Guild Wars 2

To preface my opinion, I’m a sucker for puns. That said, I like the name.

Except that people with personal sites probably want more traffic to their site, so they post it there. So long as you are able to find these things with a google search I don’t think the Wiki really needs everything.

You just have to give us some time :P

What do you want to do in WvW? For example, are your running with big groups or small ones (or solo)?

The axe was very obviously made for Minions, imo. A lot of the “fixes” revolve around turning it into a power weapon, which it isn’t designed for, which is why I agree that if they were to try to give us longer ranged power options, or cleave options, that it should be on a new weapon; not by changing a weapon that works very well for a main type of build we have.

I love our traits. They require creative solutions to things. You don’t just go 20 traits into Soul Reaping like Mesmers do for their equivalent tree. There are a lot of unique ways to build a necro because of our trees, and while I agree certain things could definitely use changes (or could be substituted for another weapon), I think overall our traits are much better than other classes I have played.

I just need to make the video so I can reference it instead of remembering :P

What I usually do is start the fight with Axe auto then Axe 2 (in PvE it doesn’t do much, but in PvP a lot of people will waste a dodge). I can’t specifically remember of Focus 4 aggros or not, but I plan to be making a video about it sooner or later.

Takarazuka.3025:

It’s a bit silly that we have to do a very specific attack to trigger minion AI to take notice. Not sure if intended or buggy, but it should be any ability we use on a target triggers the AI to start attacking.

I think it is intentional. They are delayed if you use one single target ability so you can pull mobs. The second single target ability will cause immediate aggro from them to the target. AoE doesn’t count because they’d have to guess who you are trying to attack, and that would be messy.

Omni, let auto attack hit twice (not just one auto attack of 2 hits, but 2 auto attacks of 4 hits) and they will aggro. Don’t use any AoE or non-single target abilities to make them aggro, it doesn’t work.

Are you talking about Downed state 3? Because we definitely do not create a death nova when downed, even with the trait for death novas.

I just tested it (I wasn’t sure about actives), it doesn’t work on actives but does work on summon skills.

It makes the summon skills 20% faster, I’m not sure about their active.

It does work for Bone Minions if you blow them up on purpose, but it doesn’t work for Flesh Wurm (and I don’t think it works for Blood Fiend, but I’m not sure).

Necromancers rely on smaller stacks of long duration bleeds, Elementalists tend for small duration high stacks. We are not a condition damage class, we are a condition class.

Not scaling with gear is the best part of minions. It means I can wear full PVT gear for 3.2k attack, 27k HP, and 3k armor, and I’m still doing comparable damage to people with significantly less defense.

3) I would say yes to the jump, but I think letting it give LF would be too much (just seeing as the current “balance” of the weapon does not have any LF gain from 3). I’m also not sure how necessary it would be, seeing as you can do this with DS 2 already, although I like the idea.
5) I thought Haunt already had AoE? (I rarely use him)

I do wonder why they originally changed Dark Path from a teleport to a projectile jump, because it would likely be the reason why they wouldn’t change it back. But overall I think I would agree to these, we should have more reliable ways to stick to people.

Epidemic. That’s really all that needs to be said.

Talentless.5708:

Spectral skills are underrated because the necro community is under-skilled.

I chuckled.

@Chips:
I would agree spectral armor doesn’t have something you will need in zerg WvW. But all you need to do to hit everyone ikittenerg with wall is place it right in front of them. Its not like they are running complex maneuvers, they are running in a straight line. Grasp is fine for WvW if you are running a power build, pull a person out of their zerg and he’ll die faster than you can drop your wells. And walk has tons of applications in WvW.

Minion AI isn’t perfect, I readily admit that Bone Minions and Flesh Golem go full kitten every once in a while, but overall it is very reliable. I have next week off, I’m planning to make a video showing the AI patterns, and I guarantee a bunch of people here will completely ignore video evidence and say minion AI sucks.

We can all talk about how terrible most of our signets are, we can all talk about how spectral skills are incredibly niche, everyone knows that well builds can be unreliable because they have huge CDs. The reality is everyone is familiar with the faults of necromancers, come on this forum and pick out a random thread, and you will be bashed over the head with both real faults and completely made up faults. We don’t need more people who are pessimistic about every single little imperfection in the class, and that is why I don’t mention our faults often; you can find 50 other people who are more than happy to write page after page about it.

The reason I still come on these forums is because I have people who genuinely learn from the posts I make, and I keep posting with the hope that I can make the game more enjoyable for others.

Death Shroud very definitely is affected by vitality, the only real question is by how much.

We already have life stealing, if you go 15 into Blood Magic you get decent HP per crit, completely independent of healing power. But again, they want proactive attrition, and they want counterplay to that attrition besides just flat out burst builds. Huge life siphoning is counter to their design philosophy in this game (although you can actually have very strong life siphoning builds already).

Again, a 6 second fear, Epidemic’d to a full team of 5, damage or not, is OP. That is 6 seconds of very difficult to avoid hard CC, on relatively short CDs. An entire team would need to save every stun break they had just to deal with a single necro. The other classes get longer fears because they don’t have the access to fear that we do, nor the ability to make it as powerful as ours is.

Just because you don’t like the current fear mechanic, doesn’t mean that it is broken and should be changed.

@Zinwrath, I have spent lots of time testing minion AI, I have shared my results with other necros who have confirmed my findings; the fact is that minion AI is reliable.

AI is fine,yes Flesh golem has some issues on a very rare occasion, but the reality is that it works 95% of the time.

I don’t think healing should become a big part of life siphoning. It is against their design philosophy (they want proactive defense, not reactive, plus too much life stealing becomes a source of direct damage immune to toughness), and it shouldn’t be a main focus of the class. Even in GW1, the only builds that really had access to huge life stealing were Touch Rangers, otherwise necromancers really just had some side-life stealing to supplement HP, which is what we have now.

Increasing fear becomes insanely dangerous with Terror. A single 6 second fear means 6k damage from a terrormancer, along with 6 seconds of free damage. And guess what, you can epidemic Fears. Right now, it isn’t viable because by the time you epidemic the fear is gone, but with a 6 second fear you could fear entire teams for 3-6k damage, with two abilities, along with hard CC for the full duration. Its just too much.

Because unless you are doing 1v1 just for fun, doing 1v1s in WvW are pretty useless. You aren’t doing anything for your server, and because of the fact that your opponents will rarely be fully geared/fooded up, and how mobility means most people will just run from fights, it is hardly a reliable test of skill. Plenty of fun, still, but really only for fun.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/ has PvP gear.

I use a build that focuses on DS for boons as well, but I am interested how much damage you do. Also, besides boon stacking, what do you actually use the build for (role in a team)?

A few reasons. First, for MMs, obviously there is no desire for them. For conditionmancers, you just have no use for grasp/wall, and would only want walk/armor for defensive purposes. But because you are saving DS exclusively for defense as a conditionmancer it really isn’t that needed.

Power builds, however, use spectrals fairly often. I use all spectrals on my DS build. Wall + grasp is a great combo that forces them through the wall, and chills them, plus it bring them in range of your dagger. Or you can use DS 2 to close the distance, and then save grasp for if they try to run out of your wells.

Overall, spectrals are fine abilities, it just tends to be that people have something better to run, and with how underused DS is as an offensive tool, few people need the huge LF gain spectrals can give.

I’m not sure if Death Shroud “saves” your auto attack, but you can reassign your auto attack to anything you want, although some things like ground targets don’t function properly.

Yes, Symbolic was responding to something we were asked in a thread, and also a build I personally use, and wanted his opinion about. I believe he stated later (maybe off the air) that he doesn’t necessarily believe it is a bad thing to use it for swapping, just that he personally doesn’t do it because he really wants it up for defense, and that using it for swapping means you need to be careful and not let it be on CD when you need it.

They moderate the forums (you will notice posts get removed every so often) well. I think you mean devs, who I imagine still read the forums, just never post due to fear of public lynching.

That description gives exactly what necromancers are capable of doing…?
1) We have highest HP
2) We don’t have escapes or damage reduction
3) We have other ways (LF/DS, weakness, soft CC, healing, condition transfer, blinds, chills, etc) to win attrition
4) We have poison on 2 of 4 main weapons (multiple)
5) We can easily do condition and raw damage at once (why hybrid necros work so well)
6) Daze + fears to interrupt
7) Every single necro weapon has at least 1 way to disable mobility, with every set having 2.

I would say that description was perfectly reasonable?

Power builds are fine (that isn’t to say they couldn’t use some flavor). The issue is that most people want a necro to have the exact same thing as other classes, stop trying to make every class the same. Necro long range power build = traited DS.

I like what the greatsword has for everything except its auto attack. It makes absolutely no sense for a necro to have an auto attack that doesn’t give LF or conditions, it doesn’t fit the class at all, all it does is give us a warrior greatsword with a necromancer paint job.

I like the idea of Death shroud having a condition auto attack, and also letting us see our HP (which at the time is Life Force), boons, and conditions.

It is a natural cycle of forums. You start reading, then get super excited and post a lot of huge wall-o-texts, then realize no one listens, and they get shorter. The podcast just accelerated all that, so now I feel like a weary old man when I read the forums.

1) Minions are not pets. If you want a build that focuses around baby-sitting a cute furry AI creature that can do a lot of damage, this isn’t the class to do it with.
2) Minions are balanced fine and as long as you pay attention to how they aggro (hint: just auto attack your target) you’ll be fine.
3) They work great in PvE, just beware that in some dungeon fights they get in big trouble because of specific boss mechanics. They also have a lot of trouble in Fractals 10+ because of agony.

We have a lot more versatility than other classes, we just don’t have the “standard” simple builds everyone looks for, and therefore no one tries to explore for more creative ways to accomplish something.

I don’t think we need a cleave auto attack. Not that I would mind one, but it doesn’t seem to be what they envision the necro as. What I would really like to see is a weapon with PBAoE control using cripple/chill/fear/weakness. I could see them doing this in a future expansion, where they add a few weapons to every class, keeping the overall weapon balance (warriors with tons of weapon choices, elementalists/engis with half a handful), and giving people a few new, yet balanced, choices.

Just stop with the Scythe idea, it doesn’t make sense to have a scythe when staves are already using scythe skins and have scythe on auto, and it doesn’t make sense for our long range support/utility weapon to have a melee cleave.

Andele.1306:

I hope that you know i have to hate you for this part if you do it in a organized group. that isnt going for casual farm…

People actually play PvE other than to casual farm? (Fractals not included, I’m level 2 there). I haven’t found a dungeon hard enough to warrant a real armor set, or in the case of CoE, that armor would actually make a big difference.

I agree that things should be enjoyable, but I don’t agree on your assessment of the customer base. The paying customer base is located almost exclusively in PvE, with maybe some people who exclusively WvW paying a bit.

WvW is balanced enough except in the very top tier servers. If you are not in the top 1-2 tiers, you will not regularly run into highly coordinated groups, and you can pretty much do what you want. I often WvW on my alts, which are all level 2-20, and do fine just sitting in the back and spamming ranged abilities. I am significantly weaker than what I could be, obviously, but I can still mess around and enjoy it.

PvE is fine right now. That isn’t to say that everything is perfect, but looking at the general population, there isn’t enough min/maxing needed to really worry about what happens when you push classes to their limits. This is why you can run dungeons in greens, or rare MF gear (like I do) and be fine.

The reality is that balance tends to be pretty unimportant at lower levels. I totally agree that balance should exist in the different modes of the game (WvW, PvE, and sPvP), however there is no way to make an elementalist as easy to play as a warrior. I mean, yesterday I took my level 7 warrior, which I had never used in PvP before, made a 100b build, and was stomping in PvP. Its an insanely easy build to use, even for someone totally unskilled at warriors like I am; you lock someone down and press 2. There is just no way that you can make an elementalist have that kind of accessibility without completely pooping on the balance at higher levels. And you cannot deny that balance is more important at the highest levels of play.

The other problem is that outside of sPvP, the environments are not necessarily friendly to non-homogeneous balance. And the fact is that if something isn’t truly competitive in a meaningful way, balance won’t be as important.

I typed it out pretty plainly. I personally don’t use them in WvW because I am usually in larger groups, but minions are still an incredibly solid 1v1 build.

In general, absolutes are used because when making a point, you tend to want to draw things to their extremes. For example, if you want to make a point of how good Death Shroud is, you wouldn’t talk about it when it is in an untraited form in a condition build with no on-crit bleeds, you would talk about a fully traited Death Shroud that can keep 100% fury, 60% retaliation, 66% weakness/2 bleeds, and removes a condition every 5 seconds.

We can definitely try to qualify things when possible, but in general people use absolutes to make their point (it sounds much more convincing); it is a strong speaking tool, to make your argument more impactful. Otherwise, it sounds really weak if you say, “Well, X is pretty good, but then again there are a lot of other things that you can do, and it doesn’t work so well for A, B, and C, so its really just a playstyle.” Just make sure you don’t take them the wrong way, and we will try to qualify when it is appropriate

Yeah, I was trying to make it as basic as possible, there are, of course, a lot of ways you can vary, depending on what your build needs.

Yeah, I had heard from others on the podcasts that I have some interference. I’ll have to see if the other mic I have is better, or if I can get a new one.

I’ll need to look into that. I’ve used this mic a lot before, I’m wondering if it is dieing or something from use, since I have used it for duo-queueing in LoL for half a year, and my partner has never mentioned something. But I will definitely see what I can do about that, I’d like to think I’m actually saying things important enough you should be able to hear them

I had read a post a while ago from a guy who used it to keep up AoE weakness in Fractals. I would think within a setting like that, it could be very strong, however I can’t imagine it being all that great in standard PvE because you really don’t need to worry about that.

Necromancers have some of the strongest 1v1 builds out there, including hard counters to the biggest threat in the current meta; elementalists. Minion builds are incredible in 1v1, powermancer well builds are incredibly strong (just don’t miss), and DS builds can be, depending on what you trait for. Condition builds are also very strong against mesmers, who often don’t take enough condition removal to deal with us, and who get pooped on by a single staff 4 transfering all that confusion they worked so hard to put on you.

The problem is that most people think of necromancers solely within the bounds of AoE condition damage via Epidemic, or ranged support via staff and ranged wells. Those builds are amazing, in team settings, but terrible 1v1. Anyone that thinks necromancers are the worst class in the game are flat out ignorant.

Not that I don’t agree that players shouldn’t argue with those who are more skilled as a habit, but high ranked players are just people too. Just because a “pro” or high ranked player believes something to be true, doesn’t mean it necessarily is. I think this is even more the case in a game like GW2, where even the best are far from having had enough experience to know everything.

That isn’t to say that I, who have played all of 1 hour on a mesmer, should go around pulling stuff out of nowhere, but that many things are still very open to debate.

“Knights” is a prefix, essentially. It will correspond with gear that has the same three stats.

Dagger/warhorn is great for power builds. Axe/Focus is for minion builds. Scepter/Dagger is for condition damage. And staff really can go either way, it has decent damage either way, but you’ll be taking it for utility, not damage.

Bone minions are the 2nd best minion skill in the game in MM builds, on the condition that you blow them up. If you don’t, they are the worst minion skill we have.

For gear, do not use condition damage stats. You will always have better damage using an Axe/Focus and using some kind of combination of power/prec/toughness/vit/crit damage. The problem with condition damage is that in staff builds, the damage increase is terrible, it just isn’t worth the loss in power (which will still give staff damage). If you use a scepter, you are still losing out big time on damage overall because of the loss of vulnerability stacking.

Considering I do nothing in tPvP but bunker near point (ie: fighting almost exclusively in fights with no more than 3 people on each side, usually 1v1), I can easily say that the idea that necros are bad in 1v1 is false. We have an issue in WvW because our lesser mobility makes it very difficult to finish fights, or get away from a losing fight.

Yeah, that build is pretty bad for 1v1. Conditionmancers are much, much stronger in a group setting. Don’t try to 1v1 with that, go around with other people, and use Epidemic to cause mass damage, whereas in 1v1 your epidemic is useless, Plague form is pretty useless (just a stall button), and all your staff stuff is pretty weak.

We need DS UI fix, we need some fixes to Charge, and something to allow minions to better for boss fights. And signets could use some love. Beyond that, I think we need minor number tweaking on our skills.

You might want to familiarize yourself with what arrogance is before you start throwing the word around. I’d also suggest you tone it down, there is no need to be aggressive, regardless of what other people are posting.

The fact is that your suggested fixes are not in line with what really needs to happen with the class, or are just flat out based on erroneous ideas. Then when people posted to argue their side, you freak out and call them trolls.