Stop using a singular build as the example for why another class is “better” at attrition. Thieves have a single build (P/D) that is strong at attrition, every other build you will see them with is burst damage.
Attrition is, simply speaking, how well you can drag out a fight.
All of Thieves’ attrition is based in stealth, and using dodge rolls to stay alive between stealths. Every time they are outside of stealth, they don’t have access to the things that make them “attrition”-y. PD thieves work well because while in stealth, they lose conditions, gain HP, and can deal damage pretty safely, and out of stealth they have dodge rolls to prevent getting locked down.
Necromancers get fear, chill, weakness, poison, life siphoning, DS, regen, retaliation, condition removal/transfer, blinds, cripples, immobilizes, and boon stripping/corruption. All of our CC keeps us out of range when we need to be, and in range when we want to be. Our Chill/weakness/retaliation/blind/DS slow down incoming damage, punish it when it does hit, or in the case of DS, completely nullify entire bursts. Poison and boon stripping/corruption keeps the enemy from being able to heal, mitigate damage, or deal more damage. Condition removals/transfers keep us safe from conditions, and even turn enemy condition builds into a liability. And finally, constant ticks of life siphoning, while seemingly insignificant, really add up over time. If you have minions+your own life siphoning+regen+dolyak runes (easily accomplished via staff+minions+runes), you are getting 200-300 HP per second on your own, with another 100+ HP every time a minion hits. That is a very significant amount of things to drag fights out, they are very effective (ever corrupt boon a guardian/ele?), and they are accessible.
It would be interesting to see. Even if they don’t do a ton of damage, just taking a few hits for the party (some of them get up to 20k HP traited) would still help out I would imagine.
Of course there are more at the lower levels, but there has been a significant increase in the amount of necromancers around since the patch that fixed bugs/buffed us.
It can be assumed that if you have a 10% chance to remove a boon on hit, you will remove 1 boon every 10 hits, on average. Obviously random chance doesn’t work exactly like that, but over a sustained period of time you will remove, on average, 1 boon per 10 hits. It is no different than someone who uses on-crit effects.
Yes, taking CPC in a minion build is a great idea… except it is a terrible idea because you should never be using condition damage with minions, and should be using only minions as an MM (heal excluded).
And every minion build will go 20 into Spite to get it, because it gives a bonus to power (more retaliation damage, more personal damage), more condition duration, and spite has decent 10 point traits.
I thought it was interesting they said it was brought more in line with transformations, yet realistically DS has very little in common with any other “transformation” besides that, and having different skill set.
We have plenty of viable builds. As for unable to run away, I would agree if the game didn’t have any blink skills, but with things like RTL, shadowstep, and blink, unless you get a good DS 2 hit it is unlikely they aren’t getting away.
I use Plague for when I need to tank a lot of aggro, Lich for bosses, Flesh golem for open world/trash mobs and when I don’t have use for the other 2.
Edit: and obviously Flesh Golem for MM builds.
I always knew they had decent HP, I didn’t realize that Blood Fiend with 50% HP trait will have more HP than most players will.
When talking about viable builds you have to separate the three different game modes. PvE is easy, you can do pretty much whatever you want and the only difference will be that it will take a little longer to complete dungeon runs (excluding Fractals where you need good builds).
In WvW there are the two halves of it (small and large), each has specific strong builds, but even then certain classes like Necromancer have a lot of options for each, and Warrior gets at best 100b.
PvP is where you hit a lot of issues for a lot of classes. Mesmers and Necromancers are the only two classes with decent amount of viable specs. Every other class has no more than 3 viable builds, with Warriors having 1. For example elementalists have D/D which is OP, they also have glass cannon D/D or S/D, and to a degree support is “viable” (although outclassed by guardian since a glass cannon can poop on a support ele).
Even if you are condition damage, you should be taking advantage of DS when you can. Have the ability to stack up lots of LF at the beginning of the fight, so you can use it to actually tank burst damage. It is still a very strong defensive tool, even if for a condition necro it is mostly useful for that only.
Honestly CHIPS, I wish that that [all necros knowing DS] was true, but from my experience it just isn’t. I faced one guy using my DS bunker build a week ago, this necro obviously didn’t know what he was doing, he scored 0 points in the entire tPvP match, got killed by me at least 5 times, and never was able to turn my point. One of the biggest problems was that he just didn’t leverage DS at all. He didn’t take much to stack a lot of DS in the beginning of the fight (which a 1v1 build with lower defensive stats should look at doing), and by the time he had enough to use DS, all my big bursts were down and he just used it to delay his death.
And that is a recurring theme I see in PvP; I don’t pay as much attention to fellow necros in PvE. The problem is that while we have DS from the very beginning of the game, you really aren’t forced to use it or learn it. Whereas someone like an elementalist figures out very obviously that they need to swap attunements, you can “get by” as a necro and still be ignorant of DS.
ANet devs are big boys/girls, I think they are capable of reading two opinions and not having a panic attack trying to decide which one is right. If they only read a bunch of people who picked up minions for a total of 2 seconds, they would make uninformed decisions. Over buffing something because a community doesn’t know what they are talking about doesn’t help us any more than leaving them as is.
In PvE sure, because there aren’t enough boons. However in PvP you are usually running with 4 minions + flesh golem (I separate him because of attack speed). Flesh Golem himself removes 1 condition every 10 seconds, on average. The other 4 should remove 1 condition every 2.5 attacks (of all 4 of them), and with 3-4 seconds between attacks, that is another 1 boon per 10 seconds. That is a very significant thing, considering how much certain classes like elementalists and guardians rely on boons.
Poison cloud in PvE is all about the field. That field lets you spread weakness, which is essentially a 25% reduction in damage to all PvE mobs. In PvP its all about the constant poison. Poison wrecks healing builds in PvP, if someone heals themselves while poisoned for a heal that would normally do 10k, but now is only 6.7k, you have effectively caused 3.3k damage just by having a minion die. That racks up over time very quickly.
Condition damage is bad for MMs. It is just the fact that any build that wants to run mostly minions wants to bring an axe; scepter does nothing for minions, and taking condition damage just for some poison field damage isn’t good.
They’ve said it themselves I believe. They don’t have enough programmers to do everything, so it ends up getting backed up there.
Making them scale with stats wouldn’t be good. Right now, they allow you to have 27k HP, 3.2k power, 3k armor, and still do the exact same damage as they would if you went full glass cannon. If they scaled, then they would have to nerf base stats and add in scaling, which would destroy the use of a PVT bunker MM.
Training of the Master in Death Magic would break a lot too, it would put 5 very strong minion traits into the same tree, and make it so you could never have damage and +HP on minions at the same time, without forgoing very strong Grandmaster traits.
Who brings AoE into a 1v1 fight? Besides PVT elementalist AoE hitting like a wet noodle, there is tiny amounts of AoE in the current meta for side point fights; which is where you should be as an MM necro, imo. I’ve run minions with multiple groups against a lot of people at they are my absolute best side bunker build.
Not to mention minions are single highest source of boon stripping in a meta filled with boon stacking.
Warriors are absolute trash in PvP. When I see a warrior, its kind of like seeing a little kid playing playing pretend with a wooden stick, it makes you go awwwwwwww and then walk away.
Necromancer viable builds in PvP are: Terror, support, 2-3 DS builds, power, minions, and condition-damage; at least. All of those are strong in PvP, all of them are viable, and all of them have slight variations on each other.
We are completely viable. The fact is that multiple high level PvP teams use necros, many WvW groups use necros, and necros are just fine in PvE. The idea that we aren’t viable is just flat out false.
We could also have a skill to use that Consumes life force with more damage depending on how much LF we had. We could also rename it to Adrenaline, and then have necromancers wear Heavy armor, and use a great sword…
The concept of DS is fine, the only thing they need to do is fix the UI.
They keep track of the forums, they just don’t post because I guarantee 90% of the community wouldn’t actually listen to it and just blindly throw out dozens of questions/accusations.
I don’t think they have any really strong players in the SotG things, or at least not always, because like you said, DS used only at low health is laughably terrible.
@Bhawb
And yet a Warrior whirlwind and one shot all our minions.
Yes, those super powerful warriors that are a requirement on every good PvP team… oh wait. All you need to do against a warrior is hit him with your CC before he comes in close, unless you are bad and miss your golem charge, you will win every fight with a warrior. Why? Because warriors are in a terrible place in PvP right now.
Sometimes I wish you and Bas were right. I would love to use minions.
I am right, minions are one of our best 1v1 builds, especially in the current boon-heavy meta.
MMs in PvP are fine. I used to use a bunker MM build to bunker near point. 95% of games I never died, and that point was never flipped; the other 5% were because I got stacked by 2+ players and either I played badly and died too quickly, or my team didn’t come to help.
Minions on F2-F4 is terrible. Minion builds are already strong in PvP, putting our core abilities into F2-F4 means I now have 3 more utility slots open, meaning not only can I bring shadow fiend, but I can bring corrupt boon and another utility (off the top of my head probably Spectral Grasp or Wall) to be incredibly powerful.
Minions are probably our strongest 1v1 build in PvP (at the very least our strongest commonly used build), and have become really popular in the new patch.
This is what I was referring to, I wasn’t trying to insult warriors or anything. As a Necromancer using a Dagger in PvP can you honestly say that this is 100% accurate?
Yes. I bunker near point for my tPvP team, and it is very rare that I will die. The only times I do (barring just playing bad against a thief) are when they send 2 glass cannons that can nuke me down in a second, or 3+ players.
Just because other players aren’t afraid of your dagger hitting for 2k DPS in a bunker build doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be afraid. Especially if I have minions to complement it, you will literally have a few players come to your point, get wrecked, and then you’ll see them later in the game run close to your point, look at you, and run on back to mid instead.
We can keep permanent chill/cripple/weakness, on enemies, although I’m not sure if we can do them all at the same time without team help on the weakness (via poison blast finishers).
Death Shroud can be used in support builds for DS 4 heals, it heals something like 2.5k HP to your team.
Warhorn is actually amazing for life siphon/on crit builds, and in PvP. In PvE daze isn’t quite as noticeable.
Because we all know how amazing 100b is in PvP, thats why every good team runs a warrior… oh wait.
Necromancers easily have the largest number of viable builds.
Yes. It brings pretty good utility, and does okay-ish damage in a power build.
Allowing us full use of our abilities while in a “god-mode” situation would be problematic. Adding a buff on top of that would be overkill.
It makes sense lore-wise. To my knowledge, green is the color of Grenth, the god of death and essentially supreme-bossman of all necros. It also goes in line with poison. And almost all of our green isn’t a bright Christmas green, its a dark green, usually with plenty of black.
Purple is Mesmer colors (goes with their god).
I never paid much attention to armor until 80. Just pay attention to what you pick up from mobs; if it is better than what you have on, equip it. You don’t really need to buy real armor until you are level 80, especially since you are using minions and they don’t scale with your own stats.
This is what I do with burrows in AC, which allows me to solo burrows, and for my team to then have 3-4 people attack the burrows and protect Hodgins.
Staff with 20% CD reduction, when a burrow spawns (or if you know where it will), put your marks directly on top, then drop all your wells with wells siphoning on top. That should kill a burrow (I run a glass hybrid, so high damage, if you don’t, it should just be a few auto attacks). Then the next burrow, drop every mark available, DS 4, then Plague with Blind/Chill, when that ends, throw down all your marks again, and it should be dead/close enough. For the third one, your wells should be back up or close, and repeat what you did for the 1st one.
You can actually drop burrows very quickly as a necro, the only thing I would caution is that you learn the burrows’ spawns. You do NOT want to try to solo the burrows that spawn guys that knockdown, miss a single dodge and you are screwed.
Enfeebling Blood trait just casts it on yourself, so you need to be within 240 units of what you want to hit with it.
Yep, what everyone else said is true. I am working on making a PvP support build today, as well.
Basically speaking, our support builds would revolve around Staff, with AoE utilities to increase your team’s performance. There is actually a good bit of variety you could do when supporting. Take wells for combo fields/utility support, take Epidemic to “support” your condition dealers through much stronger overall DPS and control, take Corrupt Boon to shut down boon stacking, Plague Signet for condition clearing, Well of Blood for huge allied heals, etc.
Ive always wondered, can you stack traps ontop of eachother? So when they step on one theyre really stepping on like.. 3?
Yes and no, depending on exactly what you are asking. We can stack all of our marks on top of each other, so when you seem to be stepping on one, you are stepping on 4. But we can’t stack the same type of mark on top of itself (like 2 Marks of Blood).
There are a few things that I would change with the build.
1) As a general rule, never put 2 sigils with CDs on a single weapon set. There are instances where it is okay (stacking 2 of the same on-crit sigil if you have low crit chance), but with his own sigil setup, one of his sigils on the main weapon set will never proc.
2) Blood Fiend is not good to use in PvP (just saw you said you were PvE, feel free to use Blood Fiend there). You never want to give the enemy the chance to completely shut down your healing like that. Literally all they have to do is kill the minion, and you have just siphoning to keep you alive for 20 seconds.
3) I would personally switch the off-hands in the sets to Axe/Focus Dagger/Warhorn, but that is personal preference; the ranges make more sense that way.
4) Don’t use death shroud traits in an MM build, imo. You don’t have tons of LF generation, you really need to use it solely for defensive purposes, so why would you waste a trait on something you will almost never use (life blast).
5) Use Flesh Wurm.
Staff marks can do a lot of damage to a burrow, and give quite a bit of help since they will CC the first few things out. If you put them right on top of the burrow they will damage the burrow itself, once things come out and trigger the mark.
PvE you can also Epidemic and drop fields for life steal/blindness.
I’m also surprised that no one has mentioned our Hybrid and Power builds that we currently have. What is our state currently in the game? Do you think we need more improvement on this aspect of the Necro?
We are great at conditions, something everyone has said. You have to realize that with a necromancer, every single build we make is going to be a condition build. What you are talking about is how we damage; not every build is a condition damage build.
There are people that play power builds very often, in fact many people prefer them. Hybrid builds are also very strong because we can pretty flawlessly transition between direct damage and condition damage because of our condition application, and the way that even our “condition” weapons have direct damage aspects. They aren’t mentioned because those are all specific builds we can do, they are all just separate pieces of a necromancer. Necromancers overall, however, are all about conditions.
As for builds, I honestly believe that is a community issue. Necromancer builds have proven to require a bit of creativity (like the Mr. Frost and Terror builds show). You need to decide what you want to do (a role to fill), how you want to do it, and then the specifics to make it work. Necromancers, in reality, have a lot of variety to the builds we can use effectively, more so than many other classes, it just takes a lot of effort to make those builds; whereas other classes have very limited options, but it is very obvious how to put the build together.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Yep, even if you have only 1 HP, go into Death Shroud, and take 10000000000 damage, you’ll be completely fine. No damage done while in Death Shroud will carry over, which is why, like War Mourner said, we can jump from any height. As long as you are in Death Shroud when you hit the ground, you will live and take no damage to your HP.
I don’t understand why so many people think this is the case.
Just because it applies vulnerability it is designed for minions? What about the fact that it applies retaliation on yourself? This seems like a wasted ability on a minion master, since a large majority of the time, your minions are taking hits and you are not. Not to mention Ghastly Claws having no synergy with minions.
Furthermore, minions are Utility skills with effectiveness only being increased by traits. I don’t think ANet wants minion masters to be tied to any specific weapon sets.
Even if we assume for a second that the Axe is the weapon designed for minion masters, my proposed changes could only make the Axe better for a Minion Master, not worse.
For PvE, you are correct, most of the time mobs will attack your minions. PvE is only a part of this game, and for the other part, PvP, retaliation is an amazing way to punish people that want to take advantage of one good way to counter MMs: killing the Necro. When you get hit for ~400 every time you attack the necro, it makes things much harder on you, plus the cripple synergizes with the cripples your minions will be putting out. It is, by and far, the best weapon for MMs, and seems pretty much designed for minions, along with the Focus which has great minion synergy.
I don’t disagree your changes wouldn’t be okay for Axe, my statement was a general one; stop trying to turn axe into something that it isn’t. It isn’t meant to be a long range power weapon. It is built around control with CC, support for direct damage via vulnerability stacks, retaliation to punish attacks, and Ghastly Claws for great power build damage.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
We have plenty of strong fields (dark, light, poison, spectral, all very strong fields), we just aren’t going to be the ones to take advantage of them.
There is a chill build, I’m just not sure if it is for PvE or not.
Because no other class can start a game with 40k HP?
1) Yes and no. For certain things it is considered healing (poison I believe) for others it won’t count (it won’t count for on-heal effects). There are some siphons that have healing power coefficients, they are just small. The only point of having healing on a necro at all is if you are playing a support build with staff and Well of Blood. I would never suggest using healing with minions; you can get away with it in PvE because it doesn’t require min/maxing, but in PvP it isn’t optimal.
2) For an MM, you want Axe/something (usually focus) and then either dagger/something-else (usually warhorn) or staff. Scepter with minions isn’t very good, it doesn’t bring good synergy with them, and investing in condition damage on an MM isn’t good.
3) Use power build/defensive stats (no healing power), go 20 in Spite, 20 or more in Death Magic, 20 or more in Blood Magic, and you should be pretty set. Don’t use Blood Fiend outside of PvE, bring Bone Minions, Bone Fiend, Flesh Wurm, and Flesh Golem.
Heya Bhawb,
I do understand that we excel in manipulating and controlling our conditions and to some extent the players around us. That’s what I love in being a Necromancer. But do you think it is enough for players and other classes to “Need” us in the current Tpvp, WvW and PVE meta?
In the current tPvP meta we are actually very strong, most people just don’t realize it because there are relatively few good necros out there. The meta in tPvP is heavily towards boons; and we have the strongest access to boon stripping/corrupting. It makes us insanely good near-point bunkers right now because with the right build, your opponent almost never has boons, which is a bit of an issue for them if they are an elementalist that relies on boons for a lot.
In WvW I would say we are great, and definitely needed in coordinated groups for Epidemic spam, for the fields we can put down, and a bit of other utility we can bring (plague signet for more condition removal from allies). We just aren’t hugely common because you only need so much Epidemic’s flying around.
PvE I don’t think is competitive to really “need” any of anything. It makes certain things easier if you have X class for Y path, that is pretty much it outside of Fractals, which I just don’t know well. However I have talked to other necros who have had great success with Fractals (I think Nemesis said he got to the 30s-40s in fractals).
We excel at conditions. Note that this does not have anything to do with conditions that damage. We have, by far, the most access to conditions overall of any class in the game. In fact, barring the dagger, every weapon we have has at least 2 conditions, and every weapon set possible has at least 3 conditions (dagger+focus or warhorn), with many weapons having more (staff has 4 + condition transfer, scepter has 3 + at least 2 from offhand).
What do most of our utility skills do? More stuff to do with conditions. Corrupting boons into conditions, turning conditions into boons, 1 minute bleeds, taking conditions from allies in the area. In fact only 2 spectral skills and 2 signets have nothing to do with conditions, out of 20 utilities. Those 4 abilities together are about life stealing or life force, minor necromancer mechanics.
Even 2 out of 3 elites have great access to conditions, with one of them just being a giant swirly cloud of conditions.
Necromancers are, hands down, the kings of conditions. It is our main spot in the game. We also have the best access to boon removal of any class as a nice little bonus.
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;08c3-0-kHkD0s3oI-K0;9;4J-TJ-18;229A16;3k;0BJ
This is a good generic build. You will notice that I left out gear and main hand sigils. Gear is flexible depending on what you want to accomplish. As long as it has some combination of Power/Precision/Toughness/Vitality/Crit Damage you are fine, just be sure you are not getting any condition damage (it is very weak for the build). I personally use all PVT gear for bunkering, some people use Power/Precision/Crit Damage for killing bunkers.
Main hand sigil will depend on your build. I use on swap effects because I have PVT gear and terrible crit chance. If you are using Precision gear you can use sigils like strip boon on crit.
Runes are similar; go for things that boost the stats you want. I use Dolyak personally.
http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=;08c3-0-kHkD0s3oI-K0;9;4J-TJ-18;229A16;2WkF7B;1OZG5OZG56gq
That is my specific build. Note that you will have higher stats in WvW than that because those are sPvP gear stats, plus you have access to food.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)