Again, it depends on what game mode you are in. Are you talking PvE, PvP, or WvW? In PvE/WvW, you can do just fine life stealing, but PvP melee necros are either MMs, using minions as a damage/control source, or as a glass burst build (in general).
Which game mode? WvW and PvE we can life steal tank really well, but in tPvP I don’t know of any builds that work well that way.
Dhuumfire itself is just fine, it is paired with Terror and all the other things we have that makes the offensive pressure too much. When played exceptionally, the amount of damage that comes out of us is just too high. They need to fix that burning+terror combo (because they would be fine separately), and instead of having us do so much damage, make us be able to stretch the fight out instead (you know, what were supposed to do).
Blood fiend would be just fine if they slightly increased durability, and made it easier to actually get the heal from the active (either by lowering the cast time on Taste, or by introducing some way to monitor its HP easier so someone doesn’t spike it down). It has really strong HP over time, with a little burst heal, it is just that the skill required to use it is unnecessarily high when CC can do similar without any microing.
WoB can heal teammates for upwards of 7k, and you for 6-7k, along with a 10 second light field. You don’t need a single trait either, I use it all the time untraited, and it’s fine.
Not to mention the retal everyone is getting, and retal hurts
Actually I often take WoB in my team-oriented builds with healing power. With cleric gear, WoB is healing other people for more than their own heal, and I can do it twice. CC is fine, WoB is fine, Blood Fiend needs a tiny bit of love. The active has to be easier to use, or he needs to be harder to kill
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Contagion
Make it an aura, remove the self damage, and obviously tune duration, uptime, CD, etc.
Bas just laid down the gauntlet, hard. I want to see this so much.
Also altroll, one of the reasons you don’t get people in game is because of your attitude in game. You are so abusive I had to block you on Skype over an argument you started and I tried to diffuse, and every conversation we have where we don’t agree ends in you flaming me until I get tired and stop talking; I have heard this from your own students as well, they just learn how to not disagree because it isn’t worth the fight. As someone who actually is a teach IRL, and plenty of games, your attitude at the front has to be amicable. Your attitude shoves people away, and you won’t be a pillar of the community until you fix it.
There are many, many versions of MM builds, more than 3.
MMs are fine in mid fights, just make the right team for it. Shadow fiend, if they buffed his active and survivability would find a spot in some of my builds guaranteed. He has the second highest attack speed (more life steal, more boons stripped), second highest DPS, and the blind is AoE on a low CD.
You can have perma regen, WoB, and then some healing traits if you really want to. I haven’t tried it much but it is possible to have a ton of healing.
AI has been tidied up quite a bit, not perfect but nicer.
Regarding Minions they can work great on close point however when you reach the highest rated teams limitations will show. You dont know this because you have not played the game at that level its also the reason why alot of your statements are considered jokes by some necros here. Its another game when you start fighting the best players instead of just average players.
Just because I know minions inside and out I’d like to add a little to this statement. Zombify recently told me he ran minions a bit for fun with a team made around making them work, and it was exactly what I had been telling people to do for ages to make minions work in a team comp; AoE buffing.
Minions could find their way into top level comps only if the team sits down to a long theorycrafting session and says “our Necromancer is running minions, how do we make this work”, otherwise they will never be up to par with other builds. I love minions, I will run them forever, but even if they saw perfect balancing, they will need a team built around them to maximize their efficiency, otherwise you’re better off running other builds.
You would have been on BoC already if you hadn’t gone out of your way to flame us; we’ve had on multiple people that don’t agree with us and we’ve had arguments with. The problem isn’t that you respond harshly to harsh people (that happens), but that you actually start fights that no one picked with you.
Now that AI doesn’t require a ton of work, Minions are probably the easiest thing to do. You have a lot of CC to counter other people’s builds, but you can pretty easily do the offensive work (that isn’t based on countering things) by keeping minions up, and rotating through a few skills every time they come off CD.
There are plenty of builds for you to use, Sikari’s is a solid one, and it will probably work for what you want.
The reality is that your attitude holds a lot of weight. If you acted differently this entire thread, and your impact on the community, would be vastly improved. It is, honestly, the single thing keeping you from being an amazing asset to the community. But as long as you are so hostile to opposing ideas and go out of your way to flame people you will have a terrible reputation, and will burn bridges that would let you have better outlets to voice your opinion.
The game was a different thing entirely. Regardless of what you are playing with, there are certain things one could see about how you played that showed you weren’t of the highest caliber of player. I have no doubts that you might be a very good player, but the idea that you are going to teach the top tier Necromancers how to play is going to fall on deaf ears unless you actually show it. What you showed me was something that top tier players would have picked apart easily.
I’d like to see new weapons on Necromancers (and other classes) when they come out with a new expansion. Greatswords are the easiest from a resources perspective, but I’d much rather see things like Greataxe.
I will have to say I have never actually faced him in a queue for pvp, nor have I ever ran into someone who has. I am not saying he doesn’t pvp, but I think it would be interesting to see how many of the top teams he has crushed remembers it? Perhaps you can give us some names of players you have destroyed.
I have played him in tPvP, ran into him when I queued with some of the eSports guild guys (far from an amazing team we had). He isn’t top tier by any means. Now, I don’t mean that as an insult, because neither am I, but he isn’t anywhere close to the top tier players.
You can get 2 ticks of any condition with any duration > 1s, with the right timing.
You can do the math for how much HP/s you’ll actually get out of it, look at that compared to whatever trait you are giving up and see if you think its worth it.
His side for why the size should not be increased came down to staff is still a useable utility weapon without the size increase, just its uses are different, and that AoE in general (and ours in particular) is already so incredibly strong that this is too much of a buff to be seen.
Staff without marks is less of an AoE weapon and just down to utility. It isn’t that Necromancers need the size to use staff, its just that the trait makes the weapon so much stronger that almost everyone can find place for it in their build. Not sure if I explained it nearly as well as he did, but yeah.
Minion AI has been tidied up, they now appear to acquire aggro on the start of your cast. I am sure there are some specifics to test, but they are far more responsive now.
No one is bringing healing power just for this, but if you are already using healing power in your build, then this is a decent buff.
When they move, it is literally just a double tick, so it will essentially double damage.
@Bhawb : what is the runes/sigils the 30/30/10 build is using?
I am not 100% sure, but I would guess Nightmare runes (best Terror runes), 2x sigil of geomancy, and sigil of corruption on the weapon set with an offhand. Someone please correct me if I am wrong, I don’t personally use the build.
I promised that I would respond and then I ran off to MLG without doing that :P
To give my two cents as someone who has run nearly exclusively with minions in PvP since GW1.
- Add optional minion HP bars to the UI. This change alone will make Blood Fiend vastly more viable (he actually has crazy good HP/s healing, if you are perfectly using his active, but that is darn near impossible with all the ranges of minions to track)
– I talked with Chaplan recently, and he explained very clearly why marks aren’t going to see size increases. I’ve run without staff plenty, and its fine, and I’ve run it with staff, its a trade off and mark size is too strong to be innate.
Other than that, minions are actually very close. They will never be meta because of the love/hate people have, but all that really needs doing is making Shadow Fiend more viable (just make Haunt instant cast, but keep the animation, and make it so that ability works properly and he’s good), the HP bars, fix the minion minor traits, and then the normal Necromancer sustain buffs we are supposed to see and we will be fine. It is just that you need to make builds around the idea of having an MM, and people don’t do that yet.
Comments to what you want specifically. I don’t think it would fix or break minions, I just think you are aiming to change them to being less disposable. I don’t think that is what ANet wants though, they are supposed to run the line between full uptime (like pets) and low uptime (the time-capped summons). I like your ideas, and we have talked plenty in game, we just have very slightly different opinions of what minions are.
Nothing personal, but the title of this thread is misleading. Regardless of whether these builds are amazing or not (I haven’t tried them), these are not meta builds, by definition. Meta is what everyone runs; D/D bunker eles were meta, S/D thieves were meta, BM rangers were meta, and right now 30/30/10 Necros are becoming meta (there are about 3 meta builds right now I believe for necros). Your listed builds are not meta, because they are not widely used.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying these builds are great, or bad, I am making no judgement on them at all because in all fairness I haven’t run them (and I know a few of your builds work at least relatively well), but the title is misleading, and I don’t want anyone thinking this is the meta Necromancer; because it isn’t.
Personally I don’t believe minions should scale any more than they do (which is indirectly through condition duration and condition damage, to any conditions they apply, which makes sense).
It has been said why scaling can be bad. The problem is that unless they add scaling on top of what they already do, meaning minions are just as useful to anyone, but now a bit “customized” you hit huge balance issues. There are a few things they could do to make minions as “perfectly” balanced as they will get, but scaling isn’t it.
If you go around on google, you will be able to find programs that basically strip youtube audio, all you need is the program and the youtube URL and its good to go. The one I used to use (forgot the name, haven’t used it in a while) takes quite a bit of time though, since it has to process the full video first, then strips it down the audio, then finalizes the mp3, but you will still end up with audio.
Our offensive pressure is insane, and most likely Dhuumfire will get a nerf when they start actually fixing our defenses. The problem right now is people can’t handle the pressure we put out, and so forget that at the end of the day, Necromancers haven’t been made any less squishy directly. We did get a few attrition buffs, but at the end of the day you are going down the instant you step out of positioning with the current meta builds.
Thanks for coming everyone, sorry the chat wasn’t working.
Something we forgot to mention was come check out state of the game on Sunday! I’m not 100% sure when it is, but Zombify will be on, and it should be interesting.
Yep, unfortunately so :/
We are live in a few minutes.
We are going a bit earlier today. The current plan is to go live in about 30 minutes, at 3pm PST. Gibbly will not be able to make it today, but we will have the one and only Zombify on to talk about the patch, and how Necromancers are looking now.
Yep. None of the +% damage things work on conditions, unfortunately.
There are only 4 classes that get stability from Utility skills, and 6 that get it from ultimates, basically to cover the cast/transformation duration.
Just going off that list, and it might be incomplete:
Thieves, Mesmers, Elementalists, Engineers all have terrible stability.
Rangers get stability only if they run a specific Elite.
Necromancers either get a very high stability uptime, or none at all.
Guardians/Warriors get nice uptime.
Looking at the list that you linked, we aren’t even close to worst stability uptime. People act like stability is just flying all over the kitten place in PvP. The problem is that we have no stability and no other way to make CC not stick; those other classes just don’t get hit by the skill entirely.
Close to Death is going to be better for you most likely. The reason is any group you run with an ele or guardian is going to be pushing your burns, no matter what, they can’t help it. That is going to reduce your damage a bit if you are using burning, whereas no one can stop your direct damage, and in PvE mobs aren’t usually applying tons of protection anyway.
However, remember that Close to Death does not raise your DPS by 20%, it raises your direct damage by 20%.
Not if you shroud stomp properly. If you aren’t shroud stomping then yes, you can be interrupted.
I have to agree. We’re talking about 60 trait points, with at most one of six of the major choices being “defensive”, and realistically none of the minors being meaningfully defensive. A burning/terror build does crazy damage, no one can deny that, especially when you can might stack now and have some really high hybrid damage, but you are really squishy when you do this. People were saying the old 0/30/10/0/30 builds were too squishy, well I hate to break it but you just got a hell of a lot squishier if you want “OP” damage.
That is meaningful trade offs, and balance. Sure you can do high damage (at it is high damage), but at the cost of being more fragile than a cheap, wet, one ply piece of toilet paper. I think that is a good place for balance to be. We should be able to do the same damage as super glass builds, and we should be just as glassy for it. Now we are, and that is good.
Death Shroud stomp/res is either stomping or reviving while in death shroud. You do it by very quickly going into Death Shroud after starting the stomp/rez channel (very, very quickly).
It does not change in your character screen, so you will still see whatever crit chance you have, but it is properly working, to my knowledge. Would be nice if it did increase the number with a little green thing though.
If you waited that long, it sounds like a bug.
There are a lot of ways they could fix it, and in some ways they have been making it better with the new PvE content. Karka actually really encouraged conditions, and the new Aetherblade instance’s bosses are much more about learning the mechanics and playing to those, than it is about “how quick can we DPS this”.
It takes a very, very long time for them to regen. Its a bit ridiculous, really.
No, realistically with the new buffs, the offensive pressure that burning + terror can put out, along with DS 5, and all of what we used to do, its crazy strong. What really remains to be seen is if a 30/20/X/X/X build will actually be able to accomplish that pressure without being too vulnerable to focus fire.
He’s symbolic, PvPers want to hear what he says, lol.
Yeah, when I saw that comment I specifically went and tested it. It isn’t a high chance by any means.
Also, I totally agree they need to be specific as to whether this is intended or not. If this is intended, we should know, I have had a lot of questions about this.
I land bone minion explosions all the time in PvP, it is not that hard. According to Zombify, it is intended (which makes sense, at least from ANet’s standpoint), therefore not a bug.
Axe is a decent hybrid weapon, so if you are running Dumbfire with a hybrid build axe might be fine, but otherwise a pure condi build is unlikely to use it.
PvE will not be fixed until they change mechanics, period. Without destroying the flavor of our class, we will not be needed (and the best choice) until they revamp mechanics to not be so favoring of mechanics we don’t have, and so discouraging of our mechanics. It has nothing to do with our mechanics, because we are fine, it is just our mechanics are not the ideal when compared to the “trinity” that does have those mechanics.
OP isn’t necessarily “I can destroy everyone with this”, it is simply something that is overly strong balance wise. It is not the 1k damage, it is that you can do 1-1.5k damage, on top of an already very nice 2.5k damage, twice every 16 seconds, along with permanent poison uptime, decent weakness uptime, and with traits that complement an already decently high damaging and beefy setup.
BM ranger wasn’t a problem because pets could do high damage, it was the high damage paired with the ranger being a ridiculous bunker and yet having a pet that hits as hard as semi-glass builds.