Which is even better for us, since it means condi builds will destroy themselves and all we have to do is sit there and laugh.
It says that those shouts were still heavily in the process of being balanced, which they were.
Spectral skills draw on energy/power from the Underworld, but are very much physical. Shadow Fiend for example is essentially the “spectral” minion, and while kind of airy/floaty he is still very solid.
I really think people are overestimating how hard it is to hit 3 people (to make Augury worth it), that is one Mesmer, one Ranger + anyone, there are so many sources of extra procs that players bring with themselves that I don’t see it being an issue.
That isn’t to say that it is necessarily the best thing ever, since it makes shouts stronger when they are already really strong and weaker when they are already weak, but I do think people are making it out to be weaker than it will be.
I kind of figured it would only affect it since Path of Corruption only affects the main target.
I’m hoping the Dragonhunter PvP is done with some of the other announced specializations in the same game. I want nothing more than everyone to be complaining about DH just to watch it get absolutely demolished by a Reaper.
He’s not saying it would necessarily fit on current skills, just that there is no reason it couldn’t fit on new skills. Though WoD would also fit it.
So, going for condition damage, boon, or condition duration, they will hit harder? Or their actives will?
Kind of. Those three stats still work the same way you would expect, there is no vitality scaling through condition damage for example, but minions can directly and indirectly (through combo finishers) apply boons and conditions to themselves, allies, and enemies, and those boons and conditions use the Necromancer’s stats. But their power, precision, ferocity, vitality, and toughness are all set values that do not scale with any of the Necromancer’s stats, though they can be increased through buffs.
condition damage, boon and condition duration.
They also scale with level. But that’s it.
Flesh Golem doesn’t work underwater because they never added animations for it, and that would take resources away from other stuff to fix.
Actually, on stronghold the Reaper could be really strong, if not for the fact that all points of counterplay that are supposed to keep the Reaper from being too strong will most likely be ignored by the NPCs. The Lord for example probably won’t be smart enough to move out of your Gravedigger spam once he hits 50% HP.
So, what part of the 50 different times they said “numbers are still being worked on” lead you to believe that the numbers right now mean anything except to give us a talking point on what we feel is appropriate? We’re mostly ignoring them because they aren’t final, just in between the time that they took the pictures of the tooltips and did the stream the skills were changed pretty significantly already.
In PVP you hardly ever see 5 people on one point, which means that your cool downs will be longer for something useless like one bone minion?
You don’t need to see 5 people on one point. A single supply crate, for instance, gives full shout effect even if there are no players there. Each Ranger you encounter brings a second target with them, and Mesmers will almost always have 1-2 (up to 3) that you can target. Many Thieves and DPS builds will have Rock Dogs, which you can hit. Elementalists sometimes have their elite Elemental, Necromancers often have Flesh Wurm and/or Flesh Golem. And your shout isn’t small, 600 range PBAoE is massive.
So really, it is quite easy for Shouts to reach a high enough level of power to be used. Assuming they are otherwise balanced, shouts really only need to hit 3 targets to get similar use to other skills, the 4th/5th hit bring them into much stronger areas than your standard skill.
You can always know how many important minions you have, the only unknowns are jagged horrors and somewhat bone minions, and knowing where Bone Minions are is honestly on you. They could improve the UI a little bit by adjusting the range indicators to be based off of the minion’s location, since that is the only range relevant to you, and could add HP UI’s over each minion skill. And yes obviously AI can be fixed, but this is a complex issue.
I don’t think either UI change is particularly important though, as you know by being an MM enthusiast from GW1 these little details are what makes the MM build unique. Tracking a bunch of extra bodies and information, knowing when they are getting low, knowing how to maximize their abilities and how they maximize yours, its all a part of being MM. Adding those things just makes it slightly easier to track.
The opportunity costs for using 2 trait slots for vuln stacking are rather high though.
This. ANet seems to have gotten this idea that we were sad we weren’t good at being selfish so they were like “we’ll show you selfish, you can perma stack vuln/might while having 100% crit chance, and have traits left over!”. So now we have the ability to have 160% crit chance, 60 stacks of might, and 50 vuln, instead of making any one of those few traits into % damage modifiers, or something else more helpful. If we weren’t limited to so few traits it wouldn’t be bad because we could mix/match whatever was useful at the time, but now it can actually hurt us by meaning we don’t get other traits.
No it really doesn’t.
Mesmer GS wasn’t necessarily being talked about on a fairly popular podcast that the devs listen/have listened to in the past. It is actually very likely that this was changed primarily because we mentioned it quite a bit, and as long as it exists as a weird interaction they would probably be hesitant to buff Axe AA.
Yeah for a second I mixed up Bitter Chill’s effects (it is chill→vuln not vuln→chill), but regardless they are traits you could want in the same build. I do think we could use some trait changes to make us better in PvE, and I think there is a very good discussion to have about our over-loading of vuln/might/crit chance access, which ends up creating a number of traits that effectively invalidate each other at the cost of other damage modifiers.
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This is rather awful for a number of reasons. Obviously it is a very significant nerf to PvP builds, it also kills the synergy that Death Shiver and Bitter Chill had, it removes the double-boon removal, kills Axe/DS builds, and there are multiple traits that just aren’t in the right tier. It is way worse than the current setup is.
They weren’t trying to nerf Axe or its overall cast time, the point was to change the animation so that the overall chain-time and DPS is the same, but the animations are now front-loaded with no aftercast so that you can’t animation cancel. The implementation is debatable, and the animation looks awful now on Human Females, but it wasn’t planned to be a direct nerf.
I disagree, the use of old mechanics is meant to make more specific runes for them but how will you do that if the skills are not meant to be placed together? If they were so stand-alone why would we have traits that support the mechanic? The rune/trait’s effect for a single shout would have to outweigh the oppurtinity cost of another, more general set of runes/traits. But that would make the effect for multiple shouts op.
While true, we have 4 utility shouts with only 3 utility slots, meaning one shout being the “odd man out” isn’t an issue, because it doesn’t need to fit. I still do think the shout will have a lot of issues being made to actually be a meaningful utility though.
There is no need for a command skill if they just made it work like it should. Command skills only matter because they act as aggro resets, much like many minion active skills currently work. If ANet can’t quite make the AI work properly, then a check that periodically checks if each minion is currently following a target when the Necromancer is in combat and if not resets aggro would do the same thing.
If you want to chill someone in a condi build it isn’t remotely hard. Chilling Darkness + Nightfall/Well of Darkness/Plague, Spectral Grasp, Chillblains, any application of fear, Executioner’s Scythe (plus any whirl combos), sigils/runes, Chilling Nova, Suffer!, Chilled to the bone!, and your GS auto chain.
What more do you want?
I’d like to see it in use, I think their are valid points that it could be overbearing in ideal spots, but shouldn’t be nerfed for regular use.
The bigger problems I am having with it right now is how easily it builds “free” sustain off of non-player enemies, since they can’t counterplay the chill/clumping up. If anything is nerfed though it should be the sustain from CF, not BB or the might gain, and it needs to be because it is noticeably overbearing in fairly regular situations, not something that is 1:1000000 chances.
While it might depend on targets messing up or more strict setup, we have so many potential big hits with new reaper, and GD is only on an 8s CD so its not like you can just save a dodge for it. Sure, it isn’t likely that you’ll just walk around hitting Gravediggers on every cast, but when you do hit it, it is just short of being backstabbed… in an AoE. And if an enemy goes down and start cleaving with GD? GG teamfight, time to wait for respawns.
I’ve always felt that the Shadow Fiend is pretty rubbish. Instead of teleporting to a foe and causing Blind , it should teleport to a foe and cause Chill.
Chilling Darkness. Blind is fine as it allows you to do stuff with stomps, his only issue is taking 3 whole seconds to teleport.
Oh god its so awful on humans. What am I doing with my left hand, and why did I forget how to use my elbow?
They hadn’t decided if the cap would stay or not, and it only applies while scepter is equipped, so all extra + duration would apply towards both any conditions applied when you inevitably swap weapons, or to counteract -duration.
Also, now that you don’t get all that much free duration it is much nicer than it seems. It won’t be nearly as easy to hit high bonus durations on all conditions, so the high raw duration on everything will at the least free up a lot of rune/gear choices.
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Because if they didn’t say it over and over people would take it as though they were done with the specialization and not still working on it… which is still exactly what most people are doing.
I can kinda take blame for this one, it was most likely BoC that caused it, as Blackmoa has been quite vocal about the (truly) massive increase in DPS (100% increase) that proper animation canceling could cause on the old axe AA.
Its been stated many, many times, there is a condition rework coming.
So first off there is no assuming anything, Deathly Chill has been directly compared to terror, and it will scale with condition damage. There is no reason to assume it would do anything different than Terror when it is essentially terror-lite.
I’m just going to die my Human’s bikini black and green instead of black and red. Boom, done.
The active damage scales with power and is increased by bloodthirst, go check its damage with a full build.
The cap isn’t applied until after all +/- durations are applied. It is super easy to test w/ bleed duration runes (45%), 6 spite (30%), hemophilia (20%), and the bleed duration sigils. Throw them on you get 105% bleed duration, hit someone with Melandru runes reducing condition duration by 25% (IIRC) and it is 80% duration applied. The cap is applied after, not before.
Lingering Curse it is worth noting does not actually add % duration, it replaces your skills with new skills that have 33% longer base durations, which can then be upped by 100% like normal.
Minions will have a very strong way to deal with conditions, so AoE condi will be pretty mediocre, and remember we now get to go full BM support to heal minions while also giving them protection. Minion builds are about to get very, very tanky with an overall increase in damage to go with it.
I’m worried about how to nerf ourselves when appropriate because I don’t trust ANet to do it. I’d rather nerf us, and make sure those nerfs are properly directed, than let ANet Dumbfire us again.
People will call us easy kills until someone does an MLG kill-montage using Reaper with those hit noises and “oh baby a triple” by one shotting underlevels in WvW, and then all of a sudden we’ll be OP.
Necromancer has an extremely easy job of staying above 90% HP, and SoV is still going to heal you for around 6k. Even on staff Elementalist with a tiny fraction of the defenses I can use the Arcane heal, which heals for comparable amounts, because it is a nice DPS boost. So why not introduce things that are actually on comparable access points.
Hes agreeing with my solution. Which basically means it cannot proc more than 5 times within a second. So it has an ICD of 5 procs per second. Kind of like how Chilling Nova is limited. Only instead of 3 procs every 10 seconds. Its 5 procs every 1 second.
I think this would be a reasonable change.
The only siphon things in the game which currently work have an ICD, either explicit or effective due to their proccing mechanics. This is an undeniable fact, every single one that currently is useful has built-in limiters. Vampiric Master has effective ICDs, runes/sigils/food which we always complain are better than ours, have built in ICDs. Yet ICD will break Vampiric how?
If you don’t want an ICD, and you want it to only work for some builds that is totally fine, but don’t make it a minor trait. We had this issue with Reanimator, let’s not force it on ourselves again.
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And those people are boosting party member’s damage by 5% with their healing skill? No. It is a healing skill that deals up to 10k, the active is absolutely fine.
It is purely additive, with the 100% limit enforced at the end. So if you have 150% and they have -80% then your conditions have 70% duration on them.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t tied to the AI of all mobs.
Its not about equalising. Its more about just closing the gap slightly. Which is why id prefer they left it as it is. And increase the proc rate in base DS.
There is no closing the gap slightly. There are builds that can proc it tens of times per second, and builds that won’t proc it more than once or twice. If it was an issue of say the best builds get 50% more use, then who cares. But it isn’t, some builds will get 1000% more effectiveness, and this is in a tree that directly attracts those builds that sit on the extremes, of both sides.
I don’t think Chilling Darkness and WoD are balanced together at all, Chilling Darkness was just doubled in effectiveness. I just think it was overestimated in strength and needs to be buffed with CDR.
Imo give it a 1s ICD per target (so people like Necromancers don’t end up healing them with weak-but-fast-hitting attacks that generate a lot of hits over a small period) and make it a true siphon, that deals damage, and works while in DS/RS.
This way it won’t be turned off, it has a niche that isn’t filled by Blood Fiend since it actually stacks up with Retal and isn’t just a passive heal over time, and isn’t totally awful against more than one enemy. But ANet will never go for a removed ICD without a massive nerf to its healing because of all the effects that deal very small amounts of damage each hit, but hit a lot.
“X procs over Y seconds” is just another form of ICD, it changes nothing except shifting from spread equally over time to front loading it.
There is no way base DS will ever match RS. RS has 4 abilities that hit at least 3 targets, and most of them hit those targets multiple times per second. Even if you changed LB to proc twice per second, it is still vastly inferior to RS for proccing vampiric. And this isn’t just an issue of RS vs DS (and any other form of shroud we get), it is an issue of procs in different builds. A fast hitting AoE focused offensive build is going to generate vastly more hits per second than a slow-hitting utility/support build that is going to use a lot of its time helping allies. Not an issue in and of itself, except that Vampiric is a minor trait in a specialization line that also focuses heavily on support.
And this is an issue that will continue. If you don’t gate Vampiric in SOME way, like every version of life stealing that works currently, it will never be balanced except on one build. If it wasn’t a minor trait I wouldn’t really mind, but it is a minor trait and the fact that it will be made useless on a large number of builds who go into the tree for support, not self-sustain, is crap. Now, if you don’t want an ICD that’s fine, make it a major trait, buff it, and replace it with the new Vampiric Aura.
The problem with X procs per X seconds is that it is still a global ICD, it only shifts the CD from an equally spread over time ICD to a front-loaded one that will be used up very quickly and then put on a longer CD. So instead of getting 1 proc per second, you can get 10 procs per 10 seconds, but that still works out to being the same as a 1s ICD, but front loaded.
A 1s ICD per enemy allows you to still scale into teamfights and larger fights like they want, but it doesn’t run into issues where single skills can grant full LF from one use. I would say keep the might duration, it isn’t overbearing at all, simply add a 1s ICD per target to limit it a little bit, and that is fair.
I think youre being way too optimistic of things just because of how they sound on paper. I don’t need to remind you of how bad a position necro is currently in now and anet certainly dont need the necro communities help in nerfing till its not viable again.
The trait on its own might sound powerful but as a whole the class has a few glaring issues to overcome.
This trait, paired with Blighter’s Boon, gives 2% LF per hit on a chilled enemy. It is just too much when you consider how many abilities we have that hit a lot of times very quickly, and Blighter’s Boon itself is fine, it is Chilling Force that is a bit strong.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)