oh, yeah, it’s not like other classes have access to, like, 6 blasts at the same time.
Via weapon skills and utility skills. I’m not against Enfeebling Blood getting one, I think it would be a really good buff. I’m arguing that a trait that is literally 1s of weakness away from being completely balanced getting a blast finisher is too much. A blast finisher adds a lot of power to a trait on such a short effective CD.
I think this whole thread unfortunately got sidelined a bit. So to those advertising buffing blood magic and death magic trait lines: what specifically would you do?
Remove Necromantic Corruption, the trait is bad and is never worth running. Replace it with a pulsing blind while in Deathshroud. This has synergy with the tree itself, and also has good synergy with the Curses trait, which currently goes largely unused.
Have Shrouded Removal become a pulsing effect while in DS, with a 7s interval (can be 10 if this is just too good). Normally passive removal effects are 10s, but this wouldn’t be up nearly as often. This gives synergy with Unholy Martyr, boom, synergy, look at us creating all this synergy on Necro (don’t worry, the synergy goes on).
Ritual of Protection, have it pulse at least twice per well, as it is now it gives you at best 4s of protection every 40s.
Blood Magic just flat out needs vampiric/vampiric precision to be reworked. They are too heavily gated because of magical ideal situations that will never happen. In my opinion they would do far better if they were changed to be more like the sigils, which are gated by ICDs, but are much more effective because of it.
Lower Ritual Mastery to adept.
Deathly Invigoration. Either give it a pulsing effect (notice the theme of rewarding Necromancers for expending Death Shroud to help their allies? woah team support crazy stuff), or make it a bit stronger. The reality is that “flash” DS builds do not currently nor have they ever worked, so skills should not be balanced in fantasy land.
Quickening Thirst I have no clue what to do with honestly. It should either be adept and changed to work like the warrior trait (just flat out gives you 25% when you have a dagger, warhorn, or greatsword), deleted, or given more stuff.
Those are some ideas. All of the relevant traits are never used, so this won’t flat buff to meta builds, and most of them involve support. It is worth mentioning that I think a lot of what is needed to “fix” necromancers will be given via weapons and new utility skills (specializations), but I do think additions of more synergy would be a really nice change.
Its not about buffing or not buffing certain builds, it is about introducing reasonable trade off. If, for example, they introduced a strong defensive trait into Soul Reaping GM slot, zerker necro would have to choose it over 50% crit chance in DS, and Terror would have to drop either Path of Corruption or that one passive fear I’m too lazy to look up. That is good, that is how balance should work, trading offensive, defense, and utility equally, to get more of one requires less of the others.
Downed Necromancers aren’t any harder to stomp, meaning they are as easy as ever to stomp. Stealth == dead, blind == dead, Drop poison field and spam SB 2 == dead.
Just a note. Downed 1 will continue through stealth, so you have to stealth before they go down or wait 6 seconds for the full channel to go away. Also, it ticks more than 3 times per second, so blinds just mitigate the damage. It is not that difficult to kill a low HP build before they kill you, or make it very easy for your team to finish off whoever went to stomp you.
Playing as a Necro Lich was buffed. Its been used very well at the top tiers of competitive PvP already, it is much harder to deal with now.
By that logic terror will damage even with resistance and I don’t think they will miss that one.
Actually they might. Torment when it first came out couldn’t be removed by quite a few condition removals due to bugs.
+1 to zapv, the only thing wrong with MH dagger is the ridiculous cast times on 2/3. 3 should be 3/4s, 2 should be 2.5s. Also having a half heal on a tiny CD like dagger 2 is really nice for sustain.
I can’t swap to Revenant (or anyone else) because their pet builds are awful.
Yeah, there was a post elsewhere where Jon explained it. The point was just to normalize the damage with every single application, instead of relying on averages to eventually normalize it.
how do engi,thief,ranger,ranger,mesmer defenses get better the more enemies that focus you? anyone that gets focused by 3+ players will most likely die specially against a coordinated team with lot of cc
but hey i wouldnt mind necro having more survive if they lost their 8k+ damage autos
If a thief is in an evade frame, they can be hit by 1 or 1000000000000000000 damage, and they will take none; this is true of blocks, invulns, etc.. This means their defense effectively mitigates more damage when more people are attacking them. Necromancers do not have this, and this becomes very relevant in teamfights where our 10,000 LF that is balanced for 1v1s is still 10,000 LF even when 5 people are attacking. We don’t actually gain more LF from being in a situation with more damage, whereas other professions’ defenses ignore how many people are hitting them.
Note that I am not asking DS’s LF to specifically scale, but that we gain access to other things. And yes, we wouldn’t necessarily deal high damage LBs (8k is not going to happen in PvP), because we’d have to drop the 50% crit trait for a defensive trait, or terror necro would have to go 6 into DM to get their defensive trait, meaning they’d have to give up Master of Terror or Path of Corruption, or Necros couldn’t take a second well or CB because they’d have an invuln. The point is having options.
What would happen to this game if necros would gain the ability to hugely mitigate focus fire with death shroud? Not the community or the devs want to know, the latter are well aware of what would happen to the game if necro would gain a powered up version of DS.
We would finally have the access to the same thing that everyone else can do. Yeah, it’d be insanely broken if Necromancer was suddenly balanced.
Worst of all, you suggest to have a scaling death shroud. You want this mechanic to get stronger as the number of enemies increase……sorry bro, are you 100% certain about what you’re asking?
I’m asking for defense that does not lose effectiveness against multiple enemies. An invulnerability doesn’t break after kittens or 10,000 damage, it invalidates all attacks against you for the duration of the invulnerability. This is true of dodges, blocks, invulns, evades, but nothing that Necromancer has.
First of all, can you explain what you mean for focus fire?
There is no meta build in the game that survive a huge amount of time when heavily focused by more than 1 player
Necromancer is the only profession that cannot negate damage beyond our first two dodges. Evades, blocks, vigor, none of it. We just sit there taking the damage, and pray that we have enough HP to passively tank it. This is bad design.
What you’re really talking about is dmg avoidance that some professions possess( ele, warrior, thief, guardian, engi), they’re able to quickly move out of combat to lose focus; here I can say " yes necro do lack in the dmg avoidance department".
The necro is more than fine in the in-combat survivability department, for a class that does not need healing power or high toughness, the necro does more than fine in mitigating dmg. What necro needs need are ways to get of trouble when things get hot and I fully agree about this.
I’m asking for a block, evade, faster blinds, aegis, invuln, to be accessible via traits or skills so that we are on an equal defensive footing. I specifically do not want the ability to leave a fight, that isn’t what we are designed to do. I want (balanced versions) of things like Renewed Focus, the various warrior stances, mist form, blurred frenzy, etc.
I agree that in small fights (1v1, 2v2) Necromancer has good mitigation, even great mitigation if they build for it (other issues afflict those builds but that is an aside to our defense). It is only when CC and offensive pressure overwhelms our extremely limited dodges or kiting and removes our ability to actually apply our mitigating conditions and gain LF that we see an issue. Things like blocks, invulns, and stability (in balanced durations and accessibility, giving up a fair amount of offense or utility to gain them) would help a ton here.
Your suggestion: a scaling DS, would transform the necro in a super bunker, something that can absorb dmg incoming from multiple sources…that would be silly, sorry to say that.
I’m not asking for DS to simply gain 20% LF per nearby enemy, I’m just pointing out that it is the only defense we really have, and we are the only profession whose primary defense gets worse and worse the more enemies there are. In essence I’m asking for some defense that actually works the same in 1v1s and 5v5s, which is something that Deathshroud currently does not do at all.
I’m honestly worried that ANet didn’t actually realize that a 1.5s burn actually ticked twice a pretty significant amount of the time before. Did they just leave that out, or did they actually not know such an important mechanic?
The point to complaints about Necromancers is that they have no way to deal with concerted focus fire, unlike other glass builds. Now obviously if 5 people can stay on you for a long time any glass build should die, however Necromancers have no invulns, no blocks, no vigor: we rely on Deathshroud to face tank damage, and conditions to slow the damage coming in.
The problems are a few parts. First off, all of our “defense” relies on offensive skills. I need to land a skill to gain LF or apply blind, weakness, chill, etc. The conditions can also all be removed. So no only is my defense harder to gain access to than anyone elses, it can also be countered, out of my control, after I’ve landed it. This problem is compounded by our second problem: no stability, and no way to not be hit by CC attacks. Not only do we lack the stability to absorb CC, we lack vigor, blocks, invulns, and other mechanics to absorb the CC skills, meaning (barring my two dodges) I get hit by every CC that comes my way. This is a bigger problem than other builds because every second I am CCed is a second I can’t be applying conditions or gaining life force, meaning every second of CC not only delays my offense but also delays all of my defense. The final problem is that our one big defense, Death Shroud, doesn’t scale. 20,000 life force can only absorb 20,000 damage, regardless of how many people are hitting me. This is fine in 1v1s where I won’t be CCed as much and can build and use my LF reasonably, but in a teamfight where I can going to be on the defensive far more often, I not only build less life force but also end up using far more of it to absorb damage.
This is compared to other professions whose defense cannot be denied to them. You can’t CC a warrior out of a stance, you can’t focus fire your way through Renewed Focus, and even Thieves who lack that kind of defense have mobility to avoid damage (note, not trying to say any of these professions are OP, or that I want their exact defense, but I would like a reasonable equivalent in teamfights, I think our 1v1 defenses are fine).
And finally, opening up meaningful defensive traits in Death/Blood/Soul Reaping trees, or new weapon/utility skills will actually lower our overall offensive output. I’m not asking that we get extra defense for nothing, I’m asking for the option to get similar defenses to other professions when other things (utility, damage, etc.) are similar.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
I’ll be free pretty much all next week starting this Saturday.
You can use it from out of range, and you can be pretty far out of range. There might be issues when you are also having a strange path back to the wurm though.
Ugh, I wish I didn’t have midterms today, I really want to figure this out. If someone wants to test its HP, get two of you together in an unused PvP server. One of you grab minions, the other grab Blood is Power and get 50% boon duration to make the math easy. Write down the bleed damage with and without might, your total damage over the full duration of BiP = (might bleed damage + no might bleed damage) / 2 * 30s, and then pay attention to how many BiPs you need, and how many seconds you had left when it dies.
Flesh Golem should have roughly 13,000 HP in PvP without traiting, and bleeds will ignore toughness.
Dagger 2 is used when you want to heal. I’m all for better rotations, but dagger’s design is fine as is, the skills just need small buffs where appropriate to make the better in their intended utility.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Lich is far stronger now than it was before. The pulsing stability is a buff whenever boon ripping is present, aka almost all of PvP where Lich is worth popping. The only time this won’t be a buff is in WvW against hammer trains, which were also nerfed.
You flat out cannot compare skills to traits, or you are going to have a bad time. Elementalists have to pay a grandmaster for something only a little bit stronger than what we are asking for here. I’m not even that against the idea, but I can 100% guarantee that it will never happen, ANet will take one look at an adept traited blast finisher on a 7s CD (which is what they will see, it is the exact argument they brought up when we asked for higher weakness duration) and say it is too good.
i dont get why they made Dhuumfire 100% useless though
Its not useless, I can’t remember his name right now but a high tier PvPer used it after its nerfs just fine. You just had to add a life blast into your rotation. The real issue with it was that we don’t have the base defenses necessary to run such an offensive build.
Give me till the weekend and I’ll try to give it a good bit of testing to see if there were any noticeable changes.
Wasn’t #BelieveinKarl a thing for a while?
Locust Swarm and dagger AA are pretty much the only melee we have.
i have seen people win 1v2 and almost win 1v3 fights on point with necro life-force/death shroud build, yet I have yet to see anyone play it in a tournament.
why is the tanky DS build not viable? serious question because necro is the class I’ve played the LEAST of any
Because it isn’t that good. Tanky DS requires 6 in SR to deal any decent damage, and 10 across Curses/Death Magic if they actually want to be tanky. They also have no team support, have bad mobility, and all kinds of other problems. The only reason they “won” a 1v2 is because the people they were against were garbage.
I heard the necro was originally supposed to be a pain to deal with from downed state anyway, so it’s fine with me. You just have to use your brain and melt the downed necro with ranged attacks or stomp him without going below 50%.
The original Necromancer downed state was Death Shroud, and a much stronger version of it, so yeah.
In PvE I’ll probably stick with Ele unless revenant is crazy fun, and in PvP I’ll stick with whatever the best MM build is.
S/D thief can take MM, but a standard D/P thief has no chance. No AoE, such low HP that you force them to spam stunbreaks or get destroyed (a single flesh golem AA chain is ~20% of their HP), and they just don’t deal with you well. They are only dangerous when paired with another person in a 2vX, because then their spike damage is relevant and there is a chance they just kill you and ignore the minions.
How are you getting 7 seconds though? It would be 5 seconds. But thats with 2 trait investments. One adept and 1 master in 2 separate lines. Any extra weakness would be from longer cooldowns. So thats completey fair if you are blowing high cooldowns to give high weakness uptime. You also dont have poison fields every 7 seconds. So thats another point.
On a poison field it is 5s blast (according to the wiki) + 2s on the trait itself.
Really impressed that they fixed it in a day, effectively a few hours of work.
I’m in full support of more utility, a trait that is 1s of weakness away from being a balanced trait is not where you add that utility with a very noticeable increase.
And even if you don’t feel that way, I guarantee you that ANet will not add something that gives 7s of AoE weakness (on a poison field) on a 7s CD, because that is how they are going to judge its strength.
I wouldn’t put Lich at a 6 second interval, it ends up making it extremely vulnerable to CC again, since you’d just steal the stab and then CC chain them. Chances are they won’t last till the next pulse of stability anyway, because 6s of no stability in a form that has no defense is ages. Just put RaO to 1 stab per 3 like Lich.
The f….
Can someone break this down for me? Is this extra damage while downed + chill of death?
The trait gives +50% damage while downed. This not only increases the damage of your 1 skill (which ticks 20 times in 6.25s, so more than 3x per second), but increases any damage you deal, including Chill of Death proc, wells that were already placed before you kicked the bucket, and maybe sigils though I haven’t checked that out yet.
Basically, remember old Lich form, and how it was crazy strong because it would super-charge Chill of Death? Well now downed state can do the same thing.
I wouldn’t expect a fast fix. My guess is when they made all the downed state fixes that this trait, which is very likely tied to downed state in the part of the code that forces you into DS instead of being downed, they introduced this bug.
I dont think its a problem seem as we also lack fields too. Eles and warriors have blast finishers on the cds you are talking about and they have regular fire fields to play off them too.
We have only really light fields which are semi viable.
I dont see it being a problem.
You can’t compare skills and traits. Elementalists have to invest a grandmaster trait to get a tiny bit better version of what you are suggesting we get as an adept trait. I’m all for adding it to Enfeebling Blood, but to add it to Weakening Shroud would make it worthy of a master trait.
Withering Precision does not fit spite because spite is not the precision tree, and so should not have on-crit traits. Which is part of why redesigning dhuumfire was so important. This would give us our maximum damage condition build for 4 traits less, and I’d be extremely wary of of that.
Because a blast finisher on a potential 7s CD is insanely good for an adept trait, plus it was based off Enfeebling Blood, which also doesn’t have a blast. Not that a blast wouldn’t be nice, but that is a lot of power.
I’m sorry but no class should be able to kill another player with full health while downstate.
I tend to agree with this. On one hand its nice that Necro is actually maybe decent for now, but it is stupid that we are in such a bad place that Necro is actually better off in the downed state than just playing normally.
My expectation is they give it the old Lich treatment, so that Chill of Death isn’t getting the 50% damage boost. If we’re going to be strong, let’s be legitimately strong, not strong because our downed state is crazy strong.
Also, the player in the video is TRAITED for downstate to make it seem more dramatic. No one traits for downstate…
You only need 1 trait to make our downed state insanely strong, and it isn’t like you are replacing anything all that important.
The only changes they made specifically for Necromancer were 16 bug fixes and a tooltip fix. The rest they had to make because stability and blinks were changed. I’m enjoying the bug fixes, but I wouldn’t exactly call it proof of the devs listening when these bugs have been around for at least 4 months since Flesh of the Master was bugged.
It is funny, but it will just get nerfed soon, the same way Lich was.
You don’t need to fear if you are a zerker power necro, in many cases. Each tick of your 1 skill traited will hit for 700 (crit) or 350, so up to 2100 damage in a second, plus air/fire sigil procs, and chill of death proc. Trying to fear the thief is unnecessary unless Chill of Death is on ICD, you can literally kill them through stealth before they stomp you.
Downed 1 skill hits more than 3 times per second, so there is no reasonable way to blind it.
Lich form is really strong right now because of how difficult it is to shut down in a fight compared to before. Also, with how strong downed state is now, its not even like focusing the necro into downed state is that big, since they do more damage in downed state than normally.
This trait is really good. Realize that it also works on any wells you have down prior, turns your 3 skill into a really high damage well, and should work on Chill of Death/sigil procs. Basically, it turns your downed state into something very similar to pre-nerf Lich form.
The Necromancer subforum has long been one of the most helpful, constructive, and non-toxic subforums there is. There are constant posts on changes that could be made to help the profession, people are always happy to help each other, and we don’t delude ourselves into thinking that Necromancer is god tier when it isn’t. We’ve managed to figure out bugs months before ANet has, we’ve tested interactions that ANet still doesn’t appear to know about, and all in all we get along well as a community.
So let’s not pretend like our extremely valid and warranted complaining is anything but our attempts to beg ANet to stop making bad changes. Let’s get one thing straight about this recent patch: the biggest thing that we have to praise anet for is fixing SIXTEEN bugs that have, to our best knowledge, existed at least for 4 months or so. People have made posts about how hilarious downed state is now, we’ve talked about the good and bad of the blink and stability changes, we’ve praised ANet where they deserve it but we’re not going to sit around acting like they are faultless.
The fact is the Necromancer community is one of the most realistic communities. Any time you see us suggest buffs there is always consideration of compensation to make sure they aren’t too strong. Any time we get buffed or nerfed you have people analyzing it and making helpful suggestions when needed. We’re pretty fair, although definitely a bit cynical (for kitten good reason).
But we’re not going to collectively shove our heads up our kitten and pretend like every change is some holy blessing from our saviors above.
I’m thinking 4/0/6/4 minion build traited with deaths embrace and taking death nova will be the (new?) necromancer meta… though it kinda was at some point before as far as soloQ/hotjoin goes.
But now minion builds have been mega buffed! Even if they manage to kill you, you will destroy them while in downed state.
It might be tried out, and then people will realize why no one plays MM anyway, and they will all go back to whatever other necro build they used to play.
MM builds were definitely buffed though, as far as downed state goes. But the builds that were already destroying MM are still in the meta, and these changes will make no difference in our 1v1/2v2 against them. Pair that with AI issues and MM still won’t be meta.
The reason it was changed is because it is a blink. I’m not saying I 100% agree with it due to the fact that it is pre-placed unlike every other blink, but it also opens up the opportunity for it to no longer be treated as a blink, but instead as a portal-like skill, now that it can’t be abused.
To be honest it will be buffed. They made the change but things slipped through the cracks (like Foot in the Grave). Cuz it’s not realistic for the trait to be so….. what’s the word….?
Any word that can really get across how bad it is will just be muted so: kitten.
It could:
Replace the Death Magic master minor trait. Nothing particularly wrong with the current one, but it is pretty boring as a flat stat boost.
Become an adept trait
Be a master/grandmaster trait in Death Magic or Soul Reaping, but with additional functionality, particularly a stunbreak on DS entry (could remove stability for this for all I care), much like Revenant’s get stun break on legend swap.
Let’s be honest though, this downed state bug fix patch has made Power Necro better in PvP than it ever has been. If only we didn’t drain HP while in downed state we’d probably have a niche in PvE simply by dying and spamming 1.
It wasn’t possible to test FotM working when it immediately killed all your minions when you were downed, lol.