Still gives a “tell”, though I’m not against the idea.
How amazing would it be if we could ground target where to blow our bone minions up?
It would actually nerf the skill in some situations, a lot of the strength of Bone Minions right now is that all you have to do to land the skill is make sure the minion is in range, with ground targeting you’d have to also aim it, making it much easier to miss as the minion ran to the location. Also, if it got any “tells” where the minion changed behavior, enemies would be able to avoid it, whereas now they can’t.
Not saying that because I don’t think it should be changed, but any changes will likely result in some nerfs to its primary use (MM builds).
In short ways (in my head) : necromancer < his elit spec.
All based classes, in the future, will be inferior, in some point, of Elite and Unique specialization.
This is exactly the opposite of their goal, specializations are not supposed to replace core, but augment it. Not add power but shift it.
The biggest problem I’d have with this is how easily it could make Reaper (and all other Necro specializations that use this mechanic) just straight up stronger than core. The only thing you give up to get the specialization is one trait line, other than that Reaper is stronger in every way, with more skill access, better class mechanic situation, etc.
Other professions are up in the air. Mesmer is getting flat upgraded while Guardian is having substitutions like us, and Elementalist can’t just get rid of its profession mechanic so while it is a flat upgrade the skills it gets are both really hard to use (massive channel times) and it has no choice but to have upgrades.
Wouldn’t making fear a CC effect only easier?
Would be a pretty big change to Fear, by making it not a condition it removes all condition-based play/counterplay. No condi duration increases with generic condi duration anymore for example.
so…… how then would categorize other classes that have larger dps output coupled with much better survival skill in re to pvp? IE warriors, elem, mesmers?
I don’t deny that some professions are too strong. I don’t deny we have plenty of issues. But the way to fix Necromancer is not to give us things that are too strong, and especially not giving us single options that alone make us strong or OP on their own, at the cost of the rest of the profession remaining garbage.
We absolutely need work, but adding OP stuff isn’t the answer. In this specific case though what spoj was mentioning wasn’t OP, I just misunderstood him.
You already lost a lot of credibility when you start with “Minion Master has always required little skill” which is just flat out false and shows you haven’t played the build much, or at the very least not well.
And yeah, the build shown is pretty awful. MM doesn’t run blood fiend, nor would you ever run SoU, and there are some other questionable choices. Don’t mean to crap on your hard work, but yeah.
Love Drarnor’s idea too
Greatsword isn’t even that slow compared to the rest of our profession. Gravedigger is, but the rest is no slower than the rest of what we’re used to dealing with.
Just make it so Lich form/Plague don’t kill minions which they shouldn’t do anyway. No one uses those elites in MM builds, even if they didn’t kill minions you wouldn’t use them.
Solid idea
It does 4 things. Chill, stun, damage and grants stab. I would rather them remove some of the functionality and have it cast a little faster.
Anet would class this skill as “powerful” or “very strong” because it does 4 things.
Most of our skills will long cast times have long cast times since they seem to think this balances out the skill being functionally overloaded. You can already see this on axe #3 and focus #5.
Supply crate is damage, stun, blast finisher, heal, regeneration, burn, immobilize, 1s cast time and many of those effects can’t be mitigated by simply dodging since half of them don’t affect you immediately if at all.
CttB needs a 1 second cast time, and it honestly is probably fine with that adjustment alone, not too strong or weak.
I always felt that Reaper would’ve been better with stances.
I actually think “Rise!” and “Your Soul is Mine!” are awesome as they are, they just seriously needs to be instant cast. This whole cast time thing on shouts is really crippling their viability, and only really the elite deserves that treatment based on its effect.
Stances would be cool, something I’d like to see in the future for sure.
Rise! is honestly pretty bad as is from a design standpoint. Forces MM builds to do things MM builds otherwise hate to do (fight multiple targets), and in everything except some cheese condi builds using DN it is just a worse version of Bone Minions.
I do think shouts should be useful outside of big fights though. Which is why Nothing Can Save You is probably the best designed shout, as it is strong 1v1 and then in teamfights scales well without being reliant on multiple enemies.
To the guys like Falcon and Bhawb, why are you not posting videos, guides, whatever, to teach others to be awesome necroes like you? Really, if necromancers were on par to other classes given equal player skill we wouldn’t be pitied by pretty much every other class and majority of the PvP forum.
Are my 50+ episodes of But of Corpse not good enough for you? How about my 7,000 forum posts? I’ve contributed my fair share to the Necromancer community thanks.
Also I talk pretty much constantly about how Necromancer is sub par in literally everything. I don’t even like how we are in zerging for WvW, and I’ve been vocal that the only reason we are good there is because we have ranged AoE direct damage, a niche that someone else could easily steal from us.
Give me a single example of when Anet listened to us please. Teamsupport?
Foot in the Grave stun breaking, Vampiric Aura, those are two more recent ones and I’m honestly too lazy to list them all but a TON of changes have been made due to forum suggestions, in fact most of the good changes are direct copypasta’d ideas of ours.
I didnt mean on all the shouts. I just meant one of them lol. The shouts are already gutted so yeah…
OH, well that changes everything yeah there could be a skill that has a kittenload of blast finishers, would actually be kinda cool. Wouldn’t mind that being a shout instead of Rise!
I think Break Bar would be best suited towards normal Necromancer, via a trait of some sort. For example a break bar where the “HP” of the bar is the same as your Life Force when you enter DS, it relies on you building LF, its CD is tied to DS, and then it can have its power adjusted since not all break bars have to be the same strength.
Rise! will only be used for Condi MM cheese builds that use both Rise! and Summon Bone Minions, in almost every other situation Summon Bone Minions is a better skill, for a variety of reasons.
However, hopefully they change the skill. I’m honestly not sure how they can make it interesting though, no matter what minions it summons it’ll just be a passive summon that is only strong in situations where minions themselves are weak. So to get the strongest summon effect requires you to use minions in a situation where they are weakest, really strange design.
I never said it does. I said that Reaper itself was designed with a lot of those issues in mind, not that the rest of the profession is fixed by it. Reaper has finishers+fields like we asked for, it has mobility/anti mobility like we asked for, it scales into teamfights, it has ways to deal with CC, all issues we had with previous Necromancer design that won’t be an issue with Reaper.
Don´t get me wrong, I kinda admire your enduring optimism (no sarcasm) in the face of Anets stubbornness/cluelessness/incompetence to properly address the problems our class suffers from since launch.
Its less optimism that they will fix us, and more acceptance that what we have might be the best we’ll ever get, so I’ll try to make the best of it.
Also, ANet has listened to us a lot, especially nowadays. Just because they don’t implement everything doesn’t mean they don’t listen, they don’t have the resources to do everything we ask, or even a small amount, and then the balance team just is on Mars when it comes to understanding Necro. However pretty much every good change they’ve made recently was due to direct feedback, so they do listen, and Reaper was made in response to a lot of our issues with the base profession.
Fun fact, way back in the day But of Corpse had very tentative plans to talk with a balance dev about Necromancer on a show, since back then Chaplan (I believe is the correct name) used to watch the show (this was back with Gibbly and Tenderly), but it never happened because they wouldn’t do it unless every profession would be represented.
But yeah, it will never happen. They wouldn’t do it unless it was on their terms, and their terms would end up giving us a type of show we simply wouldn’t be happy with. Its a lose-lose situation for them, there is no way they could give us what we want, so its better to not do it.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
I play PvP primarily (now) because Necro in PvE is absolute garbage. I do understand that shouts bring very little to PvE, but frankly Necro will never fit PvE until they change PvE. And acting like I don’t understand our position or problems in other game modes is ridiculous, especially accusing me of being a “PvP guy” when the majority of my in-game time is WvW followed by PvE.
Flesh Nova is a really important and fun trait for MMs, removing it would be awful, even if you replaced it with a skill of equal power. It gives one of the best things the rest of Necro lacks, which is strong field use to pair with finishers.
Not really. 5 blasts requiring 5 targets. In most situations you wont get that. And well on a lot of fields its not that strong. And in other cases the number of blasts is already completely covered by teammates. So no i dont think its broken.
You’d have up to 25 blasts across your skills, many of them on lower CDs than single blast finishers in those situations, it is absolutely 100% undeniably broken, and the only way it wouldn’t be is if they completely gutted the shouts.
There are plenty of things in the game already that could easily be considered insanely broken. And they are certainly more powerful than a situational 5 blast skill on a class which has a lack of fields. Icebow, lightning storm, meteor shower are some good examples. Then theres phalanx strength trait. The sheer number of blasts ele has on its weapons. Timewarp now that it has slow. Ring of Earth for projectile defence. Mimic… You get the idea.
1. Those are only broken in PvE, your suggestion would be broken in everything
2. You don’t balance a game by making everything awfully designed/balanced, your suggestion would just be Dumbfire 2.0 and would end with shouts being worthless.
it’s people like you who think that Reaper can even exist in a world with professions like Mesmer and Thief who can interrupt us at will and reset a fight if they are partially afk and we somehow able to get some damage skills off. just go and see what Helseth did to Leeto on Youtube the other day and tell me just how the kitten Reaper and our shouts will ever deter that and that’s excluding the Mesmer Chronomancer Spec. face it, we are kittened and pretending like we are good is NOT going to help us one bit.
When you manage to unlodge your head from your kitten let me know. Reaper isn’t any slower than other builds on other professions which have been viable, and Reaper actually has pretty good options to deal with mobile builds, as well as deal with CC. So long as they address some of the Shout cast times, which I have been pretty vocal I’m not optimistic about, we’ll be fine.
That would be insanely broken.
Reaper could be great, they just need to make sure it is appropriately balanced, which I’m not holding my breath for. However it was built in a way that doesn’t have the same pitfalls as the rest of the profession assuming they get that balance right, it has ways to deal with CC, it has mobility/anti-mobility, it has self-combos, it scales into teamfights, really the only thing its missing (balance aside) is some kind of active defense.
As far as I can tell we have no hard info on any of the Elementalist shouts, only that they seem decently designed. Except ours are also well designed except for Rise!, so I really don’t get the complaining.
Biggest problem I see with these is CttB is still 2s cast time when it should be 1s, just like the other comparable elites.
NCSY however is really strong now, I think it is solid as is.
Suffer! also still needs adjustments. But I’m not surprised they aren’t fixed, unless this WvW beta is the most recent iteration they have on the changes I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a lot going on in the background still.
It is possible that transfers still have the priority system, I wouldn’t know without doing testing myself and I cba right now. If so, its an oversight by ANet, so not surprising.
You are aware that a pulsing AoE effect is all that a well is right? Plague is already a mobile well with the label of corruption that let’s you choose what it pulses. And just because other wells aren’t mobile doesn’t mean that an elite one couldn’t be. Saying all wells must function exactly the same is as stupid as saying BiP can’t be corruption because corruptions can only give conditions and never boons.
Every single one of the 11 other wells in the game function the same way, and none of them function like what you want Plague to be. Every one of them without exception is a pulsing circle on the ground that persists for a few seconds. Just like Corruptions are all Corruptions because they self-apply a condition, Signets are signets because they have a passive effect while not on CD, every skill type has a fairly clear rule to it, and Wells are even more defined than some others.
Nothing from GW1 would fix our place in GW2, as our issues are largely based on the new mechanics of GW2 not playing well with the class. There are definitely some cool skills that could get inspiration from GW1, but none of them would fix our core issues.
There were some removals/corruptions that ignored Aegis, including Focus 5 (meaning it stripped 4 boons if Aegis was there), but it isn’t consistent.
If we every got something like this people would qq because they can no longer blind spam to win. but it would solve so many issues with several things and balance things out between why some traits will suck for base necro but be awesome for reaper. lets them be good for both.
You could have it be blindable most likely, I’d be surprised if they didn’t have a way to make the second hit conditional on the first one landing (we have some abilities that have secondary actives already). So make the second hit basically a tick of say 10 damage that is applied as an on-hit by the first ability. If you are blinded or in any other way avoid the first tick you also avoid the second, and the second exists only to apply the proper on-hits that Life Blast should.
You’re asking for an ability that has literally nothing in common with a well except pulsing AoE effect. It makes no sense to label it as a well when the 11 other wells in the game function totally differently.
Blind and Aegis with transfers/corruptions have always been special cases yes.
Yeah I think its a good idea, basically just a mechanic change but effectively buffs a lot of things that need buffing.
I don’t think it should be something we slap onto every single ability we have like you seem to be suggesting, it would be cool for our Corruptions to follow this idea since that is their whole point, but nothing more than one skill set.
There are no priorities anymore IIRC, all random, just not sure if it applies to transfers or not.
We’ll never get those functions, nor should we. Minions simply need a reliable AI or bandaid that makes them consistently attack my current target.
I’m sure there is some idea for a well that would be fine as an elite, I can’t think of it right now but there has to be one that works well and doesn’t step on the toes of our other wells and CPC (which is very well-like).
This makes no sense. Make the skill no ICD and make normal Unholy Feast a blast finisher, which applies to this, and would then benefit all builds.
Nope. A mobile well makes no sense, that isn’t what a well is, and making plague a well would make it suck, plus it is literally just Well of Darkness + poison.
They are already fixing their Mob AI, I am sure fixing minion AI will be part of the package.
I wouldn’t make assumptions like that. We’ve had improved AI in the game for a while now, the new mobs introduced with LS have better AI, and the kind of AI improvements they are making aren’t the kind we need. We need the current AI to actually work all the time, that’s really it, while minions that avoid AoE and things like that would be nice, it is all secondary to minions just actually attacking all the time.
Are you asking for piercing/cleave or for it to be a chain skill? I’m confused, because Life Blast can already pierce with Unyielding Blast and it really doesn’t make anything you mention better.
Yeah, this has been known (at least by some) for a while now.
If you play a glass one i may give you some credit but when u just play a tanky one and let ur minion doing all the dmg … that’s dam brainless
You’ve never played MM then. If you “just play a tanky one and let ur minion doing all the dmg” then only a complete moron will get hit by the minions.
Anywho, this change honestly wouldn’t change anything. It isn’t single big hits that kill minions, it is their inability to move out of effects like the warrior fire field. And there are plenty of times that I want to evade something that my minions don’t have to evade, and I’d like them to stay on the target attacking. Also, my minions dying is pretty low on the list of issues right now, with all the AoE healing we got it isn’t super common, the much bigger issue is keeping them on target, outside of that their issues are clunkiness with actives.
As it is now, the only real solution is fixing their AI. It is a bit of a pipe dream, but unless we get an AI fix or at least a way to bandaid their AI the build will have issues. Dodging might be nice to get them into PvE but they’d still be bad in PvE.
Passive stability on a signet would be bad. I think the best thing would be to rework Lich and Plague to be effects like Reaper of Grenth or Rampage as One, instead of being transforms which in this game never really work well. None of the current transforms are used in a mechanically interesting way, they are either OP, useless, or involve pressing WASD for 20 seconds.
Then, if they are reworked, they can still pulse their stability while giving either a defensive or offensive boost, but without locking us out of our actual kits.
And can 1 shot fire guardians.. unless they nerfed that.
Calling it a one shot is a bit over the top. They can like 10 shot fire guardians since that’s how many actual attacks happen to the guardian.
Yep. I’ve recently been on a bit of a crusade to balance Dagger 3, since it is objectively worse than almost every comparable skill (look at Magnetic Grasp), Spectral Grasp would help as well, and just generally more pulls of various kinds.
I think some traits similar to Transfusion would help too, things that change how your base skills work or involve some kind of (active) proc that pull enemies.
OP is the definition of the Dunning-Kruger effect.