Has nothing to do with how good we are in PvP, and everything to do with how people feel we are, and the current meta. Right now the meta is heavily towards tons of condi removal, which makes it harder for necros to do well.
The difference being that most other classes completely lose their pressure when they go invulnerable. Even DS has more pressure than the standard sources of damage evasion, which is why Necros can fill a niche as tanky builds with pressure.
It will be quite some time till GW2 reaches the level of other eSports.
That is incredibly false Bhawb. I seem to notice alot of bias towards minions in all of your posts…
Vampiric builds will offer just as much survivability and damage as a Minion build will, infact it’s probably a safer choice as you don’t have to rely on things that are very easily killed. The point of a Tank is damage mitigation, which Siphoning does effectively. When built properly, you can mitigate burning, and a few stacks of bleeds at 1200 condition damage using Dagger 2. Which no other class can do. Granted PvP Siphon builds are a little harder to work with because the best thing for it “Knight’s Gear” ends up being changed around kittenedly, so we get high HP, instead of high Toughness, which doesn’t synergize well with siphoning.
Full Ascended Knight’s Gear in PvE/WvW with Vampiric Runes with a Necromancer siphon trait line becomes incredibly fearsome. If Leeching scaled with healing power, I’d imagine we’d be the best tanks in the game. At the moment, we’re somewhat sub-par.
First, I specifically stated it was for PvP only, WvW/PvE siphon builds are very nice, and in my opinion work better than minion builds at the role of damage dealing-damage sponge.
In PvP however, I haven’t seen a single siphon build that doesn’t use minions that can hold up. Again, I’m not saying it can’t work, I’m saying I haven’t seen one that works. They don’t bring the same control, the siphoning is comparable (minion siphon vs well siphon), and the damage is much more consistent in a minion build (it is highly debatable that well siphoning is more reliable than minion). So unless there is something magic that I am missing that a siphon build can bring in that I can’t manage with a minion build, I don’t see when they would be wanted in a team.
Saying necro plague stomp is awesome is pretty stupid. Do you really think a necro would use their awesome elite that is great for group fights to just stomp one person? That’s ridiculous. No one will do that. Shroud stomping is only to keep your HP high without risking anything for the stomp. You’re still able to be feared and interrupted. The only really cool method to stomp as a necro is to drop your well of darkness so they’re blinded plus anyone who gets near you gets blinded and stomp.
I never said it was awesome, nor did I suggest that you blow plague solely for a stomp, that still doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to use it.
And Foot in the Grave gives you stability stomp every 10 seconds by DS stomping.
Problem with siphon builds that don’t use minions, is that they lack all the tools that you really want when running a bunker-ish build besides the survivability, in PvP. PvE you can easily hold the aggro and life siphon builds are great. WvW our life siphon builds are very strong because you hit the limit of siphoning (wells).
However in PvP, non-minion siphon builds don’t work out as well (in my experience) because they lack damage and/or control (comparatively). Minion builds bring a lot of strong burst, sustained damage, and control, whereas siphon builds are more “selfish”; they don’t offer as much to the rest of the team besides a damage sponge. Not to say that your build isn’t different, because Necromancers have tons of hidden builds that work quite nicely, but I haven’t seen a non-minion siphon that does.
Not necessarily. Very few of those players you listed Eurantien would have experience in a team comprised entirely of their class. However I wouldn’t mind seeing some well-known names appear in the tournament. The question is, would they want to?
Was that a joke? To my knowledge Necromancers are the only ones that regularly play around with all of their profession (or close to it).
necro has 30 SR DS stomp, plague stomp, and lich stomp
Bhawb, my point is that the SoAC Tourney was awful because no one took it seriously, except a couple of teams that absolutely dominated because it was ‘only for fun’
It was for fun, unless you are trying to imply that having fun is awful, I don’t see your point. It was never supposed to show who was the best profession.
We’re looking at dividing the brackets in the future so there won’t be the ridiculous skill differences (which, as many noticed, actually meant very little in most of the matches), but taking the tournament too seriously just wasn’t our original goal.
I think people forget that this tournament was just planned to be a few teams of people messing around in a custom arena until about 48 hours before the date when all the partnerships, streaming, coaching, etc. happened.
Its great if you want to make a serious tournament for the professions, I’d just caution because some are very obviously going to not have equal showings unless they happen to be able to gimmick well enough.
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Yes he does and always has to my knowledge. The other minions don’t, and while I don’t know of anything that suggests they will be made to do so soon, it is certainly possible.
Well, SoAC has been described as “for fun”. I’m looking at for competition. Round Robin format would probably be best. So again, if a bunch of people would like to see this happen, I’ll start trying to organize it.
The day you stop having fun playing a game is the day you stop playing that game (unless its WoW, in which case you complain constantly for changes, get pandas, and keep playing for a game that you hate to play). Just because something is fun doesn’t mean it isn’t competitive.
On that note, SOAC was planning to look at a way to have a division for higher level players. This would both give people a chance to see really high level players on a class, and also to give a bit more fairness to the “amateur” bracket (there were people playing who were undoubtably not newer). But if you’d like to organize it, obviously no one is stopping you.
That lovely little anecdote really hits hard, because that attitude is precisely what ruins LoL for me. If Anet doesn’t change something, the tpvp community will over time evolve to become just as toxic as in LoL. Havin a full party to do tpvp is already mandatory.
Except LoL has a significant system in place to reduce Toxicity, and GW2 has absolutely nothing of the sort. Which means not only are we going to see toxic behavior develop faster, but it will be a greater magnitude and have no way to cull it. I think they really need to start putting in a similar system to what LoL does (with the Tribunal); if it works, take it and put it in your game.
Guardians VS Necros Game 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QO1xvw8wHk4
Guardians VS Necros Game 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOWdwYUWhPc
Necros VS Mesmers Game 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUqwffUNf5E
Necros VS Mesmers Game 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS-LMLQFfZw
Necros VS Mesmers Game 3
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Zvoi6PzY9Y
I re-watched the footage I took of the Mesmer fights. I think what was really needed was for us to all go burst builds (of varying tankiness). I saw multiple times where a target was called and someone would blow a lot of their abilities to get them very low, but then no one else was focusing them and they got away. Obviously the coordination required was pretty high, but still doable.
I think the main problem that we are always going to face is that somehow its balanced for Flesh Wurm’s teleport to be limited to 1200 range (and have very strange limits), whereas they can portal across the entire map, neut our home point, then port back to wherever they were fighting. Oh, and did I mention you can’t kill their portal like ours can be killed? (Anet, buff Flesh Wurm’s tele!) That is going to kill us no matter what.
I’ve never had them not work, although its certainly possible I haven’t noticed it.
Why not have a 1 second recharge reduction on all skills each time someone dies in the area? That will make up for the crazy long recharges of signets and wells.
They are supposed to have a long CD, that is the point of such powerful utilities like them.
I’d agree that he was the primary reason. He pulled us all into a party yesterday and we practiced for a solid 3-4 hours, with around an hour of warmup this morning. He really pushed the communication so that when we were actually in the tournament, Gibbly didn’t need to babysit us (or basically play for us) like the other coaches did. That was a huge reason we won.
The other reason was the player skill flip. Thursday we had a lot of newer players, and something my friend noticed (he was sitting next to me), was that a lot of them just weren’t playing at a very high level, even compared to me (and I’m far from top tier). Not only did we have more experienced players, but the other teams we faced (up until the Mesmers) either had the same or lower skill level.
And no. We had multiple really high level Necromancers watching the tournament, and none of them knew how to counter the Mesmers. They counter everything we can do. If we leave a single point uncovered, they will portal there and take it (or at least get the neut), and be back to the main fight by the time we even get there. If we stay on points, we are undermanned everywhere else because with their portal use they can always have 5 men in the fight and still guard their points. The multiple shatters made it impossible to avoid them all, and because of Mesmers’ very strong escape mechanics, the only time we could burst a target down successfully is if they messed up.
Overall that match just highlighted pretty much every weakness Necros have in PvP.
If you go to twitch.tv/soacgaming you will find our matches leading up to the finals, the finals are on twitch.tv/blu42; look under past broadcasts. I imagine that TowerdiveTV will be uploading the VODs soon as well, last time it took them right around 24 hours.
I think my highlight from the caster’s side was them (jokingly) giving Flesh Golem MVP of the Guardian matches :P
I wouldn’t say we are the best class there, there are some definite weaknesses that Necros in general have on that map (treb wrecks us), but there are some tricks to making things more pleasant.
2nd Place this time, a bit different of a result. I’ll be getting up my gameplay footage when I can, I forgot to record some of the games (the ranger ones).
Give me a skill that replaces all the new necromancer skills and minions with the gw1 ones. I would like to play a necromancer that feels like a necromancer.. getting stronger when somebody dies.
Crazy thought: if you miss the GW1 necro, why aren’t you playing GW1? This isn’t a re-skin of GW1, its a whole new game, and so is going to be quite a bit different.
Not a full comp, but as a side note, if you need treb down fast, Flesh Golem charge will take out half it’s HP in one hit. Depending on CC, an MM is able to 3v1 at treb and still take it out.
It’s just me? Because i never saw a decent MM ever and i’m lv 31 at Spvp
The few I found while using my condition necro went down in the blink of an eye,
I cannot image a good niche for this setup, if i’d rather to be a bunker i’d go with an engineer, elementalist, guardian, ranger or even mesmer,
I understand that even when your Spvp gear is inferior to your PvE gear, minions are the same and therefore are more valuable,
Condition Necros have a huge advantage against Minions, so you’ve had a biased experience. In the right team, Minions bring a ton of control, burst, and survivability, as well as being one of the strongest 1v1 small fight builds out there. I’ll agree that the vast majority of them are terrible though.
I take BT because I love the personal healing. I just don’t have the LF generation to rely on LT, I usually only get enough LF to use Doom and jump out or use it as emergency HP. Also, I’m almost always on home point, which means I very rarely face a lot of AoE (its very rare that the fight will have more than 2 people on each side), and with Flesh Golem being the only non-disposable non-ranged minion, I don’t need a lot of healing.
You can’t recolor them, and you can’t get different colors later. You’re basically stuck with the one you got unless you transmute them later (removes the soul bound).
I use the Corruption because I needed Dagger OH, and corruption can help make up the difference of boon stripping I lose. Assuming I only have Bone Fiend+Flesh Golem up, on average (and as you said its random, so this is only a statistical average) I will strip a boon every 6.67 seconds, with Bone Minions up that drops to every 5 seconds. Basically, it is around the same strips per time unit, but over time instead of burst. I like this because it means I am almost always removing boons over time, whereas dodging a single focus 5 means no stripping at all for 20 seconds. Why no 30 Blood Magic? I don’t want to kill my minions off faster, they are a large source of damage, healing, and control in my build.
Bloodthirst is there because it is the best for what I’m using. Axe channel = 9 procs of siphoning, dagger channel = multiple procs, dagger chain is high procs per second, locust swarm procs a lot, I have a lot of things procing that siphoning, and having it heal more is good.
Axe isn’t taken solely for retaliation. Its taken for retaliation, vulnerability, cripple, and the channel. That channel is the sole reason I can close out fights a lot of the time. I don’t hit multiple people often, but that is completely okay, it isn’t about having high retaliation uptime, but using it smartly to add another bit of DPS to my build.
Honestly, I wouldn’t use them. My current rune set gives me much more survivability and damage, and my minions dying isn’t a huge deal to me. I like the idea to give minions more survivability, I just don’t think this is the way to do it.
You’re basically naming a super version of Spectral Grasp. The problem with such an ability is that it would be hard to implement and balance. Each pull is a hard CC, meaning you’ll be intermittently interrupting everyone around you, along with setting up AoE based team comps incredibly well.
Yes, the build you linked is pretty much the most generic minion build you get, although I wouldn’t recommend using that setup in PvP
Axe has a few good uses:
1) Minion builds
2) PvE burst builds (around axe 2)
3) Retaliation
Also, I completely forgot to post my build, so here it is
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fQAQRBHRhG2IjWpermlG9eCQ6R0UX9kCuBHSxuSD-TwAA1CtIcS5kzJjTSjsGNGYVwOkZIA
If you have questions feel free to ask.
As for condition MMs, I have actually seen some really strong ones that basically use Minions as a source of constant pressure and pseudo tankiness, while using a tanky condition build on top.
Necromancers vs Engineers
With Epidemic and BiP, you’ll want to find the rotation that gives you the most condition stacks quickly, then Epidemic it. I’d suggest something like Dagger 5, BiP, D4, S2, DS2, then Epidemic them. That should give you 12 stacks of Bleeds (some on huge durations) on the main target, with 15 stacks on up to 5 surrounding it. Then you can either use scepter auto attacks to stack up bleeding, then S2->DS2->Epidemic when it comes up, and then the next time Epidemic is up your full combo should be available. You could also probably throw S3 on the backend of that for extra damage.
Alternately, when you find yourself against single target fights you’ll want use a different rotation, probably one to setup and use Axe 2 once or twice, then back into Scepter for conditions.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Warriors vs Necromancers Game 1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWrlnWVLXbM
Cleave is an AoE ability centered around your target. You might not consider it AoE, but by definition cleave is a category of AoE.
SA needs some tweaking, but the core idea behind it is fine. Its low use is because the life force/stun break part of it is shared by walk, which means basically you are paying 30 seconds of CD, 30 seconds of swiftness, and the added utility/situational second stun break of walk’s second active, just for protection. This makes it an incredibly niche skill and very rarely worth it.
I’m online right now practicing with my build, will be online for a fair bit today in PvP.
No.
15 characters.
Cleave is AoE. AoE just means Area of Effect, literally that the skill has a certain area of the map that it affects. Cleave, piercing, PBAoE, ground target are all examples of AoE types.
There are different condition rotations for different builds and different people. It depends on your goal (burst conditions, terror, sustained conditions), the enemy’s build (how many stun breaks/cleanses/dodges etc), and the way the fight is going. We aren’t like elementalists where you pretty much have a set of rotations you spam over and over again, but there are a number of rotations you can learn and abuse when the right situations are met. But its hard to say what the ones you want are without knowing your full build.
Honestly everyone, this wasn’t set up in a manner to be a “fair” contest, it was for fun. I realize its disappointing we didn’t win (it annoyed me a bit as well), but in the end it just wasn’t set up in a way that each team got a fair chance at winning. Some teams practiced a lot more than others, some teams had much more experienced people, some really took it seriously and wanted to win, others went in to have fun.
There will be the possibility of having a much more serious tournament profession later, which could be really cool (having actual tryouts and using all high ranking players instead of just whoever happened to sign up), just try not to blow too many blood vessels over this one :P
On a side note, I will have videos up from my perspective of the fight in about an hour for people to watch. I’d love to hear comments, suggestions, w/e, both about the gameplay and the video recording. Especially let me know if you’d like me to keep it high quality (I’m running on medium-high settings but that means I record around 20 fps) or lower the quality a little to get better fps.
Actually if you are running conditions the fastest kill is using scepter/dagger and DS along with terror, you can burst 15 bleeds onto someone and then fear them.
MM actually has a lot of variation (more than I gave it credit for in the past). Even in PvP, you don’t need to run the standard 20/0/20/20/0 base. If you’re looking for a strong PvP build, I’ll post mine when I get home, I used it last night in the tournament and could consistently hold my own 2v1, and won pretty much every 1v1 I had (very decisively in some cases, I wish I had gotten footage of the poor guy that went to our home point first in the “practice” game).
Death Shroud 2 is AoE, as is DS 4, and DS 1 can be traited to be AoE. And you can’t simply cleanse chill in a chill build, in fact AlmightyTroll made a chill build that is incredible at keeping chill on an opponent even through cleanses.
Locust + Well of Suffering + Lich Form = easy 9k+ DPS
This wasn’t meant to be a serious tournament. Its why guardians were doing serious practice a day before and had multiple level 30-40 players, and we were messing around in a custom arena for a few hours before, with level 10-20s. You want to prove that Necros are good? Don’t do it in a self-proclaimed tournament for amateurs.
I’m sorry that amateur players in an amateur tournament for fun weren’t up to your high standards, but frankly, I don’t care at all. This did everything it was supposed to. As someone on the team who was actually there the entire time (as in, didn’t look in for a few minutes), Gibbly was an amazing coach who actually took what I consider to be the core desire of the tournament seriously: to teach a couple of complete noobs something about tournaments, and help us become better players. He didn’t just hand us a bunch of pre-made builds he had to counter warriors, he asked what we ran on our own, helped us refine the builds a bit, then gave us some coaching. I had an absolute blast playing, and I couldn’t care less that we lost to people who were obviously better than we were.
Seriously, if you were taking this tournament as a serious event meant as anything more than to have fun, then you were doing it wrong.
@Flow, think of it this way. What do Necromancers cry about the most? Hard CC and condition cleansing. What did every single warrior bring? Hammer and condition cleansing. They played to win, we played to have fun. They won, we had fun. Win-Win situation in my book.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Gibbly is still coach for Saturday, and honestly I loved him as a coach. He kept perfectly with the spirit of the event, which was to help newer players get into PvP, along with create a lot of community support, get some shoutcasters going, and just overall breath some life into the PvP community. We basically kept the same builds that we were normally running, but with input from a great player, and then someone to guide us a bit through the match. In my opinion, that was the point, to make a few of us noobs come out as better players in the end in our own way, not spoon feed us a set of builds specifically made to counter the team we know we are facing.
It wasn’t a serious tournament (we were severely out leveled/experienced in our games), and we weren’t taking it super seriously (guardians were practicing days before hand, we screwed around in a private arena for a few hours). The main points were totally fulfilled, and it was a ton of fun for those involved, and that is what matters.
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It was fun. I’ll be uploading my perspective on almost all the matches (I think I got them all). One of the coolest parts was getting input from players who are way better than me about my build. The idea to put in Well of Suffering was perfect, it absolutely melted people.
I have failed you all! I am now shaving my head and becoming a monk.
Alright, what do you suggest to improve them?
I can go on your posts and be the evil critic all day as well, however at least offer advice to make wells more playable to the Necromancer.
They say wells are one of the best abilities, and then you ask what we would do to change it?
Buffing Wells would bring another style of necromancer into the fold that is a lot more useful to the party. It would BRING more diversity, wells are just way to weak for there opportunity cost, even in perfect sitations they just are not on-par with corruption.
Uh… no they aren’t. Wells are very common utility skills right now. Every single power necro in PvP brings WoS, there are a lot of well based builds (and even mini zergs of these builds) in WvW, and PvE wells are a very common support utility.
And you can say “no one is going to stand there”, but that isn’t true. PvE mobs are too stupid not to stand there, WvW zergs are arguably dumber than mobs (and even assuming they aren’t, such a permanent AoE denial would be ridiculous), and tPvP forces you to stand in a circle very close to the size of a well. You could permanently cover the point in wells.