Not a bug, transforms killing minions is 100% intended and last I heard they had no plans to fix it.
Only reason Necros would be considered strong right now is D/D ele is the dominant build bar none, and Signet Necro is a very strong matchup against it. Otherwise we really aren’t special, though in a better place than before.
If SA were to get any improvement, I wouldn’t have it be retal. Buff what it is good at, not add completely irrelevant functionality.
Oh, because either Banshee’s Wail or Life from Death are way better. Vampiric Presence is 37 damage per hit, meaning with a minion build, you’re looking at a DPS increase of 165 assuming ideal minion uptime and you personally proc it twice a second, which is realistically never going to be sustained.
In a Spite build, this is a really small addition, since you’ll be blowing up your bone minions which drops it to a max sustained DPS gain of around 145, which is really mediocre. A Soul Reaping build gets more DPS out of it (back to the 165ish range), but again you have bigger priorities. Consider that in a minion build, VP is half the siphoning of Vampiric for minions, and equals your own proccing, so in a best-case situation VP is essentially a second adept trait.
However, the most important thing is the alternatives. Life from Death is a 2.5k AoE heal on DS entry, which is really important since you will already be weaving DS for Beyond the Veil/Transfusion and other CDs (depending on RS vs DS). This is a massive improvement over VP, where the healing on the minions is quite low for each minion (from 12-31 per second), and the DPS gain is also quite small. Essentially you are trading 120-310 heal/damage for a 2.5k heal, on everything affected over the same time period. This is exactly what you want, since your biggest threat as an MM isn’t needing to kill people faster, but keep the minions alive longer. If minions don’t die, especially to AoE (hello LfD), you aren’t realistically going to lose a 1v1 matchup that you’d win had you taken VP.
Basically, if you want to just have a better version of VP, pick up Life from Death, which is a straight upgrade for MM builds as it stands now because healing is more important than a small bit of additional DPS. BW is an alternative choice if you need it.
Necromancer forums do well due to such a large presence of players who are helpful in steering discussions, plus the fact that we have been not-meta for so long that the only people left are the ones that really care. Glad to see we’ve turned you to the dark side, we used to have cookies but now they’ve got bugs in them and we decided that was a feature.
And any balanced ICD on VP would far more than double the siphon, making it a net buff even on Bone Fiend.
No, most people who use it use it as a pre-planned escape or way to go back, like defending home point in PvP. It does need a shorter cast but it will never be as good as “free” mobility blinks.
MM wouldn’t be strong enough in PvE no matter if they lived or died. They could use AoE reduction, simply because in PvP they should be equally possible for single target or AoE builds to kill the minions, and AoE will always be vastly better without AoE reduction, and literally every other game has figured out that AoE reduction is necessary for pet characters.
Why is this? Are Minions not affected by this trait?
Minion builds are some of the slowest hitting builds, since all minions attack less than once per second, so an ICD wouldn’t affect them much. They also don’t have wells, or anything else like that except Locust Swarm that’ll cause an ICD to be an issue.
Dagger 2 would be really nice with a channel time drop, while it is a DPS loss the issue isn’t so much the fact that it deals low damage overall, but that it takes an absolutely ridiculous amount of time to channel. It’d probably still be a damage loss, which is fine because it can heal for as much as a healing skill with investment, but at least it wouldn’t be such a large drop.
Though I do think Vladimir/Aatrox have good mechanics that could be brought over, on the idea of sacrificing health to build up a stacking mechanic to make yourself stronger.
Except then people would wonder why we’re suddenly being followed by a Risen despite that being a massive break of lore, as well as visually weird when you go in and out of water a bunch having a Golem/Shark spawn/despawn constantly.
We don’t know, though I’ve heard it is soon™.
Nah, Spite isn’t remotely needed for Reaper. It is very nice, mainly for the self-proccing of BB, but hardly necessary if you aren’t building a 1v1 build.
While I still think Vampiric (not aura) should be flattened out with an ICD + significant buff, Vampiric Aura is meant to be mostly a PvE trait, where multi-hits are the name of the game. You would have to increase its siphon per-hit to be probably 5x its current value to have an ICD work out well, even then I imagine there are a lot of situations in PvE where players can hit more than 5x per second.
The only thing this would benefit is minion builds, which don’t need to be using the trait anyway.
All minions should be 3/4s cast anyway, but Wurm isn’t meant to be used as an unplanned escape, you are supposed to use it as a pre-planned one before entering combat.
I think you may be right, however there’s still a bunch of underwater environments in the game so really I’d be happy if they just put back the golem’s ability to operate underwater, animations or no.
Then people would not only complain about lack of animations, but also about the lack of polish allowing things to remain without animations. Its lose-lose.
Gee has already said Axe/Scepter are getting changes, let’s wait a bit to see them.
No, Flesh Golem, and all minions, are literally golems made of flesh. But we all know flesh tends to get wrinkly and pruny, and Flesh Golem really prefers to look as spruced up as possible when fighting so it has to stay out of the water, otherwise it’d ruin its skin.
You already had a 1s ICD per target, so you’d have to hit someone with dagger, then within a second hit someone else with something else for the change to be noticeable. Not that it doesn’t need a buff, but you’ll almost never notice the difference.
Chilling Force change will almost never make a difference, as it went from a 1s ICD per target, to 1s ICD, but mult-hit attacks can proc it. So basically, the only time this would make a difference is when you were against more than 5 targets and had enough effects out that you could hit more than 5 per second, or similar situations with people moving in and out of range of hits.
Overall good changes, bit more held back than I was expecting, mostly on some of the damage fronts, and I don’t see Soul Eater competing still, but we’ve got another round to test.
Oh dur, it was 60% before the recent changes, Blood is right it’s changed now, though the doubling is still relevant.
Strictly speaking your Life Force is = 60% of your HP. That said, Death Shroud has an innate 50% direct damage reduction (though there are reports and evidence of this being bugged and being somewhat random), meaning you can think of it as having 120% HP scaling in some ways as well, though obviously degeneration and conditions still only treat it as 60%.
Probably decided they weren’t satisfied with UW combat overall, and so didn’t want to use resources to fix something for a mechanic they aren’t really supporting anymore.
Only in PvE if you are against something that hits less than once a second, as it only heals for 309 per second, whereas Signet of Vampirism heals you for 325(0.1 scaling) per second. So basically only against bosses, and even that might change.
I actually think Signet of Vampirism is fine, and Consume Conditions and Well of Blood both would be pretty nice if they were un nerfed. Blood Fiend is the only heal that is just flat out worthless, at least the rest (assuming very small adjustments were made) have uses in some build types.
Focus 4:
Now a Projectile Finisher
Regeneration replaced with Might/Fury or some other better boon than regen
Focus 5:
Cast time to 1s
That’s pretty much all it needs to be much better.
I wouldn’t consider OH dagger good, so much as useable. No one is going to waste their dodge on d4, if they do enjoy the free win, so really all it is is a slightly slower transfer than Putrid Mark, but even then we’re talking like half a second to a second longer. And dagger 5 has weakness, which staff has none of unless you save two of your abilities specifically for a pretty weak combo.
It doesn’t hit 100% harder, its around 10%, slightly more once you hit ascended but DS DPS isn’t high enough to warrant having a worthless weapon.
I remember when the staff and axe looked so cool as concepts in their pre-beta videos before release.
True, back then everything seemed amazing.
Staff just suffers from many of the necromancer weapons in that they’re hybrid weapons that excel at nothing. Ranger has the same issue outside longbow and their melee options (shortbow is hybrid garbage, mainhand axe is hybrid garbage that does not cleave as a condition weapon well and is too weak as a power cleaving weapon due to the horrendous autoattack).
Lack of a really solid identity is definitely an issue, whereas the newer weapon designs have a much more cohesive approach. Though I don’t think hybrid is always a problem, staff has no identity at all, the auto attack doesn’t fit the rest of the weapon, and really the only things the rest of them have in common is that they’re marks. They just don’t go together at all.
I don’t think the staff is bad. It has a clear niche. Of course, it is currently used in basically all builds because of lack of other viable weapons. But I think it is a good weapon even compared to other non-necro weapons.
The thing is staff has no clear niche outside of its range. AoE isn’t unique to staff, nor do marks have unique utility. The only thing staff has is a convenient package of decent abilities at 1200 range w/ life force.
I think it’s simply because the range pressure in core necro is given by the death shroud. Staff is more the defensive weapon. I think it is very similar to the mesmer staff. Despite having already a good ranged weapon (GS), mesmers, including power mesmers do like the staff for its utilities (defensive with chaos armor and the boons from many skills, mobility with phase retreat).
Except our staff doesn’t provide any of that. It is no more defensive than offhand dagger, it just doesn’t provide something meaningful we couldn’t pick up with double off-hands.
It’s better than any combinations of axe,scepter,focus,OH dagger and running only dagger/MH,condi necro or what is left of it shouldn’t think of anything else so in short we settle down for it. I had short success with staffless condi necro prepatch however.
I’ve run only dagger/warhorn axe/dagger on power builds since staff was nerfed and haven’t had any issues. The only thing worth mentioning that I lost was range and poison, and poison isn’t hard to supplement on necro.
Staff needs a rework, plain and simple. Once axe and scepter are up to standard staff will be a memory to most builds, and not even a fond one considering how abysmally designed it is.
Its a placebo. People dont really need it but they believe they do… because reasons.
Thank you for saying this, #StaffSucks
Seriously though, staff does only two things of note: 1200 range, and ranged LF generation. Beyond this, the weapon is incredibly mediocre and if it wasn’t for the fact that our weapon situation is so dismal staff would be mocked for being garbage. As it is now, staff is an easy weapon to just throw onto a build and be fairly confident that it’ll not be totally worthless, but at the end of the day unless you need range you don’t need staff.
The big reason staff has remained on so many builds is because it is the only non-scepter condi weapon and supplements scepter’s awful LF generation, and the rest of our non-MM builds are really squishy and so need to be able to influence the fight without being at dagger range. On any build designed to fight on-point staff is really mediocre, nearly everything of importance that it has can be covered by having dagger and warhorn offhands.
Oh, and let’s not mention that staff is a poorly designed boring pile of crap to use.
He also might mean the fact that YSIM has garbage healing power scaling, which is a fairly big knock against it for cleric builds.
I’m all for balance, but I’m not sure your logic. In that it would become too reliable? If it was split, chances are the damage would be split with it, resulting in the same damage, assuming both hit. If anything, I’d suspect because there’d be a gap between the first and second hit, there’d be less one-shotting, though it would have better protection against aegis/blind being a two-part hit.
It would be significantly more reliable as two hits. Note that two hits would make it much better with all kinds of procs, depending on how they programmed crit it would be much more consistent with crits, it would obviously be better against aegis/blind, it would be able to proc things like CoD without sigils, get the extra damage from CtD on the second hit, there are a whole bunch of things it would do better. For every situation that the first hit and the second doesn’t (and so it does 50% less than before) there will be at least equal situations where the first would have missed and second hits, dealing half damage instead of nothing. I don’t think increasing reliability on a skill that is “overtuned” because it is inherently unreliable is the right way to go.
If it got split it’d be too strong as is, would definitely result in a nerf. It can already literally one-shot players if you pair it with double-crit sigils and CoD, glass vs glass.
Cmon, I thought I taught everyone better than this, never use blood fiend. Anyway, beyond heals (Consume Conditions is really the primary heal, with SoV as another choice), you have a lot of options for Reaper MM. You can go the US type minion build, with Rise/Bone Fiend/Flesh Wurm, or the DN build with a variety of minion setups, and also basically every weapon except scepter/focus works really well. Plenty of variation for reaper MM, pretty much whatever you want.
Who was our former dev for this class? Was it Karl?
I don’t think “profession devs” really existed before now. I believe the entire team worked on things because whenever we heard changes, we heard them from multiple sources (Sharp, Peters, Karl, etc.) instead of just one source. As a side note, Peters is gone so that’s another benefit to us in the balance department.
Don’t see anything about Reaper they would nerf for being OP, except maybe Gravedigger’s damage if they really wanted to pick something (I don’t think its worth nerfing to be clear, but at 3.0 coefficient I could see some strange justification). Honestly though, the worst changes I can imagine is not enough changes to things that need them. Robert Gee has not only made good changes, he’s made really smart ones that I think are really fun to play with (ex: Death Magic actually has some really cool unappreciated synergy w/ toughness stacking into power conversion).
HOWEVER, Robert Gee hasn’t done us wrong yet, and I think allowing our abusive relationship with our ex-dev ruin our happiness in our new pairing with Gee would be a bad thing.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
It is a great heal if it had healing power scaling and a slightly higher base for its intended goal. Main problem right now is it is super weak outside of teamfighting, it really only works as a LF tool, not as a heal, so you need to be playing a build that doesn’t really need a heal, which is incredibly restrictive.
Its okay, its concept is fine, just needs some number boosts.
I won’t not be going Reaper. At this point MM is the only build I’d probably want to play on base Necromancer, unless Gee makes some amazing base Necro changes, especially to Death Shroud.
It really needs to offer stronger CDR, that is the biggest problem I have with it currently, though it also has the issue of competing with two amazing traits and not being remotely comparable.
For the MM builds you described, greatsword, Reaper, and shouts do not seem, to me, to add appreciable value, except that Rise could potentially spawn up to 5 putrid explosions.
Do you think the Reaper trait line will join Death Magic as must-have MM trait lines?
Greatsword can work as a dagger substitute, though I don’t think it particularly adds much, and yeah shouts don’t add much. The big things for Reaper over other setups is the new Shroud, which in my opinion is a massive improvement for MM builds over base DS and the trait lines which are a nice mixture between Spite and Soul Reaping. Primarily though its RS imo being vastly better than DS for MM builds, the trait line is just mostly an equal trade off, just offering a different playstyle that isn’t better or worse than current MM. Overall, MM is pretty power-neutral with Reaper, neither better or worse than before, it just adds effectively a variant on both the current builds (as it can run similar builds to both SR and Spite).
Anet, please. Rise produces Shambling Horrors, but they6 do not look much like their namesake. Allow us to summon zombies already. You already have the models!
They do need new models but we don’t summon zombies.
My impression is that only Rise will be useful to a MM. Reaper is melee AoE. Minions mostly just target your (single) target. So, until they die, they do not do AoE and will keep switching to the mob of the second. They need leadership and focus. It is difficult for me to explain so I apologize if it sounds wierd or incomplete.
I actually think Rise! will see more use on non MMs than MMs. MM doesn’t really need the added tankiness, though it can use it, whereas a lot of our other builds could totally want it.
As for LF, not particularly hard to gain enough to jump in and out of RS if you’re using abilities right, especially Locust Swarm. Non-US MMs don’t need to stay in RS for long, at most you want enough time to use 2/4/5 in some order, and that doesn’t require a ton of LF to accomplish in a small fight since you’ll have Chilling Force giving LF. RS should be treated more like a weapon swap, at least for MM, than as a long-lasting measure.
Also, if Cleric isn’t healing you for enough, you aren’t doing it right. Each use of dagger is a massive heal, Consume Conditions is easily an 8k heal even if you aren’t cleansing many conditions, plus the incidental healing from minions, regeneration, Blighter’s Boon procs while in Death Shroud, sigils, etc. Cleric is more than enough self healing, though once again the most important part of Clerics has nothing to do with self healing and everything to do with keeping minions alive; a dead Flesh Golem is around 50% damage loss off all your minion DPS.
Reaper MM has a lot of potential variation, but I definitely would not use the shout heal, the heal doesn’t scale with healing power even remotely well, and MM doesn’t want to face enough people to make the heal very strong. However what Drarnor said is correct, Blood Magic is used on MM because the AoE healing is absolutely mandatory, otherwise the minions die quickly and you would be better off not being an MM at all.
The problem with Soul Eater is Greatsword isn’t amazing on MM already, and the CDR sucks; the life stealing isn’t too bad since it doubles up for a fair bit of healing per hit. However, my best MM duels by far were with a standard build but with Reaper over another line . Rise! could be used in an Unholy Sanctuary build that used Rise!/Bone Fiend/Flesh Wurm though, basically Reaper can substitute into either the Spite or Soul Reaping versions, with slightly different choices depending on which style you’re after.
Getting another 5 skills would be a pretty massive power creep that we don’t need.
He’s bringing up how ridiculous it is to nitpick a magic game not being “realistic” or “logical” when the game fairly obviously doesn’t do that at any point.
They should both work, yes.
It would be nice if the augury of death reflected more what the shouts are about. Demoralizing and intimidating the enemy.
Augury does reflect what shouts are about: scaling heavily into situations where you have multiple enemies. Augury takes what shouts are already good at and pushes them even further towards being monstrous in teamfights, which is absolutely fine as it allows Necromancers to specialize into a shout-heavy teamfight build.
I wouldn’t change much of anything on Augury, at most maybe add a little bit of healing to it per enemy struck, and maybe even out the CDR to be 10% base + 5% per person hit, but I’m not even convinced that is necessary.
They can’t just lazily move to the side, it has a 90° cone in front of you and you can turn to stay on them. The skill does need to respond a bit faster to casting, and could use 300 range, but otherwise it does its job just fine.
If you want to see red posts bump 2 year old topics.
Or the ones from like 2 weeks ago when we had more current red posts than every other live profession combined?