Guild Wars 2

Necromancers will be the kings of 1v1. So strong in fact that they can 1v1 themselves with no enemy input needed!

Okay Drarnor and I tested it, Spotter works with minions, so VP probably will.

Rym.1469:

I am excited for tomorrow patch, lol.

I am excited for all the wrong reasons. But excited nonetheless.

Yeah it might, I honestly have no clue, the best prediction would be whether Spotter does, since it is essentially the same type of buff.

Gryph.8237:

Haha Bhawb, if I was an anet dev and saw you upset and these changes, i would feel terrible as you’re one of the few voices of reason here

I feel awful for the person who did these changes honestly. They did an amazing job in almost every single way, and then someone actually thought the corruption changes were a good idea. If you could remove that from the changes, I’d be super happy, but alas.

Captain Unusual.9163:

Dagger 3? A ranged, non projectile immobilize on a high damage melee weapon with a longer duration than any other immobilize weapon skill in the game? How is that objectively worse?

Dark Pact is 3s of immobilize on 25s CD.

Pin Down is the exact same immobilize on the same CD, that pierces, inflicts heavy bleeds, is a projectile finisher, and is nearly double the range.

Now sure, it is a 1s longer immobilize. Only for that it does nothing else with a longer CD and/or less range, no finisher, and less effects. Magnetic Grasp is an unblockable finisher on 12s CD that can also leap at 900 range, Shockwave is a line at double the range that is also a finisher, Chains of Light applies Vuln and has a shorter CD, Zealot’s Embrace is lower CD and a line Immobilize.

So yes, it is literally objectively worse than Pin Down, and gets a whole 1s of single target immobilize while losing out on a lot of what other immobilizes get. I’m not saying it needs a massive buff, but it is weak.

Shiki.7148:

It wouldn’t be if we actually could micromanage the kitten things. That would propably even band-aid their aggro problems. Giving us “attack”, “move there” and “guard me!” commands would already help a lot. Or even a simple “go aggro”/“don’t aggro” switch.

Micro would increase it yes, but it doesn’t change it. If you think MM is brainless, the simple reality is you’ve never played the build well. You have to track minions, as their abilities all launch from their locations, so in the “simplest” of minion builds you have to track 4 extra bodies on the map at all times and their position relative to the enemy. You also need to be actively using CC in order to make sure they aren’t kited. Then you’ve got defensive CDs that you use in order to keep the minions alive, which also involves tracking their HP.

And all of that is on top of playing a “normal” Necromancer build.

Reapers with shouts will be, but MM won’t. The Jagged Horrors from Rise! will die instantly, essentially being worse versions of Bone Minions, but more of them at once.

Bone Minions, Bone Fiend, and Flesh Wurm are staples. Bone Fiend paired with dagger and old DS allows for very long chains of the strongest CC in the game (immobilize), Bone Minions are by far the best Death Nova users in the game, and Flesh Wurm is required both as a stun break and because of its movement. Shadow Fiend is bad because of his active, Rise! is bad because its a more passive worse version of Bone Minions (it is literally the same minions per period of time as Summon Bone Minions, but strictly worse due to not being on demand, less damage, and no finisher).

flow.6043:

Are you sure?
Do you mean it won’t work in general or just prioritize players over npcs if there’s an aoe limit?

Do I actually? No, just guessing based on ANet’s logic. A real guess would be if Spotter (and others) work then it should.

Rym.1469:

I guess we’re safely looking at about 15-20k damage with ease out here.

Early estimates by Drarnor is putting it at over 30k if you actively try to kill yourself with it. I also wonder if we can Blood Bond ourselves, by using Blood is Power + Plague self bleeds.

Can I get a change-profession item?

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

Almost guarantee it won’t work on minions.

Do we have the numbers on how much actual healing it does? Hard to compare without that. Also, MM builds won’t take the Vampiric, since it almost guaranteed won’t work on minions, while Life from Death will.

Fhenrir.5297:

plague should give self weakness so you wouldn’t kill yourself but couldn’t dodge/deal direct damage as much which would make sense with the theme of the skill Oo

Weakness won’t do anything because it doesn’t affect condis.

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

Long time ago, Bhawb and other expert minion masters invented some tricks/tips around the minions AI bug . Can you post the most effective/easiest ways to force our minions to attack when ever we want ?

Unlike back in the day when Bas and I made a huge list on how to overcome aggro, ANet has since “fixed” those issues, and in the process removed the guaranteed aggro mechanics.

The Demonic Spirit.3157:

Reaper Rise! skill is an amazing one, I know that many MM will use it, but what minion utility will you sacrifice for it ? boon fiend got the lowest hp , armor , damage and lifesteal . five horrors are definitely superior especially when combined with the new death nova.

Bone Fiend has very high armor, and HP is pretty similar among all utility minions. Also, all utility minions except Flesh Wurm effectively have the same attack speed, Bone Fiend hits twice with his AA which is on a 3s rotation, Bone Minions both attack once every 3s, and Shadow Fiend attacks every 1.5s. Flesh Wurm is the “worst” at once every 3.5s, but Wurm is easily the most important.

However, Rise! won’t be used commonly. It requires MMs to be in types of fights that they don’t want to be in, and completely passive damage/death novas don’t compare to the on-demand poison/cleave/burst of Bone Minions, the immobilize and finishers of Bone Fiend, or the stun break/movement of Flesh Wurm. Rise! will be used more on condi MM, and probably more on “troll” builds.

ronpierce.2760:

Often times the bug is introduced when you jump from target to target too fast, or you attack (and hit)nah enemy while the minions are a certain distance from the enemy. One way to fix it is to allow your minions to catch up before you engage and slash at the air with the enemy targeted to ensure that they attack first, then follow with them. If you do this get get used to it, it becomes a lot less frustrating.

This is pretty much it. The key to making sure they don’t bug is understanding that their bugs are due to pathing issues. So try to think of things from their perspective, if there isn’t a clear path to the target that they can follow, its probably a good idea to wait to aggro them. You can also try to summon the melee ones after you are at the fight instead of before, and their actives will reset their aggro which can fix them.

I would never use Unholy Sanctuary as an MM. Even if I wasn’t using Death Nova, which would be absolutely stupid, I’d use Corruptor’s Fervor. US just gives some crappy healing, while you can get plenty of sustain on MM anyway, Death Nova is incredibly important for keeping up poison on enemies, which is a big part of the attrition fight of MMs, plus it turns Putrid Explosion into an AoE weakness/poison, and if your minions are killed it deals fairly high damage in response.

Also, Rise! will not be used on standard MM builds.

Foefaller.1082:

Thank you for that answer.

My mind was on spvp, and Consumables aren’t allowed in there, nor is Sigil of Corruption something people actually use.

13% precision to condition damage from Curses plus the inflated stats from gear, and some other stuff. This is PvE though, it will be slightly lower in PvP, and even lower if you aren’t using Rabid, which gives you the precision conversion. Even if it is “only” 5k damage, that is still an elite dealing significant damage to you.

NeHoMaR.9812:

Not sure If people is missing something here, or I am, but Plague is going to add a maximum of 2 stacks of bleeding at the same time, that is nothing, by the time you get the 3rd stack, the 1st one end.

People have calculated it, it is effectively 40 ticks of bleeds, and that is with no added bleed duration, and they will tick for at least 180 per second in a condi build. A very conservative estimate puts it at dealing 7200 damage to yourself in a condi build, but you could easily go over 10k self damage, just to use your elite. This also doesn’t include whatever the MoC condition does.

I can’t give it up and move on, my minions are keeping me in combat

Valderius Rex.4108:

Anet hasn’t said anything about minions getting functional AI any time soon so I can assume they’ll continue to be totally worthless and stand around ignoring your target rather than actually fighting.

HoT is our best chance for this. They are making other AI better, hopefully they adjust minion AI.

Cecilia.5179:

AI builds are generally cheesy and don’t always require any amount of skill to usem making them somewhat unfun in comparison to our non minion builds. I imagine nobody is really talking about minion builds because people would rather the class be good without relying on AI.

You’ve never played MM then, or if you did you sucked at it. MM is only easy to play against idiots.

nekretaal.6485:

Look forward to testing blood bond, but it looks awful.

The trigger condition asks you to be running staff or scepter, which means that you will at best get 600 point of healing when it triggers (or even nothing if the target dodges). 600 healing every 20 seconds of “in combat” with a ramp up time is awful.

Quite easy to proc them, it is literally impossible for any base Necro to not be able to proc it, since Mark of Evasion + Dark Path. If you want to increase chances Staff (which is getting enough of a buff that even I might use it, as much as it physically pains me to do so) or OH Dagger both allow extra sources of bleeds.

Also, assuming it is simply 5 strikes of the SoV, it is literally just a 1v1 version of SoV without the heal on activation. It is at least 1k damage and 2k healing, with the ability to scale up significantly, and that doesn’t include if they applied Bloodthirst’s base when removing it, and any extra scaling from Healing Power/Power you have. That is a completely reasonable amount of damage/healing, and if they blow CDs to avoid it then you used an adept trait to force them to use dodges or defensive abilities. The trait is fine.

Zin.6170:

Which is why signets and the two traits will be strong, you will have 5 ways to turn those might stacks into weakness, including doing it aoe style.

You can have 8 corruptions and and extra 2 removals in one build.

Stability would be worthless. Resistance would make the trait okay, but honestly they need to fix Corruptions before anything, and more likely than not it needs to be an adept at its current use instead of a master, because its really unlikely it can compete.

#ANetLogic

Honestly, I think they are trying to have the condition nerfs nerf cele as well. A huge amount of cele’s damage was due to 100% burning uptime being so easy to maintain, but now that burning needs to be stacked it will be much harder to do without investment, which will make other parts of cele weaker. The condition changes will hopefully nerf cele, though cele probably maintains enough condi damage that it might not affect them, as they could reach the break-even point.

While you do need wells to have a solo option, I’d argue that any build that goes into BM will be happy with the choices. If you aren’t trying to make a siphon build, then you are trying to make a support build. Support has two really nice options, MM builds have two nice options, and solo siphoning builds will definitely be using wells, and they will have the obvious option. If you are a solo build and aren’t using wells, then you most likely aren’t a siphon build (wells are by far the best siphon options, the only other thing you’d want is SoL which could fit in just fine), and then you’d want DM over BM.

I think its fine. Now that DM is a viable option, builds can go Spite/DM/SR if they don’t want blood magic.

Flesh Golem will always be marginally useful as a 10% LF gain when it inevitably dies and Charge is still useful, Lich will be usable on power builds. Plague is the only one that literally kills you for using it.

They used to have PvP players test for them, not sure if that program is still in effect because there was a lot of butting heads (and ANet refusing to listen), but they did used to have pros test changes, including our EU overlords.

Nerfing cele wasn’t working because they didn’t kittening nerf cele, they wouldn’t admit that there are professions that make perfect use of cele, and as such the fact that cele gets a massive amount of free stats just because they are spread out is too much. But no, instead they barely touched might stacking in a way that didn’t really mean anything, and acted like it would be enough.

Foefaller.1082:

Having at least some of the Healing proc regardless of whether the minion hits or not would be great. Not sure if it needs it’s healing buffed to Healing Signet levels though… Especially since IIRC HS’s passive effect is FINALLY getting nerfed.

I mean, it doesn’t have to be current HS values, but essentially Blood Fiend needs to at least equal other healing-over-time heals, even more so because its healing can be negated whereas there is nothing you can do to stop healing signet. Whatever that value actually works out to be is a side point to me.

Also fun fact; if the OP is right about the minion summons getting shorter cooldowns (rather than (just?) minion skills) Taste of Death in terms of healing vs. cooldown will be a better heal than CC is right now with only one condition cleansed.

Foefaller.1082:

It… already works this way? (At least, that’s what the wiki page says)

The passive needs it, the active is absolutely fine. Currently, the passive will only heal you once per second, if you are hit by 1 or 1000 people in that second it doesn’t matter. This effectively makes the heal a very awful version of every other passive heal, much like Blood Fiend is. The passive alone makes this skill completely worthless.

Balekai.6083:

I like Bawb’s idea above. Not sure if its programmable with their coding, but healing every time your hit with a 1 second ICD per target would be ideal. Even if the overall regen needed to be lowered a bit to compensate.

No point, its a weaker HS in 1v1, and in larger fights its damage reduction. Also per-attacker ICD already exists in the game, and could even be made to not work on say, clones.

I’m going to dedicate my life to finding the trolliest minion build possible and playing it constantly. Probably going to stream too.

If you really want to make yourself feel bad, compare Axe 2 or Dagger 3 to other profession’s skills. Both of them are objectively worse than every comparable skill, and yet here we are.

It wasn’t that they didn’t buff the healing over time, it was that they didn’t adjust the ratio on the healing over time. The base now is the same as the old base or close enough, but they removed 5 pulses of the old healing power ratios, which massively hurt the skill. An 83% buff to the current pulse ratios will even it out.

The 20% CD affects the resummon timers of the minions, nothing else. For Blood Fiend, Bone Minions, and Flesh Wurm this ends up effectively lowering the CD of their active skills by 20%.

Well of Blood simply needs to have its healing power ratio on the pulsing buffed by 83%, which brings it back to where it was. With that alone it becomes viable, niche but viable.

Blood Fiend should have its healing split in half between healing every second passively and a heal on hit, and both of them should scale with the healing power of the Necromancer. Also, its healing needs to be buffed to be equal to Healing Signet, because the fact that devs allow a heal that can be mitigated to be worse than purely passive HS is just mind boggling.

SoV should have a 1s ICD per attacker, boom viable.

1) Because it was entirely overpowered and there is absolutely no reasonable argument that it should have stayed in the game. I’m not going to argue that we don’t have tons of issues, but we could kill people from downed state by pressing 1 due to this trait, and that alone warrants better balance.

2) No, nothing is supposed to be OP, that’s the whole point of balance. Just because you think something else is OP doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accept balance to our profession.

I think the devs have a misunderstanding between “can be hit more than others” and “has mechanics where being hit is beneficial”. As it is right now Necromancers can generally be hit more than other professions (though not always), certainly ideally if we had gotten better balance this would be the case due to attrition. However, we don’t truly have mechanics where getting hit is beneficial. Flat ICDs on a lot of those abilities really kills them, whereas SA, SWalk, SoV if they had per-attacker ICDs (if not no ICDs in some cases), a life-steal or LF gain when hit mechanic, a way to apply condis while being hit, things like that would all make this more accurate.

Right now the closest we have is a lot of mechanics to punish people for being close to us. Locust Swarm, a variety of on-entry and while-inside shroud effects that apply conditions, rip boons, and damage enemies, things like that make us want to be near enemies, but preferably while they are focused on hitting someone else most of the time.

It is being nerfed…

The devs see the Necro forums too

Lily.1935:

More minions!: Again I completely agree. Except for one thing. I personally think it would be hilarious if the bone minions flew screaming through the air and fell down at the target location in an explosion. But that’s just me.

This would be even better if they finally gave us fluffy bunny bone minion reskins.

It is flat to any vulnerable targets, you don’t even need an equipped axe in order to get the damage modifier.

flow.6043:

Also, even if moving Terror to master tier was an actual request from the community (it wasn’t)

There were multiple requests to. People didn’t like that it had been “nerfed” by going to GM, didn’t like that it fought with LC, and didn’t like that it was one of the traits clogging the GM tier with condi-only traits. So directly and indirectly people asked for it. Obviously it was based on old Curses, and it doesn’t mean it was the right choice, but there were requests for it.

flow.6043:

6. Beyond the Veil:

In regards to the community’s request to make this apply to allies:
According to their explanation, Death Magic is not supposed to be a support line for allies but just for buffing your own defense. So Beyond the Veil is primarily protecting the necro and as an extension of himself also his minions.

I wish they’d do this for other things too. If minions had my damage reduction I wouldn’t have to worry about them instantly dying to AoE.

flow.6043:

The teleport will check for up to five allies with every pulse/hit, but it can only work on the same ally once, so you can’t drag someone in downed state across the map with you.

That would have been hilarious. Also sounds interesting, it means in zergs you could potentially scoop a LOT of people into a small area and heal them back fully if you have 2-3 Necros using these abilities. Coordinated in GvG its possible to “reset” a fight with that.

spoj.9672:

If they address corruptions I will be very happy. After that we only need our active defence and combo finisher problems resolved and then we will be on an equal level with the majority of other classes.

Agreed.

Rym.1469:

However, our rezzing portions of rez traits, especially that Life from Death are a little bit too low. 4% for Transfusion and 10-15% for Life from Death would be reasonable.

You’re forgetting that you don’t take over-time damage while downed. So these two abilities combo’d are enough to revive somebody from downed fully.

Edit: I see this comment a lot too. Stats from trait lines are being rolled into gear and base stats, these additional stats from traits now are additional and in no way replacements for what we used to have.

Roe.3679:

That said, it’s just replacing the toughness you would have lost already. It’s not awful but I doubt it will compare to other trait lines, and death magic just has too many weak spots to be worth specifically into, IMO. The master minor and master slots are weak.

That isn’t really true. All stat-giving things are being buffed to compensate for the stat loss. This will be additional on top of that stat, plus the 20% condition damage reduction. It is a really significant damage reduction, especially to conditions, and it will be extremely easy to maintain.

Also Corruption will most likely be one stack per attack, 10s ICD. Meaning your minions effectively don’t have any “loss” to themselves for taking conditions from you, as they push them off at least just as fast, and that doesn’t include the fact that MMs can now build for significantly better support of their minions via Blood Magic, plus the protection.

Except now the more common condition-boon gives you resistance off of chill so not only do profession convert some conditions to boons, but they also can get additional immunity to conditions after that conversion.

See, I’d agree with all those things you listed if no one else got changed, or if our weapons weren’t trash. But comparatively our power creep didn’t match others.

Its possible but really, really unlikely.

Dagger 3 is objectively bad for a variety of reasons, it needs a CD reduction or a secondary effect
Axe 2 is also objectively bad as a channeled skill. Axe 1 needs some love
We also still lack finishers across the board
Signet passives and Death Shroud
Delayed blast finisher on Putrid Explosion

Quickness is a boon and isn’t widely accessible.

You already sacrifice all existing minions…

I just put it up, I was trying to make a post about it but as it was saving I had to log in…

So yeah, its up, I’d love to hear feedback as well as ideas for what you want to get from us in the future. We should be back to having podcasts once every two weeks to discuss builds and our place in the meta as the patch develops.