Guild Wars 2

ronpierce.2760:

Don’t move NC to curses. MM is still bloated as a utility type requiring 2 trees for good potential (blood and death), it REALLY doesn’t need a third. In fact, it’s one of the few (only?) utility types that require more than one tree for max potential after the reworks. That minion soaker idea is neat, but would be fine being tied into Flesh of the Master. That’s the main criticism I wanted to throw out. Trait placement for MM ATM is pretty good except having 2 in the GM spot and none in the Master if they really feel like bloating MM is necessary, maybe dropping Death Nova down or merging the two GMs in a fancy way (as I had explained once a while back).

Drop DN to Master and MM is really nicely situated imo. Still weird with BM needing basically a single trait investment to max out, while the rest of the tree isn’t really necessary for minions, but oh well.

ronpierce.2760:

Beyond that; Minions gaining Boons the master gets, eh… I feel like it might be OP, but frankly makes sense considering they are a PART of the master. Maybe they would have to not get them by default to balance it out for not double dipping. Would be cool if they also got the master’s Auras and other effects if we went the sharing route.

100% retal uptime on all minions with a single skill (and an extra trait in smaller fights), 100% regen uptime much more easily, high swiftness uptime, that alone would be insane.

ronpierce.2760:

Bone fiend buff seems excessive. Just lowering the CD a tiny bit on the active would do wonders.

Lower CD a little bit, make it an AA reset, and he’s good to go.

ronpierce.2760:

Blood Fiend, he needs to change to do 200 healing per second passively to the master and additional leech on hit, about 500 (3 sec swing timer) so that he isn’t useless when he can’t hit his target or it stealths. That’s about 366 hps which is decent for a heal with a lot of counter play. That, or redesign the active to not sacrifice it. The healing is too low (both while active and on use) to be worth it. I also agree, it’d be cool either the pulse heal (in my suggestion) or his leech hit healed other minions as well.

The first change to make is make his heal on hit scale with healing power of the master (it scales off his healing power right now). After that, other changes can be made to make it better. Other than that, yeah not losing significant amounts of healing just to stealth/defenses would be nice.

ronpierce.2760:

Flesh Golem needs to cleave up to 3 targets, which would make up a bit for its nerfs. And to fix the stability nerf, it would be awesome if he just passively gained 1 stability every 3 seconds. Kind of a rock steady pet by default.

Agreed, cleave would help a bit in PvE, plus he should have better stability. Either passively, or gain like 10 stacks of stab on active.

I actually like the design of all of our minions except Flesh Golem. Sure it could be different, but I don’t really mind it.

neilug hyuga.5634:

• Flesh Wurm, great escape, interesting concept, but damage are useless. Too slow attack speed.

Flesh Wurm actually deals basically the same DPS as Shadow Fiend/Bone Fiend, a bit more than both of them, but they will both proc an extra Vampiric Master siphon, and Bone Fiend has the extra projectile finisher. In practice though Flesh Wurm is probably the second highest DPS minion, hitting for about 1k every (slight more than) 3s or so, and ignoring stealth (or he used to, haven’t paid attention for a while). He’s one of the most reliable minions since no buggy AI and 1200 range. The only problem with his attack speed is his ridiculous cast animation, which effectively adds quite a bit of extra time to his AA.

neilug hyuga.5634:

• Bone Minions : interest in explosion. So killing them. So why would you keep them alive ? Alive, they don’t deal that damage.

There will be reasons to keep them alive soon, to save the 100 toughness and allow them to siphon more conditions away, but with Death Nova especially there is no point, more DPS and better utility in instant Putrid Explosions.

neilug hyuga.5634:

• Bone Fiend : the activation of his skill is really random. It most of the time won’t be useful xD

It modifies his AAs, but doesn’t change his AA timer. So basically the next time he AAs after activation he will immobilize (can happen twice if you don’t mess up when you use it with his attack timer).

Sagat.3285:

Didn’t previous DS used to “teleport” you back in a similar way at some point but it was deemed too anti-casual??

What you’re referring to is a period of time (I believe this is just after DS wasn’t our downed state anymore but I’m not at all confident about that) where entering DS was like activation Spectral Walk. You leave your body behind and then as long as you are in DS you can do whatever you want, run around, shoot stuff, etc. and when it expires or you leave it manually you are transported back.

Its not so much that it was “anti casual”, although it was, but that it makes DS really sucky to use in some defensive situations, since you are forced to go back to where you started using it.

Mobs have weird issues too, but generally speaking minions run into issues for fairly limited reasons that mobs don’t have to worry about:
Code bloat/piled up changes – we’ve seen a few fairly big changes to minion AI, the first was a massive leash reduction (currently 1950 IIRC, used to be like, half a map) and overall aggression reduction on Golem/Shadow which bugged their aggro acquisition, then we had minions no longer attack unless the MM was already in combat and a fix of the aggro issues, but also in the process the “failsafes” the old system had were removed. Effectively our minions have had so much brain surgery I think someone might have forgotten to put it all back.

Mobs also don’t have a non-static leash point. The minions’ reset point is the Necromancer, whereas mobs just return to their little area. There are also ways to break mob aggro that leaves them never attacking you, however in the mob’s case this usually triggers the massive HP regeneration and invulnerability, whereas in the minion’s case they just screw around.

And the bigger issue, mobs have their own aggro that isn’t tied to a player. When a mob has pathing issues or hits the end of its leash, its aggro hits a “reset”. Minions don’t seem to have this because they have secondary aggro that is tied to the Necromancer, and this causes extra issues by not allowing them to get a hard-reset.

Basically, when a mob screws up it just resets, and frankly no one cares (or they abuse it). However, when you are running around with your minions out, you are capable of manually breaking their AI by causing aggro when they can’t find a valid path, and then unlike mobs they can’t just reset because of you and we get the minions standing around. So to us, the minions are stupid, but to the minions we’re just really kittenty masters.

Minion AI (currently) isn’t separated from mob AI, which is part of why they haven’t fixed it yet. So considering there is a very good chance mob AI will get a look-over for HoT (since a lot of their new AI is good), there is a good chance that minion AI will come with it. Its not like they are going to specifically fix minion AI, but more fix the issues that plague all AI which will also fix minions.

I’ll go through again to give my opinion of the full list, if I don’t mention something its because I agree with you. Overall I like a lot of the ideas, though I think there are some extras that could be mentioned as well.

Greater Marks/Staff Mastery should be Master tier, although I do like the SR placement. Making marks unblockable and that large is a pretty huge change, although if you feel it isn’t good enough for Master then I think its more fitting to buff it so it fits at Master like the other weapon traits.

I think for healing in Death Shroud the best way to go about it is first allow all self-sourced things (not including Transfusion) and regeneration to go through at 100% strength. This would include signets working in DS, and Blood Fiend, and balance as appropriate if needed (I doubt it will be). For allied healing I’m not sure, as long as it is clear to allies when you are in Death Shroud.

If you merge Transfusion and Deathly Invigoration (which is a fine idea), it should be Master, both because I think they are worthy of master, but also because Ritual of Life is another support trait that a build using these traits would probably want to take, and them competing wouldn’t be great (two healing/support traits in the same tier).

Vampiric Precision/Bloodthirst, agreed with combining them (though at the adept tier is probably best), don’t think sharing the life steal this way makes sense. VP is by design a selfish trait for selfish builds, its not built for supporting, a way to have offensive siphoning support is great, but this isn’t the spot for it.

I don’t think US and UM are a good pair to combine. US is essentially a selfish defensive/bunker option while UM is a support trait. US could maybe use a buff, as could UM, but they could be buffed separately and be more interesting as clear options for either defense or support. If you need room in Blood Magic I’d rather see UM moved to SR master (Vital Persistence can be changed to fit this, by making the slower drain a part of a relevant trait or a minor, and the DS CDR added to UM).

Spiteful Spirit would be strong enough if it just cast Unholy Feast with no ICD and as a blast finisher. Blinding on top is a buff, but I think unnecessary, and would probably cause issues since it could add a 2s chill, some vulnerability, and then proc that new chill trait you proposed.

Removing DS at this point is essentially asking for a new profession. It isn’t likely to happen.

That doesn’t actually solve anything, it still forces them to rework the minion AI, it just allows them to potentially ignore these issues when they do that.

spoj.9672:

Make them both weaker versions with no ICD’s and add a blast to spiteful spirit. Opens up a lot more build possibilities and avoids frustration with double cooldowns and unreadibility of proc timing. I probably wont ever use these traits if they keep these long ICD’s. Because theres no synergy or fun to be had when you have mismatched overlapping cooldowns hindering gameplay.

And if they really want to make synergy with other traits, just have those other traits improve them in some other way. For example Axe Training could say “Spiteful Spirit removes two boons” (or whatever). But I totally agree, ICDs on something like this just suck, when there is already an effective ICD.

Gryph.8237:

what is the justification for our ridiculously high cast times on some of our skills. It so bugs me, that we have to wait so long to get off a skill sometimes. I don’t seem to feel like this at all on any other class. Sometimes on the necro, it feels so unsmooth to fire off skills, because im cancelling my own skills sometimes to freakin dodge. I mean, i cast the skill, and need to dodge (or take a boot to the skull) but since my skill has such a godkitten long cast time, and post-cast time, that i cannot chain skills together, or even finish casting one skill at times due to the pre/post cast time.

I see no justification for this. It’s not like they are huge skills either, and they have cool downs, why do they justifiy adding these kittened times pre and post cast.

We don’t actually have high cast times on all of our skills, it is really just our weapon skills that suffer from this. A 1.4s cast time (including pre/after casts) isn’t all that rare, it exists on a lot of the slower attacks. I just think ANet at launch over-estimated how strong some of our abilities would be, and we never got the second pass-over that Rangers got to fix some things that didn’t fit.

They could, but I’m not sure its a particularly interesting thing to do. The Elementalist weapons aren’t particularly strong because they allow people access to new skills, but because they had skills that were just grossly overpowered (aka, things we’d never get).

I’d much prefer a bit more “traditional” Necromancer support, in the form of extremely powerful offensive buffs to allies, that cause the Necromancer to have to intelligently manage HP (or life force). Or even just highly offensive support.

Having 8 jagged horrors constantly would be pretty ridiculous with the new poison changes. I would like to see Death Nova spawn Jagged Horrors (with no ICD) on minion death though.

I do wonder if a 7s (further reduced by Axe Training, assuming Axe training at some point becomes not-garbage) AoE boon strip, high retal uptime, blast finishing (which it should be), crippling, decent damage ability is too strong though. Not that it should have an ICD, but I would much prefer to see it like the current Weakening Shroud (which is for some reason being returned to having a massive ICD): a slightly weaker version of a skill with no ICD.

They are separate from each other healing/damage wise, but those components could still show up more noticeably from other healing/damage sources.

Malchior.1928:

That way, the GM trait Spiteful Spirit gives necros a blast finisher every 10 seconds (6 sec when traited)

15s ICD, so it wouldn’t, sadly.

Its something that only really matters on the sPvP maps. Mobs in PvE aren’t moving like that so there isn’t a big deal, and WvW has relatively few areas where minions are both usable and people will be jumping around.

April 26, 2006 they changed minions to have a cap according to Death Magic, this was 2 days before Factions. So unlimited minions only existed in the game for just short of 1 year.

Oh I agree it is totally an issue, I just want to point out that fixing it could create other issues as well. I don’t actually think it would be unreasonable to buff the damage a little bit (its been nerfed due to the fact that it is instant), allow it to scale with the Necromancer’s crit chance/damage, and then have it be targeted, either on an enemy or ground targeted.

Yes, the corpses were used as raw material. If you killed a cow, you didn’t bring the cow back to life and create an undead cow, you just used its bones, flesh, and other parts to make whatever minion you wanted. That is why the corpse itself didn’t matter, you could kill anything and then use that corpse as the main source of materials for your golems of dead material, aka minions.

I do think a few more minions would be fine after they fixed the current issues. But we actually have a larger variety of minions now than we used to, since so many of the original minions were just copies of each other. Vampiric Horrors are now a trait, as are Jagged Horrors, Bone Horrors are unnecessary since they existed as “base” ones, instead they added Blood Fiend, Flesh Wurm, and Shadow Fiend, while only really taking out Shambling Horror and Bone Horror.

Edit: Also no you wouldn’t roll around in GW1 with 20 minions, that was patched very early on to allow 12 minions max, 10 in most situations, and 8 without special rune investment.

Exactly.

We aren’t masters of raising the dead, we don’t raise the dead at all. We can, but we don’t, for a variety of lore and gameplay reasons, and we never have raised the dead in either GW1 or GW2. We create golems using dead organic material, its basically the same as what the Asura do, only instead of using metal we use organic material.

That said, we really don’t need new minions. We need the current minions to be fixed before anything extra is added. After that, the only particularly interesting things to add would be a truly defensive minion, and then potentially minions on weapon sets (OHs mainly, they’d have to be balanced around being useful for everyone) with things like AoE control. Minion traits are much more capable of expanding the minion playstyle than new minions are.

spoj.9672:

Why would it be a nerf?

Theres another solution to the combo issue though. Make the blast effect centered on your target or yourself instead of the minion.

Travel times. Bone Minions currently explode instantly with absolutely no way for the enemy to counterplay it besides not allowing them to get close enough. By having them become ground-targeted it becomes much easier for you to miss by the enemy moving away from where you targeted the minion to explode, which isn’t all that unlikely to happen on accident. It turns them into ground-targeted shatters, essentially. So you introduce the potential for not only counterplay, but just plain increase the amount of time it takes for them to blow up and the chance for them to do something weird that you didn’t want.

Also, blasting on you is a nerf to Death Nova, which currently self-combos (albeit slowly). Blasting on your target would basically be the same as it is now from an MM point of view, if you hit your target with the Putrid Explosion then it would still combo.

nekretaal.6485:

What can I do to get on the list of good necromancers? #33 rank NA isn’t good enough?

To be fair, a lot of people consider me “good” even though I probably have less in-game playtime on Necro than most of those people thinking I’m good.

Or make Unholy Martyr have effect outside of DS. Example: while in DS draw conditions, while out of DS transfer conditions away off of yourself to enemies. Although imo one of the biggest problems with UM is that Plague Signet doesn’t work while in DS.

And yeah, pulling LB’s cast time back a bit makes sense.

CodeHavoc.7926:

Shouts: Naw. Necromancers are like dark wizards that summon the dead. The last time I check they didn’t shout to bring morale to teams.

We don’t summon the dead, and we really aren’t dark wizards in the classic sense. Shouts are just verbal magic spells (as opposed to the more standard in GW2 of just casting) that are used to buff your allies. Orders are essentially the exact same thing (an “order” is literally a verbal command), just instead of inspiring our allies we’d be yelling at them to murder stuff faster/better.

While I understand the desire to make bone minion’s explosion ground-targeted, I do hope everyone understands this is a nerf to their use as DPS, in order to allow them to combo better. Basically it nerfs their use in MM builds, the only builds that currently take them, in order to maybe open them up for other builds. It would probably have to come with a slight damage increase.

striker.3704:

Death nova being merged into Minion master, while good for minion masters, makes it too powerful of a trait base line.

Instead I would change death nova from:
“spawn a jagged horror when you kill an enemy. 15 second cooldown”.
to
“spawn a jagged horror when an enemy, ally, or non-jagged horror minion dies around you. 20 second cooldown”.

This would give the condition based MMs who would be running this trait, bone minions, and some condition utilities a bit of an easier time keeping their weak disposable minions up so they can explode for a bajillion damage repeatedly.

The problem with Death Nova isn’t that it isn’t strong enough, although I do really want to see Jagged Horrors spawning from non-jagged horror minions like in GW1, but more thakittens up such an important line with two minion traits at the same tier. Either drop DN to Master, since the current master tier is actually really mediocre for MMs right now, or nerf the current Necromantic Corruption/Death Novas a little bit, and then merge them. Either way, we simply can’t afford our primary defense line having an extra slot tied up by a minion trait.

zapv.8051:

As for Terror, the damage needs to go up by more than 17% or master of terror needs to get merged into it. Currently, it doesn’t deal that much extra damage. Mesmer new trait that deals 25% more damage on shatters is a way bigger burst dps, and overtime dps than terror, and it has an extra effect of dealing 50% extra damage when targets aren’t activating skills. It isn’t strong enough to be GM right now.

Strictly speaking it wouldn’t be a 17% buff, it reverts a 17% nerf. Because math is weird, it actually works out to being a 20.5% buff to bring it back up to pre-nerf levels. It does need to do more damage, I just think having it be on-interrupt or something like that to incentivize play that isn’t just trying to stack up conditions then fear someone into a corner for 10s is a bit better.

zapv.8051:

I still think a shared vampiric buff should be the build defining trait of Blood Magic, then the other traits in that line could build off of that. Some kind of support needs to be innate to that traitline (as in included in the minors), or it will always be bad because investment in healing power is only useful if it is also benefiting allies.

I absolutely agree. Maybe have traits earlier in the tree that have ways to apply Dark Aura effects, for example Full of Life applies Dark Aura, SS would give it on blast, and some traits that deal with it, and then have a GM trait where all self-applied regeneration, life stealing, and Dark Auras are shared with allies?

spoj.9672:

Deal bonus damage to chilled foes and whenever chill applied runs out. Target recieves damage based on the total duration. If cleansed no damage is dealt.

I like it. One of the bigger problems with chill builds right now is the lack of damage because of how much you give up to get decent chill.

Also, I agree that the better ways to cause more interesting traits is to interact with the profession mechanic, give extra effects on blast finishers, and also have ways to augment condition application, either with extra effects (like why the hell do Rangers and Thieves get better poison?) or with extra conditions.

I wouldn’t try to model too much after the underwater version considering it is blatantly OP and the only reason it isn’t complained about is because UW combat is so awfully balanced anyway.

I don’t actually mind the cast time too much, if it gave projectile finisher, which comparable abilities like Elementalist staff do.

Some ways to make traits more defining
Note, I don’t think every trait needs to be build defining. Spite for example has 3 GM’s that are all absolutely fine traits, they just don’t end up being build defining really. However traits like Terror could be, but just aren’t quite strong enough to base a build around. I just feel like so many of our builds don’t have any particular direction to them because there aren’t traits that give entirely new ways to play.

Terror – Revert the 17% nerf it saw a while ago just as a base, this trait needs to become the “burst” option of Necromancers, compared to Lingering Curse which will be more utility/over time focused. Ideas to make this stronger are giving it extra damage when an enemy is interrupted, so interrupting an enemy with fear will cause Terror to deal extra damage, or even all conditions to deal extra damage. You could also have it apply an immediate damage (that scales with condition damage) instead, so that as long as you interrupt them you get an immediate damage spike that can’t just be cleansed away. Either way, this trait needs to actually give burst so that it is reasonable for Necromancers to truly condi burst, instead of just overload over a longer fight.

Unholy Sanctuary – I don’t think this directly needs a change to make it more build defining, it just needs to stack with other regeneration sources by allowing Necromancers to actually get regen and self-traited siphons and healing (not including Transfusion) through DS. I also really dislike the forced-DS entry, if anything just allow us to manually override the CD (either through F2 or just allowing us to re-enter). If it actually stacked with regen and gave us a way to have say 500HP/s while in DS (still VASTLY worse than the 1k HP/s Rangers can get) it could be build defining.

Blood Magic – Even after the changes, it still lacks anything to really create a “support” build. I’m honestly not sure what to put here, people put forward the idea of Dark Auras that give siphoning, which are interesting, but I’m not sure how to implement it in an interesting way, especially if we get “Shouts” with Orders, that do just that.

Chill Builds – Considering Grenth and chill are such a core idea of Necromancer, it is kind of ridiculous that we have no +Chill duration, and no unique ways to play with Chill. A strong chill trait at the GM level in curses or death magic would make a lot of sense to help out our chill builds, which don’t need a huge amount to make them viable.

Anyway, these are just my opinions. Any other changes you think could happen to make some of our GM traits a bit more build-defining? Do you think we are fine as is? Or do we need to scrap some of our current GMs in favor of new ones?

While looking over the Elementalist trait changes I came to a conclusion (not a particularly new or original one) that Necromancers seem to lack build defining traits. Elementalists have Diamond Skin, Blinding Ashes, Fresh Air, Lightning Rod, and all kinds of traits that really define their build. Necromancers on the other hand really lack this. It isn’t so much that our traits are necessarily bad, but that they simply don’t directly impact gameplay as much.

What are build defining traits?
A build defining trait is a trait that fundamentally changes how you play your build. It is the thing that takes your build from just another condi build to being a Dhuumfire build, which has a very distinct and different damage rotation and goal than just your standard condi build. These are traits that you can build around, in essence, where you decide “I’m going to be an Aura Share (Powerful Auras) ele” and then this decision shapes the rest of your build.

I also want to separate build defining traits like Dhuumfire or Fresh Air from traits like Close to Death and Signet Mastery (the new GM one). Close to Death doesn’t define your build, you take it because you have already decided to be a power build and you decided the extra 20% damage was more useful than something else. Signet Mastery is in a similar spot, you decided you were going to be a Signet build and so you took Signet Mastery, the actual build defining thing here is your utility skills, not the trait.

What are our current build defining traits?
I’m going to frame this with the trait rework as presented initially to us.

Lingering Curse – I think this will be very build defining as it currently is. It is going to make you re-think your entire condi build because it gives you 100% duration right off the bat when your Scepter is active. This is going to change runes, sigils, and its going to most likely make previously under-appreciated choices suddenly much more attractive.

Necromantic Corruption/Death Nova – With Putrid Defense and a buffed Necromantic Corruption, these two traits finally have significantly different use-cases, and will likely end up with significantly different MM builds. One will have MMs picking up much more support and healing, with the other most likely being more selfish and the minions being more expendable.

Death Perception – When this came out it absolutely changed how power builds are played. While it is somewhat synonymous with power builds in general right now since it is practically necessary, it still makes a really big change in how your build is changed.

Dhuumfire – I’m not 100% sure on this with the new Dhuumfire. Old Dhuumfire absolutely changed how you played because it changed your condi rotation, but this new one I’m not sure of. Just curious, what would people think if they changed it to have the same ICD it used to, and instead of applying 1 stack of burning it would applied multiple so that it deals similar damage to what it does now, so essentially unchanged except in SR now.

And that is honestly it imo. Terror isn’t really build defining now, and I don’t think it really will be, except as condi builds that don’t take Lingering Curse. I just don’t see it contributing enough to really define your build.

Gryph.8237:

anet dev’s simply don’t have the guts to come in and enter into a logical discussion with this forum community. They don’t want to, nor do they care. Stop asking for answers, you’re just wasting your time. No offense to you at all.

“Guts”? There is no particularly compelling reason for them to do it, unless they just love being called bad names. They can just let us do our own conversations and read them, no point in contributing unless it is to help steer discussions to things that they are more likely to make changes for. Ex: if there is no way they will change X mechanic (like removing DS), they can steer us away from that and more towards ways to make it work. But other than steering, which we tend to do ourselves anyway, there is no reason for them to waste time they could use actually making changes to come talk to us.

Abimes.9726:

Soul Reaping :

° Transfer staff mastery into greater marks , put soul marks Base line.
° Replace Soul marks (A) with Master of Terror
° New Master trait unholy rengeration : Regenerate life force in combat, for each enemy foe around you. (Or something else if some one commes up with a good idea.)

I would personally prefer the staff trait to be here rather than Death Magic, because of how mediocre the master tier currently is in Death Magic if you don’t have a staff. But either way totally agree on the merging and base soul marks.

I don’t like passive LF generation. We’re supposed to be aggressive, plus passive traits tend to be pretty bland. Would be good to just see a way to have scaling LF here that is more active.

Abimes.9726:

Blood Magic :

° Minor trait full of life : Gain Regeneration and life force when you health drop
under treshold.
° Transfusion(M) : Replace it by parasitic contagion.
° Deathly invigoration(GM) : Heal allies when entring death shroud.
Heal allies when using Life transfer.
Receive 50% of incoming healing while in death shroud.

Parasitic Contagion is worth a GM slot, much better to drop Transfusion/DI one tier each, BT merged into VP. Also healing through DS should absolutely be baseline, in whatever way they make it.

Abimes.9726:

Curse : (here i wan’t to bring sinergy with power lines so they can acces warhorn.)

° Chilling darkness (A): Blinding a target will also aply Chill.
inflict more damage to chilled foes 5%.
° Parasitic Contagion (GM) Replaced by spitefull spirits : Cast unholy feast when
entring death shroud.
° Reaper’s precision(M) : Numbers have to be looked at or trait have to be changed.

Chilling Darkness is plenty fine as is, especially with its new synergy and buffed chill duration.

Spiteful spirit should stay in Spite, it fits perfectly there.

RP should just be removed really.

Abimes.9726:

Spite :

° Bitter Chill : Chilling a foe inflicts vulnerability .
Chill duration last longer +20%. (Necro is suposed to be attrition and
something you can’t run away from.)

° Axe Training (M): Axe skills deal 10% increased damage to crippled foes. Striking
with Rending Claws recharges your other axe skills by a small
amount (2%).
Increased range + 150.

° Signet mastery : Reduces recharge on signets by 33%. Activating a signet grants might,
swiftness and fury to you and your allies.

° Spitefull spirits (now in curse) replaced by something new

Chill idea is good, would love to see Chill duration on Necro.

Axe training is just bad right now. Extra range just makes it bad with longer range.

Signet Mastery is fine as is. The only thing that needs to happen is see other signets get fixed.

Abimes.9726:

Ps: ( I think lingering curse 100% condition duration should not affect fear.)

Lingering Curse should affect everything, because affecting fear allows it to be a decent defensive use as well. While strong, the fact that it becomes useless the second you swap to staff for at least 10s is good enough counterplay.

I do like the idea of AI speeding up. Also, we do not need attack/don’t attack buttons, there really is no point for an MM except to be able to call them out of AoE, and realistically speaking it wouldn’t even work very well with that because of how slowly they run.

Player.8373:

raising the dead

How relevant.

If you die in PvE as Necro in 99% of situations its because you fell asleep, and some extra toughness won’t have helped the extra 1%.

Death Shroud has nothing to do with support. ANet never says we can’t get support because of DS, they just never bring up support really.

And no, Death Shroud and 1v1s vs XvX actually has no problem innately, the difference is LF generation. ANet doesn’t seem to like putting in much LF generation that scales with number of enemies hit, which would make it so that LF generation in 1v1s isn’t very strong since you can only ever hit 1 person, while LF generation in teamfights would be higher since you can generate up to 5x as much LF.

“I’m Useful!”
Applies 1s of Might (1s) to one nearby ally.
120s CD

Well, Summoner is an extremely generic idea for a profession, whereas Chronomancer ties in perfectly with Mesmer. Summoner could be made to fit with every profession that relies on “pure” magic (Guardian, Revenant, Mesmer, Elementalist, Necromancer, Ranger) and then Engineer, because it basically just says that the profession creates AI to kill things as its main “thing”.

I don’t think it is Death Shroud, I think it is ANet’s of what Necromancer has to be: a low mobility, condition-reliant, boon-deficient, profession. I honestly don’t feel Death Shroud itself really lends to any issues, but more that ANet has these ridiculous ideas of how we can somehow exist without so many of the basic things that other professions abuse the hell out of. I actually love that our profession mechanic is so heavily ingrained in how our profession works, and if anything I’d like to see more mechanic like Dhuumfire, Transfusion, and Death Perception which turn DS into a core part of the profession’s play.

DS isn’t the reason we don’t have finishers, or lack useful fields. DS isn’t the reason we have such bad team utility or awful sustain, etc. I really think it is ANet’s lack of ability to make larger-scale changes, and also seemingly massive disconnect from the reality of Necromancer’s problems (why can’t Beyond the Veil be Aegis, which would absolutely help us to mitigate single large hits, for example). Death Shroud just happens to be the scapegoat because ANet focuses in too kitten it. But I guarantee if we had something else they’d just swap from “well they have two health bars” to “well their fears deal damage” or something else.

Yeah, real ironic that a game just reaching closed beta stages might have noticed the problems of another game and used it as inspiration for balance in their own game.

Yes, because burning having such a high base damage was part of the massive celestial problem we had. It didn’t make sense that non-condition builds were killing someone with conditions. Plus we don’t know the new scaling.

The only change I’d make to the minion AAs is to have a slight range increase, and allow them to attack and move at the same time. It is completely nonsensical that in a game where players can move and cast player summoned-AI has to stand still.

The problem is their pathing, in many cases ANet’s god awful terrain mapping, and the apparent ability to get stuck on the smallest pebble and be unable to move. There isn’t any real reason the pathing should be an issue now when it wasn’t an issue at launch (they ballsed it up when trying to reduce minion over-aggression). And increasing their ability to move over Z-axis differences would remove the pebble problems.

Physical, you mean like hefting a giant greatsword around?

Rym.1469:

Except that Orders were not like Shouts. Shouts are rather simple and straight foward, while Orders, when supportive, often required health sacrafices, had variables, risk involved and were in general more complicated effects.

At their core they were party-wide buffs, which is no different than what we could get through shouts. There really isn’t anything in GW2 that would differentiate them, they would be some kind of buffs applied to allies in some radius around you, the only real reason to call them shouts (and its a good one) is to allow runes to treat them as shouts, and also so people know what to expect.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Just remember in order to get the Lingering Curse trait you have to give up Terror, and without Terror the condition Necromancer is outclassed by the likes of condition Engineer (and condition Ranger, honestly).

That has been true currently, but there are very significant changes coming. We’ll be able to have Dhuumfire, Lingering Curse (which effectively doubles all condition effectiveness including our CC), and way stronger defenses if we go into Death Magic.

tboneking.2531:

Correct me if Im wrong, but I believe Poison and Burning are being changed into stacking conditions. So the decrease in damage on both of those is to account for that. I for one am happy I finished my sinister gear and grabbed the ascended sinister trinkets for some revamped Dhuumfire

It is worth mentioning that they were also wearing non-condi gear, and conditions appear to be scaling much stronger with condition damage but with lower base damages.

JDjitsu.7895:

Going 4 into curses for spectral attunement for spectral based WvW power builds can be worth a GM. Works in pvp also. Especially in the right hands..I wouldn’t pve or gvg/zerg with more than 2 for FR though for a power build, but who uses condi for pve?

Spectral Attunement won’t be in Curses anymore, and you are forced to go the full line. So by going into curses as opposed to another trait line, you will not get a useful trait in the GM tier.

Rym.1469:

Say hello to Liadri exploiters.

Only time when playerbase noticed that we have some Life Stealing.
But quickly returned to Thief, because it was easier and life stealing was better.

Say hello to myself? :P The only reason I beat Liadri was because of it.

Why would we get an F5 without an F2-4.

Darwec.3784:

Does life siphon damage change with the targets toughness? Or is it just…applied?

It ignores armor. This is why in a number of cases it bugs out, because sometimes ANet decides to code enemies with 10000000000000000 armor instead of actually making them immune to damage, and then life stealing still applies at full strength, effectively ignoring damage immunity.