Guild Wars 2

Full MMs are still bad in PvP (although buffed a little), bad in WvW, and okay in PvE (although not great for dungeons). Varying degrees of hybrid MMs can be made to make minions actually viable in PvP (using either conditions or power to make you a legitimate threat), and while these buffs aren’t enough to make people MM now, they are still small buffs to it.

To my knowledge, AI hasn’t improved any in responsiveness, but Death Nova’s damage, ooc regen, and LF on the larger minions dying were all nice buffs, along with the other things that indirectly buff MMs.

intothemists build is updated, I don’t know of any others that are.

Actually, we can now have 3 seconds of stability every 7 seconds. Is it a huge investment? Yes, but realistically we aren’t supposed to have much stability, they have said so themselves, so the only way we get it is with 30 trait points.

I completely understand why the extra damage doesn’t work with Putrid, its too strong, but the other two seem like they wouldn’t unbalance anything… I mean no one is going to say that Blood Fiend is too good in PvP.

psygate.5632:

How exactly were zerker necros ever NOT viable? :P

Yes. They are very viable. You do amazing damage with the new deathly precision trait and don’t need to pop lich form to bring someone down. This was the best patch ever ;_;

Because in PvP, just like Condi Necros, you die in about a second or two of focus.

Infect.2738:

This was intended. It was too op/bugged on the test server.

Is it also intended with the other two sacrifices?

I used it with 4% crit chance, and I was critting about every 2 hits.

Are there any build sites that are updated?

Putrid can crit.

Torment doesn’t double the tick, but (from what I hear) ticks twice instead.

Original Heartseeker spam was standard opener (mug->backstab) press heartseeker until they are dead (1-2 times). Maybe nowadays its harder, but it was one of the original no-skill thief builds.

Frankly, it is partly accurate. Necromancers have been difficult to play for a long time now. People who have stuck through it anyway now have more power to play with, and people aren’t used to having to actually fight a Necromancer, they are used to just killing a weak build.

Not to say that this won’t even out pretty quickly. But for today at least, you could probably steam roll a lot of people who have never had to actually intelligently fight a Necro.

No idea, I haven’t tested it yet.

They are more viable, it just doesn’t work with triggered sacrifices. Realistically, I think it would have been OP, Putrid Explosion already can hit from 2.5k-3k, this hits for 1k-1.5k. Putrid Explosion could hit for 3.5k-4.5k each. I think we can agree a 9k damage explosion, on a 16 second CD, regardless of your stats.

I would like to see it work with the other two sacrifices though.

Also, Bone and Shadow Fiend both give 10% LF on death too, pretty nice.

It triggers whenever a minion dies except when sacrificed. It does 1k-1.5k.

conflict.6539:

Im talking about pure dps necros, Power Precision crit damage. Previously a lot of necros stayed away because well times were pretty long. Now with the traits they are much better and use-able more consistently to maybe warrant a full zerk build.

What part of the game. PvE, WvW, or PvP, because it matters a lot. PvE it has always been viable. WvW it wasn’t quite (too little defense), but possibly is now with 1200 range piercing, might/vuln stacking instant 50% crit chance life blast. PvP, probably not in all honesty. It might be with the right team, but its just so dangerous.

Which part of the game? Well necros have been popular in WvW for a long time, and not bad in PvE.

It won’t make or break builds (I run a cleric build), but it is a small buff.

It isn’t meant to be a huge ratio.

It still is going to work best in a build that is designed with it in mind. Sustained DS builds are going to potentially be viable now.

These are decent changes, but I am far more interested by the new Near to Death + Foot in the Grave and Deathly Perception build types that will be coming out.

I have 30 healing with just over 1.1k healing power

Oblivion.8307:

necro is broken op. hope you guys are happy.

Does this mean TP will let you play Necro again? Because I’ve been waiting for the day I can see some great EU Necros.

Zindrix.1750:

Sam.7269:

Condi duration has a cap.

Do you know what that % is?

At this point, after messing around with builds, I might end up going full Spite.

You can’t have more than 100% condi duration, except with Curses 30 trait, that gives you 33% scepter durations, which does not count, as it raises base durations (unless they changed it).

Xehanort.4589:

My bone minions proc the death nova when i sacrifice them, retry.

It is not Death Nova itself, it is the added damage it is supposed to do on death. It is not working when you sacrifice a minion, but it does work when they die naturally. Not sure if this is intended or not.

Also, I tested the Blood Magic more. I have no idea what I did, but it is working now…

Ascii.9726:

with 200 healing power, my vampiric is doing:

28 damage, 27 healing.

and traited with 50% im doing;

42 damage, 41 healing.

That is very strange, I’ll need to look into mine.

So, I’m healing for 30 per hit now… something is bugged about this trait, but I don’t know what yet.

Their numbers are messed up then. I have 1k healing power, and am healing for 19.

Vampiric is not scaling properly (I hit 27 damage with 1,635 power and 2,600 attack, heal for 19 with 1,073 healing power).

Death Nova only procs when minions are not killed by your skill activation

Bas.7406:

Bhawb.7408:

Is anyone else getting ridiculously low vampiric procs? I’m getting 27 damage and 19 healing…

Because it scales now. I am guessing the base is lower!

So, I have over 1k healing power, and 2.6k power. It hits for 27, and heals for 19, I think they messed up the formula, or they decided Vampiric was too good and nerfed it.

Is anyone else getting ridiculously low vampiric procs? I’m getting 27 damage and 19 healing…

SORRY everyone :P

So yeah, what I was seeing was a 2s immobilize on the active, and considering it to be on hit (bone fiend hits twice per attack, and twice in the attack period, so 2*(2*2) =, and had seen reasonably high durations in game and so assumed it was 8 seconds; I could have sworn I had checked it but I guess not. Anyway, yes I apologize I was way off, it is 4 seconds base (5 seconds with my 20% condi duration).

Death Nova’s extra damage appears bugged, in that it doesn’t exist. Someone please test it out to see if this is true or not.

Time for ALL the theorycrafting.

Yeah, I’ll have to see how it feels in game, and also the immobilize duration (that wiki seems… incomplete).

40 second recharge isn’t that bad though.

Staff 1 is per hit.

Just take soul marks, or don’t expect much LF generation.

This shows nothing about removing anything, this is an incomplete preview.

Yes, on demand is always stronger because it is there when you need it (like if he’s really low, and running off, and that burning proc will finish him), but RNG on crit stuff is pretty much how they are doing a lot of things.

The trait is capped at once every 10 seconds. Even your base 4% crit chance will, on average, crit every 25 hits. Lets say you throw on a Rabid Jewel (not a big loss), and have 10 points into Curses, you’ll have a 12% chance, or once every 8-9 hits. You should be able to hit 8-9 times easily within 10 seconds, considering all the AoE chances for crits.

I don’t actually think this will hurt build diversity on our side any, and actually increase it. There are two big changes I see so far that will hurt build diversity: Terror to Master, nerf to Near to Death. However, bringing Near to Death down to Master actually opens up one build option, so I really think it more or less evens itself out, leaving Terror.

To my knowledge no other change will actually hurt, directly, any build currently used. That means your standard PvP build that you use right now will be essentially untouched. The standard 0/30/10/0/30 build that many people use will remain usable. The only question is whether the new traits and changes open up build options, compared to the maybe 1 or 2 builds that died because of Terror. I think it will.

The changes appear to be overall in the right direction, although some of them concern me (CB nerfed, 5 is way too low when A/F can now do 4 on half the CD). And then again, we will see what actually makes its way into the real patch tomorrow. Then we can see where we are. Overall, I think it is a nice step, but no one can say we are going to be fully balanced after this.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Pretty sure there’s a cooldown in foot in the grave, we were just never able to trigger it fast enough to notice.

Assuming that the preview is true and it went from 50% CD to 30%, I don’t think there is going to be an ICD, otherwise the nerf makes no sense (the other DS related traits were okay, but no one was making OP builds with them).

In what context?

This is PvE, PvP is irrelevant entirely.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Saying that conditions are more powerful on Necros than on Engineers just because we are Necros is bullcrap.

Being a Necro doesn’t give you some passive increase to condition damage, doesn’t make condition removal harder or anything else we just have a more popular condition build because news-flash, we have no outstanding builds.

And please don’t defend it by bringing up epidemic, that is no excuse for such a weak GM trait. It’s probably objectively worse than close to death since the increase in scepter auto-attack damage for a conditionmancer would probably deal more damage to a target than burning.
Besides everything else, condition damage is never reliable because it can be cleansed and then you’d have to wait 10 seconds to try and crit for another application of burning.
Also, having an internal cooldown means we can only apply burning on one target every 10 seconds.

Come on, you are forgetting the secret Necromancer passive: “Necromancers are better at conditions, because ArenaNet says we are supposed to be.”

But seriously, look at the conditions that a condi engi puts out, the duration/stacks/uptime of them. Their offensive conditions are fine, in fact if they go for certain setups it is arguably better. But they don’t have the same defensive conditions, and sheer condi output (on way higher durations) that Necromancers do.

They are still posted with audio only on the website.

Invictus.1503:

Granted, there is arguably more a necro can do with burning, but still this annoys me…

New Grandmaster trait – Dhuumfire: Inflict burning to opponents for 4 seconds on critical hit. This effect can only occur once every 10 seconds.
Compared to the Engineer
Adept trait – Incendiary Powder: 100% chance to inflict burning for 4 seconds on critical hits. This effect can only trigger once every 10 seconds.

Remember that different classes have different balances. Condition damage Necromancers are still pretty strong (at least AoE) without burning, whereas condition Engineers would be (to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong) completely irrelevant without burning.

If that is what you are looking for, then yes, basically any AoE support class will not only keep her alive, but significantly buff the minions, as they can take any buff that I know of (I haven’t tried banners, but the rest work: spirits, venom, aura, boons, etc.).

Guys, we can literally just wait 24 hours and know for real what the patch changes are…

Also, the preview at the top specifically stated it was only a preview.

Bull Zooker.1672:

im worried about how long this will all take to download, if this is the changes for 1 of the 8 classes… could be an all nighter!

this is of course assuming that this isnt just bs. which I highly suspect it is.

I have awesome internet, so it’ll probably only be a few minutes-half an hour for me. My friend though, whose internet is apparently routed through half shut down Soviet-era internet servers, would probably take a week to update by the looks of it.

Remember the cost of using each skill comparatively. Condition builds don’t need to get too close to be able to get life force, so theirs is lower. Dagger has the highest LF gain, but you are also much more likely to go through that LF since you are in melee range of the target.