Not going to boycott the most enjoyable class to play in the game, especially not because of perceived weakness.
Its a necromancer guild, doing all necromancer related things. It is certainly fitting here, and while I am totally biased I think a flood of video/podcast related posts that are all meant to help are far more helpful for the forum than a lot of the other posts we get.
I use this trait in builds that either don’t use staff (some of my bunker builds), or have a lot of crit/on hit siphoning, because of how much siphoning a Decaying Swarm can give you with siphon on crit+siphon on hit with high siphoning.
Trust me, there is a lot more to talk about in tournaments than we could cover in an hour.
They got rid of corpse-based skills because they created a build-style where you were forced to change your build for every boss, and could never use them reliably in small-scale PvP. It is the reason why minions don’t require corpses anymore.
Your house dog might not listen to what you say because you haven’t trained it, but if you look at animals used in war, they are usually highly trained; you can listen to orders and still have a personality.
Minions aren’t pets.
Seriously though, anyone trying to debate that Epidemic of all things isn’t great is just hard to take seriously.
The guild is always accepting requests, at least until we max out at 500.
What part of the game are you playing? You listed “warrior tank”, which at best would work in pvp as a mid-game side show along with glass cannon guardians.
You can’t even begin to compare Warrior and Necromancer utility skills, they are completely different.
How to make Necromancer relevant:
- Remove internal cooldown on “Barbed Precision”
- Shorten cooldowns on most Utility skills
- Increase damage on most weapon skills.
- Allow use of utilities while in Deathshroud. (Think of it as an Engineer kit)
- Give Spectral Armor Stability for 10 seconds.
- Give “Blood is Power” fury and swiftness for 10 seconds.
- Buff Corrosive Poison cloud to do pulsing physical damage as well.
- Give might, fury, and regen for every sacrificed minion.
Boom, Necromancer is now on par with all other classes.
Would you like a side of tactical nuke with your order?
Lol, no problem.
Edit: also, one proc of Sigil of Rage will put your staff’s sigil on CD for 45 seconds as well, since they share CDs.
If you want to be taken seriously you might want to learn about sigils.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil
“Cooldowns
All sigils share a cooldown; while it is active, no other sigil with a cooldown can trigger. For example, if you are using a Sigil of Fire (flame burst on critical) and a Sigil of Battle (might stacks on swap), you will have to wait after swapping weapons (Sigil of Battle activated) before the flame burst can trigger on critical."
Unless that doesn’t apply to sigils on two different weapon sets, I’m not sure what you mean.
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Don’t you take my dark path away from me!
Except a thief can be damaged while in stealth, I’ve killed quite a few of them while they were invisible.
Yes, because that removes the ridiculous pattern they had in GW1, where the flavor of the month could be expected to eat nerf-hammer from Thor himself with the next patch, and then that build would be totally useless from that point on. Then the next flavor of the month would come by, and that one would take a hammer to the face, and this cycle repeated ad nauseum.
I would much rather they drop it slowly, because realistically you can’t necessarily know for sure what happens to other builds when you nerf an ability that is shared, they also don’t have a convenient Dragonball style power scouter, so while they know a build is too strong, they don’t know exactly how much it needs to be brought down to be in line without nerfing it into the ground.
I’ve worked on builds that utilize them, but outside of a build specifically made to utilize Death Shroud in that way, I would agree they are pretty weak. I think it would be better if they lumped the two together, and turned the other one into a trait that made Life Blast work like the underwater version.
I think if we can take one positive thing from ANet, is that they don’t seem all that concerned about people being mad about something. I could very well see them nerfing OP builds, even with the community outrage they will get.
I disagree about High end tournaments. This game doesn’t have a large enough pool of players playing at the highest levels to be able to definitively rule out things based on meta or perceived need, when the build itself works well. It is certainly possible that minion builds might not be good enough, but how many people have actually tried a team composition with a necromancer running minions, with the person playing MM having a sufficient amount of experience running minions that he could actually use them to their “full” potential? I highly doubt that it has happened, because minions are so rare in good tournament teams that I doubt many people even know the build well enough to try to make it work.
I also think that goes for a lot of builds, there just aren’t enough people trying it to really be able to say that something can’t work (assuming it is a decent build already, I’m not trying to argue that ranger spirit builds are going to be the next big thing).
We are talking about what happens if you can heal in death shroud, in which case, every single bit of his healing support benefits you.
@Skyro While I agree that in most builds we couldn’t completely heal to full all the time, it still isn’t an unrealistic scenario that a high life siphon build could heal itself quite well while in DS.
Also, what happens when you introduce another player into the equation, and they are running a healing support build? It wouldn’t be difficult for a support build to keep our health topped off, and it isn’t that difficult to use the right spectral/DS build to keep very high LF generation.
I didn’t say that the trait isn’t still broken or that you should use it, just that it is my opinion that making a small fix is better than not fixing it at all.
DS builds can be built to tank very strongly and still do pretty decent damage. However, this isn’t one of those builds.
The problem is that you are using wells with no well CD reduction, using the 5s death shroud trait with only 1 on entry trait, using a bunch of +fury stuff in a build that can already give you 100% fury uptime (just 5s DS CD + 15 into curses does that). You also are using greater staff marks when it is obvious that you are going to want to stay in dagger main hand almost all the time.
Imo, this build just doesn’t have good synergy with itself.
Edit: also, one proc of Sigil of Rage will put your staff’s sigil on CD for 45 seconds as well, since they share CDs.
Arghh. It seems pretty inane to fix a trait only partially.
You would rather they not fix anything until they can fix everything? It is completely a point of personal preference, (no one can really be right or wrong in this), but I will take a small fix over nothing.
Lets assume here for a second that necromancers have the largest number of viable builds in the game (because I’m not going to go through the impossible attempt to prove it), and that most other classes just have 1-2 really great builds. What is easier, nerfing a few abilities across those other classes so that their other builds are now more viable, and their “OP” builds are now in line, or buffing every single non-OP build in every single class until they are on par with the OP builds? The reality is it is easier for them to trim back on a relatively small number of builds to bring them in line with the rest of the game, instead of buffing the entire game around those few builds.
To my knowledge there is no “link” to minion speeds. You are more than able to take them into heart of the mists and test it yourself against the golems though.
It is supposed to be 1200 range, in reality the 1200 range was just how far it would “track” opponents, but if you happened to hit further it would work, which was not likely to be intended. So yes, it only hitting at 1200 or shorter is most likely intended.
I think they should give us our underwater auto as a 5th ability and optional auto attack. If it is suitable underwater (where we get a much stronger kit to use it with), then I don’t see it being OP on land.
I have very rarely had Dark Path miss by something like side stepping, it is relatively fast and it homes pretty well.
In WvW, it can be really strong in zerg vs zerg fights, where you often square off from quite a distance away. Its pretty easy to catch someone, and whoever gets caught is going down hard (assuming the pull works fully, which doesn’t always happen).
I use it more in tPvP. I have it in almost all my non-ranged well builds, that way if they dodge out of the well, I just pull them back in (and its so close the only way it misses is sheer luck on their part).
Also in my DS build that uses spectral skills for huge LF generation, you can drop Spectral wall, pull them through it, DS 3 them through it again, then Dark Path back to them for 20 vulnerability, 9 seconds of chill, 3 bleeds, and 20% LF, and you are still right next to them, and besides wall, all your interrupts/chase skills will be up in 20 seconds or so.
@Rok, it depends on your build. In WvW most necromancers are using longer range abilities, in which case wells/corruptions are better suited. In 1v1 its all about what your build is. I would never use it in a condition build, but for a well build that instant pull+chill is great for stopping someone from getting away from your WoS spike. There are other uses, but they become more niche than that. It is quite a bit of fun to pull an ele who is channeling big spells though.
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•Epidemic: Do we have something called epidemic?
Congrats, no one on this forum is ever going to take you seriously.
I would keep it as a utility. 10% LF in a single skill is great.
Isn’t freeing up a utility slot much better than 10% LF every 30 seconds?
No, especially when it can be traited to 15% LF every 24 seconds, which makes it an absolutely amazing way to get quick LF, especially when gras kitten uch (edit: seriously guys?) a strong way to start off a fight (when you have the lowest LF).
I would keep it as a utility. 10% LF in a single skill is great.
Healing power in the proper necro support build will allow you to heal allies for 6-7k every 32 seconds, and another 6-7k on a separate CD when you pick one up from downed state. In addition, you can get staff 2 to give regen for 2k over 6-7 seconds, having it permanently on your frontline fighters. With Apothecary gear this still gives you close to 3k armor, and decently high condition damage so you can drop Epidemic to “support” any condition damagers, and bring the two of the three wells that blind/corrupt boons/convert conditions, depending on which area of the game you are in/what you feel you need.
So, as a dev, you would rather spend hours of your time talking to a bunch of people you are convinced have no idea what they are talking about, instead of actually working?
Face it, there is no way he could prove that he is right, admitting he is wrong wouldn’t do anything if he isn’t wrong, and any post he makes that isn’t about DS is going to garner questions about… wait for it… DS.
If at least one person says necros are fine then they must be and the rest of us need to L2P because that guy must have figured it all out…
eSports in general shows this to happen fairly often.
And even without legs he runs faster than 99% of people alive today.
Keep in mind though, the number of people who say its not up to par outweigh the people who say its fine. There is a reason why necromancer is the second least played class in the game.
Yes, everyone knows that if the majority of people say something, why, it must be true.
If its something like run dungeons, people should be honest and tell you Necro’s aren’t the most welcome class in groups.
I’ve heard this a lot from people, but I haven’t experienced it often. Does this just happen at high level fractals (which I don’t do yet) or dungeons like Arah that are harder? Because it is really rare that I encounter it in pug groups (not saying it doesn’t happen, I just don’t notice it, but maybe I don’t do hard enough dungeons to where people care). People seem to care a lot more about if you know the dungeon or not than class in my experience.
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So what IS the role of a Necro endgame then? If it’s sort of in the middle, is there one that I should lean towards?
So remember that post I made in the beginning where I said: “We aren’t bad at all, but you are going to be flooded with posts here about how we are broken.”? That is what is happening here.
Necromancers are a class based on conditions. Conditions reduce the enemies effectiveness, or increase ours against them, the exact opposite of boons. With that in mind, just go watch Nemesis’ videos, he has a stickied thread at the top of the forums where you can find his stuff. He has great videos for beginners, and it will let you watch someone who knows what they are doing and backs it up without having to watch a bunch of people bicker about how necromancers are bad here.
Terror builds are incredibly effective for Spirit watch, everyone is going to ball up around the orb holder/orb spawn and you can really cause pain both for enemies running the orb and people trying to stop your orb runner; this is also great for necros because the orb moves so slowly that your own movement speed isn’t a huge deal.
If you already have a condition ranger, then bring Epidemic, and you can go for Shaman gear (healing power/condition damage/toughness) and bring a supporty staff build on top of good condition damage. That way you can Epidemic the ranger’s target, throw down your fears for strong damage+CC, and be using Staff 2 + Well of Blood (I personally like well of blood on revival too) for a strong support/condition hybrid.
Minions are viable in sPvP, most PvE (some dungeons aren’t friendly to them), and in small setting WvW. Basically, the more AoE, or the stronger the AoE, the less viable they are, but in low AoE settings they are very good.
We are the 2nd least common class, coming in close with Engineers. We aren’t bad at all, but you are going to be flooded with posts here about how we are broken.
I suggest looking at Nemesis’ videos as an intro guide, he is really good at showing a lot that we have. Other than that, start leveling the class to 80, play around a lot, try out things that sound weird, and see what you like. Necromancers have a lot of viable builds, so as long as you get a decent idea of what you like to do, there is probably a way to make it work well, you’ll just refine it with time (and retraiting is dirt cheap, so no worries there).
Necromancers have 10 possible weapon sets, the same as Mesmer. Warriors have 19, Guardians have 12, Rangers have 11, Thieves have 7, Elementalists have 5, Engineers have 3. We are far from the lowest in that range, and the ones with more weapon sets really need the more sets.
The real trick to fighting mesmers is targeting the real one, then sticking to them like a fat person sticks to the buffet line.
There are special tricks to know above that, like using their clones to Epidemic off of, killing the right Phantasms, and knowing other things, but as long as your main goal is just murdering that mesmer quickly, you are on the right path.
For Guardians, every Necromancer build needs at least one of: Well of Corruption, Corrupt Boon, or Spinal Shivers. Save whichever you have until the Guardian gives himself the big burst of boons (I almost always save it for when I see stability), they usually do this as they get low, if you can destroy that big boon burst, then they have lost a lot of survivability. Besides that, learn their hammer and mace/shield setups, which is by far the most common (and the most viable) weapon setup, and learn when they throw up blocks, how to dodge their leap, etc. Guardian CC is actually really easy to avoid if you aren’t dead set on using dagger for damage.
For thieves, drop your AoE when they are in stealth, so: Axe 3, Scepter 3, Staff 2+3, Warhorn 5, Dagger 5. When they come out of stealth, chain together all the hard CC you have: Dagger 3, DS 3, Flesh Golem Charge, Staff 5, Warhorn 4. As you chain the hard CC, get ready for when they will try to stealth, you want to start any channeled abilities right before they go into stealth (Axe 2, Dagger 2, DS 4) because it will keep damaging them. It usually takes two stealth rotations to get them down, the first one you will be blowing all their defensive CDs, the second time is when you can hopefully finish them. And remember, move and turn around a lot, you want to make it impossible for them to easily hit your back.
Inviting people who agree? Who has disagreed with Bas and myself (the two hosts of the podcast) more than CHIPS? We invite anyone that we feel will be able to do a constructive podcast on necromancers, even if they disagree with us. In fact, many of the people we have had on disagree with us (one of the threads about it had a lengthy discussion about how we shouldn’t be so arrogant as to question someone more knowledgeable). The point of the podcast is to have a positive discussion with reasonable people about the class. We have had people talk a lot about what they don’t like about particular builds, skills, traits, or mechanics in general. At the end of the day though, we admit that no one has enough knowledge of the class as a whole to speak definitively about most things (we pretty much all agree that some signets are complete trash though).
I say that things are far better than many people want to make them out to be. There is a difference between something being workable and being perfect. But the reality is that a lot of complaints in this forum boil down to someone had a bad experience and wants to complain about it, so instead of assuming it is their fault (and most of the time it is) people instantly assume it is someone else’s fault, this path eventually leads to it being ANet’s fault. If you have any knowledge of human nature, you will realize the vast majority of people will never accept they are at fault, and will always blame the most convenient target; these forums are a perfect example of that.
Are you in hotjoins, pugging tournaments, or doing pre-mades? Because in hotjoins I’ll face level 40+ every game, but it is much more rare when I do 2 team tPvP.
Actually, pro athletes have to deal with crappy equipment and situations, even up into the Olympics. A few years back when Phelps was destroying in swimming, a competitor blamed the loss solely on the fact that Phelps had better equipment. And how many times does a team have to play in sub-par conditions, or does a player have to work with an injury that makes his performance worse? Does he complain that his finger hurts and then everyone pats him on the back and the opposing team all claps while he walks into the goal? No, unfair situations are created in professional sports all the time (steriods, cheating, difference in money/sponserships), and you either get with the program, work around it, or get out. Also, eSports and sports like Soccer, Football, Baseball, and the various other things that people can make upwards of $1 million per year are on completely different levels. And eSports players have to put up with unbalance all the time; the biggest eSport right now is LoL, and no one in their right mind would say that every champion in LoL is balanced and competitive at the top level.
Do I agree the game needs work? Of course. Does that mean we all need sit on the forums QQing until momma ANet makes it so everything is all better? No.
Some people are going to say that thieves will always win, others will say necros always win, and unless you already know the answer, chances are you won’t actually be able to tell who is right.
In reality, if you are holding all gear/situation/skill, etc equal, it comes down to builds and chance. My minion build can completely destroy burst thief builds, yet PD thieves and sometimes SB thieves will destroy me. I have other builds that can handle PD thieves really well, but get pooped on by full burst builds.
It just comes down to whose build counters the others, and if anyone gets a lucky move off.
They dropped paid tournaments because there was no point making you pay to do a tournament. It was supposed to differentiate that those were where the “good” players go, and the people still learning did free tournaments. In reality, all it did was introduce an arbitrary token cost that basically anyone who PvPed for more than a few minutes had enough of that they would never run out (I had 30 or something tickets when they stopped it).
And yes, there is a system in place. If you go into tPvP with all level 1s, you aren’t going to go against a team with all level 80s. I usually face people averaging in their mid 20s, with the rare person that is really low leveled, and the rare person that is 50s (usually paired with a low level group). I have only faced a high level team once, which was Team Paradigm way back at launch, when the hardcore PvPers were still in the same level range as the lower people.
As for how you can have this level of play: WoW has had high level of play even through ridiculously broken mechanics, LoL has a huge eSports following, even though only a very small fraction of heroes are actually viable at the top level. You realize that a trait is bugged, and work around it; you have the information that it isn’t working, so use something else.
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And the obvious lack of knowledge you have about high level tournaments proves my point.
I have never said the class doesn’t have issues, every single class in the game, including elementalists, have issues.