Guild Wars 2

Pet AI is still problematic, though you can work with it a bit by limiting use of melee minions (which is preferable anyway) and only aggroing them with a clear path to target.

While I agree with most of the changes, this is honestly a short list. You leave out a lot of traits that are problematic still (Terrifying Descent, Soul Comprehension), you leave out how important our finisher situation is, our lack of defensive mechanics that can be used to negate skills, the need for more anti-mobility, better LF generation on condition sets, signets working through DS as well as our traits/regen, minion AI and active skill fixes, and maybe some other things.

There have been a few, but there isn’t enough reason to consistently rep for anyone with a main guild so it dies pretty fast.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Honestly, all they would need is to swap the conditions and it could be decent again. If it were “cause Blind when you inflict Chill”, it could work even with a short ICD. Probably wouldn’t need one, then.

This would be a cool mechanic too, though it would definitely need at least an ICD per target.

Also don’t just randomly spam out wells like I see a lot of people doing. I often have people throw out 3 wells the second I approach their point (or they approach mine) in PvP, and it does nothing except tell me that you have no utilities for the next 30 seconds.

Zetsumei.4975:

LOL I’m sorry I had to point out what phrase got censored in your post that was too funny when I realized it xD

I forgot you can’t use that word because god forbid a child see another word for butt

Quite a long time ago (back when they reworked Dumbfire and changed Weakening Shroud to have no ICD) they mentioned that Chilling Darkness was maybe OP for a minor trait, I wouldn’t be surprised if they always meant to do this nerf but it didn’t make it into the patch.

Lokyate.1387:

Oooh come on, one mistake is forgivable, even two. But a third? This had gone on continuously since the launch of the game.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you.

They still have the problem of relying on a balance team that seems highly disconnected from the game. So their honest mistakes keep happening because they haven’t fixed the source of them: a balance team that is so far removed from the reality of the profession that they can’t consistently make good decisions without our direct feedback, yet seems unwilling to fully listen to our feedback.

Look at the recent changes, almost all of the fair criticisms of the specialization changes were things they decided to do, or simply didn’t do, whereas most of the good changes are ideas we told them to do.

Kain Francois.4328:

Let’s be realistic here – ANET does read the forums. They hear our voices. And they know we are not satisfied with the Necro spec.

Internally, there’s probably some reason the balance is the way it is. Whether that’d be preparing for a future update, or simple balance issues we are unaware about.

Praise our Lord Grenth someone else isn’t blindly angry. Kain is absolutely right, they read the forums, they’ve proven it, and if anyone doesn’t see it its because they are either intentionally ignorant or just haven’t been around for more than a few days.

ANet is making a product here, this is their livelihood, they aren’t going to have a massive portion of the game that they actively hate and try to screw over. Accusing ANet of ignorance is absolutely justified, but accusing them of hating the very profession they have spent years working on is just flat out stupid.

Vizardlorde.8243:

did they ever explain why they removed group utility from staff #4? Everytime I try to enjoy my necro nerfs unexpectedly ruin it.

Because it was an undeniably INCREDIBLY overpowered skill. Not to justify the severity or method with which they nerfed it, but it was a full condition transfer from up to 5 people, an AoE Plague Signet, it deserved a nerf, just not the one they gave it.

Cool, another thread with baseless and moronic assumptions. They didn’t nerf Chilling Darkness because of Reaper, they didn’t touch Chill’s stack limit because of Reaper. Just because Reaper happens to have a chill-theme to it doesn’t mean every single chill change is done because of Reaper.

ANet made the change to Chill stacking because that is how all the other similar condis work. ANet nerfed Chilling Darkness because of a stupid idea that it was too strong paired with WoD/Plague. ANet didn’t touch anything else because they were only using this patch to fix things that were shipped out wrong, I wouldn’t be surprised if they meant to nerf Chilling Darkness with the specialization change but forgot, which did happen in other cases.

I get it, Necros are annoyed with ANet, but let’s stop making stupid claims. ANet doesn’t hate Necromancers, ANet doesn’t hate you, they are trying their best to balance the game for everyone, and anything they do that messes that up is not a malicious attack on your person (the world does not in fact revolve around you), it is an honest mistake.

What are you smoking? The Chilling Darkness nerf was stupid, but it hardly affects Reaper, the only builds that would have picked it up were condi builds. The stacking “nerf” is hardly a nerf, it won’t affect Reaper in any meaningful way, and the movement change is unlikely to matter a huge deal. I get that the “woe is me” crap is popular on the forums, but if you’re going to complain at least be reasonable about it.

Pretty kittenumption that the Chilling Darkness nerf had anything to do with Reaper, which apparently is what everyone is jumping to. They had mentioned a long time ago that they felt Chilling Darkness was maybe too strong paired with Plague/WoD, doubling it made little sense with that context (though I was hoping they had finally taken their heads out of… well you know). Perfectly possible they felt the Plague/WoD combo was too much, and I could totally see them somehow mentally justifying that lunacy.

I’m not even sure we can honestly say we got stronger, or that this nerf meant anything to our strength. Stupid nerf regardless, but the trait was garb already.

What? Reaper will be just fine unless they massively nerfed its traits.

I can’t chill… it got nerfed

manveruppd.7601:

MLK speech is funny, but slightly offensive.

It isn’t offensive if you don’t read it

tl;dr

I’m sure they felt there was a reasonable justification to do this change, contrary to popular belief Anet doesn’t go out of their way to screw us over, they just really suck at balancing us. Its an issue of ineptitude, not malice.

Rising Dusk.2408:

SpellOfIniquity.1780:

Gain Life Force every time you cast a spell. Life Force gained: 1%?

This would be awesome for Signet of Undeath’s passive effect, actually.

Holy moly guys, did we just find a way to make SoU’s passive not complete garbage?

Lily.1935:

I have an eternal dent in my wall called “Necromancer Balance”. Its where I go to discuss the balance of our profession.

+1

We’re salty because it is another stupid change.

The ICD was long before BB existed

There isn’t a “Necromancer team”, they have a single balance team.

It does effectively nerf their synergy yes.

Some moron probably thought that un-nerfing Plague meant they should nerf this. Honestly can’t justify this with any remote kind of logic, its like trying to understand someone who enjoys smashing their face against a wall.

Chilling Darkness nerf is stupid, no clue who came up with it but they should be fired.

Consume conditions should never have been changed. They can try to be cute with “buffs”, but until they revert the nerf it is still stupid.

Plague change is good, if they made Master of Corruption not bad then it’d be much nicer.

Dhuumfire, Unholy Martyr, Mark of Evasion, Last Rites, and Vampiric Presense bug fixes are nice.

But still, what idiot thought “all these people are complaining about Burning, but you know what’s REALLY OP? Chilling Darkness”.

Yep, its a bug.

Tobias.8632:

Is there supposed to be? You gain life force from deaths and from weapon skills and from spectral skills. This has always been the way.

And its a stupid way.

The fix was a nice one. I still agree it has absolutely no need for an ICD though, if Necromancers want to be an idiot and double dodge just for bleeds then who cares.

Burjis.3087:

Chilling Darkness now has an internal cooldown of 5 seconds.

What the hell was the rationale behind this change? Was this trait causing that much problem that justifies such a big nerf?

They disliked it was more useful than Terrifying Descent.

Chilling Darkness nerf is so moronic I can’t even begin to describe how stupid you would have to be to think it was warranted.

spoj.9672:

Yeah reaper just needs the damage numbers to be good. Necro in general needs active defence though.

This. Not even like we need it kitten upon every skill or trait either, just literally a few options to nullify abilities here and there.

Ara.4569:

Please, point to or say how to debug flower picking minions, besides using charge with golem.

Don’t engage when your minions are trailing too far behind you, don’t make any large Z-axis changes before engaging, wait until the minions have a very obvious flat path to the target to initiate aggro. At that point, any time minions bug out spam AAs, they will go to a “reset” position and reacquire a lot. And melee are the only ones that bug so Flesh Golem is literally the only one to worry about.

Knaifhogg.5964:

Exaggerate? Did you not see my 18 second clip of golem not attacking? It’s not a rare occurrence.

No you’re right, I have no experience playing MM and wouldn’t know how the AI works, how it bugs, or how the build performs regardless.

Golem is the only one that really matters that will bug with any regularity, bone minions die too fast and shadow fiend is used in builds where frankly who cares if the minions ever attack all it does is increase your TTK. However, there are things you can do to get golem to stop bugging after he’s bugged, including using his active which is a hard reset on aggro, but also just knowing how to re-aggro him after he resets on his own works.

Will you sometimes lose fights because of a bug? Yeah, really close ones it will matter. But that doesn’t matter, MM is strong enough right now that despite these bugs they are pretty strong.

Salamander.2504:

Axe 1 and 2 need longer range and higher damage coefficients. Axe 3 needs a blast finisher. And while we’re on the topic, not up there which many would like to see is for the cooldowns of utility skills to be visible in death shroud.

Range is not a necessity, though I understand its become a fetish request among the community. Axe can absolutely be made to be strong at 600 range, and while we do need finishers (which was included as a general note), Axe 3 already does way too much. Making it a finisher would make it a 600 radius PBAoE retaliation, cripple, damage, corruption, blast finisher.

The CD is a good note though.

Because the build is still strong. AI issues are real, but people exaggerate how bad it is, or don’t understand how to work with them. Regardless, the build is very strong right now.

Zetsumei.4975:

I don’t see what’s the problem with the necro trait last rites? You can still be dps’s and stomped all it prevents is bleeding out. Are you complaining of what happens if the enemy leave them completely alone? In that case all professions can do the same thing bu casting #4

The problem is Last Rites prevents all players near the Necromancer from bleeding out. If you have two downed Necromancers next to each other they will each prevent the other from bleeding out. So as long as one person is nearby to make sure they don’t use 4, those Necromancers can remain downed permanently with no way to stop it.

nekretaal.6485:

Nothing about necromancer axe here. When something is so terrible that nobody plays it, it gets ignored in future tracking.

“Axe 1,2 are weak , 2 needs more damage , 1 needs AS nerf reverted and a bit more dmg
axe range also feels terrible, maybe additional range on the axe trait would be possible”
Maybe not enough, but its a starting point.

These are just balance requests made from players that was shared with ANet. I personally brought up a lot of the Necromancer balance/suggestions, but they are nothing more than a player wishlist essentially, a compilation of the balance changes players would like to see, but with no guarantees from ANet.

They are supposed to have the same AR as the Necromancer, is this not the case?

In PvE there might be a separate issue, but the problem is if Dagger auto is better than a skill that takes such a long time to cast, it will never be good in PvP. This presents a pretty huge issue, the entire point of Reaper GS being “slow” was the idea that if you managed to land the slow attacks there would be an appropriately stronger-than-usual payoff. If Reaper doesn’t have that payoff though, it goes the way of Corruptions, where skills have too large of “costs” (in this case the “cost” is being really slow) without appropriate power.

This is a quick suggestion to Flesh of the Master and Necromantic Corruption. After the recent changes MM is getting a little bit of love, but minions overall still have some issues. Without addressing all of them at once I wanted to bring up just two small changes.

As it stands right now, Flesh of the Master is one of those traits that is mandatory to run a skill type. Without it, minions are just too squishy to reliably use in any build, and non-minion builds can’t justify taking it as it is essentially a wasted slot for yourself. Making the +50% HP baseline, or un-splitting PvE and PvP/WvW by increasing the HP of minions in PvP/WvW to their PvE values (71% HP boost from base), would allow minions to stay alive much better and be more useful for non-MMs to take.

Then the trait could be deleted, with the loss in toughness being offset by more active traits like Putrid defense, and a new trait could be put in its place. This reduces some of the trait clutter as well, since minions are the only skill in the game that has 3 specific traits.

The other suggestion is about Necromantic Corruption. As the trait is right now there are two problems:

1. The massive increase in condition damage in the game can’t be offset by MMs right now. Necromantic Corruption also makes minions take even more damage since conditions won’t be transferred right away, and since they only transfer once every 10s their transfer on hit really only exists to offset the transfer from MM to minion.
2. The trait takes too long to take effect. Much like DS traits that were changed to work on-entry and then every X seconds, Necromantic Corruption currently has no effect until either a condition has been on you for 10 seconds, or a minion has been alive for 10 seconds, whichever is longer. This means if you summon a minion in combat it won’t remove any conditions until 10 seconds later, or at the beginning of a fight your minions (even if they are summoned minutes before the fight starts) won’t draw a condition until 10 seconds after it was applied. This makes it useless against short conditions that aren’t being applied with longer ones, as this timer resets any time you fully cleanse yourself of conditions, and also means there is a long period at the start of the fight that your trait is useless.

The proposed changes would be to make Necromantic Corruption work immediately once a minion is summoned or a condition is applied, and have minions remove conditions on every hit, and once every 10 seconds they will transfer on hit instead. This allows the enemy to have some counterplay, you are still able to kite minions as they won’t be able to remove CC conditions unless they hit you, and they can “waste” the beginning removal with weak conditions. On the other hand, it rewards the MM more for CCing the enemy by allowing minions to survive a bit better when the build is being played well.

Basically, the two ideas are to react to the damage creep slightly without actually making the MM itself stronger.

Thoughts?

Rym.1469:

Well, it could’ve been much better. On it’s own, it’s currently at the bottom

We could still escape from there, but I think it would require a patch, not hotfix.

Yep. We need Anet to go over and fix our staff/scepter skills and traits, we desperately need better consistent pressure. One thing that is very noticeable is other professions have skills that apply large amounts of bleeds at once, whereas Anet seems stuck to the idea that Necromancers have to apply conditions for absolutely ridiculous durations, which are totally useless in PvP/WvW.

Like many other issues we have, our condi problems stem from ANet focusing too kitten Necromancer’s theme in a vacuum and ignoring how the game actually works and how to make our theme work in that context.

There are no base damages for direct damage, so those coefficients spoj posted are really all that matters, paired with CDs/attack speeds, so we’ve got everything we need here to mention it.

Feedback about numbers is still important, if anything because they aren’t final. If we point out that the given coefficients were too low they can increase them.

These are not upcoming changes, I supplied most of them in response to a PM I got from another player on the forums. These are not guaranteed changes, they are just a list of requests, most (though not all) of them being mine (for Necro). Don’t get your hopes up.

Ghotistyx.6942:

Those are numbers from tooltips. If you notice any of those skills for elite specs shouldn’t have coefficients with them. That Necro was probably running celestial or were maybe running rabid with some stat enhancing effects like the trait in DM giving 14% toughness as power while in shroud. Once we can get actual base damage and scaling, we’ll know how good it is.

I believe it was soldier. Also just as a note because I feel like being nitpicky there is no such thing as base damage for direct damage.

Most likely the person who put it up put already-scaled values. It will deal decent damage, but it won’t be hitting Lich hard.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

I feel like the recent yolo condi burst builds make D offhand much better, if you take axe/dagger main hand (of course this is for pvp) then you don’t need the extra life force.

It depends on build, SR MM should be going d/wh and staff, you can’t afford to drop d/wh for a/d, you lose damage, CC, and healing, and gain basically nothing; a/d should only be subbed in for staff, and only in spite builds since it synergizes with the more offensive build.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

Speed of shadows is IMO better than soul marks, due to the recharge reduction and the movement speed.

Warhorn > awful conditional movement speed. The recharge is unnecessary, you’ll never need DS that often. Soul Marks is two traits that used to be taken at master tier individually, now wrapped into a single adept trait, it is really strong.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

Unholy Martyr is indeed better than transfusion for a pure MM build, even tho shorud 4 would fully heal all minions. The life force you gain is too extreme to pass up.

Not at all, a 6.3k AoE heal is worth more than LF, you already gain really good LF regeneration from d/wh no matter what build you are using, without Transfusion minions die and that hurts your build far more.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

Due to that, i feel like unholy sanctuary is better than death nova if using clerics as it usually fills half my health in the usual 15-20 seconds i stay in shroud, plus it can be used with life from death to double heal when almost dead.

Again, depends on SR vs Spite. US > DN for SR because SR is more defensive and suits the LF gain, but DN > US in Spite builds because you need it to kill people.

Shadow.7843:

Bhawb, just curious what you would recommend for a Condi MM. Curses/BM/DM right? Rabid Stats or Shaman?

Yep, DM/BM are mandatory for MM right now imo, Curses obviously for condi, and I would go Shaman because healing power is also super important to keep minions alive.

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

Well , but as you know, MM should also keep their minions alive as much as possible , that’s what sigil of water is for. Staff is much better than axe to keep them alive.

The only thing staff does is provide regen, and you get that with Mark of Blood, and if you want to keep minions alive you use Cleric, not Soldier, the entire point of using Soldier is trading off keeping your minions alive for more damage.

ButterOfDeath.2873:

Immob isn’t a hard CC.
That assumes you’re using dagger/wh, you don’t miss any hit and the enemy just collaborates.
If by chance you want offhand dagger and use mainhand axe plus a staff, the quick, immediate, pbAoE chill can do the difference.

It’s just preference really.

Immobilize is absolutely a hard CC, arguably the strongest in the game right now, and yes it is in ideal situations, but with that much CC innate to the build there is no reason to take an extra tiny bit of soft CC; if you aren’t landing any of those other CCs the sigil won’t magically make the difference, in addition to the fact that it can be missed as well. There is never a time where dagger/WH should be left out of a minion build.

I’m not saying Hydromancy is garbage, but it is suboptimal. If you are doing your job correctly it doesn’t really provide anything.