The health isn’t small, and it is a really nice way to actually scale our sustain into an AoE situation, which is something we both need and constantly ask for. I just feel making it a stun break/instant cast (maybe) would allow it more freedom on what builds it could be taken in.
The heal is absolutely worth using right now.
I think a stunbreak would be fair, and would make it actually worth running in many builds. It would fix a lot of the 3 utility syndrome it has, because we really can’t afford not to take enough stun breaks in most of our builds and this would fit a nice spot (stunbreak + speed + heal).
There are a few that can just reach it, but no one will realistically pass it by much.
We take baby steps because the last time we were given too much at once we were nerfed over and over for months before they just removed what made us too strong and never gave us anything back.
1. Lich has plenty of counterplay, and can only be cast a few times per game. LoS, reflects or any other projectile defense, blinds, chain CC, chain boon removal, just flat out killing them; basically anything you’d do against say a LB power ranger who has no defenses but really strong offense. Oh, and it can only be cast max 5 times per game.
2. Plague Form is absolutely fine as is. It won’t kill you, it won’t stop anyone from being killed, it just makes enemies have trouble fighting within its area which is about the size of a point. At best it shuts down the offense of the melee players who have to stay inside it.
3. Why? The only change it needs is arguably not gaining 50% added damage from the downed trait, since it allows it to be a bit ridiculous. Otherwise it is fine.
4. You can also just not get hit by the abilities, since all but 1 of them have very obvious counterplay, plus they can be removed.
5. Sure, probably not a bad idea.
6. They are dodgeable. It is a 3/4s cast, which is absolutely acceptable. Better cast animations are fine, but any more delays on the skills themselves is unnecessary for their current power levels.
7. It is instant cast, the point of the animation is just to let you know that it was used.
8. Well of Suffering hits for decent damage, you can also literally walk out of it very easily. Wells aren’t actually that amazing during combat, they tend to be avoided within 2 ticks at most, and then serve no purpose but to take up area. The point of damage skills is to deal damage, so let them deal damage.
9. Or let’s not get rid of a great trait that is completely balanced for no reason.
The reality is that Necromancer is fine right now in its two meta builds. MM isn’t good, don’t kid yourself or anyone else, it is worthless in any remotely large fight and too easily losses to common builds in 1v1s to be meta. It is a worse version of turret engi in nearly every way. If you want to reduce the damage Necromancers are doing, give them actual defensive things that they will want to take instead of being forced to go all damage.
That’s true, but I heard, once resistance ticks off, you’ll go and have the conditions as if you never had any resistance… (A timer to hold back your death from conditions.)
Basically yes. While under the effects of Resistance you don’t suffer the effects of any conditions on you, but they are still applied as normal and once it wears off they will be there.
Edit: Before we get too carried away, remember that Resistance is definitely coming with the expansion. It might not matter how many stacks of bleeds you have if you can’t strip resistance off mobs.
Honestly there are so many easy ways to strip boons that unless we see large stacks of mobs that instantly re-apply multiple boons it wouldn’t be a big deal. It will obviously influence who we see in a group, since your standard condi builds don’t tend to have boon stripping (Necromancer aside), but Mesmers/Necros could get them off really easily.
However if this change sticks and is universal, there won’t be a group cap of 5-7K condi damage per second (that’s not counting lower dps condi procs by power builds), which is what made it so inferior to power.
It is inferior because of a slow buildup and lower maximum damage in a group. You will never hit the 11-13k damage of the higher DPS power builds with condition damage in current encounters.
In elongated or non-stationary encounters, condi damage may become superior in that once it’s applied and built up, enemies are consistently being hit with condi DPS no matter how mobile/defensive they are (unless they remove condis).
This change definitely closes the gap considerably between condi damage and power damage in PvE.
It doesn’t close the gap really at all, yet. As Jon said this isn’t the only change. They need to really increase the amount of toughness bosses have, make them more mobile, something to actually make a condition build equal damage wise. It would also help if they made conditions scale nicely in a group setting.
Is the difference in maximum dmg output bewteen condi+zerker really so far apart? With condi running full sinster i figured it wouldnt be that far off tbh…..obv not talking about burst dmg though zerk will always win that.
It is quite a bit off. It obviously depends on the build itself, but you’d need to essentially stack 25 bleeds on your own, plus burning and poison, while still doing around 6k direct damage to equal the DPS of zerker builds. It is worth noting that these changes will also end up increasing zerker damage because they almost all deal incidental conditions.
The things causing us to be unwanted are completely unrelated to deathshroud’s “lack” of skills. “Fixing” those issues by adding skills doesn’t actually fix the issues at all. I’m not saying they could never add DS skills, but I don’t think adding them to the base profession without any “cost” (traits, specializing, things like that) is the right way to go.
If you think life steal wasn’t useful you obviously never played a touch necro running around tanking entire groups of players with ease while still dealing good damage (until a piece of kitten mesmer showed up).
Frankly, I almost hope it doesn’t happen because now everyone is going to think its okay to run condi in groups when it is still massively subpar in almost every situation. All of a sudden we’ll have people running condi Necro talking about how they are contributing, as though they aren’t doing half the damage of a proper build.
Its a nice change and it needs to happen eventually, but they really need to fix PvE design at the same time.
It would have to be a specialization, with some other changes to the profession, because adding extra abilities has a really high potential for power creep. They managed to do it well with DS 5 but there is only so much you can add.
Spectral wall on a power build? :0 that sounds interesting, how useful would you say it is compared to another stunbreak or 2 wells? If anything, i’d consider running corrupt boon on power. I think i’m also gonna run traveler runes from now on, how noticeable is the damage drop?
Wouldn’t do it on a zerker power build, but on tanky spectral builds it is absolutely worth taking, it gives a lot of protection paired with spectral armor, which reduces damage you take to 33% while in DS.
Also people talking about nerfs, its not like these changes would be implemented base to the profession. We’re not asking for dagger AA to be a stun break. If you add better defensive traiting, it is by design forcing builds to do less damage to take it. If you introduce defensive weapons or utility skills, it by design forces you to leave behind something else. The only way that these changes would flat buff our current builds is if they are added to things that those builds already take, which is unlikely to happen because what they are taking is already strong enough, that is why they are being taken.
The mobility changes were absolutely good, even if there are some side effects (that would have been very difficult to figure out in depth with small internal testing) that might have affected Flesh Wurm negatively in some cases. Flesh Wurm is still overall neutrally changed from the patch.
And a lot of other changes Necromancers have seen have been great. The stab changes were really good for us (except FitG), we’ve seen a lot of small but nice QoL changes over the last few months, and almost no direct nerfs.
I think if it breaks stun with no stability (or at most the 1 stack at 3s) it would be fine as a GM, it also would fit DM 3 really well as is. The one thing I’d like to say though is if it moves places we need for the new SR GM that takes its place to be defensive, still. We are heavily lacking of decent defensive traiting at the GM level.
So what class, if focused first, is able to survive?
Mesmer can use Portal, Blink, stealth, distortion, and staff 2 to not only run all over the battlefield, but make it extremely difficult to stick to them plus the movement skills can be used while CCed. If someone dives them they can just port out, stealth, and even if you port to follow they’ll not care. Only Thieves can really stick to a Mesmer. At best you can just force a Mesmer to not be able to use sword burst, but if they go to staff they don’t really need to worry about that.
Thieves have shadowsteps and stealth galore, it is extremely easy for them to leave combat at any point they want to, even while CCed. If you CC them or focus them, they stealth and leave combat. At best you can focus them to make them leave combat, but you won’t kill them easily.
Warriors have stances, stability, blocks, some mobility. If someone dives on them they can activate Endure Pain to be immune to damage, if they get low a second Endure Pain passively comes up, they also have zerker stance/balanced stance, or a number of other abilities. Even their zerker varieties can stall for a very long time.
Elementalists have invulns, huge sustain, mobility, stability. If they get focused they have invuln for a few seconds, a lot of stunbreaks/sustain to keep themselves alive, high protection/vigor, and mobility to gtfo of a fight.
Guardians, same deal, blocks, invuln, sustain, blah blah blah, same with engi.
Basically, the only time any other profession dies to focus is when focused over long periods of time, slowly burning their mitigation tools or in the case of zerker builds that rely more on mobility/stealth (mainly mesmer/thief) they die to builds that out mobility them and can ignore stealth. Necromancer is pretty unique in that we have no way to have short-term negation of skills (everyone else has at least 1 way to do this), have extremely limited mobility with just 1 port, and have overall weak sustain. These issues don’t only affect our defense, but they end up forcing us into specific build choices and heavily impact our offense since we can’t afford to play up like other high-damage builds can.
Yeah, I agree that that every class if left alone is a force to be reckoned with. But also that any class, if focused, drops dead just as easily as a necro.
This just isn’t true. Watch Helseth and tell me that a Necro could do that.
Its not GS. Its a specialisation. People keep suggesting a new weapon is the only thing each class is getting. I doubt the greatsword will be anything special. The hope is on the new skills and traits.
Its also worth mentioning that everyone will be getting a trait overhaul in general, so even base professions will be improved (in theory). Plus HoT has a good chance to rework AI, and gives them a bigger “patch” opportunity to do larger reworks or things like that if they have the chance.
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They are all viable, its just up to preference.
It is even worse as a form of damage. With the exception of minions, and arguably Vampiric Rituals (assuming they buffed it appropriately), it just doesn’t really give you much damage compared to the power trifecta. For example, Vampiric does 50 damage, which is only a 5% damage boost to a 1k hit. That is really small.
Without an ICD Vampiric will never, ever be useful to a non-wells build, and that is absurd to bar a major function of a tree to any build that isn’t wells.
And with ICD all vampiric traits will never, ever be useful.
Every single useful life siphon in the game has an ICD right now, that is a fact. Leeching sigils, blood sigils, food, vampiric master, all have ICDs. If you buff vampiric to siphon 100 HP (or w/e works) with a 1s ICD, boom vampiric is suddenly useful, and it is consistently useful to every single build. If you leave it at 70 just because one build can proc it hundreds of times it will never be useful to anything other than the one best build.
Bone Minions are a double blast finisher on a 20s CD that also deal potentially nice damage if they crit properly, which would be great for PvE.
Just start off allowing siphons, regen, and parasitic bond to work. If you really think 50HP per life blast is going to throw us over the edge well…
Foot in the Grave also made life blast spam ignorable, since you are lacking 50% crit chance.
And to do so requires:
6 trait points spent for the effect
All Major traits in that line
Very high investment in Precision (or at least crit chance, and it can’t be in death shroud).
5 enemies in the area who are throwing damage right backSince the Well hits 6 times (not 7), it can only proc 90 times absolute maximum. With all 6 pulses critting, it’s only 18 procs on a single target. You can get “burst” siphons this way, but the average is still not that high and is no different than things like Selfless Daring providing small bursts of healing.
Again, why should AoE siphon ability be limited? Seems like those potentials (if made stronger) are very much in line power-wise given the investment it takes.
Necros lack scaling defense, so scaling sustain needs to substitute. ICD’s kill that entirely.
EDIT: Also edited the OP to reflect Well of Suffering hitting 6 times instead of the 5 every other well does.
My bad, I forgot WoS was changed. All wells besides WoS apply their effects on activation and once per second after that, so 5s well has 6 pulses.
The point of ICDs isn’t to deal with scaling defense, it is the fact that nothing will ever be able to use siphoning if they are balanced towards an unreachable high-point. Sure wells can be balanced so that they have a strong effect, that is fine and that isn’t what I’m talking about. But what about Condi necro, which doesn’t have ways to proc V/VP hundreds of times? It will never find use for Blood Magic. What about a non-wells support build that wants Blood Magic for support? It is forced to pick up Vampiric which it will get no meaningful use out of because Vampiric will be balanced only for a build that is using D/WH+4 wells. That is the point, by balancing these traits towards wells we are doing the exact same thing ANet does when they balance on-entry traits to them being used every 7s on CD.
Without an ICD Vampiric will never, ever be useful to a non-wells build, and that is absurd to bar a major function of a tree to any build that isn’t wells.
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Why? Why should area lifesteal be brought in line with single target and have very little, if any variation? Area lifesteal requires multiple foes, and multiple foes means more incoming damage. No ICD is a self-built scaling mechanic, which Necro sorely needs.
Please explain this to me.
Well of Suffering against 5 enemies will pulse 7 times, allowing it to proc each siphon 35 times against 5 targets, and it can proc 3 siphons. Meaning each cast of WoS can proc 105 siphons, 70 instances of V/VP. As long as that is true, no other build will ever be able to access life steal, because it will always be balanced around the builds that can theoretically proc hundreds of life steals per skill use. So sure, we can buff siphoning until it is good enough for D/WH 4 wells build, but it will never be good on any other build because for it to be strong for them it would be OP on D/WH 4 wells.
Vampiric Rituals doesn’t need it and it can scale with enemies sure. But allowing Necro to potentially proc V/VP dozens of times per seconds in spikes means it will never be balanced for any build that can’t match those proc times. Having an ICD allows for even a staff build to benefit equally from V/VP.
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Dagger’s AA is effectively a “heal” of 0.08*1.2*(SR/20)*HP, which is roughly 1700 HP base. That is a pretty significant amount of sustain, and it is increased a lot with investments. Not that Thief dagger isn’t good, but I think dagger’s “secondary” utility is just fine for Necromancers.
Would be nice, but would open to a snowball effect. Sounds good, but knowing ANet, if they ever ended up making pets fully scale on stats, it’d end up being a net major nerf. :/
This is somewhat a worry of mine. However, I think it would be a good change for it to scale off of our crit chance/ferocity, maybe only in PvE (which is the only place where this change is really relevant).
Eh, we’ve been saying this stuff since day 1 pretty much, no reason to stop saying the same thing at this point :P
DS enter/exit doesn’t interrupt res/stomping I thought?
Also I think this trait would be much better if it pulsed X stability every Y seconds. I’m becoming more and more a fan of rewarding staying in DS.
Edit: making it the DM 3 trait is a great idea too.
Vampiric Rituals is probably fine as it is design wise, but needs to be buffed numbers wise. It is inherently gated, just like Vampiric Master, so no point holding it back. Vampiric/Precision though need ICDs to open them up to non-well builds, and also to remove the “ideal case” that they get from wells, which is 100% holding them back from being decent right now. The very fact that sigils and foods, which have ICDs, are so much better than our traits is proof of this.
That isn’t the point of Life Siphon. A healing skill shouldn’t also be a burst skill, and with Necromancers constantly complaining of low sustain (a valid complaint), why would we remove a potentially great source of sustain.
No one said DS was an invuln. The statement was that healing while in DS where the second health pool can shield the primary health pool is akin to the same functionality as healing while Invuln because there is no way to
Except you 100% can counter it. All of our self-traited healing, which is what we are asking for, comes in the form of siphoning, regeneration, and procs like parasitic bond.
1. Poison. Poison will lower our healing, and there is no condition removal when already in DS.
2. Make sure we can’t attack. We have no stability or stun breaks while in DS, meaning any CC we can’t avoid with our 2 dodges is guaranteed to hit us, and will stop us from attacking. Also blinds, LoS’ing, avoiding our skills like you normally would all lowers our siphoning
3. Mist form still allows the self-healing Elementalist has already applied , so that argument is just straight BS.
4. While in DS we have massively reduced ability to actually proc siphons. It isn’t like we are going to be healing for 1k HP/s (which is what actual regen builds will do), we’ll be getting at best 100HP/s.
5. And finally, if this proves to be too good, just nerf our healing. The point of this isn’t to make us OP, it is to remove the absolutely stupid fact that our main source of defense flat out removes a large portion of our traiting.
ANet will never allow siphons to work for any variety of builds as long as they can be “abused” by a specific build type. Wells have the chance to proc too many instances of siphoning for them to ever be strong enough to work on builds that don’t use wells.
Yeah, we need more finishers pretty badly, it is really important not just from a strength perspective, but just design. Combos make the game more enjoyable. They’d also serve as a really good way to increase our sustain in a skillful way, poison/dark fields + finishers all have really good sustain applications.
I’d rather the marks on staff stay the same. If they had different colours it would be too easy for enemies in PvP to tell which mark is which.
That’s the point, counterplay is important for the game to be well designed, and staff right now has really bad counterplay.
There is no need to nerf anything on dagger, unless you consider lower cast times to be a nerf.
Just to throw in some numbers for Vampiric Master:
Heals for 63 per hit in the build he used, all utility minions average out at 1/1.5 attacks per second, flesh golem is 1/1.2, blood fiend is 1/3, so they give a total of 240 HP/s assuming ideal situations and bloodthirst.
Which is why Vampiric Master is arguably the only vampiric trait that actually works well, because it is inherently gated and so won’t have some weird extreme case, but also works relatively well even in sub-ideal cases because even sub-ideal is pretty close to ideal. Especially if they fixed AI it would be pretty good.
Which is why I feel all Vampiric traits need some kind of gating. Wells already have it for Vampiric Rituals, it is gated by duration/CD. But V/VP both need a 1s ICD, and have their values significantly increased.
I’m definitely taking down some of the suggestions here.
Couple more general questions on top of that:
- A lot of players here are saying ‘Necro is fine, you just need to build around it’. If you are building the optimal team for tournaments, why would you want to do that? Why isn’t something like war, ele, engi, engi, thief just the way better option because they can all handle themselves? Even mesmer and power ranger seem to hold their own better than necromancer (that said, I’m terrible at necro).
- I like a few of the trait suggestions, but what specific suggestions do you think will help necro with its main problem: Surviving team fights.
- If your team is terrible at peeling for you, what do you do to stay alive?
- I find a difficulty of staying alive is two things:
- It’s hard to get death shroud when you have none.
- It’s hard to heal while focused because you have nothing to cover it with or sustain you (besides maybe wurm/spectral walk)
- There are two things that Necromancer is brought for. For Power, it is Lich, for Condi it is CB and overall condi spam when paired with engi. Lich is a way to quickly wipe a teamfight, so long as it is used well, it is undeniably the strongest skill in the game when used at the right time. Condi Necro is generally brought for Corrupt Boon, which allows for really strong spikes on boon-d up enemies, and to be paired with an engi for the condi spam.
- Honestly? Traits can’t give us enough. What we need, from traits, utility skills, and weapon skills is: some kind of CC immunity, better sustain in teamfights (LF/healing that scales with enemies hit in a realistic way, LF from being hit that isn’t gated), and some kind of actual damage negation. Some CC immunity is necessary as a profession whose main forms of defense (conditions + healing) require constant casting and landing of skills. Sustain in teamfights is needed because our LF mechanic just doesn’t stack up. We either need the ability to gain more LF in teamfights, have much better AoE weakness/chill, and/or have abilities that give us some kind of skill negation (evades, blocks, etc.).
Also we really need some cast times reduced. Compare our cast times to pretty much any other profession and it is abysmal.
- If my team isn’t peeling, I simply don’t live through teamfights. There isn’t actually something you can do about it. You can stay at 1200 range with staff, with flesh wurm set up to get you out, and that will certainly make it harder for someone to jump on you, but at the end of the day if your team doesn’t peel for you you are just flat out dead. We don’t have the ability of say shatter mesmer to use 3 different ports plus stealth to evade them, we just try to do as much as possible before inevitably dying.
Just needs to give more LF
The Ranger build has far more actual HP over time, plus it is completely passive, it doesn’t require the ranger to actually hit anything, and can’t be “turned off” with death shroud. That means they have better regen, for less investment, that is more reliable. So… yeah it is obviously far better of a build.
Life Siphon is literally fine except it takes too long to cast.
Consume Conditions has no passive HP/s, Sigil of blood is available to anyone, and a single trait from engineer outheals multiple traits from Necromancer.
Necromancer’s designed weakness is low mobility and low access to boons, according to the devs themselves. No stability is not a designed weakness, awful synergy is not a designed weakness.
Spectral Armor gives 8% LF per hit, with an ICD of 1s. So no, you will never gain LF unless your opponents hit you for less than 4% of your LF per second (but they have to be hitting you every second), since you already lose 4% per second.
Healing behind DS is the same concept as healing while Invulnerable. There’s little to no counter play and that’s why it was removed from other classes ages ago like Ele and Engi healing while in Mist form and Elixir S. It’s not going to happen.
Then let’s remove healing while any other profession uses any defensive mechanic, because Death Shroud and healing is all we have. No more healing in stealth, while dodging/evading, blocking, or any other kind of defensive skill. Except that is a stupid idea, just like Necromancers having an entire trait tree that is made worthless by their profession mechanic is absolutely stupid.
Its okay, I wouldn’t use it though. Precision and ferocity don’t make much of a difference to MM builds, since they have such a low crit chance naturally.
Because it was a horribly designed trait, just like IP is. It was an on-crit trait in a non-precision giving tree, allowed you to put significant pressure on bunker guardians (they were a thing at the time) with nothing more than scepter AA which applied bleed, poison (100% uptime), and burning not including crit sigils. You would literally force condition cleansing from a 900 range AA, which is just ridiculous.
It is now much better designed than before. You know when it will proc, there is play/counterplay. It might arguably be too weak, either the trait itself or builds that can use it, but much better design wise.
It’d be an interesting idea, actually, considering I think the trait is pretty bad as is.
Every siphon trait in the game is still worse than a single instance of regeneration.