Melandru runes are awesome, I run them on occasion (I tend to prefer vamp/lyssa for my minion builds though). The massively reduced stun duration is great.
You can use him as a proximity trap right now, if he goes on CD for no reason then someone killed him.
WvW roaming Norn is strong because of that elite, anything else the “best” would be asura because of their field thingy.
Edit: Actually, I haven’t played asura in forever and just now realized Pain inverter sucks now.
So I’d say Norn for WvW everything else is pretty much even, although Hounds of Balthazar human elite is amazing for burst damage with some condition damage.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Yes, there are a few that are viable. Just know that most of them are either full minion builds that are off-point bunkers (for 1v1 mainly), and then either super-tanky versions for team fights or condi hybrids for the same. You can actually get a fair amount of diversity with minions, but they are harder to fit into team comps (although with the mass of spirit rangers right now, its not bad).
Dani is a troll, just don’t even validate his posts with a response.
One thing about cooldowns that needs to happen is for them to stop being full duration if you use a instant skill to self interrupt the action… such countless times marks and lich form dont pop but still go on cd just because of dooming or swalking…
Now, one thing regarding cooldowns that I can support? Show in trait tooltips what the ICD is.
This.
Meta shifts don’t have to be massive, there is obviously going to be the “best” way to do things (like how LoL the most optimum strategy is securing small advantages that you turn into global gold that you use to snowball more objectives/global gold/map presence until your team can bully theirs off of anything you want), but that still says little about interesting gameplay.
There are many different ways teams use to do the very broad overall method. Teams like CLG, Vulcun, and EG (although less now than before) use late game strength and stall the game until they win regardless. Korean teams and C9 use incredibly strong laning to start the snowballing so they can bully off the early objectives, and then use that very small lead to build into a much larger one. Beyond more broad strategies like that, there are team compositions. Poke, AoE teamfight, “protect the Doublelift”, all-in dives, bruiser teams, late game, early game, there are a ton of different team comps and mixtures of them, along with different variations that arise depending on which champs are currently “in” the meta, and then some outliers depending on players. Point being, there is actually a massive amount of diversity in LoL, even within a fairly established meta of how to win.
The most efficient method of winning in GW2 is always going to be triple capping their team, getting every point-giving side objective, and then spawn camping them for kills for the “fastest” win. But how do you do that? Right now, most every team uses the same composition, with the same builds, and just plugs in whichever build is strongest at that position. There aren’t really team compositions that are so specific, and they certainly don’t have the pre-game type of preparation that other games do.
This isn’t the game mode’s fault, as Conquest (along with interesting side objectives, which are needed, and sorely lacking in all but one of the competitive maps) actually gives quite a lot of freedom in achieving a win, but simply due to the limited number of players. The meta shifts that we see in LoL that keep the game interesting and fun just don’t happen that much in GW2 except with major patches (whereas in LoL they often happen with no change at all, just something someone found on accident).
Is more players the only solution? No. Better balance will help open up more diversity, as it will make people really want to branch out and explore if they think it will be worthwhile, as will better rewards for PvP (unlike in LoL where the reward is going 20/0 as an adc and knowing you carried the crap out of your team, you need a different way to feel awesome in GW2), and better maps. But imo, and its only an opinion, conquest is just fine as the competitive game mode; with more funsies maps on the side.
I’d note that in PvP they actually work quite well in “glassy”-ish (although still a bit beefier than standard glass) builds either condi or power, although it is less commonly seen.
^“Any situation ever” leads me to believe including WvW, PvP, and all of PvE, in which case there are many situations where minions are viable.
I Heard minion builds suck and im a post patch necro just rolled can any1 tell me if minions are viable in any situation ever ??
yes
If you ran Focused Rituals and the well, you’re losing out on Weakening Shroud, which is a strong trait, and you’re still basically getting the same thing done with CB (coordinated teams won’t be getting multiple people in the well since you only need the bunker on point).
And honestly I don’t think it has to do with the game mode, I just feel that right now there are so few people the Meta is a lot more stale than it would be. A game like LoL doesn’t have a good meta solely because of the game mode (conquest is just as flexible, arguably more), but because it has millions that play it daily. When you have such a massive player pool, you get people who try stuff just for the hell of it. And sometimes that stuff works, and then it can become the new big build. But with so few people its just going to come about that much slower.
Hey guys, sorry to say it but we’re going to be taking a break this week. Tenderly and I are both really busy, and unfortunately we just won’t be able to make it happen. However! Good news is that I am trying to line up some special guests for the next few weeks, so I hope to make it up to you all with some great podcasts.
Spiteful talisman has always been a better choice for me. You don’t really have the luxury of staying in DS very often at all (pretty busy keeping minions summoned and setting things up for them), and the extra boon stripping (or forced dodges) and the regen/vuln are pretty big imo.
Lich is bad for your build. You aren’t a condi MM, so you’re only benefitting from the 6th rune (which isn’t good enough), and that condi damage is basically useless to you.
Lyssa is great, imo. I don’t usually use it, but it is an awesome rune set, and because Golem is not only such a short CD elite, but also procs on summon and active, you get a lot of uses out of it.
I’d also look at a 4set of Vampirism, and melandru.
For sigils, I generally use Leeching or Hydromancy for on-swap, bloodlust on my dagger set (you want to finish people off with dagger out anyway for the LF generation), and Hobbling on Axe, as it increases not just Axe 3 but also Golem’s and Bone Fiend’s cripple durations.
Your talking about plug and play for necro as if it is a bad thing when every profession runs just about the same comps at the top. There is no deep in-depth psycho analysis on why a necro is on the team its on the team because it is the best condi pressure profession a role not to long ago that was reserved for mostly engineers but 1 team has a engineer and a necro.
Its a bad thing because imo it kills a lot of the interesting part of PvP: the pre-game strategy. I agree that is why Necros are run, but I still think PvP would be vastly better overall if we saw more diversity in build compositions, instead of the standard 1 main bunker, one off-bunker, a condi DPS, and a direct damage DPS, with all the variance being on the 5th man and whoever is filling the 4 roles bringing slight differences.
Oh yeah, thats the one. Close enough.
Only on healing skill, however I do believe it can proc both on summon and active of Blood Fiend, just like Melandru and Flesh Golem.
Please anet, lower the skill ceiling for necromancers, turn us into a running joke.
+1. It is not uncommon at all for any game with transforms to have CDs hidden. Its really not hard to get a sense for your CDs if you’re paying attention. Its actually a nice skill thing to separate people who really understand what they’re doing from someone who is newer.
More to the point, Necromancers are, right now, the best condition DPS builds, or were when all that was going on at least. Plus both of those guys are historically condi Necromancers (zombify at most has only gone hybrid). You don’t generally see other Necro builds because they don’t fit in nearly as easily with groups, meaning you need to build the team, to some degree, around them. Atm, condi necros can just be plugged into the condi DPS slot of the group and boom, you’re good to go.
And obviously there is going to be a best condi DPS build for maximizing damage, so they run it (with small differences maybe).
@BadJas, I very much expect the second to happen. Minions aren’t the profession mechanic for Necromancers, but they are very much one of the core themes that we have. I think we will see some Minion skills come into weapon sets with the addition of weapons, although possibly not many, and I hope to see at least one “trash minion” skill come onto our utility bar.
@infantrydiv, its been suggested before. We just can’t have the Necromancer class work as it is currently designed without DS. They could always come up with a weapon that has its own resource generation, and then expends that resource to summon minions, but that is the most I could ever see, and it still feels too “adrenaline-y” to me. But I find it unlikely that they could introduce a meaningful summon system based on F2-F4 without completely changing the entire class; and I don’t think anyone wants them to change the entire class just to make a new minion system.
100% agree with the party UI we got in GW1 (took them forever though, so I’m not getting my hopes up).
It might(?) work on downed 1 as well, but yeah that is all of the abilities we have that channel.
Laziness is not having the desire to make a change because it takes too much effort. They don’t want to make the change, there is no laziness involved.
Yeah, sorry if that sounds aggressive (it looks angrier than I mean it to be). But this is like the 5,000th thread like this, and I’m sure we’ll have another one next week when this one dies. Also, we do have word from a dev (not official, it was in game) that they don’t want to give us control because it is the ranger’s thing. It’d be like giving us Steal, or Shatters, in a way.
They aren’t pets, stop using that word. You can swap targets, they will abandon combat when you have run a fair distance away (about 2000 I think). Why don’t we have control? Because they are NOT PETS. That point cannot be stressed enough. In GW1 they were called servants, now they are called minions. If you are looking for controllable creatures you want to play ranger, or you want a different game.
Survivability is not fine, in fact it is the single problem that keeps them from being more widely used.
They often are attacking your target before your first skill even lands, and are plenty fun for people who aren’t biased against them for older (though valid at the time) reasons. They are viable in certain situations like, you know, every build in the game.
What kind of build are you looking for? There are plenty that are fine for yoloQ, but do you want condition/power/minion/whatever?
For that to happen we need new modes (not even competitive ones, but just to show what impact different playstyles have, e.g. capture the flag without conquest, deathmatch, single point conquest/king of the hill, moba like tower siege or even simple open pve dueling), full bug fix line and probably less % damage and more ability changing traits.
League of Legends has one game mode, on one map; and most eSports are only played on one game mode, with at most differing maps. But LoL/Dota especially have a massive amount of pre-game strategy and planning that goes in.
The top teams don’t just pick one APC, one ADC, one Support, a bruiser top, and a tank jungle (which is essentially the exact thing we see in GW2, except support/tank is combined, and they add a DPS). It isn’t just pick the most OP support and pick them. Most OP bruiser? Pick them. They have full-team comps. There are teamfighting comps, AoE comps, single target burst/catching, split push, poke, there are tons of comps for different playstyles and for countering other teams. You don’t just say “we like teamfighting so we’re picking a teamfight comp every single game”, and then ban and pick the exact same thing. You specifically learn the enemy team’s strategies, ward placements, what champs they have been playing and the team comps they like to use. You ban out their best champions, or you ban out what they could pick to counter your comp, then you strategically pick champions in specific orders to give yourself not only the best lane matchups, but also while remaining within whatever team comp you want. There is a massive amount of thinking that goes into figuring out what you will do, what they will do, and making sure its as favorable of a matchup as possible.
That just doesn’t happen in GW2. Teams have 1 comp they run on every map, or at most they change a class or two on a map. There is very little looking into and countering other teams, and there is very little change ever made. It is, generally, who has the best FotM comp, and who plays it best. There are a great variety of tactics once you get in game, but the entire pre-game strategy is vastly lacking. As long as that continues, build variety will remain really low.
@sas, toxic gameplay is when gameplay is bad for one or both sides. Generally it involves very little play/counterplay, or the play/counterplay is badly designed. Right now condi Necromancer play/counterplay is based around the Necromancer wanting to get out massive amounts of damage in the best spikes they can (there is some interesting play/counterplay in baiting out cleanses/stun breaks, but that is about it) because they have very little meaningful sustain/escape, and the enemy team tries to kill them as quickly as possible, or at least pressure them so hard they can’t effectively do their bursts. The entire play/counterplay there is a game of who kills who faster. Another problem is that the condi Necromancer’s burst has relatively small tells. They have been fixing this with the new casting animation on stakitten , but it is still possible to get chain feared and condi bursted.
Other toxic gameplay examples are stunlocking warriors and the old backstab thief.
I’d like to point out that part of the reason certain of these cookie cutter builds see so much use is not because they are the best builds out there, but because they are the easiest builds out there to put into a team. Guardians are great bunkers not because they have the best support builds, but because they have the most easily applicable support types (no group can’t make use of AoE healing/buffing and some control).
As of now, GW2 teams are still pretty much infants when compared to the big eSports groups when it comes to how they go about competing. As it goes on, assuming it does keep growing, it will eventually mature to the point where those builds can actually be assessed for their true value in actual team comps, and not which one can best be plugged into the new FotM comp.
… on the one hand I feel as if I’m being a bit unfair, but then again I actually think you have these positions and haven’t really thought them through. So I feel justified.
I want good balance for Necromancers. Having a build that has some of the highest burst condition damage and such toxic gameplay stay around is not good for us. Twist what I say all you want (you did a pretty good job of completely overblowing everything I said, and completely making some up), what I want is for Necromancers to be balanced.
We are not balanced right now. One build is over the top strong, and most of the rest of our builds are either too dependent on teamwork (which just isn’t that fun to play for the majority of people) or are too weak in general. However once that OP build is toned down to proper balance, ANet might finally realize, again, that we are still in need of buffs to bring us up to good balance.
Is there anyone who DOESNT share this opinion?
Me. It turns it into an insanely powerful team heal in some situations, and I don’t think it really goes with our “flavor”; whereas light does. Light gives retal (necroy) and condition removal (necroy), whereas water field gives flat healing and regen. Frankly, we don’t need more regen, just pressing 2 every time MoB is up is 100% regen uptime, and I don’t feel like the healing goes in with the way we currently play. Also, I feel like it ends up making WoB a bit too strong of healing (my minion build would heal me for just over 15k, maybe 16k with WoB+putrid explosion, and anyone else in the area for 9k+).
I know coordinated zergers would prefer the water field for finisher spam/field rotations, but I think the change wouldn’t really be good.
Just to play Devil’s Advocate on that one, its a .5 cast time (oh kitten ANet, I can’t put 5s because it might spell a “naughty” word?), 900 range 4s bleed->bleed->poison (the poison is really the strong part). That makes it unique, and much harder to compare, to high damage melee bleeds (melee will always outdamage per hit because it will hit less), or ranged attacks that only bleed, or the mesmer one that bounces and is random.
Blood Curse doesn’t need nerfing, in any way, but it is a very strong AA.
Yes, many many people share it.
Posi stands out, although that has a lot to do with the fact that he’s the only Necromancer I can think of from EU that didn’t reroll recently.
Now to see the stealth buffs/nerfs that came with the patch. Bet you Putrid Mark got affected somehow.
Lets face it, any changes to Putrid mark are buffs. Even nerfs at this point are buffs, because eventually it will become so useless they’ll finally notice its been bugged for ages.
The minions are the combo finishers. They are the ones that heal and apply effects, although any conditions they apply work off your damage/duration. Bone Fiend actually heals for over 400 per auto attack with WoC down, and his active can freeze someone in it for nearly the full duration.
Are they OP right now? No, although still strong. But pre-nerfs, the patch right after we got that buff, saying “it was only below top 500” is hilariously false. EVERYONE in the top 500 knew they were OP, why do you think there was a Necromancer on 90% of teams the day after the patch, when there was only a few Necromancers (only really, really good ones) before? They even forced players to swap their class over to Necro from others because the offensive pressure you could put out was complete and utter BS, just like they do every time something OP comes out. We were hardcore #1 FotM along with Spirit rangers, and are still up there, although our sustained damage is slightly reduced (and yet our burst, the biggest problem, they basically didn’t touch).
Necros not viable in competitive? Wut? Did you not watch the most recent tournament where the majority of teams ran a Necro? The top team in NA has Zombify, who you might remember as a Necromancer (even though he’s a hipster necro who played it before it was cool to).
Yes, this is why I used to, and still do sometimes, run Well of Corruption in my minion build. Flesh Wurm hardly ever needs the healing (1200 range is more than enough to stay out of harm), but Bone Fiend and it synergize perfectly.
Why do people find Necromancers OP? Because there is one spec right now that is.
I think it could be good as a PvE only change. It’d at least mean that you could have two condition builds (so long as they were complementary, and weren’t just two bleed builds) in the same group, and probably wouldn’t increase the server load that much.
Two main problems with that skill. One is that it is too counter-stealth, that will eat up a lot of “strength” of the skill because of how strong it’d be against stealth, and yet that is such a niche use. The other is that it doesn’t seem like it’d be that unique, really. Feels like Shatter/Putrid Explosion, but with slightly different effects.
Another possibility if they adjust caps would be to allow poison/burning to stack in intensity and duration, and make it individual to the player. So I myself could only maintain 1 stack of poison, and only increase its duration, if another player adds poison it will stack on its own, but he can only increase duration of his own poison
Would make burning/fear massively stronger.
First part is called Shade, and its OP for fairly obvious reasons.
Sanguine pool would help with invuln, but it has literally no mobility in it at all. You don’t move faster at all, you can use it to dodge skillshots, especially stuns, and give yourself a little bit of time for CDs or to get back to safety of team/tower. But you move at exactly the normal speed, and people slowed over you really doesn’t do anything.
Solved:
Well of Spiteful Spirits:
Whenever a foe inside this well attacks, it deals damage to itself and adjacent foes.
Call it Well of Spite (lets face it Spiteful Spirits doesn’t really roll off the tongue) and I could see it being interesting, it’d need to be fairly large or the damage radius fairly large to make it not-crap in PvP (seems like it’d be really good in PvE/WvW though).
Its actually very close in my experience, DPS is pretty similar 1v1 (slightly towards blowing them up), and should not be the determining factor because of the nice utility of having them up. Essentially what you want to do is always keep them summoned, never let them sit on CD if you can help it. Always blow them up when they are getting low HP, and if you blow one up, blow up the other one at the earliest moment where they will cause damage.
Besides that, you want to blow them up in specific situations.
1. Blow them up if someone is very low, and you need to finish them off, it catches people off guard to suddenly eat 4-5k damage
2. If you have Death Nova, blow them up on downed bodies, not only will it cleave revivers, but the poison makes it a pain to get them up, and since it leaves a field its impossible to cleanse the body.
3. Any kind of burst rotation. MMs have pretty nice “burst” rotations, that are somewhat long, but involve a lot of CC, and often really annoy the enemy and can force heals at the start of a fight.
4. When you can hit 2+ people, Death Nova can do upwards of 10k to their team if it hits all 5, plus it can siphon off of every person.
Btw, did some testing. Non-crit hits are basically one tenth of the explosion, 220-250 with 30% damage trait, and 10x that for an explosion . They attack around every 3 seconds (not exactly, but close), meaning for DPS reasons alone blowing them up is faster in every situation. Just remember that siphoning from keeping them alive and the utility is much better. Smart explosions are good explosions.
They could possibly retool Grenth’s Balance into a life siphon type well. Remove the part where it takes your HP, but have it scale depending on how low you are, so when you are super low it heals for more than if you used it at like 80%.
They have party chat, they most likely have brains. Use them. Once you find your condi build you stop getting more, but it remains that they could fix the biggest PvE problems simply by axing their terrible mechanics, instead of balancing the entire game around terrible mechanics.
Just no. Putting aside team builds that really focus on complete synergy between all members (which basically no one does), Necromancers have the most defensive problems.
Lets say you want to fit into the DPS role of your team. Power Necros require massive babysitting, at least one person completely and totally devoted to peeling for you after you burst. Otherwise you will burst and then get dropped instantly. Why? You can’t afford all the defense needed to handle focus fire (which you will get) and still be competitive with your DPS. Compare to thieves, who can still melee burst, yet without a single peeler because they can get out on their own afterwards, because their burst is concentrated on their weapon set. Eles and Mesmers can both not only burst from safe range, but also have plenty of escape options available.
Condi/Hybrid Necros, if they weren’t OP damage wise, still require peels. Its not nearly as bad anymore because you can usually kill someone before they can kill you, but it requires perfect positioning and play to properly pull off without needing, again, lots of team help.
A big problem is that other classes have one of three situations going on. Either they have all their damage concentrated on weapon skills/profession mechanic which allows them to use their utility bar for their own defense, or they have defense on weapon skills, allowing them to go full offensive utilities, or its some mix, offense/defense on both.
The problem is our “defense” on our weapons just isn’t good enough, a fear mark here, a blind there, a bit of weakness just isn’t enough, especially when every other DPS class that is going to be focusing us has gap closers and we can’t deal with it using the offensive defense that they want us to use.
You keep the exact same eHP, but you lower HP while raising toughness. Meaning power builds take exactly as long to kill the boss, but now condition builds can keep up as far as %HP damage dealt per period of time, whereas now they don’t.
They would need to completely change the entire condition system to get #1 to work, or they’d have to probably up their server’s strength by a massive amount (at least 5 times what it is now, if not more). It sounds nice to say “just fix it”, but go zerg in WvW, or do a world boss fight and check out that lag; that lag is with the condition cap, if they removed the cap, the server would have hundreds more conditions to track. That is a lot of excess strain for something they could easily fix by redoing dungeon mechanics so they weren’t bad.
The easiest way to make condition builds more viable is to change the toughness/HP ratio on boss mobs to be higher toughness and lower HP. They could strike a balance where you actually want one-two condition classes that have the right combination of conditions to be maxing your condition stacks, while the power builds do their power thing. It’d also help if they made dungeons harder, and less about 1-shot mechanics that are 100% learning the boss fight, and nothing about actual skill.
This skill hits pretty hard with Carrion gear (suck it Rabid).