Retal and vigor are completely different.
Vigor doesn’t fit what they want for us.
The necromancer has tones of problems, not just with a condition build. Giving them burning doesn’t fix their problem. Burning wont reduce the high recharge on wells, doesn’t fix the long cast time and animation time of their spells, doesn’t solve the problems in death shroud, doesn’t make them any less of a pinball, doesn’t help the necromancer escape from combat, and doesn’t give them the ability to keep someone in the fight if they need to.
Again, don’t make out Burning to be more than it is. It is to address a singular issue with a type of builds; we need better “bursty” conditions.
Then why are you playing the profession? Without context for what the profession is or their theme of how they do things, I don’t see a reason to even touch any of the professions. If your goal is to optimize and be as powerful as possible, lore be kitten ed, I would suggest playing another attrition profession like the engineer or ranger. You basically have just told me, You have no reason to play a necromancer.
And from a “Pure” gameplay stand point, it still doesn’t work considering the necromancer is supposed to be an attrition profession and keep the fights long. In which case they should be able to apply bleeds far easier and keep the pressure much longer and build death shroud much faster to out last. Burning will make the fights shorter and it cuts a core strategy that they where built around. Which is keeping a player(or players if you are good) occupied for a longer stretch of time litterally wasting their time with you, locking them in an unnecessary combat for them that allows your team to take control of a situation.
How about we give them Disease? A condition from GW1 that would spread to other creatures only change it in GW2 so its 4x bleed damage and only spreads to foes. It wouldn’t be as strong as burning, but it would be flavorful. You would be happy because you have one more powerful damage condition on top of your bleeds and poison. I would be happy because its a return of an old favorite of mine, the devs would be happy because they don’t have to listen to us argue. Everybody wins!
Even if you don’t agree with everything else I say. Can we at least agree that disease in GW2 would be freaking awesome?
Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy the idea of Necromancers, I have played the class since GW1 because I tend to love “summon” classes; I spent an entire summer playing MM in FA/AB. And I do completely agree that they need to keep the Necromancer theme going, it is why I am all for them not giving us boons and things of that nature to balance us, but balancing us with our own unique mechanics. And really, Rangers and Engineers play very differently than we do. Yes they have a few similar mechanics, but it just isn’t the same.
What I mean about lore is specifically that I don’t think lore should be the limiting factor here, I think gameplay should. Necromancer’s have a unique gameplay that needs to be addressed, and Burning is an easy (please note that it isn’t the only way, which I’ll address shortly) to do that. Would I like Disease? Hell yeah, but it doesn’t fit with their design philosophy to keep the condition/boon system smaller. I actually hope Disease is being looked at for DS 5.
Burning is just the easiest and most accessible answer for the problem. It doesn’t have to be implemented in a way to make fights faster, it is just a way to make a condition that is guaranteed to do decent damage (like Terror), and without changing a lot. Give us very short burnings of 1-2 seconds on some proc (not Rabid dependent please), and it just lets us have our condition damage actually be effective. If they keep the access to it not super easy (to where we can just spam burning after burning) then it fixes us but keeps up with the idea of long fights.
Okay, let me put it this way. I don’t give a crap about lore. I’m not reading a book or watching a move. This isn’t an incredibly interesting story-driven gaming experience. This game would have completely failed already if the best reason to play it was for the storytelling, because the storytelling is bland, generic, and forgettable. I’ve seen the exact same themes and ideas used in story after story; and they aren’t even done well. Who hasn’t seen a world with human gods, ancient evils making enemies unite and fight together, and the ton of other boring elements involved in the story. The universe itself is somewhat interesting, but outside the Sylvari I could find better lore on an amateur submission to a free website (and I have, its all over the place).
This is a game and as such is driven by gameplay. If the gameplay is boring, this game dies, end of story. I realize you have a great love for the lore, and that is cool, I’ve been there with other fantasy universes. But I am not using lore as a basis for my debate; I am coming purely from a gaming standpoint. And when it comes down to it, no one wants to play a game that isn’t working (regardless of its story); otherwise I will just read a book.
If you want to argue that burning doesn’t fix us based on a gameplay standpoint then go ahead. But I’m not going to argue lore when lore means nothing here.
It does. If you’re playing a warrior. Mine hits for maybe 1k over the two hits.
Burning works better for us than confusion. Lore or w/e aside giving us burning is just a small fix to a very specific problem in specific builds; a way to damage with conditions that actually sticks. There is so much condition removal in PvP (and there always will be, because of how destructive conditions are) that burst conditions do much better than trying to slowly stack up 25 bleeds; no one decent will ever let that happen.
The problem is that offensive condition damage builds just aren’t working well on their own in PvP. That is why almost every Necro you will see will be paired with an Engineer (or someone else to “feed” them conditions to work with). That is not good balance, this game is built around classes being at least somewhat self sufficient, and yet our condition builds not only aren’t self sufficient; but they aren’t self sufficient in any way, offensive or defensive.
How do they make offensive condition damage builds more self sufficient? They need to give us a way to burst condition damage. Burning is already just that, low duration high damage. Their other options are giving us abilities like Churning Earth (that stack high bleeds at once), which would require them completely changing around our skills, or making the new condition similar damage to Burning (which, due to it having a secondary effect, makes no sense).
Giving us burning on a trait, which can be controlled, is the easiest way to give one specific group of builds offensive independence. That is all it is. This isn’t the be all end all of our balance, this is nothing to do with defense, this is fixing one problem with one fix; stop making it out to be more than that.
It is in the direct damage tree, and retaliation scales off your direct damage; it is in the tree it synergizes best with. It is a good trait as is (we have laughably easy access to retaliation already), although it could be made more fun.
There are a few very specific builds that do high burst damage on Necros, but if you are looking for huge numbers this isn’t the class for you. You are looking for Warriors or Thieves; or specific Mesmer/Ele builds.
To my knowledge, Flesh Wurm is working according to the algorithm it is programmed to follow, so yes.
If it is actually a L2P issues, saying L2P is a valid response. He is explaining to you how teleports actually function in this game, and you are rejecting him on the basis of “nuh uh”.
It isn’t necessarily the most common things, but Spinal Shivers (and the trait), Dark Path, Chillblains, Spectral Grasp, and Chilling Darkness (trait) all apply chill, and all but Chilling Darkness do so on decently high uptime (comparable to Elementalist uptime if they want to).
Burning is solely one small change being put in, with the goal to help Condition-damage Necromancers in PvP have more reliable damage.
I might not agree with it, but it was a good laugh.
Look at Nemesis’ Hybrid build, he talks about hybrid on a necro and it should give you something to start from. And of course if you still have questions now they might be more specific and easier to help with.
He types in his voice, so no.
We’re always looking for other people to have on the show if you’re a commander too hint hint wink wink.
I just tested it; regen, healing by siphoning, healing with dagger 2, and Well of Blood all did not show up in combat log.
Just tested it in HotM, and Focus 4 was working at just short of 1200 range (went to 1200 range then took one step forward).
It is a different debate, but it is important to bring up if Earth sigils are brought up; I brought it up with the mention mons put at the end, since Geomancy is almost always better in situations where you can afford to close the distance.
Also, July would be a whole new month, and to my knowledge they always keep their monthly patches within the month.
In PvE that works fine, PvP you are never just attacking, which is why these comparisons of DPS are nice, but not as helpful. Carrion players use their own sigil that procs on swap, and you use a full rotation including swapping, DS, and if the enemy doesn’t cleanse fear; epidemic. The only tests you can really compare (for PvP, PvE has quite a bit of auto attacking) is using full combos against golems for “perfect case” testing and seeing who kills faster.
I agree, reducing it to a more realistic duration with comparable stacks would be good, but more like 10-15s base, not 3.
First, poison is a condition. Poison, regardless of how it was applied by you, will do the exact same DPS. It will do different damage with different abilities because the tooltip damage is using the listed duration and your current condition damage, assuming the poison lasts the entire duration; it is the sum damage with your current stats.
No thanks for vampiric. I want the life stealing in my hands, not theirs.
Agree that Signet of Spite needs a bit more “oomph”, although I guess there is a lot of room to talk about how to add it.
No thanks on Unholy Feast. Up to 100% retaliation uptime with a single skill is amazing. If you want to see why, look at the Guardian team’s videos in the All-Profession tournament, where almost 50% of their DPS was retaliation; which has also been nerfed constantly because of its power. Also, it does steal HP if you have vampiric traited.
Consume Conditions already does this?
Locust Swarm change is really strong. Weakness is being buffed soon™, and Locust is already a pretty strong siphon/LF/control ability.
The rest I don’t feel much either way about. I think they could be good, but I’m not sure about the balance (either way).
The devs have a great idea about where to take Necros in theory. If you go and listen to whats been said by them, they obviously recognize our problems, and are looking into ways of fixing them while keeping Necro flavor. That is really big to me, because it would be easy for them to give us stability and a few other things and “fix” us by basically making us emo Guardians.
Apparently that white damage isn’t going to be as much in question with the weakness rework coming up.
The problem with anything like that added to chill is it comes dangerously close to making Chill too powerful for Necromancers. Now, obviously it comes down to exactly what the play with Chill is, but Chill is already arguably the strongest control condition in the game; absolutely gimping mobility, and making abilities have significantly longer CDs. This hampers offensive ability (with the movement speed control and less offensive CDs to use besides auto attacking), defensive ability (can’t escape and defensive CDs are further apart) and high chill uptime completely destroys certain build types.
If it is implemented in a similar way with an internal CD, yes please.
Yeah, to anyone really in the mood for theorycrafting, I’d suggest waiting for the end of the month. There are enough possible changes coming in that you don’t necessarily want to spend a ton of time theorycrafting now just to have to redo everything later.
Is burning the only thing we need? No. Burning does, however, have the chance to fix our offensive problems in Condition builds, and depending on how it is implemented has the chance to help out other build types; just based on how high base damage it is (and low scaling).
No one is saying we don’t need more than just burning. Minions, power builds, support, hybrid, every build we have still needs slight work on the defensive front (and some others), but this is a start to fixing our offense. And if you talk to any of the current top PvP Necros, you’ll see why burning is required.
If minions dying when we transform is a bug, do you think they’re gonna try and fix it?
Yes, they have made statements about it, I’m not 100% sure what they are. They are aware of it, that is why they changed the tooltips to reflect it.
It’d be even easier in PvE depending on the target. You can get much higher stat values for the big damage hits, and there are also a lot of targets with really low armor values.
I’d be very interested to see how strong of a mob that can be killed like this.
Transforms aren’t supposed to kill your pets, they do that because they are bugged; the tooltip was just written to warn people that it happens, not to say its meant to happen. Since DS was not always a transform, it doesn’t have the issue that “true” transforms do in that area.
Shaman’s gear works fine, the idea that we have bad healing scaling is false. What is true is that we have very few things that scale with healing power, but some of what we do have has insane scaling (WoB has 3.4 scaling AoE).
If you want to use Shaman’s gear, you are basically going to be running a defensive/support condition setup. This works fine in sPvP, and there is a bit of variation you can have, the problem is that even more so than some other Necro builds, you need to build a team around it.
You never want more defense than you need, that’s just a good rule for any build you ever make; extra defense that goes unused is wasted stats. So to answer the question why go for personal damage? Because all that extra toughness and vitality you have is being wasted. Your minions will take most of the aggro for you, and over time you will learn how to manage other aggro (its fairly easy to run full glass in PvE). More offensive stats, even if only you are getting benefit from them, is better.
And every single ability you use is going to use your stats. Staff 1 will benefit from more damage; every ability you (not your minions) use is going to do more damage.
If you want to go condition damage, then run condition damage stats (carrion is generally better right now) and condition damage weapons.
Just a note, this trait can proc in Lich Form, which as you can imagine would cause a huge amount of damage. It isn’t that crazy to see it kill someone, especially if the hit that triggered it brought them significantly below the threshold (like Lich can so easily do, hitting 5k easy).
In PvE there isn’t much need for all the defense that Soldiers gives you. I’d go some mix of power/precision/critical damage for much higher damage, or go for condition damage/duration, and mix in just enough defense to stay alive.
Whats wrong with the epic return of Disease? I would much rather have that then burning. And I wouldn’t make the corpses useless for reanimating.
Nothing is wrong with a new condition, but access to burning will actually cure a lot in PvP. Besides our defensive problems, no access to burning is one of the biggest things holding condi necros back in PvP; which is why they run with Engis in cleave comps.
The icon is the same one that you would see above a downed player. The real Mesmer has a number of things that make it easier to find them, the only real problem is clicking them.
In PvP with any kind of LF generation Carrion is better, the only use of Rabid is having the highest amount of condition damage, and by way of high crit chance, the most bleeds possible. Otherwise, Carrion is better. But generally speaking unless you are going for that max condition damage, you want Carrion.
Lily is talking strictly GuildWars lore. There is plenty of reason for Necromancers in general to get burning, but within the context of GW lore, we are usually attributed as followers of Grenth, who is the god of ice and death (among other things); ice doesn’t really go with fire.
I’m not sure that it is necessarily a conflict, however. Grenth is a human god, and is worshiped almost exclusively by humans. He is not the source of Necromancy, he is merely the patron god of many human Necromancers. As such, there is no specific lore reason that Necromancers would be unable to have access to abilities that might conflict with Grenth.
Nemesis said he didn’t take Signet because frankly, it isn’t that good in an actual build, and while the point of this is to merely do a high hit, he realizes many people would completely skip the introduction and just go “omg, signet of spite 2gud!” if he used it.
That wouldn’t be good for us. Carrion is already better with proper DS usage, and giving us more LF generation would make it even better. Forcing us to use Rabid wouldn’t be good.
Easy to say, but we have absolutely no idea how much access we get to burning. An extreme example is they give us a trait that has a 1% chance to apply burning for 1s whenever we apply a condition. I think we could all agree this burning would be arguably more useless than Reanimator. This is just to show that Burning itself on a Necro is not OP, it all comes down to the how and how much.
We are getting burning via a trait, it was said by a dev in a twitch chat, we do not know where it will be coming in for sure. The idea of getting it on top of Terror is not saying Terror will have burning now too, but that a Terror Necro could have the two highest damage conditions in the game at the same time.
I think this is a case of just a terrible matchup. Dagger Necros have a lot of problems against Mesmers in general, but especially Shatter ones.
5pm PST, which is server reset (1am GMT I think) is when the runs are happening.
Trait change, not DS 5 skill.
It really isn’t difficult to hold aggro as a Necromancer, is more what I was getting at (and surviving). As long as you understand how to kite the mobs in question (and it does depend on your build), you should be more than able to hold aggro of an entire room and never die; and I have done this in rare MF gear (power/cond/MF). Its not about the rest of the group protecting you, its about you running circles, understanding how to keep CC on the mobs, and how to dodge around. I’m sure I’m terrible at it now, but when I actually PvE’d I almost always held aggro on a glass build, rarely with issue.
I’m not saying we are better than others, I have said multiple times on the podcast that current PvE mechanics just don’t require Necros, and greatly reward other classes. But I was simply addressing the idea of “gear carrying you”, when it isn’t hard at all to PvE as a necromancer, even solo, in crap gear.
Also, I’ve been told these changes are quite possibly coming out on the 11th, so it is possible (though not guaranteed) that we will see them soon.
Watch SOAC tomorrow, just saying.