Staff does not make every build better. It isn’t that good on anything that isn’t condi, its pretty much only taken in non-condi because power builds want something to do at 1200 range, and yes I’m still really salty about Putrid Mark’s nerf. The fact that staff is even considered decent anymore is a testament to how abysmal our ranged options are.
Buy to play doesn’t really matter, SC2 and CS:GO both require a purchase, as do fighting games. F2P just allows for a smaller % of the community to watch to get the same numbers, since the total size of the community will be larger.
The problem isn’t just healthbars and nameplates, it is skill visuals. League of Legends in the last year or so completely remade their entire map and is redoing the visuals on tons of champions just to make sure that there is a very clear visual hierarchy for skills>champions>map. And among skills it is always very obvious what is going to happen, the abilities make sense and even if you’ve never played league before you will quickly have an idea of what is going on.
But this isn’t true in GW2. Effects are far too common, especially professions like Elementalist who have Disneyland tier light shows for every single ability. They need to go through and at the very least have a spectator system that reworks the ability visuals to be much more balanced for viewing.
I compare them to make the point that turrets are levels above any other classes AI skills. So yes, buffing minions along with ranger’s spirits to the level of engi turrets would “solve” this (creating a whole mindless AI metagame), or just nerf turrets to the same level as those. Which do you think would be more publicly accepted?
Who cares about public acceptance? The “public” doesn’t decide game balance, and they certainly don’t get to decide that an entire sub-set of builds shouldn’t be good just because they don’t like them.
The 2 most damaging turrets have 1,500 effective range. If they are strategically set, there’s no aoe skill in the game that can hit them and pressure the point reliably at the same time.
You can’t place the turrets that far off the point unless you want to spend 30s to setup every time you swap points, and accept the fact that a large percentage of the time your turrets will be out of range. They are immobile, so you need their max range to include anywhere the enemy could be hitting you from, or you don’t have a very good coverage.
Also i’m not saying turrets should only be affected by burning, i’m saying that ALL conditions should have some sort of hindering effect on them or just straight up damage them. Then, condition builds would have a better chance to counter the engi like they are supposed to.
Conditions are a really strong counter to turret engi, they can only remove 2 conditions every 15s, and then whatever they get from runes and sigils, which is garbage removal.
Yes, you don’t nerf turrets to spite them for ANet making Minions awful. You can spread turrets out all you want, the professions that currently have access to burning have it on very large AoE abilities that are going to hit turrets that are placed within range of fighting, all that spreading them out does is increase how much mindless spam it takes to finish them off.
And no, turret’s base HP is similar to minion HP, however minions get 50% HP which throws all non-bone minion HP values above the highest turret HP. Also any minion build includes at least high regen uptimes and Transfusion, you can also mix in Renewal sigils for a fair bit of healing. That is all besides the real point though: why use MM as a point of balance when MM is absolutely awful right now? MM and Turret engi strength should meet in a middle point, along with nerfs to their passive uses and buffs to actives. Burning accomplishes none of this, it just makes turrets worse in teamfights, makes the builds that are already really strong stronger, and doesn’t address any real issues.
Why would we buff burning? Did we not learn our lesson already on how strong burning already is?
Also, turret’s base defense is fine. Making them susceptible to conditions would require a massive HP buff, otherwise a warrior could walk up, drop a fire field, and turrets are gone with 0 counterplay or skill involved. Turret builds might be a problem right now, but making turrets useless isn’t the solution either.
The other skills have no point in adding damage to, they are entirely utility based right now, adding damage to them either forces the entire weapon set to have a bunch of really badly designed skills (forced to use them for damage despite them being utility skills), or reworking the entire set of skills to be damage. All you do is make it so that you need to press a few different skills to reach max damage, not to mention the fact that it would require a net buff in Lich’s total possible damage output (because skillshots can be missed) or end up as a nerf.
If you want to make Lich more skillful, give people a reason to press anything other than 1. This doesn’t mean you have to spread out the damage, but give the other skills meaningful utility so they actually have a reason to be cast.
Honestly, I’ve always felt that Lich Form should be rebalanced anyway, but not because it’s “too strong” or whatever. Elites on 3 minute cooldowns should be very strong, but they should also require a lot more skill to be that strong than Lich Form currently does.
Not every skill should have “high” mechanical skill to use. Almost every Elite in the game is less an issue of mechanical skill and more knowledge and decision making, which is absolutely in line with MMORPG combat. Artificially increasing Lich Form’s “skill”, which probably isn’t even that realistic anyway with 5 skills, does nothing to make it a better elite. Right now Lich takes skill in knowing when to use it, who to target, how long to stay in it, and other decisions like that, instead of mechanical skill.
All it needs is to have all 5 skills have actual meaningful use cases, which just isn’t the case right now.
To be fair, you’d only take half damage. So a 4k would only hit you for 2k LF, but it is still a pretty big point of counterplay that is bugged.
Except in PvE it would most likely do better as a long duration long(ish) CD. kitten CD with a 10s duration still gives it a high uptime, but allows it to be far stronger per cast. Its not about crowding out other skills, but if two skills are equal in power but one is high CD high effect and the other low CD low effect the first makes for a much more interesting play situation to me.
See title: if an enemy reflects life blast it doesn’t hurt the Necromancer. Tested using standard 6/2/0/0/6 build both with and without life blast traits against guardian reflection wall. Life blast projectile goes through Necromancer but causes no damage to life force.
Did some quick testing, though nothing big, and it appears I was wrong.
I know everyone wants all of our skills to have nearly nonexistant CDs, I’m saying it isn’t necessarily the best idea from a game health point of view. A 24s CD WoD is insanely strong, even if they changed nothing to how it works now (and it does need a field change).
it removes the last applied condition
This is not the case, and it is super easy to show it. Just throw BiP and CB onto a golem in the mist, pop shrouded removal. Then swap the order. Do this a few times.
Almost every removal in the game has a built in priority.
I don’t think lowering the CD is necessarily the answer (though a slightly reduced one might be appropriate), I’d much prefer it be really strong and have a long duration but have a “cost” of not being able to use it associated. Dropping the CD is certainly a power boost, but it is also one that dumbs down skill usage, and also limits how strong skills can be per-use.
Attack speed is certainly an interesting way to buff an AA, and it has extra synergy with Necromancer because of life steal. I’m not sure that Scepter should get it though, Axe and Dagger both have crazy good synergy, whereas the only thing that really changes with scepter is it builds bleed stacks a bit faster.
They nerfed the wrong thing. It wasn’t Dhuumfire that needed changing, it was the Terror chains.
And of course the fact they’d put a burning trait on a power line, that was just brilliant of them. They love their hideously kitten hybrid lines/weaponskills/trait while the warriors and elementalists and thieves and guardians get all the power traits in the power lines and the condi traits in the crit/condi lines.
Terror was nerfed by 17% and was moved to Master from Adept. Also, Dhuumfire was bad because it was on-crit in a non-crit tree, however Spite gives condition duration, it should by all means be our secondary condition tree, not to mention that Dhuumfire even in its current form would be OP in Curses.
Terror’s nerf is probably still fine. It is way too good to be in Adept, and its current damage is decent. Same with some of the other nerfs we have seen, like Corrupt Boon removing 5 boons. However, adding back 2 or 3 bleeds across a few skills would be a really nice change to make, and hardly game breaking for our opponents.
You can argue about the patch specifically, but at the time I was actually interviewing top players who agreed that a major problem with Necromancer was our lack of sustained damage, which is easily fixed with burning. It was a common topic on But of Corpse, and I’m sure you could go back and listen to us complain about our lack of Burning compared to Engineer.
Did we have and do we have other issues? Yes. But things like sustain weren’t as big of an issue if Necromancers were made to be significant teamfight threats outside of dangerous (melee) bleed spikes because at the time Necros often had dedicated peeling.
And the sustain vs spike can be easily fixed if they put these into utility/weapon/trait setups that are exclusive. If you want Dhuumfire and Terror, you only have 4 points for any kind of defense. If you want staff/scepter+dagger then you should give up other weapons, and if you want certain utilities you can’t take others. The problem then and the problem now is that we don’t really have meaningful choices. Without choices we just gravitate to the one best build.
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There is a lot I love about Necromancer, that’s why I have over 6,600 forum posts (and counting, dear god that’s a lot of time…). I won’t pretend like we’re the best strength wise, but I love our design. We have one of the coolest profession mechanics in the game that is a core part of our profession and is really fun to play with. Our design as an aggressive, manly profession is great, and I love the use of offense as a primary source of defense. I also think we have some of the best utility skills in the game, we have SO many builds that could be viable with just a few weapon additions that it is ridiculous, and completely unheard of in any other profession.
I don’t have specific links, but ANet has shown off new AI systems in their PvE streams of the new content, specifically the new Wyvern boss fight, they also hired an AI specialist consultant almost a year ago, and have talked about AI a lot in terms of their new game.
So new AI is definitely guaranteed. However the reality is that minions don’t need new AI so much as they need their current AI to work. Having minions run out of red circles might be nice, but all that I really need them to do is attack my target reliably.
I would argue we are better balanced now, but mostly because there have been tons of bug fixes and QoL changes since then. Pre-dhuumfire we didn’t see much more use than we do now, honestly, and it was ONLY condi, power was garbage. A lot of what is making us weak now is the mass condi removal, and having a few bleeds back here and there would help a lot.
And it just makes sense, the thing that caused these nerfs no longer exists as it did, so these nerfs have no place anymore.
You could, they accidentally bugged it, and then it became a “feature”.
Dhuumfire was the worst “buff” and it was both absolutely unwanted and uncreative decision. Who in the hell wanted a necromancer with burning?!
A lot of people, actually. We weren’t doing amazing in the meta, and a lot of people attributed it to the fact that we couldn’t sustain DPS on people due to a lack of burning, unlike engi.
Wells being ranged is a really significant power change and its only an Adept trait anyway.
1. Is absolutely OP
2. Again, too good
3. Not an awful idea since staff has such garbage LF generation. Make the Soul Marks trait base to Staff, and make a trait that gives scaling LF per person hit maybe?
The 3% to 8% wasn’t the only thing that happened though, it was also changed to work while in Death Shroud, which IS a massive buff. You’d have to be hit 3 times per second every second for the new SA to not be a net buff to the old version. I agree we need scaling defense, but these changes are what brought SA from almost never used to an extremely common utility skill.
The protection plus innate direct damage reduction means you only take 33% damage while in DS (67% damage reduction), and with 8% generated per hit they need to be doing more than 8% of your LF (960 with no vitality or SR) per second to even cause damage to your LF. There is still a video out there of a Necromancer absorbing an entire Fresh Air burst and barely losing any LF (and Fresh Air causes a lot of hits very quickly). Again, we could use scaling defense, but that doesn’t mean it has to be on every skill. SoL is scaling, SWalk should be changed to scaling considering how low it is, and we should get others as well.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Internal CD came along a massive buff to allowing them to work in DS and a pretty large increase in SA LF gain per hit. Not that ICD is the greatest, but it came hand in hand with the strongest buff SA’s ever seen.
Is there a support build? Yes, there are two or three types that I can think of: healing (just spam out heals), wells support (generally condition removal and well of darkness), and condition support (tons of condition output to make enemies weak, plus some condition transfer from allies to enemies via Plague Signet).
Overall though, Necromancer support is absolutely never worth running in any kind of optimized setup. It is strictly for fun only.
That’s like saying revert the pet nerf because rangers aren’t very good right now. Which would make ranger top dog (huehueheu) once again. Power creeping isn’t the solution.
Yes and no. Reverting all nerfs certainly isn’t the fix, Corrupt Boon and Putrid Mark both should have been nerfed from where they were, however Necromancer has lost too much of its overall condition pressure through bleed and terror nerfs that are just no longer needed.
Terror was nerfed solely because Dhuumfire + Fear + bleed burst was overwhelming, but that is no longer a thing anymore, so it absolutely makes sense to un-nerf things that were nerfed under a situation that no longer exists. If they had just done the logical thing and never released Dhuumfire in its original state in the first place we would still have those bleeds and fear damage.
yes, it was nerfed few months after dhuumfire release.
5 boons is OK for me, but i dont get why stability have lowest priority
Stability isn’t quite lowest, it is 6th or 7th I believe. Still way too low.
And almost forget on huge Putrid Mark nerf – our only playable support skill for party – before it transfers ALL condi from caster AND ALLIES in mark radius.
Was this during the same time? Its been so long I don’t remember, I feel like Putrid Mark was nerfed before Dhuumfire but we didn’t figure it out until during the Dhuumfire nerfs because that is when marks were bugging.
Weakening Shroud was not nerfed as a result of Dhuumfire. Terror, Mark of Blood/Evasion, Grasping Dead all were though. I forget if Corrupt Boon was also nerfed along with this?
Mostly we lost a bit of bleed bursting, definitely a noticeable amount.
As for why? With Dhuumfire, Necromancers moved from relatively mediocre unless played by an extremely skilled player into absolutely mandatory on every single team. Our AA alone would bleed, poison, and burn you, it was to the point where Necromancers were forcing condition cleanses from bunker guardians simply by auto attacking. It was absolutely, undeniably OP in a way that Engineer could never hope to match, and multiple people on the alpha servers told ANet not to release it because of how OP it was.
Don’t forget being able to instantly reenter ds if you let it run out of deathshroud naturally rather than ending it. also I know it’s supposedly a bug but I’d really like my ds skills to continue if I get knocked out of ds again….
This was 100% unrelated to dhuumfire.
So ANet can make it 1s if they agree. Poison Grenade pulses 3s Poison every 1s per grenade where fields can overlap already and lasts for 5s, so I felt 2s Poison/Weakness every 1s for 12s was fine for something with a much larger cooldown and that takes a critical utility slot.
We already have that via Death Nova, neither of them also apply weakness. That is a base 26s (13 pulses) of poison and weakness on a 30s CD that can cover a point; 20% condition duration, Master of Corruption, or one blast and projectile finisher (per cast) to get 100% duration.
We could probably deal with the NPCs really easily if they are dumb and/or have low HP. SWall could turn out to be a good way to deal with NPC groups, fear chains will probably be an easy solution to heroes, but otherwise I’m not sure I see a lot of niche for Necromancer. Our supporting is really bad and we make for awful roamers, both of which seem to be really important.
Only Spectral Wall scales with number of enemies, the rest don’t.
Their AI is bad because at one point they were so aggressive you couldn’t summon them in open world PvE unless you were going for a full map clear. So when they pulled this back they ended up with this insanely complicated aggro system that honestly sucked. Then they managed to “fix” that complication, but in the process minions became less reliable. And here we are now.
In PvE just desummon them when they aren’t needed, their issues are pathing related and don’t bug out until they move over weird terrain. Less moving = less bugging.
Condi Necro doesn’t particularly counter Turret engi that hard. Turrets are completely immune to conditions, so you will literally never kill them. In addition, Turrets outrange you, so its not like you can try to deal with them that effectively from super far away, all that that does is makes the last turret (Net, Thumper, Flame) and supply crate a bit less effective. But you’re still going to face a ton of CC and damage you can’t particularly do anything against, and Condi Necro doesn’t have the insane condi burst it used to, so basically you’re hoping that your condition burst will kill the 27k HP turret engi before you die.
It might be favorable, but it isn’t a very hard counter.
A 2s duration is insane for a 1s pulse.
I don’t know about home, but I’ll rush far point and camp that because 90% of the time the enemy is dumb enough to come and try to 1v1 me for 60 seconds while I already own the point.
And frankly, its fun to have people come and throw their (soon to be) dead body at you over and over because they saw a “pro” do it.
Once dhuumfire was gone more or less. The reason 2 offensive abilities were used was because CB + Epi/SoS/SWall allowed for CB + your choice of second offensive utility: Epidemic could be paired with an Engineer, SoS could allow for a second condi overload, SWall gave fear chaining. However when we lost the ability to create massive sustained and burst condition pressure, when people shifted towards better condi removal, there were a number of factors but the TL;DR is teams and builds got better at getting to the Necro and the Necro got less and less able to just overload with conditions.
Wurm has only ever been 1200 range.
And WvW is a different beast entirely.
Making sure your minions stick to the enemy is one of the biggest points of play/counterplay of MM, especially considering Flesh Golem and Bone Minions are really strong if you can keep them in range.
Necros definitely do not all use the same utilities. Power Necro almost always runs double wells + stun break (usually Wurm or Armor), Condi has a whole bunch of utility variety now, really all that they definitely need is CB and two stun breaks (SWalk, FW, SA, and WoP are all viable here), one stun break if FitG, which opens up a whole bunch of stuff for the extra spot.
We actually have a lot of utility variety right now. We even reasonably have two builds to play at basically every level of play (condi might fall off at the highest of coordinated). The problems we have now are smaller ones related to QoL/bug fixes, and buffing things that don’t show up in meta builds so that we can get more than 2 meta builds.
You could have direct damage when Chill is applied, or simply give a +% modifier against chilled targets, more easily. It would go a long way to helping chill builds since they very usually have to lose out on other modifiers, and depending on its location could help our PvE DPS a bit.
Projectile destruction exists on very large skills already, see: Swirling Winds, a 6s duration, 30s CD 400 radius skill. Has a lower CD, lower duration, and covers 2.7 times more area.
I’m surprised no one mentioned that the game isn’t free to play.
Starcraft 2 says hi. F2P isn’t necessary for “eSports”, you just end up with a smaller potential viewerbase. In the case of SC2 though a much higher % of people watch competitive which makes up for the otherall lower player numbers.
There is no nerf to Blood is Power in that. It gets the same bleed damage but in a smaller period of time, and is otherwise exactly the same.
A single Mesmer can reach 100% uptime with iWarden+Ether Signet+Phantasmal Haste.
3 Guardians/2 Guardians+1 Mesmer can reach 100% uptime without illusions, 2 Mesmers can do it if curtain reflect works for once. And that’s full reflection.
The point is that Wall of Reflection is basically the same duration as CPC but only reflects. Buffing CPC to have reflect makes it literally better in every way. Projectile destruction is fine, but making CPC reflect is insane. Comparing an entire group of reflect builds to one skill doesn’t make any sense.
I think SWall reflecting is too much with how much the skill can already do as well. Destruction sure, but reflecting is a massive boost to an already pretty decent skill.
Well of Blood is a light field, so let’s not pretend like theme should mean a single thing for Well of Darkness.
Nope. Providing a potentially high amount of chill isn’t worth it when you realize that you can’t do much else of worth.
Greatsword might actually make a chill build work because it will provide a lot of chill with relatively high uptimes without giving up too much.
Its hard to say because it depends on what you find hard. Reality is none of the builds are actually very difficult to get into once you have a decent base skill level, most builds are also generally equal as far as how hard they are to play. There are exceptions, Turret Engi is extremely easy to play on all fronts for example, whereas something like Thief is pretty unforgiving.