There is no reason to change Necromancer at the core. There are a lot of people that are happy with the class overall; however I totally agree we all want to see the class in its “perfect” balance.
But the reality is its going to take a while to reach that high change. They have been making improvements towards there, but it takes time. However, they are doing it correctly. They are scaling things back and forward progressively, with time in between to analyze how it has affected the game.
Don’t get rid of hotjoins, turn hotjoins into mindless fun. Things that are purely for kittens-n-giggles, and then give people non-ranked/ranked queues for tournaments. That way new players can learn on tournaments, and we can throw in stuff like TDM or King of the Hill for funsies for when people get bored of the “serious” game mode.
I think the sPvP grind to 80 is a very noticeable grind compared to everything else in GW2 though. I’m not sure how much time people have put into PvP, but I think its safe to say that getting Rank 80 is harder than getting multiple legendaries, which already requires some hardcore no life-ing for a few months.
Its easy to obtain LF when you have soul marks, which (gasp) is in the build. And you can use DS 2/3 in 10 seconds when your DS comes back up, not exactly a long time.
LF pool is good for every necro that goes into SR. If you aren’t a condi necro, you have good LF generation. If you are a condi necro and you have gone into SR, then you should have soul marks, which again makes LF pool a good thing. Saying LF pool is bad is like saying having extra vitality is bad.
You don’t need the little extra toughness because of how vitality and DS interact, and SR 15 gives you spectral armor at 50% which will save you as much as Reaper’s protection will, except better.
Condi necro go 0/30/10/0/30 pretty easily, and that can give 3 amazing traits (soul marks, terror, and foot in grave are great).
Point being with warriors, it doesn’t matter how good or bad your trait tree is if you are an absolutely useless class. Necromancers have some terrible adept traits, but we also have some amazing traits.
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Do i need to do this for my thief and warrior?
Yes. Please try to make the case that Warriors are good for PvP because they have good traits, I would love to see that.
So… technically speaking you should be able to siphon from up to 25 people, or for over 20k HP. Wow.
I wouldn’t put it on GM, the only siphon we have as a GM trait is wells, the rest are 10-20.
Uh… no it isn’t hard to decide where to put them in other classes. If you run an ele, you go 0/0/0/20/30 in every single build, period, end of story. Mesmer trait line is predetermined by your build. Warriors have the same thing, Guardians have a bit of variety, but not a ton. Most other classes, the second you choose a build, you already know where 50-60 of your trait points are going, with maybe 10-20 left over with actual decisions to make.
GOD HELL YEAH!
Come my minions, rise for your master, let your darkness shine!
Then when you die, come on, respawn even faster!
But just to mention, technically we/BoC necros already did AC and CM in order…
We might start on TA then. I think its fairly underplayed anyway.
0/30/10/0/30 necro using staff/scepter+dagger, epidemic, corrupt boon, spectral walk, and plague.
Basically all you really need to farm Glory is
1) AoE, and lots of it
2) Enough mobility to keep up with the zerg/zerg from point to point
3) Enough survivability to not be out of the fight often.
Necros (and others, certainly) can fill this pretty easily. It isn’t hard at all to get 200+ glory per game like that.
In PvE, its totally worth it to blow a condition transfer to throw BiP self bleeds back, since very few areas actually require the condi transfer we have. Personally I don’t know of many people that use BiP in WvW, but realistically you should be fine here too just blowing a transfer (I don’t notice myself dying to condi that often).
If you are in PvP you’re using BiP for the might, not the bleed damage, so you can just cast it with out a target. Gives you the 10 might without the bleeding.
Hello everyone. As many of you know, Bas has been incredibly busy with SOAC events, and I have been finishing up school. As a result of this, all Necro dungeon runs have kind of… fallen off.
That said, after next week I will not be so busy anymore, and am looking to reinstate our runs. I’m basically looking to have a “casual” run for people. This would be just one path daily, and we’d go through every dungeon, story mode and explorable mode in order. So first run would be AC story, then the next day AC exp p1, until we reached Arah exp p3, and we’d go back to the beginning. This will let people see everything from dungeons, and make for a fun and easy way to get a daily dungeon run in. This would be open for anyone that has a Necro that is of high enough level to make it into the dungeon.
Every so often we will have a “large” event where we will do an entire dungeon, and that will likely be streamed.
I’d like to know what times work best for people (this event would be NA, although EU is welcome to get together and do it) on the weekdays. This will be starting up May 29th unless something comes up.
Replace Reanimator with some kind of Vigor trait.
Actually sPvP players almost never run bleed durations because it is very rare that your bleeds will run even their full base duration.
One problem with condition spihoning is, condi necros already are the superior ranged firepower setup (rangers on flank being the only guys that can efficiently outrange us with true/not hybrid focused setups), also imagine 25~28 siphons pre second, it would really have to use the 25 hp pre tick thing vampiric has right now not to be broken.
Gibbly mentioned a similar thing in the podcast we just did. Basically you just make the siphon values very small (10-20) so its like an extra regen.
Actually i would say hotjoin aka custom arenas teach ppl how NOT to play in tpvp…they’re supposed to be a “training area” but it’s all about showing ppl bad playing…and then they go tourney and they get facerolled…. It’s like trying to show someone how to drive a car with a freakin’ boat…for sure they’re going to die vs a tree at the first corner lol
Are you implying Grand Theft Auto is not a valid driving simulator?
I like the idea, and similar ideas like it (add siphoning from conditions to Blood Magic 15 trait).
Warriors are bar none in the worst state in PvP. Necromancers are in trouble because the one build we have that is easy to fit into comps is outclassed. We have other viable builds, but they require your team to actually build in some way around your build, and frankly I don’t see many people doing that.
I think if they were to implement something like this, do it by splitting queues. Make one queue for tournaments that doesn’t affect rank at all, and have that the same as what we have now (teams, solo, and any rank will all be together, matched together on some rating), then have “ranked” solo/duo and team queues that will be reflected on a leaderboard, with a level requirement of some sort (15ish imo).
The problem with saying NO to anyone of a low rank, is frankly hotjoins suck for a lot of people. You aren’t ever actually going to learn how to tPvP, unless you actually go ahead and tPvP for a while; hotjoins give you a terrible perspective of PvP.
We definitely need some kind of vigor access, and it would make so much sense to just put it in the stead of reanimator.
I think we could use more combo finishers on underused weapons. MMs bring a ton of finishers, and many other utilities already have fields or don’t make sense to have finishers. So put it on Axe, for example. Make axe 3 a blast finisher. Make Dark Pact have a 2nd active that leaps the necro to the target. Just examples, but I think we need a little bit more on our weapons.
Being sad a sequel to a game doesn’t at all appeal to the population of the first… makes sense, no?
No, it doesn’t appeal to some of the population of the first. There are some of us that are perfectly happy with GW2, we just aren’t so passionate about it as people who vehemently hate it.
@Loyo, different balance for different classes. Null field is also notably different than WoP, which converts conditions to boons. As for why no vigor, I think thats a question all Necros everywhere would love to know.
Strictly from the idea of someone main-handing dagger, it doesn’t fit with the idea. I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t take it as a power dagger build, but it fits much more with a ranged setup than it does with dagger.
The problem with DS isn’t actually our own healing, if only our own healing was allowed then I don’t see it being OP at all, although very strong in certain builds. The problem is what if you are sitting in a team with a guardian and an ele. Now the ele’s water attunement splashing around is going to be filling you up to full while you are temporarily immune to damage. The guardian is going to heal you up quite nicely while you are sitting immune. And this is in addition to your own personal healing which will be topping you off.
You could run a 0/0/10/30/30 build (just an example) and have perma regen, siphoning on hit/crit/wells plus make it 50% better, run dagger + something/staff, and soul marks, and you are going to be not just gaining LF like crazy to tank through damage, but every time you pop DS you are going to come out pretty healthy again, so not only did they waste damage hitting you in DS, but they are actually forced to burn you out of DS or you will come out with full HP.
Again it should be looked at, but it’s a dangerous path. It is similar to why we were crazy in beta.
Some of these points are good, some of them are just not well thought out, and then some are flat out false.
We have poor mobility by design. Complaining about our poor mobility is like a thief complaining that they are insanely squishy when caught out of stealth, or an ele complaining they can only equip one weapon. Also, plenty of people find space for Spectral Walk on their toolbar, including high level players.
Want area damage? One word: Epidemic. Epidemic has the highest damage potential of every ability in the entire game. A single good Epidemic (and they can be hard to land without coordination) will wreck an entire team. Engi grenades are more reliable, whereas Epi is much less reliable, but when we work, we work much better for that pressure (and if you really want fun, put an Engi with a Necro).
Also, someone went through and counted actual AoE abilities. Necromancers have an overwhelming number of them. The only problem right now is that a single build (HGH) has a very strong setup that is more reliable at doing AoE damage.
I’ve talked about traits before. While our traits are questionable as to their usefulness, they are in the right spot. Use staff for an example. Want more damage on your marks? Go into the direct damage line. Want more LF for DS? Go into the DS line. Want core improvements to staff? Then go to the staff line.
Wells are in the Blood Magic tree (as they synergize with daggers and life stealing, also in that tree), with ranged wells (useless to dagger users going into blood magic) in Curses, where a ranged player would be going.
The Necro doesn’t even need to touch the ele directly, he can spam up condis on someone else and Epi off.
Were you in a tournament or hotjoins?
Allowing healing while in DS is a very dangerous prospect. There are already Necromancer builds using high healing to regen HP very well. Including it in DS brings it into dangerous territory with all the healing we see come off from guardians and eles. Not saying its impossible, and it definitely should be looked at, but I don’t see it happening.
I’d much rather they first fix DS so my team stops freaking out (every necro thats run in coordinated groups is used to the scared shouts when they see you instantly “drop low” because you jumped into 10% LF while high on HP). And I’d like to see them revamp siphoning.
Why is this in the spvp section.
and where the kitten is your staff
Guessing because its for sPvP. And certain bunker builds (especially with minions) do not utilize staff.
Yeah, no. Thanks for trying to help out the community, but I would highly suggest not using full minion builds except for fun, they are too easily countered.
Basically the core requirement to almost every team is 1 bunker, 1 roamer, 1 dps. You can then build the rest of the team around what you specifically want to do. Also remember that certain builds like Eles can bunker, roam, and DPS all in one (although weaker than any dedicated build), so its hard to say the comp.
Minions don’t work as bunkers at all. Once the Minions go down, you’ll go down soon too.
I have used my minion/power hybrid with the SOAC team in tournaments against teams rank 40+ and won every game. The minions don’t matter for the healing, although its nice to have on the side. 90% of the healing comes from somewhere else, the minions are there for control and burst damage.
1v1 isn’t the problem at all. You aren’t a main bunker unless you can sit on point without allowing it to get neutralized or captured in a full 5v5. Bunkering side point against 1-2 people is a completely different issue, we’re bad there for a different reason.
Builds themselves aren’t the problem. I have builds that on paper could sit on mid point for years and never get kicked off. Over 12k healing every 32 seconds with WoB, tons of siphoning from minions/myself, a 975 heal every 10 seconds, 3k healing with Dagger 2, and I can still throw out some huge damage. The problem is, I would never be able to bunker well, because one CC chain or failed dodge, and I’m downed. A high level player is going to push every Necro build off point in at most 2 rotations of DS. The first one you get CC and then can blind your way till the next DS, but after that you are SOL and he’s throwing you off point. I’m not doubting people’s ability to facetank the damage, I’m doubting the ability to resist CC.
Eles aren’t better because of their ability to take damage, they can just stay on point/get back by running full cantrip builds.
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I don’t see why after all the months that has gone by, Specter 2 skill still doesn’t have the correct text: it applies 3 bleeds, but shows 1 on it’s description. This issue has been going on since BETA 1!
Idk man, that sounds like a super difficult thing, it could take years to fix (yeah, seriously though that’s just silly that it hasn’t been fixed yet, I can’t imagine it’d take more than a few minutes).
Blind does not negate all CC, and Necros don’t have nearly enough blinds to blind all the CC that a hammer guardian brings, or anywhere close to it. Your boon removal won’t be enough to force them out except once.
Foot in the grave is 3s of CC every 10s. That means they just need to wait for you to go into DS, and then they have a 7 second window to blow you off point. Neut means making a point neutral, IE decapping it in PvP. It means your team is no longer getting points off it. Peeling away from a fight is disengaging, and peeling for a teammate is CCing a target so they have to disengage.
And then a guardian bubbles you off the point and they get the neut on mid, and you’ve failed a major requirement to be a bunker.
That is literally the main thing keeping Necromancers off of being able to bunker. We have the ability to eat the damage like a bunker should, we have decent CC, though not quite as strong its workable considering higher damage. What we don’t have is the ability to physically stand on mid point for days while eating hard CC. It is the biggest thing that is holding Necros back from being a viable choice as mid bunker.
I just don’t see the need for hiding builds. Like people have said, your build isn’t secret anyway, all this is really doing is allowing for an even easier entry for new players. You don’t need to get your butt kicked in PvP for hours and hours before you find a workable build (which probably is still far from optimal if you are a new player). Now you can go in and watch how not only how a high level person plays, but what they are playing with.
You need DPS pressure.
PSA: Just do what most of us do, and ignore everything that is posted by Daecollo. It has served me and many others well, and hopefully either his quality of posting will improve (maybe he’ll, gasp, actually think before posting) or the posts will stop outright.
On topic, this is a terrible idea.
All Necro tPvP can work because you stack up huge on the benefits of having Necros (just having 2x condi necros means you can faceroll with Epidemic), but they would never do well in top play. You might be able to make a decent comp out of 3 Necros, a strong bunker, and a roamer, but I wouldn’t push it past there (and that comp would rely heavily on gimmicks with Epidemic and Fear).
If you think you have invented a super build that others necros and top necros have not tested you’re nuts. Most are just not forum warriors and spend their time playing.
I used to think the same thing you did about bunkers builds power builds, dagger builds etc… I thought they were good because i did very well with them, until I started playing against better players. Flat out there are other classes that do it better.
There are a ton of builds all over the place for all classes, dont think for a second I and other necros have not tested and tested again anything you think is a god build.
I can’t speak for EU necromancers, nor all of NA necromancers. However I do know many builds that us lowbies have come up with have had things in them that high level players had not thought of before. You tend to get stuck in a certain style of thinking (everyone does), and it takes new players to bring in new flavor. The builds usually aren’t that crazy different either, but just little tweaks here and there can completely change a build dynamic.
Again its not saying that its guaranteed that the top necros haven’t tried a lot, but if you really think that by merit of being better at playing the game, or by merit of playing the game more, that you know everything, then you are no less nuts than you accuse us of being.
And I agree with everyone saying that there are fixes we need. I don’t mind certain built-in deficiencies, because they are necessary, but others are just silly (seriously guys, vigor please?).
Unfortunately part of it is just that Ranger’s BM builds are flat out broken right now. Necromancer bunkers can fill the role of slow-as-molasses side point bunkers very nicely, with strong team fight presence, the problem is that everything we bring, Rangers bring harder. They can use their ult as a team res, whereas a bunker Necro has to give up a utility slot (and we really can’t afford it). We both bring burst pressure, but theirs is stronger. We both can have condi pressure, but they have burning.
Once they get around to nerfing BM rangers so they can’t spec fully defensive and still have 14k bursts from pets, we’ll see a bit more diversity on back point defense.
If I want to cheat in Jumping Puzzles I’ve got Spectral Walk.
If I want to grab 2 bombs from the top part of CoF I use Spectral Walk.
If I wanna jump off a cliff in WvW and tele back up I have Spectral WalkIn short Spectral Walk was intended for teleporting backwards and sneaky stuff like that.
It just fails in sPvP because 8 seconds is nowhere enough there.
It would need to be more like 30 or 60.
(And possibly leave a shining green beacon at cast point to make it easier to see)You want to make the Flesh Wurm fulfill the same role but better.
That’s bad.Not only are you making Spectral Walk’s effect even worse by comparison but you are also removing the only ground-target teleport Necro has!
I thought we wanted more of those, not less?Of course if you reversed their roles (much like koopatroopa implied) that might work as well.
Killing the Flesh Wurm allows for counterplay that the Spectral Walk wouldn’t.
Well, unless you made SW leave something destroyable at the cast point as well.The only time I use Flesh Wurm in PvE now is to teleport past something or to escape from Subject Alpha’s crystals when people aren’t destroying them fast enough.
Your suggestion would just make me replace Spectral Walk with Flesh Wurm even more often at Alpha and use it less everywhere else.Well, aside from slotting both Spectral Walk and Flesh Wurm at the same time for extreme Jumping Puzzle cheating.
That’s the on thing it’d make better as far as PvE goes.
Make it a PvP only change and there isn’t an issue there.
^ Exactly my thoughts.
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of “this build is good or that build is good”.
These types of statements are relative.In a low-tier PvP game, there are certainly Necro bunker builds that could withstand 3 people long enough for team support to arrive.
On the other hand, playing in a high-tier game, a Necro bunker build is not good enough and will either get neutralized or killed rather quickly.
And IMO it’s only ever good enough to run in a close-point defender anyway, if ever.
So when speaking about a build and how good or effective it is, it’s very important to state where it was successful.
This goes for any build for any class.
The fear-dot stability stomp 0/30/10/0/30 is a good build to play in high tier PvP games, but at this moment Necro is just sub-par compared to what an HGH Engi can provide to those teams. High tier players will lock the Necro down before his life force can generate since it’s an easy target to train. At the same time, this build is fine and works well in almost every other PvP setting.
The only reason Necro home bunker doesn’t work is because of our lack of mobility. If we were allowed to sit on that point all game and not be a detriment to our team, we’d make for great home point bunkers. But the reality is that you want your back point to be able to push up, and we just can’t afford to do that. Hell, we can’t even engage enemies off point because they can go past us and just neut the point before we get back.
From my experience, what teams do with me when I am running a bunker build, is they sit me mid, and just have me sit there all day (depends slightly on map). On Khylo they will rotate someone in for me while I go kill treb (Flesh Golem brutalizes treb), on Spirit Watch its actually pretty easy to get involved with the fight, so sitting on point isn’t a huge issue. On temple I secure the Ferocity buffs when nothing is happening mid, and our guardian can roam around and secure the buffs (and if they don’t send theirs mid, we just sit on mid all game). On Forest I’ll come off point to solo the Buffs, and on Foefire frankly I feel useless.
I feel like there are possible niches for having a Necro bunker on your team. However I would never suggest trying to run a Necro bunker (unless this mystery build Troll speaks of works) without a Guardian, because of team fights. But running a Necro can actually free up the rest of your team a lot, and if you run a very mobile team around your Necro, I could see it working (although maybe it won’t).
Sadly I don’t think we can really do side points either. Our few ways of getting decent mobility require utility slots that we need for survivability. We did try it for a while, and it was fine at just holding the point all day, better than anything else actually, including guards, because you could actually kill oroamers solo. The problem was that was all it could do. You can’t move off point without RtL, portal, permaswiftness, etc.
Pretty much this. I’ve done home point bunker a lot, it is what I do any time I’m not queueing with high ranking people. Necros would be amazing here because we have some builds that are just amazing at 1v1, you pretty much need to send 2 people to cap side point if a strong Necro is defending it (or they’ll just keep it capped and fight you over it for 10 minutes). Except you literally can’t move anywhere or you will lose the point if someone sees it.
If we put it this way, protection kinda doesn’t mean much in this situation. Stability is important and maybe stun breakers. But with our access to stability we can still get easily pushed outside that point for 2-3 seconds to neutralize the point so where is the success of the bunker then?
In small points, we are able to stay on point fairly well, if you are playing right. Its larger team fights, usually mid, that this would definitely be the case. In fact, its really the only reason I think a lot of people are having doubts about the build, because your team’s main bunker needs to be immovable from point.
I’ll be making videos hopefully over the summer, so stay tuned!
I find it unlikely that people at the top have really played around that much. Maybe we are totally off base and you have tried every build out there, but I find it highly unlikely. I feel confident saying this because competitive gamers in every game tend to play quite a bit, and just not notice the power of something. They stick to FOTM because they know it will work, and frankly there is no incentive to take the chance.
Its not that I don’t doubt that people play around with builds, but at least from the perspective of someone on the outside, few if any make a full effort at using them. By full effort, I mean build a team with the idea of the Necro being in whatever niche spot, and then having the team work around it. This is pretty much necessary for every necro build, and I’d be surprised if teams had attempted this for every single Necro build out there (it just isn’t feasible in many cases, a competitive team is focused on doing things that work).
I also say this because after having talked to great Necros, there is an overwhelming sense of their knowledge being great, but not incredibly creative. They know far more about how to play the class than I probably ever will, but talk to them about anything outside of condi or glass builds, and you get this feeling that they tried some builds, and then gave up. This isn’t always the case, there are a few who are more open to innovation and creativity, but even they seem to have those other builds more for fun to solo queue with, not attempt in serious play.
But, maybe its just because I don’t play at a competitive level, and the builds I see as viable just don’t work when transitioned up to that level of play. It is certainly possible that at the very top Necromancers just don’t have anything to offer besides condi pressure, and the rest of us just can’t see it because high level organized team play is so rare. I don’t mean to be offensive in any way, I just think that the class is so often underappreciated even by the people who play it the most, and are plagued by trying to force Necros into a niche that are far better filled by other classes (which I won’t argue at all, there are a lot of things we just are just not as good at).
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You can’t use a build that is “secret” to defend an accepted (although potentially false, I’ll give you) idea among the vast majority of the community. It isn’t even a controversial idea about Necromancers being bunkers; it is well accepted that we cannot handle main-bunker. If you have a secret build that works so well, then either keep it secret, or put it out there. There is absolutely no point waving a “secret” in front of our noses, it reminds me of what kids do; tell fake secrets to get everyone’s attention, then later reveal there was nothing at all.
I also would not be surprised if builds existed that were stronger bunkers than minion builds. Minion builds are not meant to be the main bunker of any team, they are bruiser builds, meant to have very high defensive stats, while retaining reasonably high burst and sustained damage. I would never try to
Symbolic summed up perfectly why condition necromancers do not do well. I think it serves even better to reinforce my point that people never even consider Necromancers running something other than conditions, and as long as that feeling persists we will be highly subject to the whims of FOTM builds and whatever the very few players at the top determine to be the meta (and players at the top have 0 incentive to try new things).
I’ll eat my words when there are teams with Necromancers that are participating and WINNING in the Master of the Mists.
A pool of a whole few hundred competitive players isn’t exactly conducive to a meaningful meta. Why use your brain when you can just copypasta what works and is easy to do? Its also part of the reason (in my mind) teams are so difficult to put together and keep together. The second FOTM changes and your team isn’t meta, the team disbands; everyone that is still in line with the meta joins a new team, and those who aren’t are stuck solo queueing until they are in favor again.
Not at all.
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