I personally would prefer that Terror be made into an effective burst trait, and condi Necro be shored up so that it wasn’t needed to have Terror. As much as it is a good trait, I don’t think it should be baseline.
I don’t understand why Alacrity, the exact opposite of chill, wasn’t made a boon with conversions being between alacrity and chill. It makes no sense.
Transfusion won’t work through shroud no, the only thing they mentioned was actually Deathly Invigoration not healing Necro, and buffing it to compensate for that.
Awesome! Thanks for the clarifications, and its great to know we’ll be seeing the thoughts behind the rest of the changes.
1 is definitely no because that’s how it works currently and wouldn’t be changed. 2 isn’t actually a definite yes, as they very specifically mentioned looking at making that trait not heal the necromancer, and then majorly buffing its support potential. I wouldn’t get too fixed on either possibility.
There is, while they said random it has never been random, and they acknowledged this on the stream, that each skill had a hard-coded (though that was more random) priority system.
you’re telling me that there’s a boon that completely nullifies all condition damage, and that the only counter to it (boon removal/corruption) doesn’t remove it by design? Can’t you tell how unbalanced that would have made it? Why would they have ever done it that way?
We’re talking about ANet, yes I absolutely believe that could have happened.
Thanks dude, that’s good to know.
I’m curious, does this mean Spectral Walk (first activation) won’t be able to break stuns that occur mid-air, so things like knockbacks/launches?
Kill? No, however Plague will deal about 9,000 self damage via bleeds on a condi build, according to Drarnor’s math.
Video should be up soon, just publishing and all that pizzazz.
Interesting perspective, good to know.
That’s just one example. It would have allowed me to stack massive immobilize on enemies, it would allow for easy perma cripple/chill/poison, maybe even weakness, 4 second AoE fears, basically it would validate the need for the stupid amount of spammable condi removal, since without it you would consistently have half a bar of condis on you.
I would point out, without the variance it would be very likely that corruptions would never have an effect on the enemy unless they have very low boons already, because Resistance would probably be hidden deep under all the crap. So don’t think of it as “X chance for it to suck” but having “X chance for it to not suck, whereas pre-change it was 100% to suck”.
I think its an improvement to the old situation. It is worse skill-wise than an upgraded system, but its better than we had.
Hey everyone, But of Corpse will be discussing the changes in two hours, we’ll be going over literally every single change. We won’t be doing it live, but will be recording it and throwing it up on Youtube afterwards, so if you have any questions you’d like us to cover, please throw them up here and we will cover them. My guess is the show will take 1-2 hours, and I’ll keep this updated till the very end so hopefully we can cover everything you’d like us to.
Thanks for any questions, and hope you enjoy the show
-Bhawb
in pvp
So in the least played game mode sometimes it won’t be an awful change, and this is support for the change? No.
Spectrals shouldn’t be required for a LB build, and without this change they aren’t even close to required.
Whining people into giving you what you want is a terrible thing.
Its not about whining until they give us what we want, its about expressing a completely valid opinion in the hopes that ANet makes good changes. The reality is that they made bad decisions, and if no one says anything we can’t fix that. Only reason we even got changes this good was due to thousands of posts of feedback.
The necro forums are probobly the most negative proffession forums on here and I dont think it is because necromancer is so bad now but because early on necros had alot of bugs that did not get fixed for a long time so that created a very toxic enviorment.
The necro forums are probobly the least looked at by the balancers because of how extreamly unreasonable most people here seem to be.
Not remotely true. Necromancers have traditionally been some of the most constructive and realistic of all the profession forums. Just because we don’t get on our knees before ANet at every sight of false hype doesn’t mean we are toxic. We are the most reasonable forum, the first thing you’ll see most people (at least the long standing members) do when they suggest buffs is very carefully outline counterplay and accompanying changes or nerfs in order to keep suggestions from getting out of hand.
And a lot of builds don’t want to be forced into using spectrals to make up for a nerf. VP is used by a lot of builds that don’t have spectrals to allow for long-term LB spamming.
We got amazing trait synergy too… as long as you don’t play condi.
Consume conditions and curses are my two biggest complaints about the changes. Now, that doesn’t address the fact that all of our weapons except warhorn need love, that we still need some QoL fixes to other skills, that our heals need to be buffed, and plenty of other issues, but at least consume conditions being treated like shelter would resolve half of the problems I have with the changes being made. The other half would require curses to be fixed.
Dhuumfire won’t work “well” on Reaper, it will just make being in reaper slightly less detrimental to a condi build.
a elite skill should feel rewarding to use not to be a painful reminder of what it once were or what it could have been
Both would still be absolutely strong. Plague’s only nerf was the self bleeding which won’t do that much, and Lich rarely needed that last 5 seconds anyway. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be changed, I’ve said a lot how I want them to be, but those were reasonable changes unlike CC’s change.
SoV passive should scale to multiple enemies would be a nice alternative as well, however the active is still kitten tier
The active is great, absolutely nothing wrong with it.
well of blood is a heal over time which needs a higher heal really it only pulse for 5 seconds at its base cool down and healing even SoV looks better
Like I said, 83% higher ratio is all it needs, brings it back to pre-nerf, but with some other buffs since then related to traiting. Would be viable then, especially with the new BM tree.
This is still worse than what we have now and axe doesn’t deserve a nerf at all, it needs a buff. Or am I missing something?
The 10% damage applies to all damage done to vulnerable targets, regardless of whether you even have an axe equipped. Meaning with this trait you can even use staff + DS to have an even stronger LB build than before.
@Bhawb Scaling defense,utilities in DS,Parasitic Contagion in DS,ranged defense just some,AoE boon hate,low LF gain on condition specs etc. We got some improvements but in the process losses as well and we need to compare necro competitively not to it self.
Just because some things weren’t fixed doesn’t make the huge number of good fixes irrelevant. There was no way they were going to fix literally everything we want in one patch. Also, we did get better scaling defense, we got AoE boon hate, certainly not enough but we did get some of it.
CC was fine. It shouldn’t have been changed at all, the other heals should have been buffed (which wasn’t super hard to do either) to make them attractive.
Probably yes, and will be hilarious. Just don’t activate it stupidly and you’ll be fine, there is a bit of leeway in range when it comes to things like this, plus you will also res them via Transfusion and in the build that will use this kind of trait you’ll probably be able to finish up any healing for your allies instead.
It could be problematic every once in a while, but much more often you’ll pull an ally away from being stomped, which to my knowledge is the only ability in the game that can’t be stopped in some way, only counterplayed afterwards.
There’s a reason they cut the livestream right before necro. They didn’t try to fix the broken stream because they read the Necro changes and decided that they wanted to save themselves the rage.
/SIGN
Everyone put on your tin foil hats.
Stronger Bhawb? MM is stronger, Condi got destroyed and power Necro will get destroyed compared to the power creep. In wvw, Necro’s will be replaced by mesmers, and we still can’t roam, nor will we be a thing in pve. Stronger, I strongly disagree
If a condi Necro post-patch could fight with a pre-patch condi Necro, even allowing the pre-patch to have all of the base power creep of stats and 2 extra trait points, post-patch would win, easily, that’s what I mean. I don’t mean that we are in a better place overall in the game, though I don’t think we can get worse than the completely worthless we are now, only that we are in a better place after the patch than right now.
I need to wait to see how a few things work, like Blood Bond and Vampiric Presense.
I wish Plague was just a Reaper of Grenth-like effect with blind/poison and 3 stab every 3s, I wouldn’t even mind if it kept the current bleeding, but it would no longer increase stats, but also wouldn’t lock you out of your skills.
Lich should be like Rampage as One, with its 5 skill as a second active after using it. Gives you a large DPS increase through a stat boost for 15 seconds and pulsing stab, but requires you to still land your normal abilities.
Boom, both abilities work much better, are more interesting to use, and don’t bar you from the rest of our profession.
Plague and Lich changes are fine, the skills themselves should be updated, but that is a different story.
Well of Blood needs to have its scaling on pulses approximately doubled (needs to be 83% increase per pulse exactly, to make up for the unwarranted nerf way back), at which point it is great
SoV needs its passive to work in DS, and also have a 1s ICD per attacker
Blood Fiend needs to have its passive scale with healing power, if not a change so that it has split healing over time, some no matter what, and some tied to landing its attack
Consume Conditions should absolutely get shelter treatment and stay as it currently is
Other than Blood Magic, I really don’t see much- especially with Necromancer’s mobility, axe issues, and amongst many other things. There were also unnecessary changes made, something the community never asked for and is now dealt with frustration.
Necromancer mobility will never change.
What we did get:
Axe’s trait got fixed as we wanted it to
Terror and LC no longer conflict
Curses now has use to non-condi builds
MM builds have a straight line through DM
DM also has another non-MM trait like we wanted
Blood magic has better support and a vampiric group buff
Plague was made a corruption and lich was a spectral
Signets had their CDs lowered
Staff now only has one trait and had a lot rolled into its baseline
Bloodthirst became baseline
And that doesn’t include the things that were already answered like we asked for in the first set of core specialization changes. I probably missed something in that as well.
I’d say quite a bit was responded to.
Consume Conditions should stay as it is now, just like shelter is.
I would be interested to know, there is literally no good reason that transforming should kill minions, yet here we are with multiple ways to lose all our minions to Moa.
I think Plague is fine, yeah its been nerfed a little bit but w/e I couldn’t care less you almost never die in plague anyway and its a tiny bit of bleeding on a massive HP pool.
Consume Conditions just should retain its 25s CD, or not be a corruption, like how Shelter wasn’t changed.
I think the real issue is that we’ve got this one guy making reasonable, theme driven decisions, while the rest of the balance team is just like YOLO buffing everything else with no consideration for what might be unreasonable.
Even in a vacuum, not considering what happened to anyone else, there were bad changes here. Consume Conditions was a bad change, all healing skills besides CC should have been buffed, waiting on leeching is a stupid idea. Also the curses tree is a bit of a mess, though I can understand how difficult it is to deal with that while still getting everything everyone wanted.
It doesn’t mean everything is his fault, I doubt he is allowed to make every change without input, and I doubt he is the only one making every change, but it would still be nice to hear reasoning for unreasonable nerfs. Also, I’d really like to hear the positive things too, they made a lot of great changes, it would have been nice for them to be able to show those off as well.
To be honest, I don’t even know if the developers who are in responsible for Necromancer class even checks the forums.
Then you’ve paid even less attention than you accuse the devs of. There were a lot of very obvious changes they made in response to our requests.
Unholy Fervor:
Flat 10% boost to vulnerable targets, don’t even need an axe in your build.
Lingering Curse:
Yes to both.
Mark of Evasion:
It really shouldn’t work out of combat.
Corrupter’s Fervor:
Anything that counts as you applying a condition, which includes transfers/epidemic, but won’t give you multiple effects per individual stack of the same condition in the same application (so applying 2 bleeds is still just one condition).
Vampiric Presense:
Should work on allies.
Spectral Walk:
Probably still allows you to teleport back for say jumping puzzles, they just didn’t want to allow you to break out of maps.
Parasitic Contagion:
Whatever the sum total of your condition damage is, take 10% of that and that’s what you heal for. Vulnerability will affect this.
+1
And they told us they liked staff skills being put on full CD when interrupted, I wouldn’t take their word as law, they can change their mind.
Agreed, I’d rather it not have anything, it is in a very similar spot to Shelter, almost universal to all builds.
I’d really like to hear their reasoning behind some stuff.
If you are fighting a thief you’ll already be in combat, this would only help for stealth checking or something like that, otherwise you wouldn’t clear combat fast enough to matter.
Its not like we got nerfed. While there are very valid complaints to be made, the only build that might have been nerfed was condi, other than that we are stronger after these changes than before.
If it doesn’t specifically say axe then it doesn’t only apply to axe skills, according to that wording (though ANet could have misrepresented its actual functions) it is a flat 10% damage boost to vulnerable enemies no matter what while that trait is equipped.
And we were once told that staff skills being interrupted and going on full CD was working as intended. ANet can change their mind, and they did, it sucks, but whining won’t change it.
Yes it will, that is how it has always worked, there is no reason to believe they’d suddenly change it now.
Bone Fiend > Shadow Fiend. Immobilize is the strongest condition in the game, easily, and arguably stronger than even stuns, plus double projectile finishers to pair with Death Nova’s fields. For sigils I’d highly recommend at least one of the life steal ones, though you could even run both, they will likely do more for you by providing a ton of extra sustain and direct damage that can’t be mitigated, though your current options certainly aren’t bad either.
For traits, I’d pick up Plague Sending, as it is a free stun break if you get lucky, plus more condition removal, and you only have 1-2 blinds in this build anyway. I’d take PoC over the corruption trait, I honestly think Blood Fiend is worth using, when you consider the nerf to CC and the amount of condition removal you can get with minions now.
I’d also consider Blood Bond, Banshee’s Wail, and Transfusion, depending on how things work out. Blood Bond should be easy for you to proc, Wail is really, really nice, and Transfusion is a big AoE heal for the minions, to keep them alive. Wail vs the Vampiric depends on if minions benefit from the healing buff or not.
Its the only reason the question is relevant. The reason that came up in the first place was due to LC “capping” out the 100% duration cap on its own, making it wasteful to a lot of condition setups, so it was asked if the 100% cap would be removed to make the trait a bit less clunky. With it no longer being bonus duration, the entire premise of increasing the duration cap is gone, it will be difficult to even hit 100%, let alone go over it.
If it were a blast finisher this trait would be amazing, until then I think it is okay, its still boon corruption + retal and a nice AoE damage on a smallish CD, but not quite enough to warrant GM.
Because it was used to break intended use of maps. Fun? Sure, but it was used to overcome an intended mechanic of the game, just like leaps + swiftness could break out of maps.
Absolutely, Reaper MM will be hilarious, but we won’t see it yet.