Tank isn’t part of GW2’s soft trinity. It is damage, control, support. We could potentially fill damage/control positions heavily depending on the base Necromancer update we’re about to see, and the type of content there is. Most likely though Necro won’t be wanted for group content but instead for solo content inside raids because we can fill all 3 roles at once in a single build, but not in a way that benefits groups.
I think what should happen ideally is that your minions disappear during the moa (because moa IS supposed to disable you completely) but reappear when the skill is over. Now I doubt that will happen, but this is exactly how it should be.
This would be the best. Otherwise not only does the skill CC you for 10 seconds, but effectively CCs you for up to 22 seconds when you factor in 6 seconds to summon minions, 10 seconds in Moa, and 6 seconds to resummon afterwards.
I don’t understand why any profession should be able to press a single button and completely delete an entire build’s setup, putting it on full CD without any traits taking effect. How is this even a discussion? If Moa morph put every utility for every build not only on full CD but also erasing their effects from the game the instant it lands the skill would be completely broken and no one would debate this change, yet against AI builds this is worth a discussion? Furthermore, this was a known function that was then added onto Engineer in AoE form.
It makes absolutely no sense, and I guarantee if this wasn’t AI builds we wouldn’t even have to talk about it.
Is this actually a buff? we get 1 extra stack of bleed, but lose 60% duration. This seems like a significant nerf to me for overall PvE dps.
You lose 1s of bleeding from Scepter 1’s first and second hit, but gain kitten of bleeding from the final hit, and more poison. On top of that you get 2-7 stacks of Torment. I wouldn’t take anything as gospel yet, wait for a red post or the patch notes on Tuesday.
I want to quickly clarify something about this note. The change is that specifically Plague form and Lich form will not destroy your minions. We can’t do this universally for all transforms because it can cause problems with the balance of events or story steps that transform you.
What about Moa Morph?
Interesting viewpoint.
Or make it PvE only if the concern is about making us unkillable in WvW/PvP. But it has to happen in some form.
Their form is essentially a step between Shroud and Berserker. It is even less of a transform than ours is, though more than Berserker.
At the very least we need to be able to see our utility CDs, and we need to be able to receive healing. Make it PvE only if you have to, but we absolutely have to receive allied healing in Raids if we’re ever going to be even considered.
Base changes are coming, wait it out.
Well… at this point its obvious ANet is trying to force healers/support builds onto Raids. We’ll see if it happens, because ANet is notoriously bad (they know this too) so it is entirely possible that it won’t be the case, however, the dire situation is pretty much confirmed: no healing through DS will be a major hamper to Necro, basically solidifying that the only time we’ll be used is for solo content within raids, if that happens to be a thing.
Hopefully the base changes come around and fix this somehow, but I just don’t see how we’ll be wanted at this point. Not only do we not play well as far as offensively buffing our allies, but at this point our allies can’t even help us with entire builds in some cases.
No, I’ve been playing the game since launch and don’t know what roaming is, you mean to imply it involves moving? Crazy stuff man. /s
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be fixed, I’m saying it won’t be any time soon, so learn to play around it.
You also need to remember my suggestion to have utility skills have a life force cost to be activated while in shroud. Which could balance them as well as provide new utility options as well as let us share a common rune that triggers on resource spending with revenant or thief.
That alone is a huge set of changes to the mechanic overall which will require massive balancing. It is just too much to reasonably expect any time soon.
I don’t think this is a Stealth counter because Plague has a 180sec CD and there is no way someone going to use such a long CD skill to counter some random Stealth. My suggestion is about someone using Stealth to counter you.
Stealth doesn’t remotely counter Plague though, it doesn’t affect anything you are doing, since you use Plague to stop their offense, and if they are sitting in stealth, they stopped their own offense.
It makes no sense to add Revealed, considering their first attack out of stealth will already miss, which at least for Thieves is already a huge weakness since those attacks tend to be really important. Plague already shuts down pretty much all offense within its radius, no need to make it shut down defense too.
I think it’d be too much work to do at this point. I was a much bigger fan of this concept back when we were really weak, because mechanically I think this is a really good idea. But at this point we are getting to a point of being strong (at least in PvP/WvW, PvE we’re weak for reasons that wouldn’t be touched by this), and this would put us over the top. Death Shroud currently allows for massive stalling in some situations, and if you were able to not only stall but completely reset fights through things like SoL/Healing skill use, it would be too strong.
That means that DS/RS and all of our utilities would have to be rebalanced to allow this, and I think that’s too much right now. However, seeing the CDs should be done. No one else has to hide their utility CDs like we do.
You don’t nerf a trait for being too mandatory unless it is mandatory by merit of being OP. VP isn’t OP, it simply fills a really important thing for Necromancers, by making Death Shroud much less time-gated, giving you a much better chance to use sustain to keep yourself in Shroud unless enemies actually focus on bursting you out of it. This is one of those things that is such a core improvement that it shouldn’t exist in traits, and arguably should be made baseline.
At the very least, I’d lower DS regen to 3% per second and remove that part of the trait entirely, putting the shroud CD onto another trait, or adding some functionality onto it.
I don’t understand how plague, a transformation, can work underwater but Lich won’t work because it’s a “transformation”.
My guess is it isn’t Lich’s transformation itself, but adapting the ground targeted skills. Otherwise Lich works just fine, it floats around anyway, the animations should transfer just fine.
Then don’t roam with Flesh Golem already active. Its fairly rare, at least when I roamed, to actually get into fights underwater, so all you’d have to do is leave Flesh Golem un-summoned until you actually need him (a good tactic for MM anyway in many situations) and you have no issue. Flesh Golem being disabled is only a big deal when you need to actively use it in combat in water (extremely rare across the game) or going back and forth a lot (also pretty rare).
Greatsword is really strong in PvP because enemies are always forced to fight on point with you (or near another objective), it has the potential to nearly one shot people with gravedigger, and its 4 skill is a really strong denial. GS is quite nice in PvP, and the addition of even more superspeed is annoying. That said, I don’t think the superspeed that is accessible is actually going to be used/abused much, it requires a really heavy investment most people won’t make.
Yes we will, we just don’t know how soon Gee will be able to release the changes, or which patch they will be allowed onto the live servers on.
Just because the primary boss won’t be slowed by soft CC doesn’t mean there couldn’t be a host of situations where soft CC is needed. You could have extra mobs that are extremely difficult/impossible to kill that must be held off, which soft CC could do, you could have something like mob-based instakill mechanics that can’t be killed/blinded (think mobile liadry zones you can slow), a mob with high health that will be consumed for boss HP if it reaches the boss, etc. There are a ton of ways to design raids where the boss is immune to a mechanic, but that mechanic is still really important.
Curses is the crit/condi line, of course it gives crit/condi in its minors, just like Spite, the debuffing condi/power line gives debuffing condis and power in its minors. Power builds get benefit from this trait already, it benefits any build that would go into curses because any build going into Curses by definition wants crit/condi.
This change is only beneficial to PvE power builds, it makes no sense to change it.
Rarely as in multiple times every kittening day rarely?
I haven’t touched underwater in ages. PvE is the only place where underwater combat is an issue, and very few important PvE encounters take place underwater (namely like 2 dungeon paths and one fractal). ANet has completely given up on trying to deal with Underwater, and I guarantee the majority of players don’t have a noticeable issue with just having Plague underwater as opposed to Flesh Golem, it isn’t causing people’s build to become weaker in an appreciable way, just an annoyance that you can’t have a preferred skill UW.
If there was modding in GW2 this would exist within a week at most, probably with an extra variety of different sharks to choose from.
That’s because modders don’t have to make an expansion, or deal with bugs, or resource allocation. Completely different situations.
Swapping places with the Wurm and having it immediately die would be a good change. Keep the blast finisher/poison (knockback would be fine too, but maybe a bit strong), it allows non-MM to proc fields and get away while using the poison, and MM would be able to use Death Nova.
However, it has to die when it swaps or it makes the skill a fair bit worse.
Same issue, changing design is going to cost them time to do model/texture, animations, etc. Even if they just stole the rigging of an existing mob and just painted over the model, it still takes them some time that they probably don’t want to use on something that is an extremely minor problem that shows up fairly rarely.
Its not an issue of being unable to do it, but unwilling to allocate resources. Don’t get me wrong, I’d really like it, but I don’t see it happening before we get an underwater rework in general.
I don’t think Dhuumfire belongs in Curses any more than Soul Reaping. It is a Shroud trait every bit as much as a Condition one, and most importantly it provides Condition builds with a second trait line to pick up condition based offense. Loading all conditions into Curses is the opposite of what we want, though arguably Curses should have a better GM level damage focused trait.
BM/DM/SR Wellmancer vs MM goes completely in the other way in a straight up 1v1, from my experience. Unless I have never ever fought a decent MM (plausible) or I am better than I think (plausible). I have seen a MM successfully win a 2v1 against some teammates, then at another time I walked right over him.
Can’t say I’ve faced this before, so I could only speak on a theoretical level. I don’t see it being any more than a skill matchup though. You are essentially the same as the MM build, just built differently, but it is an attrition setup, and the only build that really out-attritions MM is D/D ele, which is only true because D/D is OP as hell. I’d have to play the matchup though, because obviously I could be totally wrong.
I control where your minions go as much as you do and I’ll use them to heal myself. Position myself in a way that breaks LoS and I can pull all but the Wurm, and your Golem will just run into a wall trying to escape. My LF generation is better since I can take Spectral Armor and your minions will always attack me when I have it up. There’s basically nothing you have worth dodging besides Golem and Warhorn 4, and no condi pressure (my only weakness).
Works for non-conquest well, but in conquest it is really difficult to clump them up on top of you without inviting yourself to pound town, and without going off point. Its the old “I’m not stuck in here with you, you’re stuck in here with me” thing, sure you can deal a lot of damage to them all, but you’re also standing right on top of two Death Novas (not including any more you cause by killing minions), you’re taking their full damage, conditions are flying right back at you, and I’m not being pressured at all. And you still need to be able to burst your way through 25k HP, which isn’t happening outside of heavy damage builds. That’s why incidental AoE is stronger, they die as a by-product of you simply doing what you’d always do, instead of using burst to deal with them. Also as a side note SA has a 1s ICD, just about any fight will have it proccing at that rate, the minions won’t trigger it more.
If we’re not talking PvP, I could see it working though.
Do Wellmancers just throw down all their Wells at once against you? That’s pretty silly for an attrition fight.
The thing is you don’t out sustain an MM. You can’t out heal them, you won’t realistically slow them down with conditions, and they’ll either have Death Nova making it insanely difficult to out sustain because of weakness/poison, or they have Unholy Sanctuary which basically resets the fight every time DS is popped.
But again, I’d have to play the matchup and I haven’t.
Gluttony is just fine as it is. If anything needs to be done about Vital Persistance, which is certainly an argument, it would be making it baseline not making it a minor.
AoE is definitely one of the strongest counters, but heavily overestimated on how easy it is to just cleave the minions. Burst AoE on long CDs, which is what Necros have, isn’t what counters MM, you have too much healing/defense, too many ways to counter their AoE. Bone Minions are just blown up before they die, Flesh Golem can be charged out of the AoE and won’t return until it’s done pulsing, and your other two minions are ranged.
Reaper is certainly stronger because of Greatsword, and the ability to use Gravedigger and general AoE. But wells are a really weak setup against MM, because of how easily you can avoid their effects and have maybe 1 ability forced onto CD (Flesh Golem, or a ranged minion), while they have 2+ forced, and now they have no burst to kill you.
The builds that would deal with MM really well are engis with kits, elementalist, Shout Reaper, and other builds that bring a ton of incidental AoE on really short CDs, not Wells necro with a massive CD burst that can be avoided really easily and then lack the kind of pressure needed to down the MM before their CDs are back.
I do not like Corrupter’s Fever. The ROI is bad, very bad. It looks fancy with its special icon but compares very poorly with protection, weakness, and our second health bar that prevents heals.
CF actually works really well with Necromancer, though maybe a little bit weak. Its just dumb that they should get a strictly better one, if it is balanced on them it would be on us.
Necromancer has only not been bottom bin in GWEN, out of every game mode. Anything else, even in PvP, was very specific for short periods of time, and 100% depending on singular OP things, namely Dhuumfire and Lich form. Outside of that we’ve always been bad, and everywhere, so pretending like our PvE angst is any worse, and that we should only get attention there is frankly as bad as implying the same for PvP or WvW.
They had a great theme to go with, and they chose to address one set of deficiencies we had. But an elite can’t be the only thing to float us, and making an elite solely to fix our PvE would have been really bad design.
Why does Curses have to be an only Condi line though? Spite is used for Condi and it is considered a the Power line.
It should be, which is why so many people complained about the lack of a non-condition GM trait and we got Weakening Shroud. It is crit/condi damage, just like spite is power/debuff condis.
I mean sure we have low damage, but that isn’t Curses’ fault directly, its our weapons. Death Perception doesn’t make sense as it is a primarily power boost for shroud, it makes little sense to have in Curses over Soul Reaping.
The only thing that annoys me about Scrapper is Adaptive Armor being a strict upgrade from Corrupter’s Fervor (easier to maintain, stronger baseline and stronger when fully stacked) despite there not being any direct reason between the professions for them to have a stronger version (like happened with Dhuumfire). And also Superspeed being so present, especially in AoE. It is an irremovable buff you can’t stop from being applied that hard-counters soft-CC, which we heavily rely on.
I’d argue that most MMs are complete garbage, which tends to be true. I’ve done a lot of 1v1s against heavy damage builds, and the reality is that you can put out around 10k healing in a normal MM build, on top of minion base 15k HP. So unless you guys know of some build that can deal 25k AoE damage to both ranged and melee minions at the same time, I’d be really interested to know how everything dies in seconds.
Also, MM only has, at most, 3 traits invested only for minions, with a few others being kind of useful to minions but also generally useful. Flesh of the Master, which makes it harder to kill them and so is fully used when minions are being killed, Death Nova, which is fully used when they die, and Necromantic Corruption which is the only one you actually deactivate. Transfusion and Life from Death are also heavily minion focused, at least in 1v1s, and both of those should also be taken advantage of. So by the time you kill the minions, the MM build doesn’t actually have any traits left that need minions, the traits have already done their job.
I just find a lot of confirmation bias with MM, people who think it is OP will always find it OP because all they see is losing to a build with AI and go “oh well the Necromancer did nothing and I lost to the AI”, and people who see it as too weak are just like “well I beat this MM and they did nothing so MM is bad”. MM is a hard to play and really specific setup build, and people don’t understand the interplay. They treat it like a fire and forget build, which it isn’t. Just look at the person OP was playing against to see an example.
No, Curses really needed the crit minors, because it is the crit and condi line. It made no sense for the condi/crit line to have a trait that didn’t help either of those two functions.
We get that Shouts suck for PvE and other professions got better PvE. Not everything can be great in PvE, and in this case they addressed a major issue we had in PvP/WvW, and a major issue we had been asking for. Gyros are cool, Shouts are also cool.
The only thing we should be salty about Scrapper is the fact that Adaptive Armor is better, and “different situations” doesn’t matter, they have the same type of traiting that would make ours too good, and the fact that Superspeed is another mechanic that is an irremovable, not possible to counterplay, counter to a heavy mechanic of Necro: soft CC.
Yeah If I run cleric MM and I’m dueling a power well necro and he puts all of his wells on my minions, they will instantly die unless I’m already pulsing transfusion.
All their utilities for all your utilities isn’t that bad of a trade, especially since the CDs are pretty close and Death Nova is going to destroy their HP. Plus they’d have to deal about 18k damage, through protection, to kill them. And that’s without Transfusion.
This should be his build, though I haven’t watched closely enough to gather sigils/runes, and I wasn’t entirely sure what the rest of his Reaper line was.
Watching over just to see how it goes, but if the MM used Blood Fiend he’s a bad player out the gate so I’m not expecting much.
Edit: He’s using Death Magic/Soul Reaping/Reaper, which is already a really bad combination for MM. You notice his damage drops off right away, because he allows his minions to die to your AoE since he has no healing for them, and on top of that he’s using staff, which is another huge damage dropoff. Plus Blood Fiend. Essentially, he’s a tanky Reaper build that happens to use minions, not an MM. He also seemed really slow to respond to stuff.
For your play, you need to concentrate on kiting him into his own minions to drop wells more. I noticed you do it a few times, but other times not so much. You have a build that can double-spam AoE effectively with the F5, so whenever he goes melee you should kite him into Bone Fiend/Blood Fiend, and drop all your AoE. He’ll have to stand in it with you to pressure you, and so will all his minions, which will all die since he has no healing. At that point, you play it like normal. Go offensive when he’s in staff, since he can’t pressure you, play defensive when he has GS/RS. It also seemed like quite a few of your F5s were pretty weak, doing very little. Against a build with little to no burst, you should be using F5s for CD reseting, especially at the beginning of the fight (MM is heavily front-loaded).
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Wow bhawb really? You’re seriously going to sit there and tell me a wurm leads to a 3 sec invuln? Okay so let’s get this straight nobody would waste utility or weapon skills on a wurm it just gets cleaved out, real easy to do so.
The person I was responding to was making the assertion that it was easy to just turn and kill Wurm in 3 seconds. If you have placed Wurm appropriately, it is far outside of cleave range, unless Anet has tricked me and added a bunch of cleave that has a 600 radius. This means any time or damage spent on killing Wurm is time and damage the enemy could have been using to pressure you, but isn’t. So yes, if you don’t get attacked by an enemy for 3s while they use up 10k of their damage to kill Wurm, you have effectively nullified 3s of their offensive pressure, the same way a 3s invuln would have.
What if in this scenario you have to help far but you placed your wurm near mid or home? Okay well now when you activate your wurm it sometimes ports you to places that aren’t in your favour. It’s just so unreliable.
Then you need to use it more. It is absolutely a bit wonky, except it is 100% consistent in its behaviors. If you place Wurm in a location, every location that it can/can’t teleport you to that location successfully is constant always, you’ll never place it in the same spot and teleport from the same spot, with different results. This means you might need to spend time learning the appropriate spots to use it, and you might have to think when you activate it to make sure you’re in a valid teleporting location, but this is all true for every shadowstep in the game.
Should it have a bit faster cast? Absolutely, so should all minions. But people are acting like Wurm is completely useless because if you stand next to it it’ll die and be useless, or you can’t just randomly run into 5 people in full zerker gear and expect to be able to go “oh wait that was stupid time to use my escape to save my dumb self”. All you have to do is pre-place it and you’re fine.
The thing is, devs only nerf something when it needs to be nerfed. Good design never nerfs something that doesn’t need to be nerfed. The point of nerfing paired with compensation buffs, which is what you’re talking about, is when something overall isn’t too strong (or is just a little strong), but has a single or small number of things that are problematic, while the overall is balanced or weak. An example of this would be Elementalist: D/D cele Ele is too strong in PvP, so good design would be to nerf it, however if they had to touch anything related to non-D/D ele they would give compensation buffs in order to have a net neutral (if not positive) change to all non-D/D builds, while still addressing the problematic D/D builds.
As a side note, one mechanic, such as a weapon, should never be nerfed because of anything but itself. We faced this issue with traits already, where skills were too reliant on traits because they were too strong in combination. If GS is too weak, it should be buffed, and it can internally have a nerf/buff compensating thing going on, but a completely outside mechanic like dagger should never be nerfed to buff GS.
Bhawb, the armor is based on WANTING to get hit… So why not make it more punishing… I would say regeneration instead of retaliation… But ANET hasn’t made it work in Death Shroud (Reaper Shroud). It’s just an idea. :P
The armor is based around the inevitability of being hit as a Necromancer, and thus requiring some kind of defense to mitigate it. You could just as easily argue it isn’t about wanting to get hit, but accepting that you can’t avoid it and therefore need a way to not die to it.
Retaliation doesn’t bolster anything Spectral Armor currently does, which is strictly reduce incoming damage and generate Life Force. Stability/Resistance could both be argued for, changing up how the Life Force works, tuning numbers, adding other defenses are all within its scope, but retaliation makes little sense.
We lose range, other professions lost things too. The things you’re suggesting they lose is like if we lost Death Shroud entirely, but we didn’t, we just traded one shroud for another.
Okay, so you just got a free 3 seconds of taking no damage and a burst build just wasted their entire burst, and that isn’t worth a utility slot? That ends up having the same effect as a 3s invuln to their damage or 10k damage from them you didn’t take, on a 36s CD; absolutely worth the slot. If you can’t win the fight with that kind of free lack of pressure from the enemy, you would have lost with anything.
A number of elites are trading their profession mechanic for new ones, which is where we are. It allows them to further focus the specialization, as well as give us something really cool to play with.
The only issue with stability on our base class, is that we really don’t have access to it beyond a well and a singular trait. Reaper has good access to it.
I get that, but they can’t just randomly slap stability onto skills in a random balance patch. They can’t address our stability until they go through and update a number of our skills, and then have a chance to put stability in there where it fits. So far they haven’t had that chance, we’ll see if Gee has had that scope of work for the upcoming core changes.
MM doesn’t afk at all, it isn’t remotely comparable to Ranger’s afk builds. If you do nothing as the MM your entire build sucks.
If you’re putting Wurm in a spot where someone can just walk over and kill it you’re using it wrong. You can easily put it in a really inconvenient spot for the enemy to target it without wasting a ton of damage to kill it (Wurm has base 10k HP, if someone wastes 10k damage in a fight and you still lose…), on top of the time it takes. The only time Wurm is easily countered is when you plop it back on a point to be able to back-rotate, and even then you can see it taking damage and jump out of the fight if you are being attentive enough, and even if you don’t you made the enemy waste a few seconds to kill it where they weren’t capping the point.