I’ve played minions in PvP almost exclusively since beta. The melee minions sometimes screw up, but it is incredibly rare.
Only in hotjoins do you end up having any sPvP that doesn’t heavily involve PvP, and that is just because people will run around capping in a circle. In tournaments, every point is going to be occupied, and you are going to be fighting for a fair amount of the time.
WvW is PvE mixed with PvP. You cannot possibly win WvW unless you play the PvE aspect of it.
So sPvP is the closest thing to “pure” PvP there is in this game.
I have no idea what parsing is, but this game does have a combat log that will give you how much damage you dealt with X ability.
Well I know what I’m doing over the next hour or so.
Wait… did you just say 100b was an OP build? I’d just edit that part out if you want people to take you seriously.
Minion AI is okay. It could use some work, but 95% of the time your minions will attack, they just need to fix it so that they don’t get as confused against mesmers and thieves going in and out of stealth.
Everything else here was just… no.
I read all the threads in the Necro forums, if you post asking for an invite here I’ll send one your way.
Its the Holy Duo, DPS (warriors)/Support (mesmer time warp).
In a staff/well ranged support build, condition damage, in a bunker/support DS build, power.
And since you probably don’t want to be using a frontline DS build in WvW, go with staff ranged support and condition damage.
Nope. To my knowledge (and I could be totally wrong), originally traits were not tiered like they are now. So ANet had to tier them, which is where you get some silly things.
It does to the healing you gain from those siphons, not the damage they do.
Edit: I’m not sure if it works to the healing done to other people though.
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Plague form is just a stronger version of what we can already do. There needs to be some way to help us get away from a fight more than just dropping a bunch of marks and running away.
I don’t think necros are at a disadvantage in a majority of situations, I think they are at a disadvantage in 1v1 in WvW against the common 1v1 classes, which I think are largely contrived scenarios (WvW doesn’t seem meant to have 1v1s, it seems build around varying sizes of groups from 5+).
That said, I do still hope they do something about mobility in the current meta. It really just is too strong in PvP and WvW. I think they should give us some kind of blink or RTL style ability to disengage a fight, and I recall them saying that a profession was getting a portal soon (fingers crossed).
You won’t base an argument off of sPvP, but you will base it off of a game mode with culling, NPCs, and rarely any sense of fairness? That is why I base more of my arguments of PvP off of an sPvP environment, because if you really want accurate comparisons in WvW, you need to completely constrain a ton of variables that will never really be constrained that way in reality.
In sPvP you can assume that even encounters are not just possible, but likely. 1v1s on equal footing are very common, in fact in near point bunkering it is the main thing you will encounter. In WvW, the only time a fair encounter will happen is if both people are level 80, with the same gear levels, food, no NPCs to help, nowhere to run and hide (like a tower), no running away because there are 50 people coming soon. It is incredibly rare that you will actually get fair encounters in WvW, and so you can’t really base an argument off of it. You can certainly argue who is the best in such an environment (thieves), but that doesn’t make them a better class, it means they are better at abusing the unfairness of the situation.
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@Krav, you countered my point that a stealth burst thief that can do high damage and get out isn’t as prevalent in tournaments because they can’t do what they can in WvW, by posting a video of a non stealth thief, with basically no burst damage? Its like saying trying to prove minion master necromancers are amazing in WvW zergs by posting a video of a conditionmancer.
@Chips, my point was that if you introduced a mechanic that made it super easy to snare an RTL elementalist from getting away, you possibly introduce a mechanic that totally poops on two classes entire way of surviving. It would be like if ANet gave someone an ability that removed even non-boon buffs, and that ability also worked on Death Shroud. So someone could just pull us out of death shroud whenever they wanted, completely negating our main defense.
I do agree that snaring skills are useless if they don’t snare, it is why I’m really worried about the immobilize thing, I was just trying to make the point that being able to lock down everyone could introduce balance issues.
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I honestly don’t see how the holy trinity really made things more difficult in an engaging way. Of course you can make things difficult for the sake of difficulty, but if you want to make things difficult in a fun way (like interesting mechanics that you need to master) you don’t need to restrict yourself to the old trinity.
As a condition necro, I can tell you the ability to dodge out of roots would make my month. Getting rooted by a ranger is instant death when you don’t deal enough direct damage to kill the roots and your condition clears are on cooldown/buried behind other conditions.
It is also a huge nerf to immobilize and any build that relies on it (well builds), and is an indirect buff to classes that have lots of endurance regen. You now only have warhorn’s daze to try to keep people in your wells, since they can just roll out of the well with immobilize on.
Also, that thief example only works in WvW because of culling, otherwise thieves would be far more prevalent in tournaments because they could murder a player, get out, get their CDs, and come back. But the reality is that the only reason they can do that in WvW is because of the bonus “stealth” they get from culling. If it wasn’t for that, the thief would get murdered when they came out of stealth, which is what happens in tournament team fights.
Note about how Necros should be able to lock down even RTL eles: the problem is that for some classes, they are balanced around using things like stealth and blinks for survivability, namely thieves and mesmers. While it would be nice to lock down an RTL ele, it is somewhat problematic to introduce that ability without really hurting how thieves and mesmers can perform against necros.
I was actually really concerned by what they said in the SotG though, about dodging while immobilized.
Yeah, I use full Cleric for that build.
For the condition damage, you need to remember that we only have access to 3 damaging conditions (fear, bleed, poison) without the help of another class.
I remember it healing for ~660 in my build with ~1200 healing power.
You need to realize that for a necro, our conditions are a lot more involved than just stacking bleeds. Like Pendragon said, longer conditions like chill, poison, weakness, etc. all really hurt the enemy in PvP, especially since no one has enough cleanses to be able to cleanse everything; you have to choose what to cleanse, and few people choose to cleanse non damage conditions because of the threat of damage.
Yeah you don’t play WvW very much. This isn’t how WvW works at all. At least not in the top 3 tiers.
Seriously, since when do people solo cap keeps and towers? Who solo caps camps? I get the impression you’ve lost what we’re talking about some where.
You can solo cap camps and small teams can take towers. Solo in general in WvW is for fun, nothing more. You aren’t doing objectives, you aren’t helping your team, at best you are just doing it for the fun of it. You are that guy who plays like its TDM when you are on Capture the Flag basically.
ANet isn’t going to balance the game around an aspect of the game that people started doing solely for fun. Its like if they started balancing the game around Costume Brawl.
Most dungeons have areas where you need to defend against loads of trash mobs. Even when I’m running in rare MF gear with the only defense being 20 in Blood and Death magic, I am consistently the longest person to last. Why? Because of 1k heals + full death shroud every 10 seconds. Literally, you can go into DS, wait for it to fully run out, and by the time its off CD it will be full again (note only in trash mob situations). That is pretty significant.
No one is talking about sPvP. There is a reason very few people play sPvP any more.
I already said why leaving fights was stupid in WvW objectives. You give the enemy team free supply, free siege, free keeps, etc. So to change it; congrats, you left the fight so now you have to siege your own tower, or congrats, you left a supply camp so the enemy team has a brand new golem that they didn’t have to do anything for. Its worse in WvW than sPvP because a flip takes a hell of a lot more time to reverse, whereas in sPvP it is just a few points.
Congrats, you gave the enemy team 10 extra seconds worth of points, plus the time you wasted in the first fight, and however long it takes you to actually finally kill them. If you count wasting a minute to take a single point that is going to be recapped pretty easily, a win, then I think we have different views of how to accomplish objectives.
@Chips, I think the issue isn’t snaring classes, the issue is that there are three classes that are essentially immune to snares (thieves, eles, mesmers). Any other class we really can snare and kill, but those three have far too much instant movement/stealth to snare.
I have used a support build in PvP with DS. It was bunker/support, using high healing power with WoB, MoB, 100% ret uptime, some weakness, and using the two healing for DS (transfusion and heal on leaving DS).
I enjoy it, it is good for team fights at mid because you heal for a ton, any attack on you hits the enemy for 400, and you can bunker pretty well with it. I don’t know if I would suggest it for PvE though, a staff/well based support build would work better there.
Securing an objective, even for a short amount of time, can help flip things. Last night we ran around in WvW flipping supply camps because you can easily flip a camp, build a golem, WP the golem back to a safe area, and move on to another camp. If an enemy runs away from that objective, we get a free golem; regardless of if they get the camp back in a few minutes.
Walls and Keeps are another example, even if only flip the keep or tower for a few minutes, it takes the enemy a fairly good amount of time to come back and recap it. Running away from objectives doesn’t work well, even if you can flip them back easily; it is just a slightly better alternative to wiping and having to walk all the way back and flip it again.
I don’t agree that we have to drop damage to bring utility, especially considering how easily we can play full glass necros without dying. You can pretty easily keep up permanent weakness and poison without losing any DPS, and close to permanent chill; just by bringing staff and scepter/dagger.
To OP: no point in ranting about a class that you have very little experience in. You can’t say our skills are useless when you are level 20 and haven’t even unlocked half of them yet, and have a whole 10 out of 70 trait points to use.
I do quite a bit.
I see epidemic but when in tspvp, i dont find it to be as universally good, seeing as i find myself in a lot of smaller fights where people dont always stand close together (or its just 1on1). Its not bad, but i dont think its overly incredibly either in this mode.
PvP outside of organized group play is just TDM with 3 big circles telling people where to go to kill people.
In group play, a conditionmancer will run with a group of 3 others to mid for fights. You want to specifically look for that big group fight because Epidemic can tag everyone on their team with 15 bleeds and everything else thats been stacked on that one target. And that forces everyone to start popping condition removal, which means in 15 seconds when epidemic is back up, no one is going to have the removal to stop the new huge stack of conditions.
At the moment attrition based opponents are like an encounter you can just skip in a dungeon! :P
This is absolutely true, only in WvW, and only when you are roaming. In PvE mobs don’t skip you. If you are trying to defend a supply camp and are getting wailed on by a necro, “skipping the encounter” means you lose the supply camp, which is a win for the necro. If you are defending a tower or a keep, you can’t just skip the encounter and let them take your keep. In PvP you can’t just decide you don’t need to hold that point anymore and run away because a necro can’t hold you down.
That is the one thing keeping mobility from completely destroying this game; objectives. If this were TDM, then yes, mobility would be far and above better than everything else because you couldn’t get locked down to die, and you could catch up with anyone trying to run away. But this isn’t TDM, almost all PvP in this game (besides running around killing things in WvW) is objective based. If you run away from the objective, you lose, period.
Bhawb, I did not see where the guide recommened sigils. I elected to put peril and leeching on axe/focus and force/leeching on dagger/dagger. I believe the CD on leeching should coincide with the CD on weapon swap. I do not feel I have any better options for mainhand dagger since my crit is <10%. I think off-hand dagger is a must at my level for condition removal since I do not have the trait allowing minions to remove conditions.
I use the leeching on swap on both sets, and +cripple duration on both sets, but I use a warhorn on my dagger main-hand set.
I use Consume Conditions in PvP, in PvE I use staff.
Also, just drop Locust off your bar when you are about to get in combat.
@Phira: bunker = tank, tanks exist in PvE.
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I always run WvW and PvE without any defensive stats. If you are paying attention to your positioning you don’t need them (unless you are using dagger).
1) Drop signet of the locust. Feel free to swap it in during PvE when you need to run places, but it shouldn’t be an official part of your build, it is going to drop your DPS by a pretty significant amount, and one extra minion will far outheal it. In PvP MMs are terrible roamers (imo) so you don’t really need the speed.
2) In PvP, drop the staff traits for minion ones. In PvE its fine because of the utility and AoE damage, but in PvP you are only wanting single target damage, and your staff will fill the role of a utility weapon for the fear/condition transfer/poison+chill.
3) Drop the carrion gear, only use Axe/Focus. Staff will give you condition transfer and the weakness is good, but not as good as what Focus gives. Condition damage is bad with MMs, you either want to run full PVT, or some combination of P/V/T/Prec/Crit%.
4) In PvP, drop the Blood Fiend. In lowbies it will be fine, but the higher up you get the better Consume Conditions gets, because they can’t just kill a mob to prevent 90% of your healing.
Because this is a fantasy game and we WANT fancy frills and doodads. I can throw a blanket over my head in real life for a robe, I want cool fancy crap in game.
Spectral wall doesn’t block projectiles though.
Oh I agree, my DS build is specifically for tPvP side point bunkering in small fights. It is a very specific thing in an area that doesn’t need much flexibility at all. I would agree that it being 20 just isn’t really worth it unless you are using 2-3 spectrals, or spectral armor (where it takes like 18 seconds off).
Yeah, I know how much people just hate permanent regen and 6k healing, along with plenty of life steal/blind fields and an elite that basically lets you face-tank every mob in the game at once.
Necros have plenty of team support.
All it does is cast Enfeebling Blood on top of yourself, which is a separate ability. They could certainly reduce the durations and CDs equally, but I think as is is best. This way, they can have long duration bleed/weakness, which means you don’t need to spam DS to keep it up. It certainly wouldn’t break anything either way, though.
I use it in my DS build and I enjoy it, but I only use it because I happened to be going 15 in that line anyway, and the 5 points were best spent there than anywhere else. I’m not sure its worth 20 points any other time though.
Save everything that isn’t AoE for when he comes out of stealth, then spam as much CC as you can (daze, knockdown, etc). and murder him. They drop really quickly if you can chain a bit of CC.
Because spammable permanent weakness and bleeds is too much. Even with the CD, its 66% weakness uptime.
Don’t be in that range with a glass warrior unless you have a full daze/fear/knockdown chain going and know you can kill them before they kill you.
If you are running dagger/warhorn and axe/focus, you will have 2 immobilizes, 1 knockdown, 3 cripples, 1 chill, and 1 fear to keep people away. How are you letting them sit in range long enough for it to matter how much damage they do?
1 condition removal + 2 conditions to boons every 5 seconds is definitely OP.
Bone Minions and Flesh Wurm can both be killed and recycled in between fights, and Flesh Golem will regen outside of combat, so only Bone Fiend will not be at full HP. And since he is ranged, if I aggro at his max range then most elementalist AoE is too small to hit him. Same with Flesh Wurm.
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I know, I use that build right now, it also gives permanent fury. With what he is saying right now though, you can do it without even traiting. The traiting would just allow a 1.3k Heal, 2 condition cleanses per 5 seconds, one of which turns into a boon.
DS builds also still allow for pretty high DPS (you can keep 60% crit chance with 30% crit damage in sPvP) on top of all the defensive boons.
Edit: actually you would have 3 condition cleanses, two of them turning into boons, every 5 seconds.
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I would remove the things that allow things on enter and leave, and keep them at just enter or just leave, otherwise the 5s CD death shroud would be far too strong as a boon tool.
I feel like the chill might be a bit too strong, and the heal seems like it would be very strong. I know elementalists have a similar ability, but I’m not sure that it would translate as well for us when we can go out of DS every 5 seconds.