Honestly not having issues, but haven’t been able to play much. Greatsword is actually doing really well for me, played a game as Reaper MM with hydromancy sigils and ice runes, and people were pretty constantly chilled, which meant I was generating a lot of LF via Chilling Victory and Blighter’s Boon.
Big things I’m noticing so far is that dropping out of RS really needs to not cancel abilities, it is just overly clunky with how long the cast is, whereas DS its really just 1/4 that get canceled. GS might still be a bit clunky, but I’ll have to play more, it is definitely much more usable now.
Also, Soul Eater just can’t compete imo. Blighter’s Boon basically requires Chilling Victory to proc well unless you rely on teammates, and together they give a lot of sustain. The CDR on it needs to be fixed, it can’t rely on Gravedigger hits, otherwise the healing is okay, especially since it can stack with Vampiric and Vampiric Aura for around 125 siphon per strike.
Definitely positive changes all around though, its just a matter of addressing things that still need tuning. I’m going to have to wait on personal testing though because GW2 appears to be crashing my GPU for some reason.
I consider Death Shroud part of the base profession. I’m just saying that I don’t necessarily need it to be a part of DS, so much as I need it to be somewhere highly accessible on the base profession, whether or not that is Death Shroud.
Guang would be proud of Nemesis’ math.
I don’t know that I mind Death Shroud not having stability as much as I really mind not having any reasonable stability access on the entire base profession.
Haven’t taken Nemesis all that serious since he tried to proclaim that we out damaged Warrior. I’d love to see a “Nike reacts” video to this though, dude is going to blow a casket when he sees this.
The problem is Signets of Suffering directly outperform Spiteful Spirit with either Plague Signet or Blood Bond traited alone, and once you hit 2 Signets from any sources it is a huge difference, which isn’t hard now that we have multiple good signets.
Well, only Spiteful Spirit has an ICD on shroud entry now, so they did listen.
Also, I think the most striking thing about SS is that Blood Bond and Signets of Suffering end up outpacing its boon corruption, before including any other signets. The rest of what it does is pretty minor imo, so overall it ends up just being a weak AoE proc and a minor corruption.
DPS calculations are generally done by looking at how much damage a profession does in a 30 second time period (including cast times and stuff like that), and then averaging that out over the 30s, at least it was last I heard. So even when a “burst” CD is used, and deals say 10k damage, that would be averaged out over the 30s.
Oh I totally agree its a good change, just that it wouldn’t suddenly overpower MM because the only time they’d be cleaving is when they themselves are at much higher risk of dying and the MM is in a weak spot.
Dagger DPS wasn’t improved, only Reaper was affected, and it is unlikely Reaper suddenly gained like 10k DPS.
Well to be fair, the reason Ele is there is because it has (or had I’m not sure of current DPS listings) the highest DPS. Which means if your build doesn’t have any unique support, it has to be the highest DPS in the game as its “niche”, which so far doesn’t happen. With 10 people in a group it might actually be possible to devote a few people to max DPS duty if a DPS-only build actually had insane DPS, but I don’t see how Necromancer would get that role.
Also, they mention that you need survivability, but the reality is people are more than capable of doing the current most difficult content with berserker gear, so it might be that ANet is just too bad to deal with it.
According to Robert Gee (forgot where) it is allowed to proc more times on Soul Spiral because the healing is only 300 range instead of 600, but I’m not 100% sure if that made it through development.
No offense to ANet, but they aren’t known for being good players. I’ve seen their PvP streams more than enough to know I wouldn’t trust them when it comes to high level gameplay. Necromancer would need some insane buffs to be worth bringing over Ele.
Yeah Scepter can work too. Kinda sad that our weapon situation is so awful there are 3 equally “valid” power weapons that deal fairly similar damage and have similar utility, and one of them is a condi weapon.
Wait so RS 4 procs 12x Transfusion? Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeet
The fact that there are even enough enemies for the cleave to be a factor inherently means the MM is in a subpar situation. It just makes the skills much friendlier to PvE and non-MM builds in PvP, without actually making full MM builds stronger, since they don’t want to teamfight anyway.
It doesn’t need a mild team-support function that also provides an extra blast? Why not?
That isn’t the main problem of the skill right now, and it makes it conflict with Well of Blood. It isn’t an awful change, but it isn’t the primary problem which is that Blood Fiend is built to be a healing over time skill like the various other profession’s signets, yet it doesn’t scale with your healing power nor is it either reliable or have a high payoff for being less reliable. Until the over time healing is fixed, the skill is a bad version of SoV, or in your case a bad version of what WoB should be.
Given how minions move and attack pretty effectively now, their mob mentality is rather effective without one of them potentially immobilizing someone. Instead, now you the player get more clutch counterplay options. The recharges on minions also remain low in order to get them up faster after sacrificing them for any specific reason. They don’t always just have to be little AI units that run about and strike targets. They are utility abilities. Let them have some support and counterplay functions. The player can still continue to fight.
8s of immobilize isn’t clutch? You are replacing the strongest non-elite immobilize in the game for something that MM builds don’t want or need, just to provide a utility to non-MM players.
It was somewhat arbitrary, but since the new Blood Magic and Death Magic lines both have a lot of potential party support in them, the distinction between them softened. Swapping two traits around for the sake of your forced flavor isn’t a difficult feat.
Blood Magic’s support is all healing based, that’s the point of it as a line. If Death Magic gets support, it would need distinctly different support.
My biggest problem is a lot of these changes aren’t needed. You’re changing skills that either don’t need changing at all, or simply need QoL changes, for no reason except to fulfill some design purpose you made up.
RS 4 is poison, not RS5, and its 11 stacks.
Doesn’t make sense, the builds that need staff need it for pressure at 1200, not to close gaps.
Soul Marks isn’t at all mandatory, it just makes staff worth using. Power builds that don’t need the 1200 range LF generation can generate LF just fine without it, only condi needs it.
Spectral Wall could use a small buff like projectile destruction, and it needs to work properly with Spectral Mastery (increase duration of protection and fear by 50%). It does’t need much, mostly QoL fixes and maybe a CDR.
Because fear is the weakest hard CC in the game
Burning has 2.5x stronger scaling, and 6x stronger base damage than bleeding, and multiple professions can stack large amounts of burning. Guardian can hit 25 burning, which is like getting hit with 60 bleeding.
Unless the mobs attack insanely fast Elementalist could group and kill them on their own with the storm glyph’s blind.
It actually is just fine for condi. Locust Swarm is amazing on every single build ever conceived, Wail of Doom is just the big-daddy version of Reaper’s Mark with a smaller range.
WoD could use a small buff with some added functionality, but it doesn’t need much. WH is already really overloaded with beneficial skills, you can’t consider WoD in a vacuum because it comes bundled with Locust Swarm which I’d argue is the strongest Necromancer skill bar none.
It isn’t taken much because warhorn is an amazing set that does everything and would be worth taking for Locust Swarm alone, but has Wail of Doom on top. Dagger OH is good, but Enfeebling Blood and Deathly Swarm are clunky and EB arguably doesn’t do as much as it should.
But its hard to beat warhorn. Swiftness, cripple, massive LF generation, damage (that also procs a ton of things on its own), and an AoE unblockable hard CC. You can’t beat that.
More pulls is good. We’ll never get mobility, so don’t bother asking for it, instead ask for counter-mobility mechanics like pulls, shadowsteps to us, CC, etc.
MM changes aren’t good. Blood Fiend doesn’t need that kind of change, we certainly don’t need nerfs to minion HP without any compensation, or nerfs to Bone Fiend CC, or losing the amazing functionality that Flesh Wurm has, some of the trait changes were really misguided (Last Rites has no point being in Death Magic).
It seems like a lot of changes were made not to fix anything that’s wrong, but simply for the sake of change. There are some solid ideas in here, but its mixed with a lot of bad changes.
It isn’t really weak. We could maybe add a blast to it or something but its a very large cone unblockable hard CC.
Staff is garbage, so is axe. Choosing between the two is like going to a restaurant and being given an option of two steaming piles of crap with slightly different garnishes.
Dagger/Warhorn Axe/Dagger is just fine though. Staff is pretty garbage, doesn’t really bring anything special outside of its range, so if you don’t need that range Axe is an option, especially for bunkers. The only real loss is the extra damage in Death Shroud.
A shadowstep to enemy might not happen, but a pull definitely could, or a chill or something like that.
Soul Comprehension should just be dumped and us given a new trait, one that gives actual defense. In fact Death Magic needs a bit of work still. It is great for MM builds, but Soul Comprehension, Reaper’s Protection, Unholy Sanctuary, and Corrupter’s Fervor all need some attention.
CF and US conflict too much, I’d really like to see US shifted heavily to a cheat death mechanic, instead of what it is right now which doesn’t honestly fit Death Magic well, its a healing/death shroud focused trait in a line that isn’t the primary line for either of those things. CF is honestly fine I think as is, 300 toughness is a lot, so is 20% reduced damage from conditions, it just conflicts too much.
Reaper’s Protection just doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. We don’t need a counter-CC on a massive CD, we need damage negation so that CC doesn’t affect us in the first place. Give us something like AoE blind on shroud entry.
And Soul Comprehension just needs to go. Make Putrid Defense the minor, or give it some other defensive trait. One thing I used to say was give Death Shroud a poison on entry (maybe weakness too? poison+weakness on shroud entry+ putrid defense at master major) as the adept minor, with Putrid Defense as master minor, but there is a lot they could do. I’d really like to see the traits have synergy though, I love the newer lines which have a lot of synergy among the minors.
I loaded up the video and I was like “oh man this guy has great taste in music” and realized I had my own pandora on in the background. Also the use of Blood Fiend made me die a little inside, but I imagine with the huge restrictions you guys had, plus the knowledge you were against a Necro (who can’t dodge any of the attacks) it was actually a solid choice.
Great job though, I’d be interested to know what build you guys ran.
The problem with Dagger 2 is it simply takes forever to cast. 3.5s of being locked into a single target ability that is a significant DPS loss to AAing simply isn’t okay. A lot of healing it does is usually cancelled out by the fact that for 3.5s you can’t avoid any attacks. Decrease the channel time to 2-2.5s and it immediately becomes fine.
Dagger 3 just needs a small buff. Reduced CD or an extra effect (especially a second active) upon hitting it would be sufficient, but as it is now its just flat out worse than comparable weapon skill immobilizes despite being on a profession that needs better ones.
Hence no direct access. That is a very rare situation that we’ll even get a single stack of confusion on anything, since it requires us to either get lucky with minion AAs or lucky with staff AA.
Anet has specifically avoided making any promises about making Necros more desired in structured group comps.
Promises no, however they have made statements suggesting that Necromancers would be desirable in PvE again, such as Colin’s interview with Angry Joe.
It isn’t that you can’t find a group, plenty of people are willing to carry a good Necro through a normal PvE run. It is that there is objectively almost never a situation where you want a Necromancer in your group over another profession, and it sucks knowing that me playing a Necromancer is holding my group back in a noticeable and significant way over me running something else.
Slow makes sense, it and confusion are the only things we don’t have direct access to, along with Torment which we have only one source of. And honestly they all make sense on Necromancer, though I don’t think we should have a ton of sources of slow/confusion one or two direct sources could fit thematically and gameplay wise in the idea of punishing certain things.
Celestial is really mediocre on Necromancer in general in my opinion. Go some kind of power gear, with whatever mix of non-condition damage stats you want basically, though precision isn’t particularly important due to the free crit we can get.
Dagger could use work, but on the 2/3 skill, the AA is fine.
The thing is cele basically only matters on professions that can use all the stats, which includes a lot of baseline burning application. Necromancer doesn’t really do well going hybrid, signet is one of the only exceptions because it gets a lot of benefit going hybrid due to corruptions.
Generally speaking celestial only works on professions that have high base burning even while running an otherwise fairly tanky power build. Guardian (in theory at least), Elementalist, Warrior, and Engineer all fit this, but Necromancer doesn’t.
Oh its totally niche, but its basically what we need until they fix the profession otherwise. Essentially the only situation Necromancer will actually be the #1 pick is a situation where they have to be highly self-sufficient against enemies that have mechanics fairly similar to players. Things like needing good self-buffing, high base durability, mechanics to deal with boons/conditions, and having this all on a single player.
But in group-heavy combat its the same stuff as before. We might be playable though, if they manage to make other professions a bit worse or us a bit better.
Chances are its a map issue, related to how the map is coded and isn’t unique to transfusion but shadowsteps in general. I’d go there with thief and try to shadowstep around and see if it bugs too.
They can make trash mobs not-skippable if they want, they could also make a boss situation where trash mobs are spawned en-masse and you’ll break off a few players to deal with them while the boss is killed. Not sure Reaper will do significantly better than others though, unless they did enough damage that Elementalist wouldn’t be able to deal with them without sacrificing a lot of damage.
Yes I did test it and it has the same 50% reduction. The loss of LF on 4 makes it feel a bit less tanky, plus its melee which means you take more incidental damage. However, if you aren’t very quickly bursted out the LF gain from AAing in RS will fairly quickly make you effectively last longer, plus things like RS 5 → RS 4 pairs with chilling force to allow you to gain some LF by applying a lot of chill and then AAing a lot.
Overall DS is more resistant to burst and incidental AoE because of DS4+ranged, but overall RS can be made tankier with LF on AA and trait combos.
You have no clue what PvE will be like. I don’t get why this is difficult. Elementalists have high DPS because mobs are stupid and stand in fields, if Anet returns (yes returns, because it was originally in the game) the AI that makes mobs move out of pulsing effects Elementalist DPS drops hard. Same if they make mobs hit hard consistently, in a way that just dodging doesn’t mitigate, and zerker thief/ele gets two shot. They could very easily hard-counter the entire PvE meta if they wanted.
Stop comparing the way PvE works now to the way it will work. They can make fields extremely difficult to use by having highly mobile fights, they can make boon stripping mandatory by having bosses that apply every boon in the game to themselves once every 30s, they can make control/range necessary by having a boss that instantly kills anything within a small radius around itself, make conditions required by having mobs with 8k armor. They can take everything you think GW2 PvE is about and completely flip it on its head.
The reason the current PvE meta exists as it does is because every nearly every single fight is a stationary DPS race where the only threat is an occassional highly telegraphed nuke. Glass cannon builds can exist because active damage negation can allow them to work, but if bosses hit quickly and hard Ele and thieves would drop like flies. Things like stacking exist because bosses don’t punish it well, but they easily could.
Until we have further details, stop assuming that ANet will go out of their way to say they will highlight all the unique combat GW2 has, only to give us the exact same PvE they say they won’t give us.
Interesting, I never saw issues with it but it could be a bug recently that messes with it, or just I wasn’t paying attention.
For offensive support, you also have might vs vulnerability. Necro is good at continuously applying vulnerability, but vuln stacks so easily 25 that it does not matter.
As a result, it is usually agreed on that boons are way stronger than conditions in PvE. This should not be! And people often say “necro have no team support” while in a sense, we have one of the best team support of the game, it is just not “direct support” but support through enemy-debuff.
I’d honestly say Vuln vs Might is the way things should be. Vuln is a significantly higher damage increase than might, and honestly might is much easier to stack over a team. Otherwise totally agree, debuffs have a strange drawback when boons don’t, and it doesn’t particularly make sense.
I get a lot of fails <300 on almost flat surfaces. Is the tool tip wrong or are conditions not right?
Could be strange bugs? I’m not sure, I’ve used it to pull people quite a ways (example being pulling people from point up to the high area on Foefire’s middle point) including height changes. It might be WvW’s awful map coding, if I were to just throw something out there to blame.