needed the 900 range (and the damage wasn’t terrible)….so the 600 PBAoE is a wasted skill. make it a ground target 900 range w/ a smaller appropriate radius to compensate. now you have an aoe cripple to help you take advantage of your range /tag mobs away from you.

That’s valid, but that is a very specific use for Axe that not everyone needs. I don’t want Axe 3 to be nerfed just for mob tagging at a slightly higher range.

No, Gee said the animation wouldn’t go back to the old one, because it was true that the old one could be canceled for around twice the DPS. It can still get a new animation, so long as that animation works out cancel-wise like our current one.

Relshdan.6854:

weak changes from a pve perspective. 900 range is okay i guess, but why not on all axe skills?

There are only 3 axe skills, and 2 of them are now 900. Unholy Feast being 900 range is completely unnecessary, it’d be one of (if not the) largest AoE in the game.

Just because raids will come out as a single component of a very diverse and large game mode which itself is only one of three game modes doesn’t mean the game is now a “raiding game”. They aren’t going to, nor have they attempted (nor would it be reasonably possible) to balance every single thing every profession has in every game mode. This leads PvE balance to be fairly “general”, with them only addressing things that are way too powerful (Ice Bow, FGS, etc.), and bringing up professions who aren’t taken (their attempts at making Necromancer better). PvP however is a much more “fine” balance, which is why most of their efforts tend to go there. And it is very unlikely that they will stop balancing the game primarily with PvP in mind. This is why we got these changes, which don’t really do anything to PvE but greatly improve Scepter in PvP.

MM in PvE is pretty mediocre. Playable in most cases, but really no point to doing it when other builds do the same content far more efficiently.

What do you mean any more? We have no meaningful finishers on anything except minions right now. I’m not saying we should just Oprah-style give them to every ability, but we 100% need finishers sprinkled into our skills.

Yeah, the animation is just fine. It never went beyond right in front of your character, it is the green slashes appearing through the target that should be on the target, and they work at 900 range just fine.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Give this a blast finisher and you can bet it will see use.

This is what they should have done to Unholy Feast anyway. We need a few finishers on our base profession.

The range increase is nice. As for animations, I just want something that doesn’t look so… pathetic. The name of the AA is Rending Claws, yet the animation looks like some white girl trying to finger snap.

Overall I’ll have to play with it a bit. At this point I still don’t agree that Ghastly Claws being slightly more reliable due to no projectile is enough for it to be so much weaker in comparison to Rapid Fire. It has 0.87 less power scaling, has no vuln or any other utility, and 600 less range. Also, almost all projectile skills (except those given to Necromancer) get projectile finishers, which makes up some of the difference in reliability. Rapid Fire for example should proc 2 projectile finishers per use on average.

Basically this patch was just

1. Bug fixes, which are always nice, though I’m sad they didn’t fix Blood Bond’s healing through shroud if they were going to touch it.
2. Scepter buffs, which are really nice
3. Axe buffs, which make axe a bit nicer but the Unholy Feast buffs were in the wrong direction (needs to blast), the 1 skill needs animation changes, and the 2 skill needs damage buffs
4. CPC buffs, which are really cool

Overall an okay patch for us. The D/D nerfs are bigger than anything, though Scepter buffs should help out condi a lot. All around steps in the right direction.

There are two massive differences between MM and Spirit Ranger/Tourrettes Engi

1. MM relies really heavily on proper use of the abilities, which means not only using them at the right time for strong effect, but also knowing the rough positioning of your minions so Flesh Golem doesn’t charge into a wall, Bone Minions don’t explode 10ft away from the enemy, Bone Fiend doesn’t immobilize itself behind a wall, and Flesh Wurm actually works. Spirit/Turrets didn’t have that, you activated skills off CD and they basically hit (or it didn’t matter in case of Spirit).
2. MM has interplay. Spirits were used because the passive benefits were strong, but there was no need for the Ranger to use CC or heals to keep the Spirits alive. Turret engi didn’t have to do anything with the Turrets, except at the highest levels track HP and pick them up just before they died for some extremely minimal min/maxing of CDs. MM however has to time and chain CC, debuff enemies, heal minions, summon them (and plan when to do this), and use their own abilities to keep themselves alive. There is a lot of play that goes on between the MM and their minions, you don’t just end up summoning the minions and forgetting, you summon them and then have to track 4-5 extra moving entities on the field, both their positioning and health, while also playing your own build. It is like playing DPS, support, and control all at once. Contrasted to Spirit/Turrets which was like running 5 signets that you never activate, so you only have to screw with weapon skills.

Yeah, if anyone has doubts about how strong healing in DS would be go play SR/Unholy Sanctuary Cleric MM, where every time you use DS you basically reset the entire fight. Now imagine every single build being able to do that all the time without the heavy investment.

I do think they need to address healing in DS in some way, but I don’t think 100% would work without massively nerfing the LF pool.

Silverkey.2078:

The problem is that the way they are designed, they are very hard to balance. If you increase their potency + increase the self-harm “to make up for it”, it can be actually too strong because you can send back the self-harm to the enemy.

Here is the problem with this thought process, the very act of transferring them takes an entire extra skill. That extra skill carries all the power budget of transferring conditions, regardless of their source. If I use a corruption and then transfer it with Putrid Mark, I didn’t gain any power, my corruption didn’t suddenly become stronger than another skill, because the entire reason I have putrid mark on my bar in the first place is to get rid of conditions. If anything, the conditions transferred have to be significantly stronger than normal conditions to warrant me losing out on my condition removal tools.

Think of it this way, you have a core build that already has just enough condition removal to deal with whatever you’ll face in the content you are playing. You can either load up the rest of your build with non-corruptions, and don’t need to waste any power budget on more removal, or you can take Corruptions, which not only take up power budget on their own, but also require additional power taken away from something else in order to deal with the fact that you now don’t have enough condition removal. In practice, this means you now have to take both your corruption and say Plague Signet, whereas in any other situation you would just take a single skill and it wouldn’t need an entire extra skill just to mitigate its downsides. In this way, Corruptions have to have nearly double the strength of normal skills, because they effectively take two skills to use: the corruption itself and the skill used to mitigate its downside.

Now, if you equip a corruption and don’t take anything to mitigate its downside, all of a sudden you are down on condition removal. If you transfer that bleed from Blood is Power, you now have one condition removal less than you would have had, and when you get hit with that long immobilize or huge bleed burst, you won’t have the removal to deal with it because you instead used it on BiP.

The self-applied conditions for these reasons are not a “plus” to the skill, because they innately require other mechanics (which by taking weaken you) to deal with. Because of this, the corruption skill itself doesn’t hold any “extra” power just because another skill can be used to take advantage of the self weakness.

This wouldn’t really help our support in any situation where we really need support. It would be really difficult to use, since Necromancer is the only profession that relies on tanking damage to the face (and thus Necromancers are simultaneously the ones most wanting someone to take 50% of their damage away, and the worst at taking 50% damage from allies). This means not only would we be quite bad at actually dealing with the damage, especially in PvE, but also other professions are much more likely to just see an attack incoming and negate it somehow rather than see they’ll take 50% and tank it.

It’d work well in really coordinated play, and at the lowest levels of play, but not really in between, which is where most people play.

Letting us stun break, letting MMs control/summon minions, and allowing us to use LF gaining skills would be a large change to the current situation. I wouldn’t argue that this would be too much, I’m generally for giving players more control, but it would likely require some balancing.

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Can we please stop posting things related to this person? The Necromancer community is widely known for being compassionate and willing to teach those who are new to the profession. This guy is just a massive flamebait and anything with him involved turns in to a troll/rantfest. The only people who think what he says is valid are the ones who don’t ask questions about what he’s saying/doing.

Be constructive. There’s enough whining within the Necro forums as is due to our position among the other professions.

This.

Listen, Nemesis is doing what he thinks is best for the community, we can all agree with that. He also did a lot of good work on us early in the game’s time. Unfortunately, since then it has become his personal vendetta to be “Nemesis vs all those morons who don’t agree with Nemesis” in all situations. The way he tries to get his point across is needlessly inflammatory, and at this point he isn’t providing anything to the community.

His videos at this point are on par with climate change deniers or creationists releasing “science” to “support” their opinions. His complete refusal to accept what our issues are right now serve only to hold us back by avoiding the actual source of our problems (and therein denying the changes we need) and instead blaming them on the “berserker meta” or people just not following his most recent build.

The thing is, if you removed the conditions from corruptions it’d do nothing to the skills except buff them. Old Mallyx was based around wanting to load yourself up to get the bonuses from the skills, but that was reworked because allies spam so much condition removal (as they’d want to in literally every case except with a Mallyx) it screwed you. But this isn’t the case with corruptions, the self-harm is literally just some mediocre afterthought.

Necromancer has an ungodly amount of unblockable and quasi unblockable (through boon removal to bypass Aegis) effects already. Wouldn’t mind us getting group unblockable, though I don’t think it fits on anything right now.

There are three ways I think to go with the skills:

1. Remove the self-harm entirely, leave that concept for an Elite spec down the road where it can be built from the ground up in a much better way, and just have Master of Corruption be a fairly “bland” CDR trait that has some kind of potency increase, like Spectral Mastery.
2. Remove self harm from the base skills, and push it onto Master of Corruption, which gets a significant boost not to CDR but to the potency of the skills. For example, MoC’d CPC would not just destroy projectiles, but reflect them.
3. Keep self harm, but fix it up along with the effects of the skills so that the skills are strong enough to justify the self-harm, and the self-harm doesn’t have the range from ignorable (bleeds) to huge detriment (weakness). Make Master of Corruption increase both effects and self harm, or have some method of mitigating the self harm.

No matter what they do, Master of Corruption and Blood is Power need to be totally reworked. The other corruptions are okay in concept, just not power.

Lightsbane.9012:

the dulfy notes say 900 radius. I’m assuming this is a typo, but clarification would be marvelous.

On what?

Yeah, Condi Necro definitely needs some LF improvements.

Nike.2631:

If Moa put EVERYONE’s Signets all on cooldown, then I think there’d be a case for Necro minions popping. But as it stands its entirely too situational of an interaction and it punishes one family of builds excessively.

It doesn’t even put other profession’s summons on CD, it is only Necromancer minions that have this transform interaction.

The damage is pretty mediocre. It deals just slightly higher damage than AAs with much better utility; Stoning is only 0.1 coefficients per second weaker, while being a 100% finisher and 3s of weakness. It also deals less damage than actual damage ranged AAs, like Fireball or Long Range Shot.

So it sits in this weird middle area where it doesn’t do enough damage to be a good damage skill, but doesn’t have any utility to justify this lack of damage.

Glyph of Unity isn’t a weaker retaliation. Any time you take damage, you deal damage to everyone tethered to you. So if 5 people are attacking you and those 5 are tethered, each one of them actually gets hit with 5x the retal damage they’d normally take.

On the note of Spiteful Spirit, it just doesn’t do much as a trait. Cripple is negligible, the damage won’t really add up compared to Close to Death, and the boon corruption is worse than a single Signet with the signet trait. The only thing this brings that is special is retaliation, and getting some retaliation on a trait that is otherwise entirely mediocre just doesn’t fit a GM tier trait.

Lyger.5429:

Played a match against 3 MM necros yesterday….nuff said. Seriously though was really annoying. I agree to leaving moas killing minions. Mes is ok since it’s high cd also maybe they could slightly increase engi moa skill cd and slightly decrease cds for minions.

If MM is annoying, it needs to be addressed on its own. You shouldn’t have to rely on getting a Mesmer/Engi on your team with the moa skill in order to deal with them if they are actually overbearing.

Lily.1935:

But its so boring and not even remotely flavorful.

While I agree it is a pretty boring skill overall, Fear is the weakest of the hard CCs. It has all the counterplay of a condition, on top of all the counterplay of a hard CC, and also displaces enemies which isn’t always wanted. I quite like the Daze (other “screams” in the game use daze) as is, the only real thing I’d ever add is a blast finisher, because finishers make things have more play outside their single use.

Zania.8461:

A compromise? Moa still destroys all minions but resets the summoning cooldowns. That way if necro survives being moa’ed they can at least re-summon and re-engage without waiting up to a minute.

The best thing would be consistent behavior. As it is now only Necromancer summons are affected by transforms. Turret Engineer can drop turrets and not only Transform without any of the turrets being desummoned, they can also interact with and pick up turrets while transformed. Necromancer is the only profession in the game whose summons are despawned like this. So whatever happens needs to happen across the board.

Realistically, I don’t think there is any reason minions need to be desummoned. 10s without any protection from the MM is more than enough time for the minions to be “singled out” and killed, if that is what the Mesmer wants to do. However, if we have to “accept” some kind of desummoning, then all summons should be desummoned by Moa, on any profession, and then reappear next to their summoner (or in the case of ground targeted ones where they were placed) afterwards.

Be surprised if we didn’t at some point, considering Blood Magic changes.

Chill would be a nice upgrade, as it is now the skill isn’t much to mention except to add a few bleeds.

spoj.9672:

Lily.1935:

Also. while I’m at it. Wail of doom. Can we get the alpha version of this skill? Were it feared instead of dazed?

No thank you.

Same.