Thank you all very much.
I appreciate all the friendly and constructive feedback and will definitely apply them in-game.
I don’t think necros are OP and believe they are the least OP out of all light armored classes. I just had a hard time dealing with one of the builds and would never cry for their nerf.
Worth noting that the SoV bugfix and subsequent bugging have double-nerfed the skill, which was a really good heal for MMs, and the Unholy Martyr nerf also hit MM, and was probably directed at MM builds abusing it and Unholy Sanctuary. So effectively 3 nerfs to MM this patch which will reduce the damage/sustain of the build a bit.
Only ANet could fix a bug and immediately bug the exact same skill they just bug fixed, all while nerfing the absolute hell out of a previously worthless skill that had just become viable.
Are you using any well traits like Vampiric Rituals, or anything else that maybe gives an effect to casting well of blood? That tends to be the issue, things like stunbreaks that have a cast time get put on full CD when interrupted. I’ll head in game to test it out though.
Edit: just tried it out, it never went on full CD when I was using it, both with and without Vampiric Rituals.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Its not a great way to play with the minions, its just passive summon minions that passive attack until they passive die. However, for a great design, I’d like to give more publicity to Rym’s amazing idea which includes a lot of active minion play.
Necro doesn’t either, just because you don’t remotely understand the profession doesn’t mean they are OP.
I really doubt ANet is considering dungeon vendor prices when picking new weapons.
Spinal Shivers wasn’t nerfed, it had a tooltip fix.
+1 to zapv
Overreacting is a thing everywhere honestly. This patch was basically a non-factor for us, bug fixes and changes that are basically ANet not admitting Chilling Darkness is badly designed and Corruptions need a rework.
Chilling Darkness will be garbage until they remove the ICD or give us way more blinds. On a side note I don’t actually think Spinal Shivers should be unblockable, its a massive hit that removes boons. I’d much prefer it get a 3/4s to 1s cast time.
They said they were going to continue these balance patches up until HoT release. If we cant expect stuff during one of these patches then well its hopeless.
I don’t think we can expect anything big from these balance patches. For example, a lot of our fixes will require massive bug fixes, reworking entire weapon sets, reworking how DS works, etc. Bug fixes and balance changes are expected, and we got that, but I don’t think we can expect the level of changes we need until the HoT patch.
I understand your point but shouldn’t they address “the large scale balance fix” at the same tme they introduced the specialization system?
I’d say they addressed a fair number of issues, the trait changes were pretty good to use overall. Also I don’t at all believe they nerfed Chilling Darkness because of Reaper until they say that themselves which I haven’t heard.
Holy crap this is an amazing idea. Really solid skills, a lot of fun play, and a completely unique take on playing MM without being the traditional MM build.
In my eyes the staff is already a pretty good weapon to go with minions. I mean it could use a bit more synergy, but the ability to give them regeneration with #2 is quite good.
Staff is pretty mediocre with minions. Regen you get from a minor trait already, and it doesn’t bring anything else special.
If we did get a minion weapon it’d have to be an off-hand. Honestly though any type of support weapons we get would work with minions, so just a proper support specialization would most likely do more than a “minion” weapon.
So the question I now have is was this skill ever unblockable? Was it nerfed last patch and they didn’t remove the skill fact?
I don’t know that it was ever properly unblockable, and I used it a lot.
UM was on the strong side, I think the nerf is absolutely valid. Is it the most pressing issue in the game? No, but most of what will fix us is way too big to address in a random patch. It doesn’t kill any of our builds though, MM is just fine without UM, it just helped out the already absurd DM/BM/SR Unholy Sanctuary MM build.
No real changes, just bug fixes and UM nerf which wasn’t surprising because it was an absolute insane amount of LF generation. Nothing really to see here, I wouldn’t expect meaningful balance work yet, and frankly most of what they need to fix to balance us is too large scale for just a random patch.
We already have forms of hexes back in the game, like Tainted Shackles, but they are far more limited as they should be. Would love to maybe see a “Hex” based specialization though, with hex-like effects. But implementing too many hexes would be bad for the game, the point of getting rid of them was to make the game less complicated to get into; you shouldn’t be forced to read 10 pages of wiki articles just to play PvP.
Bhawbs not wrong. Unfortunately no matter how good the elite spec is if the base class is still in a god awful state it doesnt really help the class overall.
This is the biggest issue. No matter how amazing Reaper is, even if every single part of the spec is awesome, it will only be part of your build. You’ll always have to take another non-GS weapon, you’ll still be stuck with 2 non-Reaper trait lines, you’ll probably often have some mix on non-Reaper utilities, and then you’ll be stuck with core Necro BS. As long as core Necro is broken on a design level elite specs will suffer.
Yeah just needs cast time reduction.
Yeah that’s part of what I mean by numbers adjustments.
ICDs will kill a lot yeah, that’s why there are a lot of conditional statements in what I said :P
Honestly think the skill is fine already, though I’m always for usuability improvements.
That is what it should mean, you are correct, but people have been reporting bugs.
You know what i’d like? Zombies.
There are loads of risen models of various races, why can’t “Rise!” give you a risen version of whatever mob/player was killed? In the event that there is no risen model there can be a generic construct or maybe a shadowfiend.
I’m sick of the constructs, give us something new!
There are ethical reasons for only raising constructs. If you’ll notice, the only people who use actual zombies in the game are evil, and in the lore we also see a Sylvari do it before she understands she isn’t supposed to, and her group kinda freaks out.
Reaper is amazing, easily one of the better specializations if not the best if they adjust numbers. All they need to do is rework Rise! and Suffer!, adjust some of the damages, especially on Greatsword, and not destroy our traits and we’ll be great. Basically as long as they do the smart thing Reaper will be great.
Be snarky all you want, they do listen (never said it was perfect) and all you need is one functional eye and at least a somewhat functional brain to see it. Foot in the Grave being a stunbreak is an easy example.
Are you talking about my “and?” You suggested two things, suggestion A and suggestion B… And how exactly would neither add to MM’s tankiness? Only Last Gasp and Strength of Undeath have defensive attributes in SR, meanwhile Reaper has healing on GS. Just a trade-off.
Suggestions were on an either or basis, they were proposed as different minions.
It wouldn’t add to DM/BM/SR tankiness, which is built on by every single trait taken in the tree. Soul Marks, Vital Persistence, and Foot in the Grave are all defensive traits, and Gluttony, Last Gasp, and Strength of Undeath are also all defensive boosts. Reaper would lose all of these to gain access to “Rise!” which would be based on a tradeoff. Reaper MM would absolutely be less tanky than SR.
As opposed to your suggestions of reducing damage per minion and minions absorbing attacks that actually hit you?
1) It was either or, you wouldn’t have both
2) My suggestion wouldn’t do anything for DM/BM/SR because you’d have to use Reaper trait line
3) It wouldn’t be a flat buff unlike your idea, they would have to give up one of their minions to do this, which would hurt their damage and utility even further, for defense that wouldn’t really benefit them much
4) That build is only strong in small fights, and Rise! doesn’t do nearly as much in smaller fights
The thing is that they never actually listen to playerfeedback on Necro. I mean, they still didn’t fix minions, made Axe useful etc. and it has been years.
They listen to us in almost every single patch they make. They don’t make changes fast enough and they mess up plenty, but they absolutely listen.
Death Nova is fine as is, and we really can’t afford to buff the DM/BM/SR tanky as balls US based minion build.
Is there any necro that’s really complaining too much about 1v1s? I mean, yeah, we have a hard time if we have 0 life force, but overall, we already do well in 1v1s. Team fights are the biggest issue we have…. So I fail to really see your point, Bhawb. 1v1s aren’t the issue with necros. Realistically, we should be a class that others are kind of wary of fighting alone (kind of like facing Death.) And we should be able to actually contribute more to team fights than a sponge on the floor (which happens entirely too often)
This change wouldn’t change anything you’re bringing up. It would make us unkillable in 1v1s where we are already fine, and wouldn’t do much at all for teamfights except let us facetank more before dying.
Well I suggest that the minions generated, degenerate naturally and/or have a spawn limit. Second 5 percent/minion is quite little compared to mesmer’s defender. 10%~20% sounds better.
The minions I proposed would degenerate through damage tanking, further degeneration probably isn’t needed. And 5% was just an example, its why I said X%, 5% was just easier to show numbers.
That’s great and all but meanwhile you have bunkers with less than half the HP you mentioned who can survive better than a sentinel necro, more HP on a necro just makes you a tankier punching bag without any positive sustain or offensive pressure.
In teamfights yes, in 1v1s Necromancers will full LF should never lose because that much HP to start a fight off is unbeatable in almost every matchup.
If this were to happen LF would be nerfed very heavily, at the very least its 50% damage reduction would be removed. Starting every fight with 66k HP with sentinel’s gear would be absolutely overbearing.
Two ideas I had last night:
1) Each minion summoned takes a full hit for you every X seconds, including all effects of that attack. So if the minion takes a Backbreaker, it takes all the damage from it, and it is knocked back instead of you.
2) Each minion absorbs X% of the damage you take from all hits, and for each minion summoned you gain a charge of a stun break which pulls the CC effect from you and puts it on the minion instead. So lets say its 5% each, if you have 5 of them and you get hit for a 10k hit, you only take 7.5k damage, and each of your minions takes 500 damage.
Both minions in question would have a very low damage AA that exists solely to apply minion traits. Their HP could be tuned to limit their life span, as well as armor to adjust how much damage they take from normal attacks not transferred from you (the damage they take off of you would be armor ignoring).
The point of the minions would be to give defense that scales properly, like any shout, so it wouldn’t be overbearing in 1v1s where it is harder to kill the minion, but in 5v5s where the minions will die somewhat quickly, you will see a very strong effect for however long it is up. These are also effects that would help any build, not just MM, and wouldn’t be reliant on any minion traits.
I’m not really sure about how great the tempest will be. I like the warhorn skills a lot even if things like heat sync clearly rip off signet of inspiration for mesmer. I just don’t like how aura-centric the shouts and traitline are when you’d have to go D/D to make an aura build with tempest.
Easy, 10s ICD AoE stun break. Also, tempest can easily not run any of their utilities if they don’t want, or only run the auras when they are going D/D, you aren’t remotely forced to take all of a specialization at once.
However, I don’t see why getting rid of the Not So Secret 50% damage reduction would help it. Unless it were replaced with something equally as powerful, DS would be gone in about 2 seconds (you mentioned invuln, but I’m not sure how that could be made to work)
One of the biggest problems with current DS is that it is absolutely oppressive in a 1v1 when fully filled. There is no reason a Necro should ever lose a 1v1 unless they are just completely hard countered if they have 100% life force, it is a 120% boost to their eHP to start the fight, imagine fighting a Warrior with 40k HP. This lowers that, and while each life force bar might be 50% less, if they fill up 3x as fast you end up stronger overall.
None of our current minions will work, they are either way too strong (Flesh Golem) or uninteresting and weak (basically the rest of them). They either need to design a new minion that can somehow make the skill work or redesign it.
That being said, I think DS could be made more of an actual defense mechanism if it gets more of that kind of augmentation. I don’t see the point of making it less effective than it already is
The point is that Death Shroud shouldn’t (in my opinion) be something you sit in for 60 seconds after building for a long time. You should build it quickly, and then use it instead of building up an effective HP pool of 66 thousand which is what you have with vitality-focused gear and full life force against direct damage. Instead, drop that number so that you don’t have the potential to tank massive amounts of damage in one sitting, and instead be able to build full LF extremely quickly but it also goes away somewhat fast, and at the same time give it proper defenses, like invulns, blinds, etc.
The point isn’t to nerf DS at all, it shifts the effectiveness from DS being something that is extremely hard to build and ranges from useless to insanely powerful while full, to something that is quick to build and used often, but only moderately powerful with each full bar.
Chilling Darkness nerf would have been fine if we had a lot of individual sources to blinds. Then it would make sense that it was used as an occasional throw-in to help disable enemies, as such short durations are impossible to deal with realistically. However, we don’t (though we should) have many blinds, we have very few sources of blinds, almost all of which hit multiple enemies and are completely gutted by the addition of an ICD.
I think they need to remove DS’s “hidden” power with 50% direct damage reduction, maybe even lower it to 50% of our HP, but then give us better life force generation options, maybe some extra ways to spend it, and some good generic defenses like invuln.
I’d prefer to wait on Reaper update till I can play it. I don’t honestly trust ANet to balance without player feedback, I’d rather have them do nothing and just let us get our hands on it in a beta, then let us tell them what to do.
I doubt it, there are CD adjustments depending on whether someone is hit by an ability already, shouldn’t be hard to have it work per person hit. And positive effects have scaled for a while like UF as Drarnor said.
Also love that they get AoE mass boon strip, on top of stepping on Chronomancer’s toes with Rebound. Literally no reason to not run ele after this, they can do everything.
They are actually golems made of deceased organic “legos”. But yeah the Chinese ones look pretty cool honestly. I’d like to see them be designed better but w/e, its pretty low on my list of issues with Necromancer, and pretty low even on my list of issues with MM.
Also, the Chinese taboo is against human skulls, its why all the human-looking skulls were changed to just generic looking skulls that aren’t human.
Annnnnnnnnnd now I agree they dump on our shouts. They deal more damage with shorter cast times (when they even have one), lots of cool effects (though I think some of our shouts are cool in concept). And some of their utility is just absolutely insane, an AoE stunbreak on 10s ICD, what the actual kitten.
Honestly, Reaper would have been great if it was part of base Necromancer, it basically is the same theme that Necromancer has always had, but without a lot of the design flaws the original profession has. The problem is it doesn’t really add a new thing, its Necromancer 2.0, the Necromancer we always should have had, instead of something truly new.
Unfortunately I think Tempest destroyed any semblance that I thought ANet was getting better at balancing us. I wouldn’t expect much.
SA: distortion would be far too strong for the full duration, however distortion (or some similar effect) would be great for a very short period after casting, in order to give us a way to deal with massive hits in PvE, and in PvP it would allow us to break a stun, absorb some immediate followup hits, then have good damage reduction afterwards.
SG: not a bad idea
SWalk: distortion still too strong, give it something to enhance the mobility aspect or maybe all projectiles go through you for the duration
SWall: I’d like to see it do something with projectiles
Honestly I can’t even express how stupid this is. The good news is with Revenant’s introduction ANet can go back to having an 8 profession game.
running to target doesnt solve the current problem of blasting in line fields.
This is the big problem I think, and I’m not 100% sure how to solve it. MMs don’t care about field placement because Bone Minions bring their own field in any MM build that uses them, but for Bone Minions to be good for other builds they need to be able to have reliable blasts. I’m not sure you can fulfill both at once.