I’m glad there is a good conversation going on about this.
I do run with an organized Zerg in tier 1 (so almost all combat is organized very well), and currently I run staff with well of corruption and suffering to tag the enemy Zerg. I never thought to stack up a pet and epidemic, that’s great! Do enemy pets ever catch any of the boons the group puts off? Would it be worth to tag one with a corrupt boon before epidemic?
Also, we run very organized plague rotation with chill, and that is actually the main role of necros in our guild. The rest is kinda up to us, I just get nervous that blood is power, corrupt, and epidemic isn’t nearly ad effective as it may seem being that I couldn’t possibly cycle through all the enemies it affected and see if they had been cleansed.
Two additional thoughts though.
A. People probably burn their condition cleanse early on with a heal during the initial push.
B. One stack of bleed might not be scary enough to want a cleanse. Where as maybe it is more effective to epidemic with one stack of blood is power rather than a bunch of conditions which would almost instantly trigger a cleanse.
If at all possible, form parties with other people in your guild who are condition builds, or at the very least one other person. If you target classes with not much condition cleansing, you can easily overload it and Epidemic off. If you want to get really fancy, pair with someone that can burst conditions onto a target, and have them call out every time they are going to burst. With decent timing, your Epidemic will go off pretty quickly and the person won’t have had enough time to really react.
Yes, that is a future issue that they will address, but not starting the road to fix that issue just because they can’t make the entire journey yet would be silly. They are starting on the path that will eventually bring them to interesting gameplay.
And yes, signet actives are used, with a few exceptions (warriors/rangers) the actives are the only reason signets are brought at all, because the passive stat bonuses are trash.
The point is to make it an actual choice as to whether losing the passive effect is worth the active. That is good gameplay for signets. We can argue all we want about how signets are right now (terrible), but having signets for only actives or only passives are both useless; the way they are trying to take it is much better from a gameplay standpoint.
The only class that doesn’t is Engineer. And the point remains, they are trying to fix signets a little so they are more interesting to use. No one said this was the end all be all of signet changes, they are just fixing a small part of the gameplay associated with signets.
I do like the idea of a condition that would punish teams staying close together, something that has a chance of spreading every tick to the persons allies within X range.
Oh yeah, like Roe said, find the nearest Ranger, then find his pet, and stack that thing to the sky with conditions and start jamming your Epidemic button.
I use Rampager gear for high everything damage. Since you are already plenty experienced, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to survive mobs with glass gear; if you absolutely need to you can always throw on some minions to face tank a bit for you. It also allows you to quickly swap from all condition damage to more power based damage if you find yourself in a party with someone like a condi engineer.
The only things that affect minion damage, besides the trait, are buffs to the minions themselves (spirits/boons) or debuffs to the enemy (vulnerability).
I think this is splitting hairs a bit. A minor buff to the passive on Undeath would probably be ok, but better LF generation on the Scepter would be a better fix for builds that struggle with LF generation currently. I don’t think giving too much LF from a passive is a good idea. It would be better to promote more active play generating more LF.
If you aren’t getting enough LF in a build that doesn’t use scepter the majority of the time, then you are probably doing something wrong, because everything else can build up LF with reasonable speed.
+1. This game is trying to have active combat, you can’t get much further away from active with a passive effect that is going all the time.
Signet improvements – Buffing the passive is not the answer. The signets are the issue, this general buff while it continues to improve the value of Signet of Undeath, the rest of them are still not worth taking.
Etc.
The signet change is a good one. There needs to be an actual choice as to whether losing the passive buff is worth it or not. Also remember we aren’t the only people with signets, this is to make signets that are currently being used more of an interesting gameplay decision, not to correct the actives for unused signets.
Remember that the SOTG isn’t an all inclusive ask everything wrong with the game for every single class. It is for the devs to read off their list of fixes per class, get a few questions, and give a general idea of where the game is going. This means they aren’t going to talk about every single tiny issue for every class. It means that unless something is specifically being fixed, or on their minds, it is up to the rest of the people to ask.
It isn’t the place for a lot of what people seem to expect, it is just a way for the devs and community (via leaders) to communicate directly for a few minutes per class.
I died a little bit inside when I saw what we had According to that post ha would be very over powered though I think. DS would turn us into an unstoppable face plunger.
There was a reason Necromancers ate nerf after nerf after nerf from the beginning of closed beta all the way into game launch (via Epidemic). We used to be able to more or less facetank teams and have the damage output to kill them all.
It used to be kind of a unique feature we had, well Mesmer a bit. Need boon classes taken care of, get a Necro. Now if a bunch of other profs are going to get similar stuff, they ought to give us a way to get some boons of our own more easily.
Warriors are getting a boon-based version of our Target the Weak. That only increases their personal damage. Thieves can only steal one boon per S/D 3. If you really want boons taken care of, Necros (and to a lesser degree Mesmers) are still the only way to go; the other classes are really just getting personal mechanics.
We are not regarded as weak at all. We are slow and easy to kill, but far from weak (there are multiple “tier” lists in sPvP forums that rate us mid to high depending on what they value). I’m surprised you are trying to defend more damage to a build that is already regarded to have very good damage.
Well of suffering/axe 2. If you want to run glass gear, do it with abilities that scale, the rest of us will keep running full defensive setups with minions.
Not every single class is the same. People want to add burst damage to a class that isn’t built around doing burst damage.
Edit: also, you are right. I would really love to be on par with the god-tier of warriors in PvP.
The thing with LoL is there are what, 40+ classes to balance? So it’s a good and bad thing that the meta can shift a lot, people can find a lot of OP combos but same as in GW1 at least people have more options to find a new counter meta. Here we’re kind of locked in without a lot of permutations.
There are 112 champions and around 150 items, all with individual balancing.
Realistically speaking though, GW2 has similar diversity. In the highest level of play for both, there is very little deviation. Team comps are very similar, strategies are pretty common, there isn’t tons of variety. And in lower play, things are much more wide open, just like in GW2 you can do pretty much whatever you want in lower tournies and win with good team play.
@Anchoku, one example is statistically insignificant, LoL’s system is pretty smooth. Spectating is a pretty easy way to see it, deviation is very small.
No, some of us just realize that bad examples are bad. Putrid explosion, a non-scaling high base damage ability that is no more difficult to land than a shatter, cannot be compared to other high damage abilities that have added scaling from an entire build around them.
100b is a huge damaging ability yes, only on glass warriors, you throw together a PVT warrior and his 100b isn’t doing any more damage than my bone minions are. Same thing with every other ability that was listed; they are all only strong when used in builds that are entirely built around super high burst with only just enough defense to live.
He doesn’t need to sit around though, that is guaranteed LF (except if you are dead I guess). I’m not sure what experience you have, but I have a significant amount of time in a tournament where I am not in combat. Again, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good fix, just saying that it would be a significant increase.
There are what, a whole couple hundred people online doing tournaments at any given time? Not exactly a lot to work with from an MMR point of view.
And LoL current matching system is pretty consistent. At most, you will be facing people one “rank” away. So diamond will at worst be placed into high platinum, bronze will never face higher than silver, etc. They have even split team queueing, solo/duo, and ranked/normals with different MMRs.
If you are having a lot of trouble with boons, and you aren’t using one of the 3 very accessible utilities we have to strip boons, then you can’t blame the devs.
There is an MMR (match making ranking) in place right now, which means you are facing teams of similar MMR. The problem right now is that MMR is very volatile, due to a combination of a new system and very small population, and also that with so few people around in general, MMR differences in each game might be fairly large.
Epidemic used to be infinite range, no LoS, no AoE limit, and couldn’t miss. That needed to change, so they have progressively been scaling it back. Them returning the unblockable is just restoring some of the function it had before the most recent fix, but not all of it.
I could understand them not giving a buff to Bone Fiend because he’s ranged, and with good play you can keep him relatively safe. Somewhat on the same strain, Bone Minions are really made to be exploded, even huge buffs to their HP pool really wouldn’t mean much. I’m also hoping they buff Shadow Fiend’s HP a bit, he’s always in the fray, and his active is, frankly, not great.
On the other side, I am really happy to see Flesh Golem get an HP increase. He is right around half of your DPS in a minion build, has the best active, and even DPS aside the crippling he gives is an awesome bonus (a lot harder to kite minions when you are getting crippled constantly). Flesh Wurm HP buff was a bit silly to me, but I’m not one to complain about free buffs.
Think of it this way; League of Legends has an estimated 12 million people online every day. It has been out for over 3 years, has a very active international competitive scene with people that literally do nothing but play LoL as their job. And yet with so much money in their game, so much time, and so many people playing, nearly every week there are at least small tweaks to balance.
The reality is that perfect balance is impossible to achieve in this kind of a game. There is always going to be a build that is a bit too strong, some that are a bit too weak, and flavor of the month classes. ANet has been doing a lot of balancing, but it takes time. They are approaching it the right way though, and I think it will get better.
They can’t make it a choice without completely overpowering the passive. A multiple person res is going to turn fights around, LF generation won’t be able to match that.
Signets aren’t supposed to have powerful passive effects, they just need passives that are just strong enough that you need to actually make a choice when to activate them. Strong passives = boring all signet gameplay.
Its a pretty common theme across the classes, the grandmaster minor traits are basically all small damage boosts, although some of them have “more interesting” effects like doing it with vulnerability.
Leaving super organized zergs aside (because they are rare, and the only way to beat one is with another one), condition removal is much less prevalent than everyone likes to say. People in your average zerg might have a lot of AoE condition removal, but they rarely are using it in timed bursts to help allies; they save it until its their skin on the line. Which means Epidemic can still hit like a truck, and I have had it hit hard very often. Corrupt boon is even easier, because all you need to do is target a guardian, and you know for a fact that at some point he is going to throw out a ton of boons, and all you need to do is corrupt them to practically guarantee a down.
People overplay the condition removal. Reality is you can run condition necros just fine in WvW, just realize that you aren’t going to be hitting perfect Epidemics left and right (even hitting 5-10 bleeds every time epidemic is up is increasing your damage quite a bit).
I recall the devs saying they were looking at giving us more boon hate, just don’t ask me to quote it because I have no idea where it is. We already have the most boon hate in the game, but hell I’d be happy for more.
So no one likes my 1% every 2 seconds whether in or out of combat? I thought it was a pretty good idea lol
I think ANet is trying to stay away from allowing Necros to generate much LF outside of combat. I’m not sure if it’d really be too strong, but I think it would border on it.
well, I’ve always personally thought this sigil to be garbage, moreso in pvp because charged sigils are usually a no-no. Maybe possibly in a gimmicky wvw build it would work. In pve though I could see it being fairly decent, especially if you’re killing at a high rate to keep it charged up, you can easily cycle through, what is it, 26?, enemies. I will still give it a go though, I’m always open to new ideas, but my personal take on chargeable sigils is they are crap for a necro but I like to be proven wrong because it means I have yet another build to add to my toolbelt lol.
I run charging sigils all the time in PvP; it depends on what kind of build you are running. If you are playing a glassy condition/power build, then yeah you wouldn’t run a stacking sigil because you’ll get downed all the time. But especially in minion builds, it isn’t uncommon to go entire games without getting downed. I’ve found myself with 25 stacks in tournaments pretty often. Btw, you only need to kill 6 people in PvP to get it, in PvP you get 5 stacks per kill.
They are all very good, in my opinion, but 4 of them are limited to very specific build types (3 minions, 1 axe). For example, 5s DS CD is a trait that makes specific types of builds work; if it didn’t exist, there are a few builds that just wouldn’t work.
100b isn’t instant. Neither is eviscerate, shatter, or firegrab when you consider every one of them requires some setup. Shatter needs clones out, firegrab needs burning, eviscerate needs adrenaline, and 100b takes 3.5 seconds channel.
And I reliably hit bone minion putrid explosions all the time. Yes there is the occasional miss because they aren’t quite on their target, and they aren’t hitting the target easily if they haven’t aggro’d, but like every other ability it’s up to you to make the ability hit, or not use it (yes they are unique with AI).
2k damage per explosion in full soldier gear with minimal offensive investment is very nice.
My mistake for bad wording. As far as just a flat out skill for getting people off the ground Undeath is the best. It is a full minute less CD, and doesn’t waste your elite slot. It is also on a class that isn’t widely terrible. The Banner is a better skill overall, the boons are amazing and it has a better radius.
If you want a pure res, banner is not the best, that better?
They do roughly 2k damage at level 80 regardless of stats. That is important to note, because those listed things are all equally pretty terrible without very heavy damage investment and trait investment. I can get a 2k minion explosion at level 80 with no gear and no traits. In fact, 100b listed damage is only a little bit higher than putrid explosion (with nothing invested).
In my opinion, death nova just isn’t the place to put the damage. Yes it would be nice if it did like 500 damage on death, but if they are getting a damage buff, it should be somewhere else.
If you got the full cast off, the people were downed (not dead), and it still didn’t work, then sure, that is a bug that needs fixing. Otherwise you are comparing a utility skill with a full minute less CD to an elite.
No, the Moa is an elite on a 180 second CD that transforms someone for 10 seconds. They don’t attack allies, they don’t do anything extra, they get access to a few meh abilities, and they can just run away. It is nothing more than a 10 second complete shutdown of a character. What you are listing is greatly outside the bounds of the Moa, which is already a really annoying ability.
It isn’t good gameplay. The only counterplay is to spam condition removal until it is off, and god forbid you manage to actually get it to proc. I’ve got another great idea, what if I make a zerg of a bunch of Necros and hammer warriors/guardians. They run in and CC the bejeezus out of everything while the group of Necros run around planting DS 5 and epidemic’ing it.
But yeah, from a gameplay standpoint this wouldn’t be implemented.
Dots that affect movement are bad from a gameplay side of things. It is counterintuitive, counters many classes far too hard (most classes die outright if they don’t move), and doesn’t really involve interesting play/counterplay. Its just oh great, I have that stupid condition now I get to stand still until it wears off.
I thought it was a pretty good idea lol