I don’t enjoy fighting the mobs because doing so is completely trivial. If the general encounters in this game were more fun I’d be with you, but they aren’t. Something like Dark Souls, however, I often find myself fighting most enemies because the fights are rarely trivial, and there is a feeling of accomplishment of learning a path so perfectly that you can run from bonfire to boss without taking a single hit.
I don’t really think the res-giving is an important part of the trait. Its a ~2.5k heal with healing power that works well with Transfusion, the res was just tacked on because ANet decided that was something to throw onto a bunch of our traits.
I understand your point, but what if you make transfusion to heal yourself as a lower healing than it heals allies for example
Self heal per pulse :250
Allies heal per pulse : 500
i guess this suggestion can be possible
If it is balanced right now, or even arguably just shy of OP, then buffing it, by definition, makes it OP. So no, it wouldn’t be possible. The only way this trait can have its self healing buffed is by nerfing the allied healing, which makes no sense to do.
Well the outgoing healing scales very well with healing power. Without healing power, you’re looking at 1.5k heal, with 1200 healing power almost 4k. Transfusion is a 3k without HP and a bit more than 6k with. Together, they make a strong combo, but transfusion is indeed stronger on its own (also much easier to actually apply thanks to its greater range).
Well yeah, Well of Blood wasn’t considered good for a long time, then ANet nerfed its healing over time ratio by roughly 45%, so its no surprise that it went from one of the highest heals in the game, which was still bad, to just flat out awful.
I’m not convinced Reaper is meta, so much as not bad anymore. There is a decent stretch between the two. That said, yeah core necro feels unplayable to me now.
Dagger AA is one of the highest DPS skills in the game. Don’t just pay attention to the numbers, but also how long they take.
The first focus target is always the one that is easiest to kill and turn the fight into a 4v5 (or whatever the numbers actually are, but giving your team the numbers advantage regardless).
This. It doesn’t matter if the Necromancer on the other team is a terrible player who isn’t contributing at all, bringing the enemy down a player is a huge advantage (this is why +1ing a fight is such a big deal as well). It can also drive the enemy team to blow defenses on the Necromancer, a lot of support-containing builds will try to help the Necromancer peel, they might try to res the Necromancer, etc., so not only do you quickly bring the fight to a better position player wise, you can also often burn a lot of the enemy team’s defenses.
Perhaps I’ve misunderstood the issue, then. Are Necros perpetually focused in sPvP matches, or is the hyperfocus limited to first fights, after which they tend to tank a more nornalized amount of enemy player aggro?
Necromancer is the #1 target in every single situation when it comes to generalizations. The only form of disengage we have is running away, which anyone can follow relatively well, and Flesh Wurm for a Z-axis port, which a lot of builds can follow. Thre are situations where you wouldn’t focus a Necromancer, if they happen to be built extremely tanky and you have an easier target, but that’s pretty rare.
But as others said, targeting in teamfights actually has significantly less to do with how much teamfight impact each player has, and is based primarily on how easily you can kill them. Most other professions have either plentiful blocks/invulns, these abilities mean no matter what you do, they can generally stall for quite a few seconds (whereas a Necromancer cannot truly stall, especially not when it comes to focus fire with concentrated CC), and the few builds that don’t have negation all have multiple Z-axis teleports and/or stealth, all of which also stall out the fight (as a note, this is why a lot of zerker builds get eaten alive by Thieves, they can match any amount of Z-axis ports you have). Also, this has been true since launch. I remember my PvP guild in the first month of play having a general target list we used, and Necromancer was always #1 because they have the worst ability to deal with focus fire.
As a side note, the other reason I dislike LF in general is because it is really difficult to appropriately scale. A 3s negation scales perfectly into teamfights, 3s is 3s no matter who is hitting you. HP doesn’t scale as well though, even LF generation that linearly scales with people hit doesn’t truly scale into teamfights because of things like more CC holding you down longer making it harder to land those hits.
Just give it back its healing power scaling that was nerfed for no reason, potentially give it a water field.
Not at all an expert in our group PvE, but imo Necromancer is in a decent spot right now because while it doesn’t necessarily offer enough to be taken in optimized groups, it is close enough for pug groups to take one. It also has the huge benefit of being extremely safe, and now with buffed minions you can even make the rest of your group significantly safer.
Reaper is such a good line for all builds its kind of pushed classic DS out completely. Which is a shame. I would have liked at least one build direction to have better usage out of classis Shroud. (This could actually be partially rectified simply by making specialisations weapons available to the core professions at all times).
I think the biggest problem with classic Shroud (and core Necro at large) is, like we’ve said for three years, the lack of finishers/fields. RS/GS gain a ton of decision making and skilled play due to proper combinations between their skills, both with and without utilization of combo fields/finishers. Base Shroud has almost no meaningful combos that change how you use the skills, you mostly just use them for their obvious utility with no emergent gameplay.
No, it would be insanely imbalanced. You can get upwards of 7k healing, its already one of the strongest allied AoE heals in the game, and the only reason it is as strong as it is, is because it can’t heal you. Otherwise you are suggesting that a single trait allows you to proc a healing skill for your entire team, including you when you can’t be damaged, on the same CD as a normal healing skill.
The skill is just shy of being OP as is (I’d only argue its not too strong because it has good counterplay, and just healing a bunch isn’t that crazy anymore), this would make it near mandatory, not increase build variety.
I think Rise! getting tuned would be best to address their HP. While 50% is really high, it is pretty easy to just throw out a few AoE effects and invalidate a high CD skill. But I don’t even think its too strong, people just see 50% and think its crazy without checking actual uptime in games.
Yes, we don’t have that because its the Ranger profession mechanic.
I just don’t see the point in keeping us so weak for the opening moments of the first fight of a match.
I’m not suggesting we do. But just adding a huge amount of HP (we’re talking even glass Necro builds starting the game with essentially 30k+ HP, a Soldier build would have closer to 45-50k HP) isn’t going to lead to fun or skillful defense, all it does is create the same stat check as now, but delayed: do you have enough burst to burst the Necro? If yes do it. That’s exactly where we are at now, except you’ve just made it a higher number. There is nothing more skillful on the Necros part, they just have a ton more passive defense.
I’m suggesting we get active defense, both in the form of better burst LF generation and things like damage negation. You shouldn’t just be a vegetable and either live or die through their burst by merit of whether your HP is high enough or not, you should have to actively do something.
But what could we give up that would be meaningful to us? Everything is negotiable. No single weapon is necessary for the Necro to function, nor any particular set of trait lines. There are some that are better than others, of course, but if the trade-off were immortality through the correct layering of DS and negations, I can’t think of any individual component that wouldn’t be worth losing.
Immortality through layering isn’t balanced, that’s what we had with BB and it was rightly nerfed. But yes, giving up OH dagger or WH in order to gain access to active defense is a very meaningful tradeoff, that means you either have less transfers (both damage and anti condi defense lost) or you lose WH’s speed around the map and AoE CC. Both of those are really meaningful trade offs for a bit of active defense. Everything else is the same, giving up damage trait lines in order to get some anti-burst is a fair exchange, you survive better but aren’t going to impact fights as much.
To play devil’s advocate, if starting us off with 50% LF creates a toxic offense/defense dynamic, then aren’t you really saying that that the Deathshroud mechanic is fundamentally toxic? Once we get some LF together, our defense is basically having so many hitpoints that we can’t be burst down. If ANet gave us significant negation on top of that, wouldn’t they then have to nerf Deathshroud into the ground (if not remove it entirely) just so we couldn’t have a giant HP pool on top of negation?
Yes and no. There is far less intelligent play associated with using Shroud vs a time-limited defense to mitigate burst, because Shroud is just more HP (note, there is SOME play, mainly around shroud’s CD, but much less than tracking defensive CDs and all the play around that). The interesting play comes through building LF while in combat, and applying mitigating mechanics like weakness, which I think just throwing LF for free at Necromancer gets rid of. At least spawning with LF you previously generated has the play of you purposely using the last fight to generate LF, but making the decision that it is more beneficial for you to spawn with LF for the next fight than extend this one by a little bit. On the other hand having 50% more LF is just adding 34.5%-69% HP (15% more w/ SR) to passively mitigate burst in the first fight. If we need LF to start fights, we should just have some/more viable options of generating LF quickly (like making SGrasp not garbage).
I don’t think adding some negation would make us OP with this either. By design it would come at the cost of something else in your build. Ex: a buffed Unholy Sanctuary that is good at anti-burst comes at the cost of an entire trait line in your build, a defensive OH means you can’t have another OH, defensive utility means one less utility, etc.
I don’t think we need many, but look at how massive of an improvement Infusing Terror was for our lack of stability, and that was just one addition of accessible stability.
It appears fixed to me. I’m able to immediately dodge after finishing the cast (in fact you can cancel some of the ending bits of the animation) and it still recharges.
Dragonhunter didn’t get any flat out additions.
Adding LF isn’t a good way to fix the issue. The issue is a result of us having no ways to stall against burst except hope we have more HP than they have damage. What we need is negation, which we should have, its a big part of the game. All that LF does is says “Necromancers have so much HP that maybe you can’t burst them no matter how well you play”, which sucks the opposite way.
+1 Shadelang. I also think they could have an improvement like minions never aggro unless you enter combat or actively target and attack something, so you wouldn’t need to despawn them to run, and if they were hit it wouldn’t aggro you. But its unlikely we’ll get pet controls honestly, we already have a massive amount more control than we did in GW1, and Ranger has pet controls as their mechanic.
In PvE, whatever gives you the max DPS (for MM probably precision based food), because DPS is all that really matters with the obscene amount of tankiness the minions give you.
In WvW, either -condition or stun duration, or + condition duration, the first to protect you from some of the more dangerous things to condi builds, the second to enhance the conditions you put out, which are a big part of MM builds.
I’ll add to that the possibility to get healed while in shroud. If you look at the meta teams right now, they have a lot of AOE healing, and this is a great part of their sustain. But if a necro gets focused, he does not have much tools to survive, and his team does not have much tools to help him either…
Strictly speaking any balanced sustain we have will never suffice. Blighter’s Boon gave us what you are talking about, which was effectively such obscenely unbalanced sustain (in the situations we’re talking about) that it might as well have just been us negating all damage taken. But any balanced level of sustain won’t cut it, you’d have to be able to sustain through the coordinated burst of 5 people, which by definition isn’t balanced.
Complete skill negation (evade, block, invuln, etc.) or heavy disengage. So basically only skill negation, since we’ll never get disengage.
Vital persistence baseline wouldn’t make necros op. Virtually all necros in pro tournaments have it, and they all still drop fast in any team fights. Focus reaper is still the meta.
Of course they do, because VP does absolutely nothing to stop focus, it just allows you twice as much passive shroud time. The way to go isn’t to make VP baseline but improve the other options in that tier. VP isn’t mandatory because its so strong, it just happens that Soul Reaping is nearly universal, and VP is the only real trait option in that tier (due to the weakness of taking multiple Spectrals and Fear of Death being garbage), if Spectral Mastery became worth taking, and Fear of Death was merged into Curses and replaced with something else VP wouldn’t be taken as much.
As an example, I play Reaper MM and so never go Soul Reaping. Despite having a much weaker shroud I still feel mostly capable of using Shroud for utility and damage soaking, and can deal with 2v1s just fine (did a 2v1 for about a minute then 2+treb v 1 for ~30s not that long ago).
Bluewizard’s idea is a pretty solid one, at least for testing. I honestly think the best option is to push Spectral Mastery as a burst generation option, and pushing the reduced shroud CD to another trait (VP shouldn’t both increase shroud sustain and allow you to get back in faster compared to the burst option of SM), while leaving VP’s degen as is.
I’m not really tired of Reaper yet, plus the alternative is core Necro which is where good gameplay goes to die a boring, uninteractive death.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m nowhere near as down on the Staff as Bhawb is. I think it has its place and, generally, the choice between it and Axe/? comes down to personal preference and the specific content at hand. But Axe/? is good, too, certainly better for single-target damage.
This is really the take away for Axe/? vs Staff. There are some situations where one is objectively better (higher power DPS on Axe vs Staff’s condition damage), but generally speaking, especially in PvP, its a matter of personal choice.
@Lily, just because I hate using staff doesn’t mean I’m incapable of seeing its strengths. Me refusing to use it in my builds is just a personal choice, I know it is stronger in certain situations, however there is also a lot of blind love for staff when it doesn’t strictly benefit your build more than another option. I just dislike it when people go overboard on bringing up what staff does while ignoring what axe brings; they’re both generally subpar weapons that have a ton of mechanics without any of them being particularly strong or unique.
Necromancer has 7 (I think) ways of transferring conditions and several more ways to remove them. Building for transfers is absolutely, IMO, necessary so it is highly Necromancers are expected to transfer self-inflicted conditions to opponents.
Here is the thing, those transfers don’t come for free, at no cost to your build. They take up utility, weapon, heal, trait, rune, or some other slot that comes at an economic cost to your build; taking that selection means you can’t take something else in its place. Meaning, in a standard build I take enough transfers and removal that I feel comfortable dealing with enemy conditions and no more, because excess transfers are wasted power in a build. So, to take a skill that requires me to take additional transfers, means that skill and its subsequent transfer needs to be strong enough to validate me dedicating two components of my build to one skill. But this isn’t the case for Corruptions or Master of Corruption right now, they simply aren’t strong enough to be worth running, and OP’s listed changes aren’t going to fix this.
According to the wiki its Berserker, Knight, or Trailblazer.
I don’t lose very much damage when switching to a staff from dagger/focus.
That’s just factually inaccurate. Staff’s AA is 58% of the damage of Axe’s, and that’s assuming it even hits, and its a slow projectile vs nonprojectile. Marks hit for 0.3/0.5/1.2/0.25 coefficients, which is again, pathetic damage. Every single mark added together does less direct damage than a single Axe 2, or a single Dagger AA chain – 2.55 vs 2.88/2.8. So you absolutely lose damage, its not debatable.
Also, staff doesn’t keep people in wells. It has a single soft CC to keep people in place, in the form of chill. One dodge and they’re out; or if you fear them they’ll leave on their own.
I dislike staff because if you’re not in a condi build swapping to it says to your enemies “hey guys I’m not going to deal any meaningful damage to you for the next 10 seconds, please wait a bit!”. It just doesn’t have the kind of pressure it would need to compete, and even worse for it, its utility as a utility weapon is incredibly lackluster compared to our other skills.
If you take A/D over staff, you end up losing poison/chill (as if those are rare in necro builds), your condi removal becomes slightly less reliable, and you lose the CC of Fear mark (which is easily made up for with smart Wail of Doom use with your D/WH set). On the flip side, you gain far more significant debuffing of enemies (weakness, cripple, boon corruption, vuln), and you never lose offensive pressure by swapping weapons anymore. The two weapons aren’t objectively better than one another, they fill different goals, and in plenty of builds its a fair swap.
I highly prefer axe to staff in non-condition builds. I haven’t used staff (except to reaffirm my hatred of it) in my non-condition builds for 2 years now, and Axe has only been getting better and better. The only real advantage staff has at this point is a functional and strong trait, otherwise Axe provides way higher pressure, plus it allows me to run A/D D/WH for perma 25% movespeed.
3 and 10 are both too much, and the nerfs are completely unnecessary, with the possible exception of Deathly Chill.
Its the classic “we coded everything as minions” issue. Rise! should proc from anything that counts as a hit, but they’ve coded way too many things as being hit-able.
And minion transfers can easily proc it.
This is a fun PvE build, but I wouldn’t run it in PvP: Cleric > Soldier, Anything else > Blood Fiend, Lich doesn’t exist, GS, etc.
The first doesn’t really solve any problems with the trait, the second is a good idea though.
They’re both fine, depends on your playstyle.
It used to deal damage to targets you applied chill to, that damage was then doubled when they were lower than 50% HP. Assuming you have an actual condition build (as in, high condition damage) you now do just less than the lower than 50% damage no matter what the HP of the enemy is. I’m talking like less than 10% damage loss (with condition damage) below 50% for a huge damage gain above 50%.
Can you link a video that shows an engineer consistently getting burns that high? I have looked around since I’ve heard people make that statement but haven’t found it, maybe I suck at searching but even in guides for condition engi I don’t see that many stacks.
Burning deals about 3x the damage of bleeding or poison. Meaning an engineer who can keep up say 10 burning is dealing the same damage as a Necromancer who could theoretically keep up 30 bleeding/poison. Now, will they maintain that high of burning? Obviously not, nor will a Necromancer maintain very high bleeding/poison.
Its likely exaggerating to say that it actually outdamages everything from a PvE context, though its worth mentioning that it is actually true in PvP where the ability to burst 25 burning (very doable) definitely beats out Necromancers ~12 bleed “burst”, but they still way out damage us in a condi context. A large part of that is Curses being really bad though, and the fact that Necromancer having the same condition damage in PvE would be insanely toxic in PvP.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
With HoT IIRC, it was requested by quite a few after Reaper’s Shroud did it.
Can be outdone, or is always out done though
The burning that they stack faster than we stack our damaging conditions out damages our entire build, not including the extra conditions and direct damage they do. Necromancers have literally one of the worst condition damage builds in the game when it comes to raw damage.
I admit that I’m very much at the casual end of the player pool, but I would have thought there were some high enough armor targets in the game somewhere that a condition necromancer could out damage power builds? Or similar to the example in the video where ground targeted skills gave an advantage against a stealthed enemy, where a necromancer’s play style could be preferred? Say where enemies are immune to burning? Or where epidemic can be used to spread conditions to the maximum number of targets?
TL;DR no, there isn’t a group situation in the game where condi Necro is good. There are niche spots (solo) where it is better than power necro, but you could also just play one of the other condition builds not on Necro that deal double our damage.
Death Shroud procs swaps now.
My build is the best for PvP, obviously :^)
For PvE, it depends on your goal, but generally whatever build maximizes DPS while having the minions is best.
Aren’t blanket statements like this somewhat the issue here though?
When its true, no. Condi Necro’s entire max DPS can be outdone by just burning from the better condi builds, its also outdone by basically every power build in group settings. So in the context the blanket is true.
Condi Necro does much better in PvP/solo play because of how its conditions work, but when its just about raw damage, which is all that’s important when you consider condi necro vs other condi builds in a group PvE setting, we lose hard.
At least OP understands these are OP. It’d be pretty hilarious though.
I wouldn’t have it work like Death’s Charge exactly, but having him cut off his charge just after the targeted enemy is an idea. I would generally be against it because it would be much harder to multi-interrupt, since you’d have to target the furthest target in order to make sure he doesn’t screw up and miss a lot of people, but he might miss the important target because of that.
If I were to change anything on Charge, it would be to give him 10 stacks of stability instead of 1, and to remove the cast time from the Necromancer, shifting it to a short animation on the Golem before charging.
And of course reduce the kittening summon time from 1.5s because its ridiculously long.
They need to make the “sacrifice” part not a condition. Because they assume you will transfer it, so they balance the strength around this assumption. I’d rather have a unavoidable sacrifice (straight LF or HP loss) and then a powerful effect on top. This way, the balance is easier.
I think conditions could have a place, but it shouldn’t be the only thing. Blood is Power for example should go to being %max HP, and then something really strong like quickness, to mirror GW1. Conditions make more sense on something like Corrupt Boon, where you get more conditions inflicted on yourself depending on how many boons you corrupt, for example.
That isn’t the right way to make them strong. Removing counterplay on okay skills to make them OP isn’t how Corruptions should work, they should still have counterplay, but be powerful enough to justify other parts of your build or team being weakened to compensate. But making Consume Conditions instant cast (basically) isn’t a good way to do that.
Now that I think about it, it might be better if instead, the corruptions just have really low cooldowns to begin with (8-20s), with mild/moderate effect and self harm, and then have the trait really amp up both the effect and self harm. It would be easier to balance than slapping a flat CDR to all of them.
I think if Corruptions were ever reworked the best thing for them is to be something similar to Blood is Power from GW1. Huge effects that are strong enough to make builds around, but also a significant enough downside that you have to really think about it each time you cast. And generally short CDs, but with downsides significant enough that you can’t just spam them on CD.
For example, BiP could be a large health (20% max HP or something) sacrifice for potent group buff, on a shortish CD. If you tried to maintain the group buffs, you’d end up killing yourself in realistic combat. CPC could be kept up as long as you paid a continual price for it. Things like that, which actually have risk/reward. Anything shy of that is a waste of the entire theme.
Also as far as MoC goes, I still think that it should be a Cast time reduction. For example 1 second cast time reduction take a lot of skills and turns them into instant battle effecting skills.
Removing counterplay shouldn’t be a trait. It doesn’t matter for some, but heal/CB/epidemic would be way too good with a cast time reduction.