(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Well, look at our BiP, pretty high CD (40s untraited I think?), it applies 4 bleeds (once you nicely give the 2 you get yourself to the enemy), 2 of which are nearly full, 1 minute bleeds. Our weapon skills also have very low CDs, and many of our utilities have very low CDs (epidemic great example). Our really high CDs are on signets, which apply passive effects (attrition at its best), or big defensive/offensive hits (well of suffering = big pain), or have very long lasting effects (spectral walk has 30s swiftness).
It really makes perfect sense.
:P I wasn’t running conditions with minions, it was a condition build I recently made. I wanted a high AoE condition damage build using scepter/dagger plus crits to quickly apply lots of high damage conditions then epidemic them to larger groups. Thinking that 20% extra damage to this build sounded perfect I grabbed it (strangely enough I still got incredibly good results from this as long as I remembered I wasn’t a bunker anymore). But since it doesn’t work, that’s 30 traits that are very useful into some life siphoning and life force generating.
I’ve been trying to make non-minion builds (although as I say that I’m working on my minion build) to have some kind of ability to vary my setup beyond MM and easy-mode wells/staff in PvE.
+1 to what Bas said. To simplify it, OP is just something that lacks counterplay.
No, see learning curves have to do only with time invested compared to returns at a given skill level. That example was contrived to do exactly what I wanted it to, and that was to show your ideas of OP and learning curves were absolutely fallacious, and if you had bothered to comprehend it, you would have seen that.
Good to hear, I had stopped playing right as they rolled out a lot of content, so I’m sure I missed a lot in there.
I just added you too, don’t worry, I almost never bite. Just don’t be surprised if I don’t answer right away, I like to log in and afk in the mists so my guild thinks I am a good member.
Minions don’t suck, I can vouch for how strong they are at pure bunker builds, Bas can vouch for heavier damage MM; atm they are a very strong build in the right situations.
Necros are absolutely fine in every part of the game. WvW we have strong AoE damage/support, PvP we are great at just never dieing, and if you never die, then your opponent auto loses. PvE we are awesome too.
You won’t be able to bring minions into every situation, but they work well; plus they are cute as heck.
The only thing we have, and this will frustrate you a little, is we have (to my knowledge) the most bugs of any class. It will take a while to fix them, but they will be fixed, and in the mean time we are still strong and can only get stronger. Also be prepared for a challenging (in a fun way) class.
Learning curve is strictly related to the overall balance level. … Because you don’t need to put efforts into the profession to get better, that’s the point.
In a well balanced game, an unskilled Thief should have a tough time with an unskilled Necro, same sitation should be at higher skill level but it absolutely doesn’t happen in this game, as you also pointed out.
That just isn’t accurate. The only way that every single class will have the same learning curve is if they all played exactly the same. The reality is that certain mechanics are really easy to learn and utilize, compared to others. I could easily show this via math and graphs, but I have a feeling that it’d go completely over most people’s heads here, but if you ever get a chance, look into differential equations, they have a lot about learning curves.
Lets use two over simplified situations to show this: A warrior build using all signets, and an elementalist build using very high CD abilities (use your imagination). Now, the warrior has 4 signets, these give passive benefits that almost always outweight active effects. He essentially has 5 abilities that he needs to use properly, since the signets are being used solely for their passive effects. His entry level strength is quite high, just running around auto attacking is 60% of his build being use perfectly already. However the skill cap is very low, he has very few skills to manage, and there isn’t much he can do to increase his ability besides this very easy management of a few, low risk skills. His learning curve is nearly non-existent, yet he caps out very quickly, and not really all that high.
Swap to the elementalist, they have 25 skills to manage, they need to properly switch attunements to make sure they are in the right one at the right time, and using the activate effects well. They must manage 25 CDs, 15 of which are hidden to them at any given time. They also have very high risk for improper use of their skills. Entry level at this build gives very low output, and would be completely stomped by an entry level warrior’s build. However, they have a very, very high skill cap. Perfect management of their 25 skills gives them tenfold increase in their strength, and that high skill cap means that, with time, they will surpass the warrior by a lot, because there is more reward for proper use of their abilities, whereas they also have high risk if improperly used.
Now wait a minute, according to you easy = OP. Well I think we can very easily disprove that in this example, while the warrior build is very easy (5 skill management, low risk), and gives good entry output, once we go towards approaching skill caps, the warrior is hopelessly underpowered against this ele, because he just doesn’t have much room to work, his perfect play only gives slight increases from unskilled play. But the ele’s skill play gives incredible returns compared to unskilled.
Easy =/= OP. OP simply means that the thing in question is too effective at what it does. This could be something incredibly difficult, like a mesmer build that relies on perfectly positioned and shattered clones and almost no survivability, or a thief pressing two buttons and killing dragons. OP has nothing to do with the skill required to get those OP results. UP means that the thing in question just isn’t effective at what it wants. With incredible skill it might be made to work, but it just doesn’t cut it at a high level when tiny things make the difference.
TL;DR you have no idea what OP is or what learning curves really mean.
TL;DR more QQing about a class that is perfectly fine if you know how to play it. The only problem with necro is you can’t throw a build together in a few seconds and expect anything. We have one of the worst learning curves in the game, if you want to do well as necro, sit down, grind it out, and expect it to take a long time.
Just some quick tests since I wanted to see some tihngs I didn’t know:
17. He was right, I was wrong. Easy enough to test (also, time to change my build).
3. It appears to to affect damage slightly, according to my tests it raised the damage from ~91 per tick to ~97 per tick, with about 60 less damage at the end.
And quickening thirst is not bugged. Just tested it using completely sound scientific methods (running between two trees and counting the seconds, once with, once without, dagger). It seems to work.
Our entire argument is that your perception that the class is underpowered is 100% related to the fact that necromancers have a much harsher learning curve, and one that many people have not scaled yet. If you are bad at a class, then you cannot reasonably expect to perform well at it, regardless of time spent. Other classes might be easier, or you might just understand their playstyle better, but if YOU are not as good with necros as YOU are with mesmers, guess what the common factor is?
Aka, the class is fine, its just difficult to learn. That isn’t underpowered, its just a learning curve.
I’ll just answer what I know, and leave the rest for others.
1. Anything gained by going into DS will remain even if you leave it, so yes, you keep the boon.
3. Yes it affects downed 1, not sure about DS 4
7. Yes for damage, but the CC portion will last through 1.9 seconds
8. No
9. Staff auto attacks do
10. A pretty dang long time. Enough so that you can place all your marks and they will all be off CD long before the old ones fade. I think it was a minute to disappear on their own. I have never tested distance
11. I guess theoretically you could, I’d only switch axe for scepter if you are going power build, scepter is much better if you do condition damage.
12. Main hand dagger is incredible for damage and LF gain in a power build. Off hand is generally considered a condition build offhand, you are probably better off using Dagger/Focus in a power build, and Scepter/Dagger in a condition, as they synergize better.
15. That is per person it affects, yes.
16. Yes. It is currently bugged when people are very low on HP and affected by poison though.
17. To my knowledge, yes.
If you want to know how one of the hardest classes to build/play (because of our mechanics) compares to other classes, first you have to either assume equal skill levels, or each class at its skill cap. If you are comparing a bad necro (because necro is hard) to a good guardian (not as hard) then guess who wins out?
To be able to even start comparing classes, we need to compare them with equal skill levels. At equal skill, necro’s are totally competitive with other classes, ESPECIALLY in survivability, but people will never see that if they refuse to see that they are not playing well, and instead blaming it on the class.
The only possible changes I would make to DS are giving it a 5th skill that is more defensive in nature, maybe making dark path to a straight teleport instead of a gap closer relying on hitting enemies, and possibly making the first ability based off of weapon, and then making it a similar thing to that weapon. Heck, I wouldn’t mind if it had minions in it, but we’re already reaching overpowered status.
Thats it. Stop asking for ridiculous things. Life blast and life transfer already have the chance to apply bleeds for any build that specs conditions (5 into curses gives that), and the OPs suggestions are just bad. Sure, I’d love completely ridiculous abilities that did insane damage with no skill requirement too, but thats not going to happen because we need balance.
I mean really, your F1 would make necros nearly unkillable; you’re giving me essentially a second heal that does damage AND causes conditions, how is that balanced at ALL.
F2… I mean come on, really? With the right build, thats potentially permanent stacks of 4 bleeds, poison, AND chill. We already have the ability to do half of that with builds, but now you want to just make it so every necro can perma bleed/poison/chill people, thats ridiculous.
F3 Yes, one of the strongest damage minion skills, except with 50% more damage, 1200 range, and on a pretty short CD considering they’d create poison fields and do damage from big range. However, this is probably the most reasonable of your ideas.
F4 NO, just no. Go watch Nemesis’ fear build. With traits, we are talking about a pbAoE that does (if I remember right) 1k damage per tick, with at least 9 ticks (could probably get 11 with the right rune buildout). How is it balanced at all, in any shred of an idea?
People have been throwing around activated abilities instead of DS. If anything, I wouldn’t mind if they gave us a balanced extra abilities in F2-F4 that cost Life force to cost and had multiple build synergy (ie: a minion on one, conditions on another, straight damage on a third, w/e), but what you are asking for would make this Necro Wars. I just feel like you didn’t really put a lot of thought into what would make DS better, or be a good replacement considering our class mechanics/concept, but just threw out a ton of stuff that sounded cool until you think about its uses and realize its beyond the range of being OP.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Servers in all tiers have very good soloers and 5 man gank groups, and organized guild teams. In fact many people have left the upper tiers in order to avoid ques and to get great small scale wvw action. Trying to equate a server’s tier with individual player skill is, for lack of a better word, pure arrogence.
I switched from a full exotic conditionmancer to a full exotic powermancer. Both have their place in WvW, however, I prefer the powermancer playstyle.
No one can cleanse enough conditions in 1v1 to bother condition builds.
Any 5v5 group that CAN cleanse those conditions is going to have much lower damage output (they will need at least one person on full defensive duties to have the AoE cleanse necessary, which means less DPS overall)
And if you aren’t on a tier 1 server, there is a very good chance that, overall, that server has a lower concentration of coordinated guilds in WvW; high tier servers are high tier for a reason. Even if there are a few great wvw guilds in a tier 3 server, you are much less likely to run into one than if you were tier 1. Therefore if you aren’t tier 1, there is a smaller chance to run into a zerg that can cleanse conditions to negate your damage, and you are fine running conditions. Run into a lot of these guilds and you will want to change your build instead of being constantly useless.
And necromancers are a troublesome profession for ANet. I have read claims that a single necro during one of the beta weekends could sit on a SPVP point and via DS and other means basically hold out against the other team in full.
Yep, you can look up footage from the beta matches they officially held, 5v5, there was a necro that, as I remember, demolished people.
ANet has said a few times that they are very cautious of buffing necros directly (as opposed to bug fixes which indirectly buff us to what we should be), because we are a very high skill cap class, and they don’t think the majority of the community is close to reaching it. While buffs might make the average necro more competitive, it would also make those at the very top of the skill spectrum even better.
DS replaces your whole skill bar. You are not yourself when you are in DS. And DS drains naturally. Of course LF gives you extra hp. But a 100% full LF bar would be worth maybe 50% of your regular hp bar at best.
Its up to you to utilize your DS skills properly. Any build you make has the potential to have strong use for DS. And lets say you have 0% offensive use for DS (impossible, but lets say), then you can just use it the second someone is about to burst you, and BAM, you’ve negated a full burst from someone, without losing any “real” HP. DS isn’t meant to be a long-term thing, you jump in, do your stuff, and jump out, usually within 1-2 skills at most.
I read that in an earlier incarnation dark path was a teleport skill, similar to the thief shortbow skill, rather than the targetted gap closer it is now. That’s a change they should definitely roll back, it would put necroes more on the level of other classes in terms of being able to disengage.
It was, this was back in closed beta (I believe, it might have made its way to open beta). At the time I remember watching some live matches they put on, and it looked a lot like a staff mark, except you would teleport to wherever you clicked.
They need very minor flat buffs. Making them scale with healing would require ANet to nerf their base values to even lower amounts, so that people stacking huge healing power won’t become super-bunkers capable of soloing dungeon bosses (exaggeration).
And thats really it, I can’t remember if the 50% better siphoning works with all siphoning yet, and I’d prefer if they fixed our current bugs, bringing us in line with our real potential, than go overboard and buff us so we get nerf hammered later.
It depends on where you are. In PvE duration is great, as it is an easy damage increase and mobs almost never remove conditions. In PvP, my basic advice is this: the closer to 1v1 it is, the more likely that duration is going to actually increase your damage.
In my current PvP build (which I am very likely going to change), my scepter auto attack bleeds are approximately 10 seconds long, and tbh, I’m probably going to switch out my runes for survivability ones (currently 5 nightmare 1 necromancer), because it is very rare that you will meet someone who has such little condition removal that it will matter.
And as Frisky said, bleeds aren’t your only condition. I’d highly suggest running condition duration runes over bleed duration. As a necro you will be applying a lot of conditions (fear, bleed, poison, weakness, vulnerability, chill, cripple, and blindness are all very accessible) and as such overall condition duration will likely do better for you.
1. No class can out condition necros. No one has the condition removal necessary to stop us from easily maintaining 10 stacks of bleeds and perma poison in a condition build.
2. Killing minions, except passively with AoE, is bad, and will get you killed by any competent MM.
3. Wells require support, you can’t just throw down a well and expect anything, you need to use your condition-based CC to keep them in the well (its only 5 seconds).
4. Direct damage via power builds is fine. We can get 2-3k crits from DS, 1k from dagger autos, huge hits from Well of Suffering, and easy access to vulnerability.
Its all teamwork once you leave sPvP hotjoin, especially as a necro. It doesn’t matter how much better than them you are, if they out teamwork you, you will lose 11 times out of 10.
No way to control its position with your keyboard, you can only set it to fast cast which makes it go wherever your mouse is when you activate the skill.
Viable? Sure, in theory you could be nearly immune to conditions, have full stacks of bleeding/poison/vulnerability/chill on people, just giving 5 necros epidemic and full condition specs and I’m sure it would be lulzy at least. It’d just be up to the people in question to make a team build (instead of just individual builds) and then execute in game. I could see it being very strong on gate defense/offense though.
Sometimes I wonder if people that post in this forum have actually spent time playing around on necros and actually understand the class.
We have unique mechanics, so do other classes, you can’t simply say “necros have no boons, therefore they can’t live, gg necro sucks”.
Lets talk about necro survivability, because ours doesn’t come from “standard” sources like boons or high healing. Ours comes from using death shroud to mitigate damage, using our huge access to condition removal/transfer to render using conditions a liability, use our own access to debilitating conditions to reduce incoming damage, and finally our actual heals/life steal to heal up the damage we’ve taken.
I don’t know the exact amount of HP given by DS, but lets just assume for this example that a full, untraited DS pool (0% extra life force pool) has the same HP value as your current HP. Let’s also assume you have 20k HP (our base hp is 18k, so this is hardly any investment, and makes it easier to show with math). So for each 1% of life force you gain from an ability, that is 200hp “healed” to your secondary life bar. I’ll list just the weapon abilities below (post would be huge otherwise, and you should get the point by then), along with how much effective hp you are healed for by the life force gain.
Now, lets look at what skills give life force, and how much from weapon skills + the one DS skill:
DS 4: gives 3% LF per tick per person – 600hp per tick per person (note: I’m not 100% sure if it is per tick or overall, however more people hit does stack LF gains)
Staff 1: 3% LF per hit, up to 3 hit – 600hp per person up to 1800
Axe 2: 4% LF if all hit, up to 800hp
Scepter 2: reads to give 2% LF per condition, not sure if this works as intended – 400hp, up to 22% LF gain (only in completely ideal situations: ie never going to happen) if this works as it reads.
Dagger 1, part 3 of chain: 4% LF, 800hp
Focus 4, 3% LF per enemy bounce (not sure if it applies for allies too), 600hp per bounce
So just looking at weapon skills, many of our auto attacks, 2nd abilities, or offhand abilities effectively give us upwards of 400hp per hit. This doesn’t include traits, or utility skills that can also give LF, also effectively giving you HP. And this doesn’t include the damage reduction/survivability reduction we afflict enemies with in battle.
Necros look bad on paper because of the unique mechanics that we use to live longer, but saying that necros can’t survive is only out of ignorance of our mechanics.
My staff auto attack stacks 10 bleeds and perma poison.
Is this firing it through a field or something?
WHOOPS, no that is me mistyping, sorry. Its meant to say scepter.
He said that Life steal should give life force as well, so every time I steal health I should also get life force. His post and my response had absolutely nothing to do with healing power.
@Pendragon
We get a second, separately refillable HP bar… therefore we need more HP sustain? wut?DS isn’t our only defensive tool, its our class mechanic, which happens to function amazingly well for defense.
There are no “best” builds for necros. There are a variety of general builds, which I’ll name below with short descriptions (most can have variations), and then its really up to you. Some do better in certain situations than others, some are very niche, some are rounded, etc. but there is never one best build.
Condition support: condition necro that focuses less on damage and more on supporting with a staff by spreading conditions that reduce enemy strength.
Power builds: focused on bursting, usually through DS or dagger main hand, with big crit damage and easily accessed vulnerability through focus 4.
Condition damage builds: uses BiP, scepter/dagger, and epidemic to spread huge amounts of conditions in large areas.
Minion masters: rely on minions for tankiness/damage and overall annoyance, since minions don’t scale with your stats, it has huge base damage that lets you do whatever you want to synergize.
And there are far more, some have builds that use fear as the primary focus, some pop in and out of DS for tankiness and easy boon access, some spread blind/chills, and there are variations of everything. Just mess around with it all and see what you like, there is NO best build, period.
There are some skills that are bugged, Lich form/staff auto are big culprits.
However, if you find yourself missing a LOT of skills, make sure that:
You are facing them
They aren’t dodge rolling
They aren’t blocking
You aren’t blinded
You are in range
You have clear sight of them
I am pretty sure that most of your issues are actually because you are using the skills wrong, or that the other person is doing something to make you miss. It certainly isn’t easy (I’m a terrible 1v1er because of the mechanics I listed above), but thats the likely reason for missing skills.
also in response to the other things:
1. Tis a bug, we have lots, get used to them because they’ll be around for a while. Good news though, if you can do well right now with the bugs, you’ll do even better without them, when they are fixed.
2. We have highest HP in the game, with access to a recharging, secondary HP bar, insane control over conditions, and just generally high survivability. Stun breaks on short CD would be too strong.
3. lolwut? BiP + transfer conditions (via dagger 4 in my build) = 4 stacks of bleeds, 2 for 50s, 2 for 20(ish)s. Then dagger 5, scepter 2, scepter auto’s using a build that applies bleeds on crits is an easy 20 or so bleeds, with about an 8s average. My scepter auto attack stacks 10 bleeds and perma poison. With the 10 stacks of might from BiP, they tick around 130 per bleed, plus easy access to blind, weakness, chill, and vulnerability, AND you can use epidemic every 12 seconds (traited) to spread all those conditions to enemies in a pretty big AoE.
Sure, we can’t stack 25 bleeds like rangers, but I can stack a whole lot else in addition, on multiple people, while still having good defenses.
Necros need bug fixes, and some fixes so things work as intended, along with very minor buffs to certain traits/builds/abilities (VERY minor, mostly CD reductions, or slight damage boosts). Thats it.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
I suppose that would be a pretty valid reason! But honestly, their burst is not as bad as people think when utilizing proper gear and traits.
Its definitely not bad, you can burst for a decent amount of HP, but its still pretty tame compared to actual burst classes like thief/ele. Not saying its bad, just comparatively.
Also, 19K health for a glass cannon. I’m not sure why Anet made Necros have some of the highest based HP next to Warrior, but it’s awesome!
Almost non-existent defensive boon access, low burst, focus on attrition, and the way DS scales made it a balanced thing. Like how guardians have pretty small health pools because they have incredibly accessible defensive boons.
Conditions have a weakness in wvw when you go up against coordinated guilds. However if you aren’t on a tier 1 wvw server, those won’t be an issue. Conditions, imo, are a much better option in wvw because they have strong AoE damage/support without putting yourself in danger, and can be used from/on walls to defend and attack much better.
If you play necros right, we have the highest survivability per whatever damage output we are at. Whether its bunker, glass cannon, or in between, we will have similar damage output, but with more survivability.
It is up to 3, it needs to bounce to transfer all 3.
The GM trait does, actually. Anyone can benefit from your enemy having 33% reduced healing in a fight, it can completely gimp their survivability. And no condition necro should be going 30 into death magic, at least I couldn’t see why when there are much better traits, staff or not.
MMs just don’t build condition damage, simple as that.
Either they need to remove the CD (or lower it significantly), so that its actually possible to have a small group of them, or they need to remove its degeneration. Atm, it gives a minor boost in damage (whatever 2 attacks + bleeds are), and 20 toughness (if 15 into death magic), then dies off. If you have 30 into death magic, they become at least somewhat useful because they throw up a poison field. It’d just be nice for what could be a decent adept trait to get some usefulness.
An unbalanced team sucks, but that really does prepare you more for tPvP, and brings the game more in line with needing teamwork. As is, the only kind of “teamwork” that is rewarded is moving in a big group and laying down a lot of AoE to get as much credit for kills as you can; farming up 300 glory per game.
Survivability wise we are the strongest as far as living the longest. However our mobility is pretty bad without traiting for it and devoting too many skills for it, and our stun breaks aren’t that good; we have them, just they aren’t that great as only stun breaks. We also have the strongest condition control in the game (I don’t say removal because we don’t simply remove conditions, we transfer them, turn them into boons, or nibble on them for HP instead of just taking them off).
Basically, necros have some issues moving (if you consider that survivability), but have very little issue living a lot longer than other classes.
I wasn’t serious about killing a team. Still, if you cannot out sustain every other class in the game, bar full bunker specced (no damage) guardians, then you have specced a lot into damage. Necros have, bar none, the highest general sustain in the game. We have the strongest condition application and removal, bar none. If you add easy access to a bunch of boons on top of that, I could make a bunker necro that could tank through boss fights (again, not serious, but you get the point, bunker necros are already incredibly strong at sustaining, give us boons and it’ll just be stupid).
Depends on your team. The trait build would be the same, you’d just swap gear when you wanted to change.
I would probably say more towards damage or at least a hybrid, bunker MMs are great, but the damage output is pretty low, and in a dungeon you don’t really need the absurd tankiness you get with it. Really, I’d suggest going as far towards glass cannon as you can, as long as you can go an entire dungeon without getting downed in reasonable situations (we all know Necro’s wonderful tendency to take 100% aggro all day err’yday).
Yeah, in PvE he’s fine because, lets be honest, you should be able to go through most situations without a designated heal. I wish he’d just heal a bit more on hit, or something to increase his viability. I feel so dirty playing MM and yet having to tell him to stay home, its wrong ANet, you shouldn’t force families apart like this!
And yeah, Consume is just too good to not take. WoB I could see if you were running a supporty build, or happened to have so much condition removal the thought of more disgusted you.
Good points.
I also agree with the Blood Fiend, I stopped using him after Beta (MMs were just plain OP in beta, so you could get away with Blood Fiend and still be able to 5v1 just about anyone), but his healing/damage her hit is pathetic. He doesn’t bring enough damage to be offensive enough to work, doesn’t bring enough healing to work on defense (unless you are telepathic and can use his heal right as he is about to die), and doesn’t bring enough mixed to warrant it. I’ve felt bad for the lovable little sack of organs and bones since release, he’s just bad outside of easy-mode PvE.
Edit: not to say you can’t use him, I still mess around with him sometimes, but he isn’t worth the 20 toughness and small amount of healing in most situations.
Even though Necro’s are about debuffs, we could use a few more boons. Boon stacking builds seem much more effective than condition builds, and its because conditions are so much easier to remove than boons.
Until you face a necro, and all your boons are turned into conditions, then a few bleeds added on, then epidemic’d to your entire team, and everyone dies because you put boons on yourself.
But yeah, necros don’t need boons, we are fine as is on that front.
If what people stated above is correct about the games design philosophy. Then maybe what Necro’s lack more than heals scaling better/at all with healing power, is easier access to defensive boons.
Our accesss to Stability is almost non-existent (grand master trait 3 seconds). Our abilities that gives us access to Protection are on far to long cooldown or far to short uptime (wells or utility). Our retaliation is very short excluding Axe#3 which is uncommonly used due to poor implimentation.
Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?
Necros are a bit different. We are more towards the philosophy that a good offense is the best defense. We take reduced damage not by reducing incoming damage with protection, but by reducing their damage output with chills and blinds. We do have decent indirect boon access through traits and condition transformation, but since we already have the highest sustainability in the game, it’d unbalance us to have a bunch of boon access too.
@Bas Essentially, the changes he proposes turn the minions themselves into a much tighter micro-managing setup, with higher reward for skilled play, then they currently are. Right now, the biggest skill factor in using an MM is making sure you keep your minions on the target through CC, aiming Flesh Golem and using his CC properly, and timing Bone minion explosions. With this, minions will be able to apply their standard conditions through auto attacks, instead of relying on active effects only, and give their actual active effects a higher return for skilled play. You would need to judge when the cost (losing a minion temporarily) is less than the benefit gained from the damage/conditions gained.
That was a big idea in making non-elite minions: have strong actives that require a lot of skill and micro managing to maximize their efficiency. Shadow fiend breaks away from that by having a skill that is, lets be honest, something you can press every time its up and lose almost no utility, and Bone fiend, whose active is okay, on the very rare chance it works.
Flesh Wurm would be much better, as is his poison is absolutely useless, and he is only good as an “oh crap I need to get out of here” button, and one that I very rarely find myself pressing, because by then he is dead, I would get downed anyway and his extra damage is more helpful than another second of life, or killing him off would actually hurt me.
I wouldn’t say that these changes are PERFECT as is, I think they are very liable to make MMs far too strong and turn it into a near-mandatory build in PvP. However with balance the idea of slight changes to auto attacks (and applying conditions), with slight nerfs to the damage output to match is good. Along with that, useful actives, whereas right now 3 of 6 actives are arguably useless. The fixes presented aren’t necessarily great, I think they are conceptually good though, and bring minions more in line with what their concept was, which seems lost along the way.
In response to your # posts:
1. Minions should be auto attacking based, with actives that present to you a cost-reward problem. This retains that idea, by giving fixes/tiny buffs to their attacks, while making their actives an actual choice (in PvP its almost never a question, when your shadow fiend skill comes up, use it. When bone fiend’s active comes up, who cares, it never hits anyway, and Flesh Wurm’s will always stay up, since it is a rare, niche use).
I agree this makes them too OP, and would need tweaking (shadow fiend would be disgusting with his current idea, I’d keep him the same as he is now, but with a chance to blind, or blind every X seconds or attacks, and the active suggested).
2. His port is already terrible except across flat terrain, and as an escape only, at least as I have found him. You can’t use him to port in any vertical direction, and anything horizontal is fairly limited in use; except as an escape. His damage is nice, but half of his active is nearly useless right now. Yes it makes him a bit weaker because he will possibly add poison to poison, but it keeps his tele and brings the poison to a useful spot.
3. I agree, too much towards killing them, which isn’t the focus of MM at all, it is keeping them alive, and then killing them yourself either with situational timing or at the very end for some bonus damage/utility. And frankly, I think all the exploding would end up OP or useless, but never balanced, I just don’t see how you could balance the current minion state of decent DPS/life length and expendability.
4. I agree that those should be left in, however with what he is proposing in changes to minions balances it out. Minions will be more directly supporting you and keeping you from dieing (actually getting cripples off, having more consistent blinds, poisons). It makes you a bit less tanky (I think 140 toughness at complete max?), but with less incoming damage anyway.
I have a feeling this will be a giant wall, but just to summarize everything, I don’t agree specifically with all his changes to minions or minion traits, there would need to be a lot of balancing. However, I like the concepts of making minion’s attacks and the conditions they are designed with more meaningful, and making the choice to use their active more of a decision. I’d even take the second half, making their actives a more meaningful, skill based decision than it is now.
Plague form does wonders if used with team coordination, or in PvE. Its main weakness when using it for damage (constant poison/2 bleeds) is that people walk out, so you need team help to keep them inside. OR you can use the traited blind, so they have perma poison/blind/chill on them, and then you have your team do their thing.
In PvE its just abusive. You can tank groups of elites by setting the blind to auto attack, and just aggroing all of them. Let your team throw down AoE on top of you, and you have ~20s of free damage on them, while taking very little yourself.
Plague just requires more teamwork than other abilities, it isn’t very good in 1v1 unless you can somehow force them to stay near you the entire time to use the bleed (such as point defense where they are forced to stay there). So like Bas said, you really NEED a team with you to make it work. At the very least, you want a super glass-cannon that benefits a lot from the large damage reduction it will cause.
“One of the best” we are, hands down, THE best at controlling conditions. You literally have to go out of your way as a necro to NOT have some kind of condition control in a build.
Anyway, I like the idea of DS, I think it is just the implementation of the idea that came out rather crudely. I cant count how many times DS has saved me in WvW. I have experienced it on the other side too. Countless times I’ve almost downed an enemy Necro before he DSed and ran into a tower.
Again, I’m not saying that DS is great the way it is, it’s a great concept but executed poorly. It has to be able to synergise with the majority of builds, ANet should address that.
It was an example I threw out, I haven’t done testing to know if there were any CDs, and I meant it as an extreme example (you usually get 4-5, which is still at least 500 damage + life transfer damage). But, DS only doesn’t have great OFFENSIVE synergy with every build, and thats completely okay, considering how strong it is on defense, if I could build every single of my builds AND have DS as a second source of stupidly high damage, it’d just be ridiculous. Necro condition builds really don’t need any offensive help right now, with how insane Epidemic is.
Edit: I do agree that they need a better UI though, not being able to see important things while in DS makes things really difficult.
They haven’t directly stated why they don’t have healing do more, but they have indirectly answered that. It is the same reason that they have lots of boons that are pretty accessible, why everyone has a self heal, and why there is no designated “priest” class: they didn’t want the age-old holy trinity of RPGs (tank, dps, healer).
Now then, as someone said, heals need to be balanced with the rest of the game. If the game is designed in such a way that boons and not being hit are supposed to be your main defensive sources, then if healing was really strong, it would very easily become OP, and we’d end up in a similar situation as to what the WoW situation had.
Sorry, but if you think DS only works for Power builds, you are lacking a LOT of knowledge about building necros. I recently made a condition damage build that also uses critical hits to apply extra conditions. Popping into death shroud every time 4 is up means an AoE attack that ticks 9x for every enemy within range. At about 80% crit chance, every crit has a 60 and 66% chance to apply bleeds (that means up to 2 bleeds per tick). That means, with great luck, I can apply 18 bleeds to EVERYTHING within the DS 4 radius. Please tell me how that doesn’t help condition builds? And since every condition build should go into curses at least 20, every condition build will have similar access to condition application.
Every build can use it as:
A gap closer
Decent burst of damage
“OH CRAP” button, you can negate almost any burst with it
On-demand fear: stops people from ressing enemies, stomping teammates, healing, in the middle of a dangerous channel (gg 100b warriors)
And a variety of utilities depending on traiting, it can apply vuln, give might, remove conditions, heal, apply conditions, and more.
DS is a vital mechanic of necros, no necro build cannot use it, no good necro player doesn’t use it.
TL;DR : L2necro