If you guys are speed running dungeons (which generally skips trash mobs and is done in situations where AoE damage isn’t important) power is the way to go. Our AoE is very powerful in condi builds, but few people speed run dungeons with AoE situations, and even then I’d suggest running something like Nemesis’ hybrid build so you can adapt for single target.
I’ve done this testing, I’ll get back to you in a second with the numbers I’ve found.
Just so you know how I got the data, and can understand any possible flaws in it, I put my methods below (its late, and after like 5 edits my brain is failing me).
I got the DPS by taking their attack speed and using it with their tooltip damage to get DPS. Tooltip damage is not perfect, it does not include critical hits (which means listed DPS is lower than it will be, by differing amounts according to which minions, as they have different crit chance), however it appears to average Flesh Golem’s attack chain and Bone Fiend’s cripple attack. Attack Speed was done by counting attacks over a time period; 100 seconds when possible, cut short by Shadow Fiend and Flesh Golem who would both kill a Heavy Golem long before 100 seconds.
I’ll look into testing crit chance and crit damage tomorrow to get more accurate estimates.
Bone Minion – attacks every 3.57 seconds – listed damage is 159 – so according to listed damage DPS is 44.5 each.
Bone Fiend – attacks every 3.055 seconds (2 hits per “attack”) – listed damage is 572 – so according to listed damage DPS is 187.
Shadow Fiend – attacks every 1.64 seconds – listed damage is 350 – so according to listed damage DPS is 213.
Flesh Wurm – attacks every 4 seconds – listed damage is 833 – so according to listed damage DPS is 208.
Flesh Golem – attacks every 1.2 seconds – listed damage is 770 – so according to listed damage DPS is 642.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
This has been a problem for a while. Its not just an issue of the projectile spawning outside your body, but also where the projectiles are aimed, and the hitbox of similar objects. Basically, for whatever reason (and this occurs in multiple classes with different weapons), your attacks are aimed in such a way that they overshoot the target. You’ll notice the burrows in AC as an example, and some other structures that are low to the ground.
Its annoying, most people have just learned to work around it, and while it is great to bring it up to the devs just to remind them, frankly I don’t see this being a high priority fix right now.
PvE hasn’t changed much. We’re still not needed for any content, you can pretty much run whatever you did before.
Yes, which part of the game? PvP, WvW, or PvE; its pretty important.
What part of the game are you wondering about?
It wasn’t directed at you Blaine, you just posted faster than me :P
How about we stay civil and on topic? This thread was specifically made to keep a positive tone, and similarly to how I was told to not talk balance in a joke thread (thanks to the person that did that), there is no reason to be not just negative, but outright belligerent in a positive thread.
If you actually think that what we are seeing is bad customer service, I really start to wonder if you even thought about what you were saying. These devs take time out of their day to come on live streams as guests, they take time out to watch tournaments and podcasts, and talk with people during them. They are taking an intelligent approach to fixing the game, one that is shown to be effective by far more popular games, and an approach that in the end makes the game much more enjoyable to their customers: us.
If you want examples of bad customer service, or completely ignoring consumer base, then you don’t need to look far to find far more impressive examples of not caring at all for their customers.
whats OP?
Quite a few of your suggestions. Lets just pick one out to show off: “- Flesh of the master and Minion Master is now just “Minion Master”, which increases Minion HP by 100% and reduces the cooldown by 20% for minions. (To lighten the amount of mandatory MM traits)”
Now for 10 trait points, I can make my minions have more HP than I do. With this trait, and your proposed changes, Blood Fiend would be sitting around 30k HP, if I remember his HP correctly. Most other minions would be sitting close to or above 20k, and this is with only 10 point investment. Oh, and they have 20% CDR as well, so when they do finally die they still come up 20% faster with, again, almost no stat investment.
These changes aren’t happening. Most of them are completely OP.
There is one major benefit of boons over conditions tho, transference. Unless i pack epidemic, taking down one target and moving to the next means that with conditions i start from scratch. With boons however they follow me rather than my target.
That just reduced my available utility options from 3 to 2, as i basically have to have epidemic padlocked there so i can transfer those conditions. And that only applies if the next target is withing AOE range.
Actually Necro conditions are pretty AoE heavy, especially non-damaging ones. Bleeds are often single target, but weakness, poison, chill are all pretty easily put on a team. So you shouldn’t need to spread weakness with Epidemic at all, they’ll probably already have it. Also, with the exception of fighting a Necromancer, conditions don’t usually come back to bite you, boons can. A thief can steal them, a Necro can corrupt them, and a warrior can get more damage out of them. In fact a Guardian can kill themselves very easily by using shouts at the wrong time against CB carrying Necros.
But again, they want to boost our ability to live without needing boons. Obviously that means buffs, which means using the current system is fallacious, they are going to change the system.
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Congratulations for finally finding the best profession, we’ll hook you up with the Necro kool-aid so you can truly be one of us.
It will be towards the end of June, most likely. They tend to do large patches on a monthly cycle, going back and forth between balance and fixing bugs/tooltips/etc.
There is a difference between bunkers, builds that can avoid some damage, and tanks.
Not just that, but every single minion ability has to be looked at from start to finish. You summon the minion, taking 1.5 seconds, then wait for them to get in range/get LoS etc., then activate the ability itself (depending on minion, possibly another cast time) then you have to wait for the ability itself to take effect.
Other CC we have also can take quite a long time to actually activate, and that is an issue; it means we can never react, we have to always be 100% proactive, and that is an impossible request.
Overall, I think this SotG and Chap appearing on BoC at least assured me that they have a definite path for us in the upcomig patches, and a solid vision for us, along with a realistic way to achieve it. The real question now, in my mind, is waiting to see how they realize this vision.
They didn’t specifically talk about Blood Magic a lot, they did say they are looking into making siphoning better though. But they did address it indirectly by saying they want us to have more sustain.
I personally really like the way they are looking at the class. They are really fighting to not homogenize us and basically give us exactly what other classes have to make us fit into the meta. Instead they want to keep Necromancers different, but then buff or otherwise tweak those uniquenesses to make us more viable in our own right. I love that. I don’t play a Necro to play a dark Guardian, I play a Necro to be the king of debuffs; so I want to have meaningful debuffs, and not just stack boons on myself because that is what the cool kids are doing right now.
1) I think it should be a PvP and maybe WvW change only. PvE we don’t need sustain
2) Numbers can be changed. Yes we need to look at the idea of Epidemic, but frankly it is so insanely rare to get a good Epidemic to hit high amounts of bleeding that sticks.
Sigh… I can’t hear it either. I’ll check my files to see if it was an issue with exporting. Really sorry about this everyone.
Edit: So I found the problem. Mumble recorded everyone’s voice to a different file. So currently you are listening to me talk to myself. We’ve got someone smarter than me helping us fix it, and we’ll get a more interesting version up shortly.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Thank you Chaplan! For those who don’t know, Chaplan was watching the Twitch stream of the BoC podcast last night for most of it, and also answering questions and talking with the viewers. He has also said he would like to be on the podcast in the future.
That is what I love about the Devs in this game. They are completely involved with the community, and take time out of their day to talk with us and communicate what they are doing in the future.
Just so everyone knows, Nay had an emergency come up last second and so he was not able to be on on time. However, he is scheduled to be on next week, so everyone that was looking forward to a PvE podcast on support and minions; nothing to worry about, we’ll have your fix next week!
Yes, my live streaming software was setup wrong on my end, so my mic would go off a lot. Fret not, however! I recorded it via mumble, which did actually catch everything, and we’ll get that out.
You can certainly argue that they have better fields to combo off of, or that they have better utilities to use to combo off of, I certainly won’t argue that; because its true. I completely agree that we have less desirable combo fields, I’d love to see an ice field added (it fits lore/our purpose).
But that wasn’t the point of my post, nor has it been a large point in this thread that I have seen. The point was people are saying we don’t have finishers, and that is false.
That would be awesome if it were true, I haven’t personally seen it but I can’t say I paid attention either.
The problem with our finishers is that they are based around minion skills, which are a love/hate relationship with the community.
If you take that into account, however, we can have 6 finishers on three skills, with them creating their own combo fields, to also combo off of. Death Nova + Bone Minions + Bone Fiend + Flesh Wurm = 6 finishers (blast/projectile) and 4 combo fields (though all Poison) on fairly short CDs. This leaves room for WoB to spam on for retaliation, or drop 1 and you can pick up a well for Dark field, which will have your minions stealing HP for themselves and causing blindness.
Compare to Elementalist, who people love to, and you’ll see what I mean. Staff ele, which has 6 fields, only gets 3 finishers, all of which are located on different attunements (earth finishes, water/air/fire sets fields). D/D only gets 2 combo fields, both fire, and 2 finishers each, both earth. Scepter has no combo field but 4 finishers, Focus has 1 field and 2 finishers. That isn’t many fields/finishers in one set, following the rules I stated.
Engineers are more similar to us in that their combo fields/finishers are mostly utility related. Each weapon set gives a few (comparable to staff) finishers, and then they get fields through using weapon/device kits, which have limited ability to combo off themselves, and require you to swap to another kit to combo off your previous one. They have decent ability to combo off themselves, but again it requires switching.
This is no more than my ability to drop WoB and have minions finish on top of it. The sole different between our ability to combo off ourselves and other classes is that ours are less reliable because they are based on semi-independent entities, which require microing, and because many people don’t like those entities. The core amount of finishers/fields are there, most people just aren’t using them.
It has been stated by ANet a few times that they wanted to look at reducing AoE in the hopes to make single target damage actually meaningful (which use single target damage when you can get comparable damage, but done on 5 people at once), but I’m not sure what they feel right now.
We’re live with Black Avarice, come check us out!
We aren’t going to get combo finishers. Why? Because you aren’t supposed to be able to combo off of yourself too much, they put this system into the game to provide team support; not necessarily solo support. Generally speaking, you either have lots of fields, lots of finishers, or somewhere in between, and a lot of them are based on weapon skills.
Here is the problem, we are completely off the norm. We get our fields almost exclusively off utility skills, which means adding anything to weapon skills gives us a lot to combo off of. So where are our finishers? Minions. In fact we have one of the highest field/finisher builds possible in Death Nova + minions.
Also, actually take a look at how the fields/finishers are spread out before you post here. There has been a bunch of stuff said that is flat out false.
Because it works.
How it works is when you press the skill, your bone fiend is immobilized. He then gets a “buff” of sorts, where his attacks from then on cause 2 seconds of immobilize (and also deal a bit more damage), for the duration of the “buff”.
So if you immobilize him in a position where he doesn’t have LoS or if he drops aggro, you’re SoL. Same with if the attack misses, if the duration ends without taking effect, etc. It is a very powerful ability, since it can last for at least 2 auto attacks (it looks like it lasts at least 6 seconds, so maybe even 3), meaning 8 seconds of immobilize, but its difficult to hit.
Edit: it looks like it lasts 5 seconds, so with decent timing you can get 2 hits out of it, not 3, but its also possible to only get 1, since it doesn’t reset auto attacks.
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This is how they currently behave, I don’t know if its intended or not.
1) One of the most solid HP/s heals in the game, they just need to make it easier to use his active before he dies. The only reason to not use this guy is PvP where people are smart enough to spike him down and you won’t get off the active.
2) what would they be blowing up? Combo fields, of which we have multiple available. If you want to run full minions, then feel free, but if you are running full minions you can’t complain that you aren’t getting full use out of the finishers you would easily have by hybridization (or you know, playing with a team in a team game).
3) Lol? Its a 4 second immobilize every successful hit, if you chain this with dagger 3 you are forcing them to blow a cleanse or eat some serious damage (ever worry about someone staying in a well? not with rigor mortis).
4) Severely reduce the amount of time it takes for the skill to activate, and make Shadow Fiend less useless and this is a solid skill.
5) the only real change this needs is to change the blast/poison to where you are, not where he is.
Its only difficult to get bone minions to pop finishers if you are ranged, and even then its not so much getting them in the right position but getting the enemy to stand on top the the field anyway.
1) Get into melee range of enemy, drop well/wall
2) Blow up minion
3) ???
4) Profit
And seriously though, there are very few builds that get a meaningful amount of combo fields and finishers in one setup, with Elementalists being the most noteworthy.
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I’m not planning for these to be big events, just for people who’d like to get through dungeons, do their dailies in a more fun way, etc. We’ll have bigger events sometimes, but basically it will just be log in at 5pm PST, do a dungeon run or two, everyone says byebye.
Yes there are builds around Near to Death. Basically what you do is flash DS whenever you can afford to for boons and other things you get from flashing it. But these builds are very hard to play, because every 5 seconds you need to make the decision of whether you can actually use DS right now (or if you need to save it for a few seconds), and if you can whether you can get right back out and attack or if you need to stay in to tank damage.
That said, the permanent fury uptime, high retaliation uptime, and few other benefits you can give yourself are really strong if you can manage running the build. Its a very easy way to have a highly offensive build without losing all your defense.
Yes, that is why most high level PvP Necros you will see run with Carrion. If you are using DS well, it completely changes the formula for Necros. It does depend on build as well, the more LF you get, the better Vitality scales.
Because we aren’t bringing classes down to our level, we’re bringing builds down. Elementalist is not balanced as a class, neither is Guardian, they just each have one or two builds that are really desired at high levels. Same with most classes, they have one or two top builds, and then the rest are either being overshadowed or are underpowered. So they are bringing everything to a middle ground, we just happen to be right around that middle ground, since realistically with the right team comps we have a lot of build options.
So, uhhh, is this gonna happen?
Sorry about that, got stuck with some stuff. We can officially do our first run Monday, so anyone who is interested be on Monday 5pm PST (server reset).
Agreed with Andele, we mostly need healing power coefficients to our healing, their base amounts aren’t bad at all, even compared to support builds; the problem is that without scaling real support builds in other classes beat us out.
@Bhawb
I do find Anet to progress slowly in that direction tho. I played a lot of other MMO and MOBA, and never did I experience such a slows big fixes and balance patch.
I know they don’t want to Whack a mole balance, but I’M not sure they are doing any better.
Elem DD : They became OP because of the meta and the daphenix build being popular. How long did they tried to balance it? Each 1-2 month they would slightly nerf them, not affecting them much. It took what? 5 month to balance Elem DD? And some people might arg they are still unbalanced.
Same with warrior, they are trying to bring them back in the meta, they do little change (banner buff?) and wait 2 month to see if the meta change.
I’m personally not a fan of that kind of strategy. When you have a bug or a useless utility, you know you are in for a long time before it get resolved.
LoL takes this exact same methodology, actually, and it works very well for them. The “whack a mole” approach that defines fast cycles of FotM builds→crappy meta→nerfwars→search for new FotM→repeat plagued GW1 and was one of the biggest flaws to PvP in that game. It is also responsible for the flak against WoW and a huge problem with the game (that wasn’t made larger only due to them having no real competition). Fast cycles of huge nerfs and wide swings in power are terrible for players, and developers. It doesn’t create a really enjoyable playing experience.
Yes, its going to take a while for ANet to get at least close to the “perfect” balance ideal they want, where there are many builds available to every class that are all competitive, but they are slowly getting there; balance is much better now than it has been (minus that little oopsie with Engi glue bomb).
It was Symbolic, who asked about staff mark size. Specifically he mentioned that staff was useless without 10 points in DM, and asked if they looked at increasing the base mark size, and they talked about something else completely different. In that case they just totally missed the question and no one pushed it.
I’ve said multiple times I would do unspeakable things for fluffy bunny minion skins.
I understand the feeling, but I don’t believe its a concerted effort from “the man” to keep us down. I much rather that they systematically nerf OP things, or things that aren’t working properly and get rid of all of them first because after that they can see where our class actually is, in its entirety, and then work on buffing us.
I know this isn’t shared by many, but I would much prefer to have a while where my class isn’t as competitive so that in the long run we get to the best balance state; and I would prefer this happens now when being competitive means absolutely nothing, frankly, and not in the future when there might actually be something meaningful on the line.
I like the idea to split some abilities that are obviously more towards one side of the game than another into two, especially minors.
Parasitic Bond having an on-down mechanic instead of on death in PvP would be awesome. We could get more reliable healing that way, and actually when we need it (during the fight).
Siphoned Might – why not have it start at say, 75%, and then have tiers: 0-25%, 25-50%, 50-75%, with each tier giving better might (either longer or more stacks). Have it fairly light at the higher tiers, and more the lower it goes (numbers are totally changeable, more the concept).
I loved some of the Reanimator ideas. Specifically ones that didn’t summon minions on its own but worked off other skills. Some of those seem really strong, I think this would be a good way to move this skill up to Minor Master tier, get rid of Protection, and then give us a more all-build friendly selection for our Minor Adept.
Also, some of your proposed changes aren’t needed, or are a bit too strong. For example, +50% HP is already an awesome trait for anyone grabbing a few minions. Shrouded Removal is on par with similar traits (10s condi cleanse, which can go to 5s).
And I like the idea of Blood Bond, or more specifically I think MMs should have the option to have a better build that keeps minions alive, for passive damage, at the cost of other things.
What part of the game are you talking about? In PvE I imagine you can get a decent amount of precision while still keeping up your other stats. In PvP though, Carrion is the best for us because of vitality scaling.
That is actually part of the reason I think they should add Minion HP bars somewhere on your screen (or the option). It would make minions much more viable in PvP as focusing minions would only cause you to force a good MM to use the active; it wouldn’t actually cancel it out.
I need the HP bars so I can more efficiently kill them :P
Consume Conditions is the best option by far until you start getting into a decent amount of condition removal on your own, and higher healing power. WoB is only worth it if you can deal with condi pressure and have the healing power to heal a solid amount per tick.
Blood Fiend is great, until he dies and you are left with no heal.