Balance. /15char
Actually, I might try this out today to see, I think it might actually be a very strong utility to bring to big team-fights for a condition support class. So many bunker builds rely on dodging and small heals, the immense poison and weakness uptime you’d get could be worthwhile.
Orders/auras, same thing ;D
Also, Desecrations would be similar to auras and in a way to our spectral armor/walk, except it would have different effect types. I see no reason that would make them not usable.
Shh, the lore people might come after you
I would imagine in places like sPvP where you can almost entirely cover a point with CPC, it would be entirely possible to use it if necromancers weren’t always expected to be the main condi DPS. If you had a support Necro though, I see it being potentially really strong.
WvW it isn’t good enough IMO, people can just move out of it and it will have little effect.
I wouldn’t call them Auras or Desecrations. The first is something others have, and we’re special dangit! And the second sounds too similar to Corruption. Just call them Orders, as that is what they were (in effect) back in GW1.
AoE resistance only ANet would know. Cleave? Imo never. Minions have always been single target, even since GW1, and I find it unlikely it will be changed.
The only time you would be using minions in WvW is if you are soloing camps (or other small fights), or for funsies with the massive MM zergs that people have tried. Also, while they do have trouble with thieves/mesmers with all the resets, if you are on top of your game you can overcome that. Also, Flesh Wurm has stealth hax and ignores stealth atm.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
But then I’ll lose my most basic complaint against Protection of the Horde!
Or they could add more weapon skills that summon minions and I’d get over it entirely. Hmmmmmmmm…
I’d love to see them put summons on off-hand weapons (only offhands, I don’t think they want their to be full minion setups where you are useless except to summon and control minions).
As for why no direct access to burning/confusion: it’d be insanely hard to make them fun and meaningful, yet still remain balanced. Our condition damage is already on the border of OPness, and giving us any meaningful amount of burning/confusion, especially on an off-hand weapon set is most likely to just throw us over the line.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
STOP comparing bleed bursts to other classes. Not a single person in the game cares if you can stack 25 bleeds on someone, not a single person. It is stacking high bleeds, plus burning, plus poison, plus weakness, plus cripple, plus chill, and then fearing them so they are forced to eat massive DPS or blow a stun breaker and large cleansing to get it off, and you are already guaranteed to have done some damage even if they do react. That is a lot of damage being dealt to you, and the entire burst is back up again in 20 seconds, or you could just do a slightly smaller version of the burst by the time the first is wearing off. That is without Mark of Evasion as well.
Thieves can’t do that, no one else can do that, and that is why we are currently the king of condition spam.
Summon Will o’ the Wisp: Summons a Will o’ the Wisp that attacks foes, delivering a chilling blow every X seconds. 30s CD.
Grenth’s Beacon: minion channels for four seconds, chilling enemies that move away from him and granting 2% LF per second per enemy in the range. 300 radius, 30s recharge if secondary active not used.
While Channeling press again to activate
Grenth’s Embrace: cancels the channel and pulls enemies towards the center, granting LF. Distance pulled, LF granted, and damage dealt scales up to 150% extra depending on how long Beacon channeled. 50s recharge
Oh my god, I never thought. The torch should… SUMMON A MINION. It can be like Shadow Fiend, but blue and flamey instead and dark and spermy
Edit: more seriously though, I actually am going to flesh out the idea of a minion for torch, I like the idea, and we could summon a “will-o-wisp” flame that inflicts short chill durations (either 1s every attack on longer attack timers like Flesh Wurm, or have flesh-golem like chain that inflicts on last hit), with an active like I described above.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Its small things, honestly, that make the difference. By giving it an ICD they keep our ability to bleed burst (which was already a huge issue without the extra 2 bleeds) low, without needing to actually nerf a single ability we have.
inb4 ANet calls this a “feature” and not a bug.
I really like the concept with it, that the longer and more people are kept in the area that the worse it gets for them, I’d just like for them to keep mechanics Necro-y.
As for a #4 ability, what about something like:
Will-o-Wisp – channels for three seconds, enemies trying to move away from the Necro are slowed by X%, deals damage to all enemies in the area, and gives 2% LF per enemy per second channeled. 240(?) radius
If you’re set on playing Ele or Necro, go Necro unless you enjoy Ele’s playstyle more. Necromancers have it far better in PvE (to my knowledge), and you can pretty easily go from farming mass groups of mobs in open world to doing high damage in dungeons (it is still slightly lower in dungeons, but I believe Nemesis showed thakittens actually not that bad, and you can bring unique support abilities if needed). Eles are just… meh imo in PvE. A lot of what they do is done by Guardians (who are better in PvE).
Too many boons. I love the idea of an ice field, but if we were to get something back per pulse, it would need to either be “necro”-y boons (retaliation), HP, LF, or something similar. I wouldn’t mind if it stole endurance in a way, but I still really don’t want them to start adding many boons.
Remember that every talk about PvP will always be about common builds. When people say “necros are OP” they aren’t talking about glass hybrid MMs running 10/10/10/20/20, they are talking about the most common builds.
As of right now, we’re still way too tuned towards the offensive side of things. ANet needs to fix our defense and tone down the damage where needed to compensate for what should be a class with the highest base sustain in the game.
MoE has an ICD for (imo) not allowing us to “burst” too many bleeds at once. The difference is that the thief ability can just be moved out of (its tiny), whereas once MoE triggers, the full effect is on you.
A full bleed rotation, btw, assuming two MoEs and 1 Geomancy proc, would be 15 bleeds. When you combine that with other stuff that we have, the burst is just a bit too much, and this is an easy place to have a small cutback on.
Minion attacks no, the 15 trait does scale up slightly with healing power up to 6 additional healing per hit (I believe).
If you’re doing Lich, you honestly don’t need much prec (it boosts it tons), just stack up that power and crit damage, and you’ll be hitting for stupid damage.
My first set after hitting 80 was to buy rare Explorer set (I never bought armor till then, so I had enough really quickly for the full sets), gave me really high MF to farm my “real” sets with, and power/condition damage so my DPS didn’t suffer much. Over time I just found that I honestly didn’t need anything better; DPS was high enough for my tastes (although it could have been higher obv) drops were great, and dungeons were pretty easy anyway, so it took me ages to buy more.
Finally I got Arachnophobia at the very beginning of the Halloween event’s Labyrinth thing where they had respawning Champions every 30 minutes or so (the farming was strong with that event, till they nerfed the hell out of the drops), and immediately threw it up on the TP for 100g. Took ages to sell, but with that I bought full T3 cultural, and figured since dungeons were easy with rare MF armor I didn’t need the defense, so it was rampager or berzerker. And frankly, I like the flexibility in Rampager gear, I get really strong condition damage from Dhuumfire, Terror, and the other things I throw on, yet if someone pushes my conditions off I still hit like a truck. Also, I’m too lazy to farm any more armor, so there’s that too.
It isn’t accurate that we bring nothing unique that we excel at in PvE. It is the exact same stuff all Necromancers excel at. The problem is there is absolutely no need for it in PvE, and that other mechanics can accomplish the same or better effect more easily.
For example, Necromancers excel at conditions, yet boons are superior in every way in PvE. We had (ANET FIX PUTRID MARK FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS COLD AND DEAD) amazing class-wide condition removal and great sustained healing, but rarely do you need a lot of condition removal (more than a character can handle themselves) or sustained healing (you either dodged it or it 1 shot you, little in between). Its not an issue of everyone doing things better, its an issue of ANet made terrible mechanics for DPS Races 2, and seem to refuse to admit that their content is so badly designed that it blatantly favors three classes over all others.
Explorer’s – anytime I don’t feel like my main gear set is needed, which means anything that isn’t Fractals (which I basically never run) or dungeons that I am not confident in running without the slightly better gear stats from my main set.
Rampager – every other time, since I’m too lazy to actually get more than two sets, and frankly have never felt the need for more defense than none. I’m already playing necro, might as well go full masochism route.
Make a new slot in the wallet like finishers, put all the ability skins there, once unlocked you are able to select a skin (or multiple, depending on skin type/overlap), and voila, done. Seriously ANet, look at riot, LOOK AT THE MONEY, DESIRE THE MONEY, MAKE SKINS!
Or more simply:
Step 1: Make Skins
Step 2: Release Skins
Step 3: ???
Step 4: Profit
His HP/s is already incredible, his attack speed is not the problem with this skill.
Power, Condi, or Hybrid all work in PvP. However do not play a power build in sPvP without a team, or at least not without some serious investment in defense. The build is extremely glassy, and while you can destroy people when you gank them, its hard to get back out of the fight to reset without team support (which pugs won’t give).
Condi/Hybrid on the other hand, while certainly not super easy to pug with, are much easier fits because the large sustained offensive pressure you have to force people away from you, plus fears, really helps you peel for yourself more easily, or at the very least bring people down with you when you do fall.
Hello everyone!
What is the best Thing about necro? What are they good at?
Necromancers are debuffers above all. When balance is a bit better, we will be somewhat bruiser-y debuffers with good innate sustain.
I 100% agree that one of our big problems is that we have no access to truly defensive weapon sets. We have some that are certainly more defensive than others, but all of our sets have as much use offensively as defensively, if not more.
I don’t think it’d be difficult to keep the minions alive. Its a group of around 280, you’d need to do at least 3 million damage in 24 seconds before the AoE buffer is summoned back. The problem is that each Necro will be summoning 6 minions, so 7 total units per actual person in the zerg, or every 2.5 people in the zerg will actually take up another full AoE limit (a group of 40 would actually need 56 people laying AoE to hit everything with AoE). In a fight against equal zerg size, and with healing going on, I just don’t see it being feasible to deal that much damage that quickly.
Also, a fun side note. For every minion you kill, you deal around 1.5k damage, assuming they have death nova, meaning each round of summons can deal around 360k damage. Not to say this is necessarily super viable, but I don’t see it being possible to stop without heavy fortifications.
Basically all of them look like a puff of smoke on the ground, I don’t see how more people aren’t bothered by the simplicity of the animations.
Flashy lights and pretty particle effects aren’t always that important on every skill effect. We have some that I absolutely love, others are very basic, its good to have variety.
Interaction isn’t simply “attacking” the person. To go to League of Legends (because its always easy to draw examples there), they recently nerfed the 9 HP pot start that almost everyone had been using, because you essentially had 900 extra HP in lane. What it was effectively doing was completely removing the actual interaction of laning opponents during laning phase. That isn’t to say they were never attacking each other, but that the massive sustain brought by one side demanded that it be brought on the other side, and there was almost no point in recognizing that you had an actual enemy in lane because you would never do anything to them.
Drawing from above, interaction isn’t just attacking someone, it is meaningful play/counterplay that adds fun to the game. Just because a Necromancer is in the middle of 5 enemies to maximize their attrition, does not mean that there is meaningful counterplay to it. The old Retal/DS tanks in beta are an example of this. There was no meaningful counterplay to them, attacking them caused you to die off to retaliation before you could drain their defenses and killed them, there was no way to stop them from sustaining themselves, and if you didn’t kill them they could sit on point all game with impunity.
Not saying that is the case now, but that is an example of aggression (Necromancers were completely in their face on the point, disrupting the teamfight and getting damage out by way of retal procs) but no meaningful interaction going on.
I love you (edit: whoever did this) so much for doing this.
Also, as a srsbsns question, how would you actually stop this without some heavy, heavy siege in place? Assuming a zerg of 40 people, that is 280 bodies that you have to cleave down in essentially 24 seconds (the CD of the longest non-elite traited), and even minions have pretty high base eHP.
Anet needs to buff our survivability, though. I suspect they wanted to strip us down to the base as an experiment to determine exactly how much survivability and where, as they’re probably still scared silly of turning us into unkillable tank monsters.
I think this is part of it. They had a massive bug on their hands, essentially halving our defenses in Death Shroud. I imagine they wanted to take away our overflow for a while, and realistically the two changes in one balance each other out overall, but differently (and the difference is really big in certain situations).
The problem will still end up being that in PvE ANet has a fetish for making every single boss have one stupidly powerful “killshot” that can 1hit (or very nearly) any build. The reality is that they will never be able to balance an HP pool with a mechanic they love so much that is designed completely around destroying HP pools. They need to realize this, and either stop with the bad (and it is bad) dungeon design, or they need to man up and give necromancers the tools they need to handle PvE mechanics. And that is going to take the form of Aegis/block/invuln/dodge/etc.
Escapes and running have nothing to do with burst mitigation, nor stability. Those are entirely separate issues.
The problem was not burst mitigation, it was burst mitigation that we gave nothing up for. It was burst mitigation that was base to every possible Necromancer build (at most, you had builds that could use it more than others, but every one had access).
Compare to the other class mechanics; only guardians and mesmers get burst mitigation as part of their class mechanics (ones that require no cost/benefit, but are merely built in). Mesmers get one every 60 seconds, Guardians get an almost copy of ours every 40 seconds, except it is uncontrollable (they could just as well Aegis my bone minion as they will a thief Backstab), 90s for a team-version. That is fine, those are strong yet balanced effects because they have such long CDs, and if you want to make them stronger (reduce CDs) you have to give something up via traiting.
Beyond that, every single other class has to give something up. Warriors might give up an offensive weapon to bring shield, guardians have to use a specific heal, elementalists need to give up utility skills, etc. All those classes had to give something up to get access to mitigation (although their mitigation was stronger). We gave up nothing, and that is not good design. The current system allows for skills like SA which are incredibly strong defensive tools for burst mitigation. All they need to do is make more things that are similar to that and we’ll be having our mitigation, and it will actually be more balanced.
Honestly, I don’t think its the best fix short term either. It’d be much easier if they just plopped vigor on us in a 5 point trait (reanimator be gone!), and then removed it when they finally fixed this issue, and it would be healthier for the game in the long run.
It looks like a fine build, I just don’t know how well it would actually do in PvP.
That is why I would only use it with the Stability; it prevents that (they have at most a 4 second window, which in a tanky build shouldn’t be enough). Grab defensive stuff, go 15 into Curses (the 15 trait gives you a lot of damage without much investment), and use it as a more tanky power build, if you really want to use it.
Actually, the build overall got a general nerf because of the nerf to the speed of Near to Death (from 5s to 7s made the flashing weaker), however a single kind of build type for it got a lot stronger, which was a tankier build that used it to keep high stability uptime. So imo, make a tanky build with it and it’ll work best if you want to use it that way now.
1 from each enemy hit
Just an FYI, we’ve moved back 1 hour, so shows will be at 6pm PST from now on!
Was a little upset about the ‘tree fix up’ patch that didn’t do much.
The dev’s before that patch LoL’ed and said Blood Magic is terrible, that it’s useless.Also from there ‘fix’ they did move +Minion Dam & +Axe Dam into the same slot, which altho making the axe more viable, stuffed up the MM as it was axe used with minions. (Now you have to give up Closer to Death, or Dhurmmfire to get both)
They did fix up staff to no require grater marks to be useful. :-)
I do dream of a day, they fix up Minons/Vamp, make traits funkyer.
You were never able to get minion damage, axe damage, and one of the two grandmasters listed, so the build hasn’t changed at all if you still want axe mastery.
DS’s ability to take damage needs to be increased in two areas alone: burst, and multi-target. Multi target has little to do with this so that can be left for another discussion, but we did take, in general, a nerf to large, single hit absorption. While the SA buff is really strong, we need more overall ways to take the big hits, and in my opinion there are way more fun and interesting ways to do it.
ANet has a great opportunity now to make DS far more fun.
Aura of the Lich – every minion is summoned with an unremovable buff that, when killed, has a chance to summon a jagged horror.
Order of Undeath – minion damage is largely increased whenever they crit, but you receive feedback equal to the extra damage caused.
And just to appease all the MMs:
Blood of the Master -when a minion takes damage that would kill it, you jump in a dramatic (and slow mo) fashion in from of them screaming NOOOO, and are downed, and all minions are healed to full.
That is why I added in the second part that there are a number of ways they could have it proc (and I agree not entry would be best, either upon leaving or upon expiration, expiration obviously could give it a much lower ICD).
Sounds like they could potentially bring it back as a trait with a 30/60 second cooldown, perhaps after fixing the map so players couldn’t accidentally end up in weird spots.
I actually have really thought it could be good to have an Aegis on DS entry with some high ICD for balance. Every X seconds or something, entering DS gives Aegis for like 5 seconds, or leaving, or on DS expiration, but some Aegis-DS proc I think could make sense.
I say no. The problem is that it gives a significant amount of power into niche situations (surviving falls, and also a one shot invuln every 10 seconds), and as such ties up a lot of defensive power. They really couldn’t afford to boost our ability to nullify burst damage, because Death Shroud had this amazing ability to do that on its own already, and so any additional mitigation would have been over the top (burst only). At this point, they have freed us up for more sensical buffs (SA already is insanely strong at fighting burst, and its CD is more reasonable than every 10 seconds), and it is blatantly obvious we need it.
Balance aside, I never liked it as a mechanic. Yes jumping from really high places and living was a ton of fun, but other than that it just didn’t feel right that I could magically nullify excess damage because my two HP bars were separate.
The most necromancer-y weapons are weapons we can’t equip. Nice move.
Honestly I’ve had an easier time soloing on Necro (including story mode) than any other class so far. Pick up minions, pick up defensive traits as you go, and its really easy.