Actually ANet is by far the most transparent game development company I have ever seen. They talk to the community a lot, there are AMAs, plenty of interviews, they post fairly often in forums, and overall there is a pretty decent sense of what is happening in the near future.
But they can’t just say “we are planning to fix necros” without getting bombarded by people wanting to know the exact second of the exact day that those changes are coming out, and wanting to know the specifics of what is being changed, why, and how. Instead they give very general things (we all know there are going to be bug fixes), and then only announce specifics when they are actually nearing the release of that.
Also some of the beauty of GW2 is you can quit for 2 months, for whatever reason, and just jump back in later. That said, they are not going to lose many players. People always say “If you don’t change everything right now everyone is quitting”, but it doesn’t happen. They might lose a few players here and there, but it won’t be a big deal in the overall scheme. Also, they are introducing another event tomorrow (seriously, this game has had an event almost every month since Halloween).
Necro’s can’t stack much higher than that without using a rabid build. If you want more conditions, then stack up some crit chance, and then use the sigil that causes bleeds on hit. Those won’t give huge bleed stacks, necros basically sit from 10-20 bleed stacks, but it will help your overall DPS.
They don’t give times until they are 100% sure they are rolling it out then, often they don’t even announce what they are doing until they are close to rolling it out, as well.
I would agree that due to class mechanics we will never see the highest end of PvE (which is based around speed, not something we do well). However in WvW and sPvP especially I think it is more an issue of people not seeing necro’s uses.
WvW necromancers are incredibly strong in big attack/defense situations. You need to be more careful because we don’t have the escapes that others do, but if you are actually paying attention you shouldn’t get caught out. We have our niche there just like mesmers do due to portals/time warp, and thieves for roaming/scouting.
PvP is definitely just an issue of perception in the community. Every tournament team I have played with have been completely fine with necromancers. The reason being that we have the most survivability with the least amount of investment. We also have builds that completely and utterly counter two of the most popular classes: guardians and elementalists (seriously, we crap all over them day and night). We are perfectly fine in PvP, and just as competitive as others.
The highest end PvE is down to very specific things, usually a time warp mesmer and huge damage sources like warriors. That said, I don’t care much for high end PvE, and I doubt ANet is too preoccupied with making everything balanced at that level of the game. Right now, PvE has nothing to do with the challenge. Any dungeon is incredibly easy if you have teamwork and know what to do.
The reality is that people don’t like challenges. Its a fact of life that the vast majority of people are too lazy to do the difficult thing unless they are absolutely forced into it, regardless of what the outcome of that hard work might be. That is a huge portion of why the necro isn’t played often, people just plain hate difficulty. Paired with things like misconceptions and lack of burst damage, necromancers are also not as fun as other difficult classes like elementalists, and so are played less often. It has absolutely nothing to do with how competitive we are.
I have to disagree:
1) Conditionmancer in PVE: Re: 25 stacks shared by others. And there can only be One … condition build in one party. If you need to destroy structures, you are out of luck. Also trash mobs are usually quickly killed, so u have to get ur bleed stacks started all over again on a single target that doesnt die.
2) Dagger DPS: May as well run Axe which is ranged. I dont know about dagger DPS builds to compare, but I will say that before bleed is power, I do 5k on Axe skill 2 on a COF p1 mob. After bleed is power 6k. I run hybrid knight and berzerker armor with ruby orbs + all berzerker accessories + cavalier backpiece. Not counting a bit of bleed damage and the high chance of sigil of air processing.
3) Highest learning curve: I leave that distinction to Engis and Elementalists.
1) Gear for condition damage, and you can just use a staff build to support your team, and epidemic whoever the condition damage guy is focusing. You won’t be pushing much bleeds off of their target, and every 15 seconds you can spread 25 bleeds to 5 enemies. You don’t even need to fight over bleeds, you can use someone else’s hard work to stack bleeds and just press 1 skill and be doing 5 times the damage.
Also, unlike most other condition professions, restacking bleeds is nothing to a necro. Most of our bleed stacking is based on auto attacking with scepter and a few very low CD abilities. Its as easy to start over again as double clicking the next mob.
Holycrapwalloftextl2formatman
Anyway, while this was hard to understand (at least for me), there are a few things I can say.
1) Yes, necromancer needs a few fixes, we could use a few tweaks here and there, but its really not that big of a deal.
2) We are perfectly capable of outlasting opponents right now.
We have tons of soft CC. Axe 3, Dagger 3, Staff 3 and 5 (and 4 depending on what conditions you transfer), Scepter 2, Focus 5, Warhorn 4 and 5, and to a degree Dagger 5 (applies weakness to slow the amount of dodges they can do). It is literally impossible to have a weapon set without 1 form of soft CC, and impossible to have your 2 sets have less than 3. That doesn’t include any traits (like the chill on blind), utility skills, or the fact that every one of our elites has soft CC as well. Nor can you tell me that ANY class in the game, including necromancers, can cleanse or dodge all that soft CC without using all their endurance and cleanses, leaving them completely open to far more damaging conditions or leaving themselves with no way to dodge bigger abilities.
Our life steals aren’t that strong in PvP, I agree, but they would only need very minor tweaking to be completely in line. They also require almost no thought to do, other classes actually need to trait for HP gain, we just get it in the process of doing something else, in most cases. In PvE our life stealing is very powerful.
DS should always be used proactively, even as a defensive tool. It shouldn’t be an “oh crap I’m low HP better stall button” so much as “hey look that thief is about to burst me, time to completely negate it”. Also, the only time people should be dodging your DS is if you are full power/crit build, otherwise they are wasting it on nothing. DS needs some UI updates, and they could tweak it to synergize with every build better, but otherwise it is pretty solid.
“Caster” classes have melee range weapons, “melee” classes have caster weapons, get with the program. You are perfectly able to go in close range against a warrior, the only true difference that our class has to more “heavily” armored ones is a bit of armor, and it really doesn’t mean much.
The class isn’t broken. The class doesn’t have gaping holes in its design. It requires a few bug fixes, and a few tweaks to make some of our more useless utilities better. That is it. We aren’t underpowered, we aren’t overpowered, we are completely competitive, and in fact can easily counter the “OP” classes (which are also more or less balanced).
We aren’t UP, stop complaining. Thieves aren’t OP either. There are a few specific builds/abilities going around that need minor nerfs to bring them in line, and that is it.
Plague is fine in WvW if you have the ability to sit in the damage. Otherwise you shouldn’t be close enough to use it anyway. Life transfer is amazing, if you want to pretend that every zerg is a perfectly coordinated mass of people that notice every ability worth dodging or interrupting you are obviously facing different zergs than I do.
As for P/D being attrition, of course it is. However you cannot take a single build and then extrapolate that to the rest of the class. A power build with Well of Suffering has incredible burst damage, but that doesn’t make us a burst class. Warriors have great support with banner support builds, but they aren’t a support based class.
A good necromancer should win any fight that isn’t already lost in the first burst or soon thereafter. We are only weak to that initial burst (as you won’t usually have LF to face tank it like you will later in the fight), after that we have insane DPS.
Try axe/focus dagger/warhorn out, you shouldn’t really NEED to auto attack with axe, you should switch into axe, focus 4, axe 3, axe 2, and then either you can attack for a bit of vulnerability, use utilities, or go DS for the few seconds extra, then switch back to dagger, dagger 3, WH 5, WH 4, dagger 2, auto with dagger, switch back, etc.
You increase your damage, LF gain, and condition output by a lot if you are swapping back and forth every so often (just a bit longer than on swap CD), you should almost never be staying in one weapon set as a power build except for very specific scenarios (keeping axe out because you don’t want to be that close, or keeping dagger out to top off your LF pool).
Thieves aren’t attrition classes. Saying they are is absolutely ridiculous; yes you can force them to somewhat fit that role, but they will never fit it like classes that are built specifically for it.
1) Never compare minions to pets, they are vastly different.
2) Flesh golem is okay at tanking but not really a tank like earth elemental is, so elemental wins out on tankingness imo. The difference is that the elementals, once dead, take 2 minutes to respawn, and only last 60 seconds, whereas Flesh golem is permanent until killed.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
And the problem lies in? Theif stealth (except for shadow refuge in combat), Guadian Renewed Focus, Ranger Trap nest into Spring and Ele water switch (especially if with 30 arcane) all do pretty much the same thing, reseting the fight by maximum potential damage output, but returning the hp bar to a reasonable survival level while cooldowns get up, for the other classes same could be said with Mace/Shield Warriors, Mesmer Moa and Elixir S, but they are way stronger in combat abuse than a hp reset.
You are naming builds, of course there are builds with strong defense. This would make every single necro build, regardless of how we spec, able to reset battles every time we hit 100% LF. Those other classes are forced to trait certain things, use certain weapons, use certain utilities; essentially they have to actually give up on damage to be able to have those fight-resetting abilities. Now, if healing while in DS was made into a trait, such that you actually need to spec into it (and therefore sacrifice another aspect), then it could possibly be balanced. But as is, giving healing to DS would give every build far too much defensive ability with absolutely no cost.
I think healing your real HP while in DS would unbalance it. The problem would become that you are now not only tanking damage and/or stalling for time for CDs, but if you could heal, you could nearly “restart” the fight every time you went into DS by healing up at least portions of your HP bar and getting extra time on your big CDs, all while the enemy is completely unable to truly hurt you.
I don’t think there is any problem with LF gain in sPvP, although I think they should give you at least a very small bit of LF when the game starts, because atm you go into your first fight weaker than other classes.
I think they could look into 1 being affected by your main hand weapon, giving it something similar to what that weapon’s use is. I think 4 is fine as is though, most conditionmancer builds that pop into DS should have a decently high crit chance (around 40-50% because of DS fury), and that will allow them to apply bleeds in an AoE, it makes the ability really strong if you are running a rabid build.
And possibly a 5th skill slot, although I’m not sure what they could do there to make DS better but not overpower it.
Vitality is also a much better stat against bursting, something we are definitely weak against (even more so if we have low DS pools).
arenanet have already done this to the necro’s DS mechanic. im still waiting on them to revamp the skills and traits to even come close to what was taken away. DS was a stun break on activation, could be traited for stability for its entire duration, and had means for renewing life force while in DS without relying solely on life transfer. this was the original design. this is why we didn’t need any escape abilities. this is why we have extremely limited ways to mitigate incoming damage.
while i agree that DS in this form was very powerful, arenanet could have used a scalpel instead of a hatchet when nerfing it. they simply could have limited the necro’s DS duration in a number of ways as a start. after all, arenanet’s no secret ‘trial and error stance’ on making small changes first must have clearly missed the mark in this case. they never gave the playerbase time really experience DS strengths and flaws in its pre-nerf form.
im not saying this applies to you, but i don’t think most players realize this about the necro. and im pretty sure the necro is the only profession to have received any treatment of this scale to their primary mechanic.
They have changed it a lot from conception to closed beta to open beta. But from open beta on, it has remained fairly similar, although with minor changes. I do agree that there are certain things about it that shouldn’t have been smashed so hard, Necromancers were severly OP pre-DS and Lich nerfs. Pre DS nerf, DS necros could win 3v1 fights simply because going in and out of DS often made you practically unkillable. Lich form was similar, except that instead of being unkillable, it gave you champion level damage output such that Lich was guaranteed to win any and every fight it was used in.
They just overreacted on the nerf sticking a little, and in time that will peel back a little. This game is still only half a year old, it’ll get better.
I agree that you should always find a balance between toughness and vitality, as it is going to give the best returns. That said, I still think because of how LF is built based on a % (therefore higher HP actually means higher healing), and just the general necromancer playstyle, that if you absolutely had to choose between vitality and toughness that vitality is a better option. It is completely up to debate though, and in the end falls down to personal preference.
He’s also about as strong as paper when attacked.
On every other class, I would say toughness, because HP’s effectiveness diminishes the longer you are in a fight. This is because HP is just an initial defensive buffer, if you have 20k HP they need to do 20k damage for you to die, so that is your damage buffer. If you have lower HP, that buffer is smaller, so burst damage hurts more. That said, toughness actually lowers the damage you take. If you extrapolate that over multiple heals (anything that raises your HP during the fight), then having higher toughness will actually be more effective.
That said, necro is the one class where HP is possibly better than toughness, simply because of death shroud. Death shroud scales with your HP bar better than with your toughness, because everything that gives you LF gives it based on a percentage. 10% LF is twice as much with 20k HP than with 10k.
In my opinion, stacking HP and taking advantage of the way DS works is much better than stacking toughness. So for a necro (and no other class) I would say HP>toughness for defensive stats.
Actually, we could easily pull people to us with 20% LF, then spend the next 80% using spiritual gun, keeping them permanently knocked down and dealing damage, while we use Focus 4, then dagger auto attacks.
It doesn’t matter if we can’t 8k in one hit, we’ll still be glorified thieves and be turned into a burst class.
The signets are fine on their own in certain builds, but I would never use them all together, they don’t really synergize well together, and they just aren’t very good if you try to make an entire build just with signets.
I’m not exactly sure what you are meaning by the first two questions, if you could explain them a bit more then I could help better.
Build wise, necromancers have 4 main build types, which then break down into a lot of sub-types and specific builds.
1) Conditions
2) Power Builds
3) Minions
4) Hybrid
I’d suggest that you first play around a bit in PvE or PvP (whichever you plan on doing more) and figuring out which one you like the most, across all of them the play styles are fairly similar. Once you have an idea of the build type you want, then you can look for a specific build that can fulfill what you want to be able to do.
No, we’ll become a glorified thief with this. Power build + wells + this = thief on roids.
1. They aren’t going to completely and entirely change a class like this. This would require a complete revamp of all necro skills and traits.
2. Having this many skills is too strong. You are basically giving us 8 more utility skills that we can use.
3. They are way too strong.
It makes us do too much damage, too fast, with too much tankiness, and too high maneuverability. We could out-everything everyone.
Huh… that makes things easier.
Like Bas said, we can reapply conditions faster than any class. Watch a rabid build in action, you can get 15 stacks of bleeds very quickly as a necro, you just won’t get a whole lot more than that, but even if they remove all your conditions, they are all on really short CDs. No one can completely cleanse a necro’s conditions, even other necros (and we have the best cleansing in the game).
I know for a fact this isn’t how use to work. How it use to work is: if a fall would take your life force down to zero while in death shroud you would insta die. So this ‘change’ is new
Yes, that is how it used to work, but it is different now. As long as you are in Death Shroud when you hit, you take no “real” damage to your HP bar.
Yeah, my minions are pretty reliable. There is the rare time that mesmer clones totally throw them for a loop, or they decide to stop the fight when I get downed, but all in all it is pretty rare. I’d love a fix, but people exaggerate the issue.
You get used to it over time. I do the exact same thing when I use Plague form, right as I’m casting it I get my mouse over the 2 spot and ctrl+right click the blind and let it auto attack for me.
Also not having your auto attack choices saved from your transformed skills is annoying. Everytime I use lich I have to mash 1 like a crazy person.
Ctrl+right click right as you pop into Lich is what I do. If you do that to your 1 it sets it to auto right as you start off (and you can still jam 1 while you set that). It is still stupid that it doesn’t have that already, but at least it saves your fingers.
They have fixed minion AI quite a bit since beta. Flesh Golem is the best example, he used to be absolutely ridiculous; anything considered an enemy within a huge radius was automatically attacked, no matter what. Now he is much better about peeling off once they get away or you stop attacking. I agree it needs fixing as it doesn’t work as it should right now, but it takes time.
At low levels most utility skills seem pretty bad, in my experience. Especially something like minions, where you really need access to the increased HP and damage you get through traits.
I’d say our greatest strength is Death Shroud. No other class can get down to 1k HP and then instantly have an effective 27k HP, and be able to do that every so often (depending on build).
I would say our greatest weakness is the very start of a fight. As a necro, you really need to always be the person to initiate the fight, so you can stock up life force, and stack up the early conditions. If you start off the fight by being bursted, you’re in deep trouble (unless you have managed to stack LF before hand, in which case you’re still needing to burn LF just to keep up, instead of pull ahead).
Except this would be a single skill that would grant 400 toughness permanently (until you killed each and every minion), which would be a bit much, considering how tanky MMs can already be.
Previews don’t show particle effects. Generally speaking, the stuff with the most amazing particle effects look like crap in preview, because you can’t see it.
OR, we could keep a perfectly fine system and not ruin it because you don’t like an aesthetic choice they made. Also, 20 minions = 400 toughness from a 15 point trait.
Minions look pretty good right now, they are fairly disgusting and revolting, like things created from on-hand pieces of dead flesh would be, but in a somewhat charming way. I actually prefer the way minions look in this game compared to GW1.
You can make pretty much any build work in WvW if you want to, it really isn’t so much about min/maxing and making perfect builds, as much as it is about some general strategy and zerging the crap out of everything.
Play necro, if you enjoy it, keep going. If you don’t, quit. If anything, you’ll learn a little (hopefully) about how they work so you can beat them better.
Honestly, I don’t really like the Final Rest weapon much. It looks like someone grabbed an imp, put a stick somewhere it shouldn’t be going, then dipped them in stone colored paint.
I mean, my weapon turns into a scythe when I use it, why do I want another scythe with my scythe? This isn’t double rainbow.
Honestly, I feel like spectral skills are just a tad bit off from awesome. Its like the devs had a great conversation about perfect necro skills when they were hammered, and then when they went to actually implement them, they couldn’t quite remember what they wanted; so now we have Spectral skills.
All of them have the potential to be really good (big defensive boost, big speed boost with a recall, big teamfight protection/enemy vulnerability, super-dope pull), but they just missed the mark on making them useful.
Meanwhile the class can not compare in the aspects of damage, utility, group-buffs or debuffs even.
Because the one’s you actually need; others can put up even easier, faster or at least just as well.In the end we’re at a point already where the game has the so often dreaded trinity. Instead of bringing the rest of the classes up to par, a few guys in the class forums scream and shout “no it’s fine, leave it and screw the elitist speedfarmers!”.
I can’t speak for the highest level of play where people are trying to clear dungeons in the fastest time possible, but the vast majority of the game is played completely without the trinity or any semblance of it. Even in the first post, you’re running 4 glass cannon builds with a mesmer to double the damage output, since when did 4 DPS 1 support fit the trinity?
And necros are different, thats the point. We don’t try to stack bleeds the fastest, stack boons the fastest, heal our team the most, its not what we do. You will very rarely, outside of specific builds, see big numbers as a necro, if that bothers you, necro isn’t your class. We do things differently, doesn’t mean we are worse, doesn’t mean we are better, but we reach the goal just fine.
Oh, another question since I’m new to Necro: Why do people run Scepter/Dagger + Staff?
It seems like Scepter/Dagger is suboptimal to, say, Scepter/Focus where you have the Vulnerability burst.
I run Scepter/Focus + Dagger/Dagger, and I find it’s been working out great. I plan to switch to Rabid gear at level 80. Basically, I’m using Dagger/Dagger as the Life-Leech/Condition Removal weapon set while using Scepter/Focus for most of my damage.
Because Scepter is a condition damage weapon. Dagger main-hand has 0 condition damage, making it almost useless for condition builds. Staff has 3 damaging conditions, 4 if you’ve traited terror. Dagger off-hand is all condition damage, you get bleeds and whatever you are transfering.
They use it because it is the best build for 99% of condition damage builds, and even many hybrids.
I agree with Star Ace, unless you are in some highly competitive environment (like if you are taking tPvP seriously), or abusing a specific glitch, there really is no point.
I actually think Necro is a good first class, so long as difficulty doesn’t make you quit games. It is much easier to go from a really hard class with weird mechanics into another class, where things are much simpler; usually. That said, I’m so used to our weird mechanics that I’m pretty terrible at other classes.
what? wait???
where are all the usual necro fanbois today?
I don’t like the feeling of this….
We get tired of listing exactly why necros don’t suck in every, single thread. You just stop caring after a while, and you post only when you can really help out the OP or someone else who has specifically asked.
You can learn how to manage aggro, it just isn’t as simple as “I have highest armor therefore everything attacks me”.
Yeah, its something I’ll need to work into my team’s strategy, you can just run in a circle kiting the enemy while your minions kill the treb for you.
Note that the question did not specifically say " are you looking at fixing pet AI problems", it was a generic question about all the different things that have been said about pets and minions, which DO include some ridiculous suggestions that are along the line of double greatswords.
Dark path, for a while, was a targetted blink ability as well.
I can’t say why they made Jagged Horrors die so quickly, however the limit makes more sense in PvE, where you could have more easily summoned multiple of them (or if another kill killed the old one and made a new one), which means lots and lots of poison fields. Not necessarily OP, but those poison fields are still fairly strong. That is the only thing I can imagine was their reasoning on it.