Good insight into the flaws of my post. I honestly did not want to overcompensate ideas into the post because, if I did it could probably turn out to be overpowered.
As for this part. (This would completely destroy minions in sPvP and tPvP, I would need to kill 1 person for every minion I summon? Impossible.) I don’t want to override my post by adding other ideas, but I am pretty sure there would be ways to make it work.
I think any significant changes to minions (such as instant re-summoning) would unbalance minions. For example, think of just using bone minions with this idea; you could instantly respawn them over and over again, and the second they reach the target you have them explode. In this way, I can have 1 skill, along with 1 trait (the grandmaster death magic), and have 2k damage per explosion, with poison fields everywhere. Now, we could even do something like only getting X charges per minion skill, but still, in WvW I would just be too strong, I could sit in the back of a zerg spamming out marks (to get as many charges as possible), and just send bone minion after bone minion to its death, making the entire fight a giant field of poison.
I think the current minion system works pretty well. We all know their AI needs to improve, but after that they are a great build, and one of our most balanced ones. It doesn’t have the same feel of GW1, and that throws some people off, but this new direction is a good one.
Yeah, I’ve been checking here and gotten quite a few people into the guild.
Just to answer a few questions I have been getting:
1. Blah blah blah (too lazy to renumber, ignore this)
2. We don’t have a home server.
3. Only requirement to join is if you play a necro.
4. Yes, this is the same as the all-necro post.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
I’d suggest using Flesh Golem for general leveling, having someone to tank aggro for you is great, and since he cripples on hit, even if they go for you they shouldn’t reach you.
As for what build, I suggest either a power build, or a condition build. If you go conditions, make it a supporting build, because you will usually be running with other condition people who will just throw your conditions off as they apply theirs. Instead, make it half support (using staff/wells), and then bring epidemic to make all their conditions turn AoE.
I can outbunker everything except grenade spam engi’s and trap rangers. CC isn’t a big deal when I can DS tank your hundred blades. Especially since while you sit there trying to smash my face in, my minions are definitely smashing yours in. Yes CC can be an issue, but I have never been CC’ed enough by a single person to make it a big issue.
However, recently in hotjoin (and one reason I hate hotjoin), I have been the ball in an intricate game of pinball using god-knows-what CC chains. All I know is I walk into some crapstorm of CC and by the time its over I’m staring at the sky.
How much damage do you actually do in a power build, sustained over time? Not that much. In fact, even maxing out power/precision/crit damage, you aren’t going to be doing much more than 3k DPS (even Lich form in a full power build does 5k DPS). A condition build can do over 2.5k DPS easily (even without max investments), and that is using ONE stat, and ONE condition. Add in poison or burning and they are already out damaging power builds, with only one stat compared to three. And this is with the cap, the reality is that some condition builds can go over the cap, heck even my necro can stack 12 bleeds just auto attacking.
Now then, lets say you stack 100 bleeds onto a boss. Hopefully he doesn’t had any adds, otherwise guess who gets to have a complete, overpowered field day? Epidemic. You think Epidemic is an amazing ability now? Wait until it can transfer 100 bleeds to everything in the radius, every 12 seconds. But no, I’m sure that isn’t OP at all…
I haven’t heard ANet’s official stance on the condition cap, but frankly, it doesn’t take a lot to see why it is definitely needed.
When skills are on cooldown, its good to switch and put that second set’s abilities on CD as well (which will also cause more damage).
1. Yes, both will do damage. However, because fields don’t stack, I would suggest rotating them, so that your allies get the fields for 10s, not just 5.
2. Not necessarily. In small fights, darkness will be stronger because of how strong missing a bunch of attacks can be. However, the larger the fight gets, the more likely people will have lots of boons, which means corruption is better.
We have already done one all necro run, we’ll be doing more.
Necros can take as much punishment as any other class, the only time I have found myself in significant trouble is when I am against 2-3 people who can permanently keep me stunned/knocked around so I can’t cast any skills.
We don’t have low damage, I don’t know why everyone insists on this. Its sustained: it isn’t burst, it is over longer periods of time. We are perfectly tuned to being an attrition class.
Dodging 22 times in a row isn’t going to increase our ability to escape zergs. It is nothing like being able to RTL away from people.
If you want to say that DS 2 should go back to a ground targetted blink, then I’d agree, because we could use a little mobility in that aspect, but escaping from a zerg has nothing to do with dodge rolling.
Learn to use your class properly. Necros don’t have escapes, so stop allowing yourself to be in situations that you need hard-escapes to get out of. Let some other noob distract them, let the ele’s and thieves stay in too long since they can afford to, and start running when you notice the flow is swinging against you.
Staff auto attack in dungeons will easily gain large amounts of LF because it pierces, so no worries there. I’m not sure about the rest, I’d just look at what other people do for builds and find one you like. Nemesis is a great one to look at, he has a lot of good builds.
It is generally best to either have 30 in 2 lines and 10 in a third, or 30 in one and 20 in two others, it is pretty rare to want anything else, at least for necro.
Necros are the most survivable class in the game, its also why we aren’t allowed good escapes (only thing we can do is try to run away, or jump off of really high cliffs that no one else can because of DS). WvW is hard because once you get into a fight, you can’t really leave it; its why I use staff in WvW and stay in the back.
If you are getting blown up by glass cannon builds, you need to figure out why. Chances are, you yourself are trying to build heavy damage, in which case that is the necessary trade off. You can pick up traits that stop it, and remember to use DS to eat burst, but I can’t imagine how you’d get blown up by glasscannon’s, regardless of build.
I don’t find toughness to be very important in dungeons on necros, we have enough survivability that you can manage without it.
That is correct, it pushes the old ones off. It is why you really only ever want 1 or 2 people doing bleeds in a dungeon. I agree that it sucks when you are pugging it, and someone isn’t really doing their job and paying attention it can suck, but it brings up teamwork. If you aren’t doing condition damage, you shouldn’t really be using abilities that apply conditions that damage.
Also, bleed caps are kind of necessary in PvE. Imagine having 100 bleeds on a boss, with each person doing 100 damage per tick, 10000 damage per second? The game is currently balanced with the bleed cap in mind, if they didn’t have it, they would need to increase boss HP, which would make power builds worse off.
Are those people also playing necros? Because that is a pretty important distinction, I’m not actually sure if one necro can hit the cap without using a condition transfer.
Edit: hit it quickly, that is. If you use a rabid build it isn’t difficult to stack up those bleeds with decent crit chance and long duration bleeds, but we don’t apply a lot of bleeds in a few seconds, it takes a few seconds of auto attacks to stack them up.
We don’t actually have a home server, at this point we’re spread out everywhere.
You seem to forget something. Guild Wars 2 is NOT Guild Wars 1. You have to deal with it.
I’m not sure what you are referencing? I like GW 2 MMs better, we can actually be useful in almost every facet of the game, unlike in GW 1 where we were amazing in our niche areas when we worked, and terrible when we didn’t.
Seriously.. bhawb u r so wrong. In Pve areas where there were corpses i could regularly keep up 11 minions with masochism and candy corn buff. The minions could survive through almost anything, if they were taking spike damage i could spam botm while the monk healed me. With half of my army being bone fiends the MM had good dps as well. Boss battles (like shiro, lich, abadon) were not good for minions. But then you just switch to spoil victor or SS
and pvp i agree they sucked balls
I said high end PvE; hard mode, bosses, anything without pretty trash mobs either made MMs bad (can’t keep them up), or made you a constant drain on your team because you need a dedicated healer just for yourself.
Well of Blood heals for 6740 (base 5240 + 152 per second, over 10 seconds) with no healing power. With 944 healing power, it heals for 11484 (base 6184 + 530 per second, over 10 seconds). That is to yourself, to others it only heals the ticks (so 1520-5300). I think you could get a bit more healing power than just 944 too.
Edit: Just realized you could easily get more healing power. The best I could get in the Mists was 1388 healing power, with WoB healing for 6628 initially, plus 707 each tick, over 10 seconds. So, theoretically, you could heal an ally for 7070 HP with WoB, and yourself for 13698.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Staff is required on all condition builds, just because it has condition damage where the other 2 weapon sets (you will obv be using scepter already) don’t. Outside of condition damage builds, staff isn’t required (although it is still a good weapon); unless you are in WvW.
That said, staff, especially when traited, is an amazing weapon, and I highly suggest trying it out.
Actually, its really easy to deal with aggro as a necro. Its an on-going joke whenever I dungeon with people, and its something they all actually appreciate. With 0 defensive investment outside of traits (I wear rare armor, with Power/Condition Damage/Magic Find in every dungeon run I do), I very rarely am downed in dungeons. Its really easy to stack LF in dungeons, so easy, in fact, that often I find myself with full LF before my DS CD is even up. Just going into DS a lot, using siphoning wells, chill/cripple/fear to kite, and plague when it gets really nasty will keep you alive through even the craziest fights.
Actually, I’ve already made a build that would completely break this mechanic. With just 20 traits invested, 10 in Death magic, 10 in blood magic, and using Shaman’s amulet, I can heal 1k HP on every dodge, and deal about 1.5k damage.
Meaning, with each dodge, I can actually stack bleeds and regen on myself, healing and dealing about half the damage I’m causing to myself, with only 20 points invested.
The amount of HP it costed to do this dodge roll would have to be so high that it just wouldn’t be worth it, because of the Mark of Blood on dodge roll.
Even assuming we removed that trait, I think it focuses too much on using LF outside of DS. I can pretty easily get another X% of life force, its really not that difficult to get it, and then I could dodge far too often. Its making a class that isn’t balanced for mobility, too mobile.
lolno. Necromancers are great bunkers.
I’d suggest either running a DS power build using dagger/focus and focus on building LF/going into DS a lot. You should also go 20 into Blood magic for 50% better siphoning, siphon on crits, and siphon on hit. Build up a good bit of crit chance/damage and you can use on crit sigils for conditions like vuln or just more life stealing (its easy to get about 200HP per second like this), then use Dolyak runes for more regen.
Your other choice is to run MM. Don’t listen to other people, it works great. With this, you can either go full bunker, use the normal MM build (20/0/30/20/0) with soldier amulet/dolyak runes, or you can go berzerker for more damage but less defense. I also tend to like to use the minion boon stripping with zerker.
I played the crap out of MMs in GW1. The reality is that people seem to forget how terrible we were the second our minions died. Our entire skill bar was devoted to minion creation, upkeep, and buffing. Any time you went into a group in PvE or the huge PvP (JQ, FA, AB), you would pray that your group could carry you through 2-3 fights so you could get up at least 5 or so minions and be not useless. You then had to pray that those 5 minions would kill more than they died, so you could stay somewhere close to 10 minions; all the while you are spamming Death Nova, BotM, and other healing/buffing spells to keep your army alive.
It was a 100% snowball build. You either got it going, and kept it going forever, and it absolutely demolished people, or you got shut down once, and then you were less powerful than your own minions running around masterless. Not to mention it was completely useless in most high end PvE and any smaller PvP. Most people used MMs as their 3 hero slots along with Discord because it was stupidly strong.
Playing as a necromancer in GW1 was one of two things: SS or BiP. Those were your options, and that was it. BiP was great for giving your caster’s lawnmower hacks, and SS was just incredible for its AoE damage.
Necromancers in GW2 are best for our conditions. We can out-condition every other class in the game, both offensively and defensively. Do you have an amazing condition build on your team? Awesome, bring a support necro to throw down wells/marks, and then bring Epidemic. That awesome condition-build is now 5x stronger.
Who else can say that they can make a teammate do 5x more damage just by pressing 1 skill every time its up?
This would completely destroy minions in sPvP and tPvP, I would need to kill 1 person for every minion I summon? Impossible. Even if they did it like sigils where it stacks multiple, any extended fight I would automatically lose because they can just try to stall me out.
I appreciate the thought put in, but minions, despite AI bugs, are one of our strongest builds right now. The way they are using minions right now is awesome, and has finally balanced minions out so that they can be used in most situations (except huge WvW and high level fractals, where no matter what they would be pretty useless except as bombers).
They got rid of the corpse requirement for a reason; it forced MMs to be only useful in big areas. It completely voided us from being useful in anything below the size of alliance battles, or PvE missions with trash mobs.
I would suggest to not play a necro for roaming in WvW. Its not that we can’t, you could pick up the signet for the 25% move speed, and use a power build for some pretty strong 1v1, the problem isn’t that we can’t 1v1, its that we lack the mobility that other strong roamers have. Imo, mobility is more than just movement speed (which we can do fine), its about the blinks/near instant movement that ele/thieves have.
That said, necros are awesome in WvW, but we do better in small groups, where other people can help us hold targets down and escape, and in huge groups, where you can just spam staff marks/scepter attacks, and then press your Epidemic button every time its up and be successful. Besides, who doesn’t like seeing hundreds of numbers flying around on your screen after a good epidemic.
Power necros are okay, as long as you can initially close the gap. Once you are on the target, you should be able to stick to them fine. Power necros also do insane amounts of damage (DS auto attacks for 3k, dagger auto for 2k DPS, lich form for 4k crits), and our spike damage is pretty amazing when you jump on a target, immobilize with Dagger 3, then drop WoS, Focus 4, and start wailing on them with Dagger 1.
Anyone who wants to join can do so, just message one of the people listed and we’ll get you in.
It depends on how you play this in game. I feel like what this really is, is a condition build, where you sacrificed all your extra HP/toughness for power (not a bad thing in PvE, don’t get me wrong). I’d suggest that, since you have such high crit chance, that you pick up a bunch of sigils that apply conditions on crits, it can be whatever you want, but that will abuse your pretty good crit chance to use even more condition damage. I would also suggest using a stacking sigil with your weapons; you can put it on your dagger for either stacking defense, or even stacking even more offense.
I would also suggest dropping the dagger CD reduction, and picking up 50% better siphoning, since you have well siphoning and siphoning on hit.
I think in PvE, this build is fine. You’ll have incredibly high damage, and as a necro it is really easy to go all in offenses and never have an issue staying alive. Hope that helps.
Those AoE areas are so small that you cannot tell me you are going to land it on multiple people without spending 10 points to upgrade its size. Are the AoE’s nice? Sure, but as a power build you aren’t going to have good AoE damage (outside of WoS maybe) anyway. The bleed/poison will do crap damage, because its a power build. The regen will do very little because necros should never have healing power in PvP (and focus grants the regen).
Axe’s auto attack has more damage than staff (not by tons), and also makes the person take 10% more damage from ALL sources by vulnerability stacks (up to 22 vuln stacks because you’ll be taking the focus with it). Focus 4 will grant regen to your team just like your staff will. Focus 5 will strip boons and chill a target.
Staff is a fine weapon, and it has a lot of use, but trying to argue that it replaces the position of Axe is ignorant. Axe/offhand (you can’t compare them without considering what the offhand will be, otherwise its 3v5 skills) can be used in its niche situations, and in those situations it outclasses staff. You can argue all day that it doesn’t do as much damage as dagger, and no one cares, its damage has nothing to do with why it is used.
Staff is terrible unless you have traited for it; using trait points that should go for better power build options. If you are going WvW, then staff is great, but you still need to burn those points. You need to look past strictly one section of the game. Axe has its own niche; staff is a support weapon, dagger is a single target raw damage weapon, scepter is condition damage, and axe is AoE control/support.
If I can be kited at 600 range, how would dropping it even further make anything better? That makes absolutely no sense.
Actually, it gives us 12 dodges, before it dips into our HP bar. Theoretically speaking, you could do 22 dodges, in a row.
Let the devs fix what we already have before they add more stuff. Once every play-affecting bug is fixed, THEN they can truly evaluate necros for where we are. After that, I would much prefer then change some of our less used traits to more competitive options, and give minor buffs/changes to things that need it (like spectral wall). Necro mechanics are fine as is, we only need fixes/minor buffs/changes to be perfectly balanced.
I recently picked up using berzerker stats on my MM in PvP, it does great when you need more damage output and already have bunkers.
Low toughness in WvW/PvE is fine. I have been running no extra toughness or vitality on my PvE/WvW character the entire time, you just need to be careful.
Power builds right now are our best 1v1 tool. If they give us a cleave, it means they need to nerf our single target damage, which means we’d have only DS to rely on for 1v1s.
Axe is a team/minion weapon. It gives 10 vulnerability just by auto attacking, which means 10% more damage from every source. That is a huge increase in boss fights, and in team fights where you can easily stack a lot of vulnerability with axe/focus.
Our class isn’t designed around avoiding damage, we’re designed around slowing their damage output, and absorbing damage with DS and healing off any real HP loss.
Why would we want to escape when pulling all their aggro means I can drop a bunch of wells/marks on myself, jump into DS, hit 4, and win?
My necro is a staff/well/cond basicly all of them rolled up in 1, wells don’t stack with eachother, and necromancers don’t have any projectile finishers or blast finishers besides staff auto-attack and chillbanes.
Basicly, it would be 100 times better to have a Necro and 4 warriors or guardians.
You have one person run full conditions with epidemic, they will pretty easily keep us up in bleeds/poison. You don’t want much more because you don’t want to cap out on bleeds and start wasting damage. Everyone else can do whatever they want, so long as it isn’t focused on stacking bleeds; this can mean MMs, wells, staves, various power builds, etc.
Also, its for fun. We aren’t trying to break records for fastest dungeon clears.
I’d like to say I approve of all punny names.
Post those names on his other thread, drainbamaged, just so its all in one spot.
Adding a bunch of mobility to our class will break us. We have AoE via condition builds, you want AoE in a power build, then switch to staff with bigger marks, 20% recharge, marks do more damage, and throw in well of suffering. I don’t know why I never see it, but staff can actually do a pretty fair amount of damage in a hybrid/power build, when you need AoE or need more range.
We can stack bleeds very easy, we just can’t get them up to 25 easily. However you can easily maintain 15 or so bleeds all the time.
If you are in WvW, and keep defending, don’t leave the wall. If some idiot jumps to his death, why is that your responsibility? Just stay up there and keep throwing out damage.
WoW was, by far, the best MMO of its time. It did some great things for the genre, and I think that is great. However, I also think it’s time is past, and if you want to get into why it isn’t nearly as good now as it used to be that is a completely different topic.
Just play a few other professions and see what you like.
Just to give you an idea of how strong MMs can be, this is an experiment I just ran in the Mists:
It was just me and Fleshy (the flesh golem). The only skills I used were my axe 1/2/3 (I had my other weapon de-equipped), heal (needed it once), and obviously my elite: Flesh Golem (used his active once). I never popped DS. Fleshy had all the minion traits (+damage, + HP, strips boons). We killed Chieftain, just us two.
Lead with Fleshy’s active (I actually was just trying to use Chieftain to kill him since I was trying something else out, and then I decided why the heck not), then ran around a little since I didn’t originally plan to actually fight. Eventually I turned around and started auto attack chieftain, and just spammed the axe abilities whenever they were up. I needed heal once because I lost about half my HP before I actually started fighting.
But really, minions are incredible. Just the elite minion will nearly perma cripple opponents with his autos, which do approximately 1k DPS (against medium armor he hits 850-900, 850-900, then 1400ish on his third hit).
Also, to get flesh golem to attack, remember that you cannot use his active. He will charge through people, then walk straight back to you if you just use it, using the axe auto however, gets him to attack very easily.
I just don’t stomp as a necro unless I think I can get away with it on the first try.
I prefer to just attack them to death or help my team out by making sure no one can res them while someone else stomps.
All necro groups, besides being tons of fun, are incredibly safe for Dungeons. Mass AoE damage, permanent 25 stacks of vuln/bleed, perma poison, multiple fear chains, and tons of other conditions all stack on top of each other to make damage output incredibly high. Plus, every single person in your group can pretty easily take aggro for prolonged periods of time no problem.
I use soldier’s. Because dieing is for noobs.
Just ran a 5 man necro with Bas using minions, they did perfectly fine the entire time. CoF too, not like there was a lack of AoE.
Asura are technically the best in WvW because of one of their racial skills, but its not that big of a deal.
They got rid of corpses because those skills were useless in smaller-group fighting. They were pushing 5v5 for competitive eSports, making all those skills complete crap. The reason it was in GW1 and worked okay, was because there were like 600 skills to choose from. In this game though, corpse based skills would make 4+ skills completely useless outside WvW and PvE, which is outside their design wants.