Guild Wars 2

I like its passive as a potential condi-hate mechanic. Especially with the obscene number of ways you can deal with conditions, it has potential if we could ever afford a bit more support-y of a build, and if it worked in DS especially. Not that I’d turn down 10% condition duration either, mind you.

Bountiful Theft takes one “stack” of boons it steals, so you’d only receive one stack of stability, assuming that behavior transfers. However, I don’t remember if it removes the boon (meaning if you steal someone with 15 might, you only get 1 might but they lose all 15) and all stacks or not, which would give you the answer you want.

Deamhan.9538:

Do you mean wells? I thought it didn’t work with wells which was why there is the master trait that causes wells to also steal health.

WoS/WoC can proc Vampiric and Vampiric Precision 5 times per second each if there are 5 people in the well. Meaning you can get 60 total procs of V/VP from a single 5s well.

Its a bit hard to draw a comparison, because no one is as reliant on their profession mechanic as Necromancer is.

But basically, most of power necros damage and 100% of their defense is tied to DS. No LF = no defense.

Basically the only time Vampiric/Vampiric Precision start healing for meaningful amounts is with pulsing AoE effects.

Teladis.1309:

Cool, one question. That trait that lets you summon more bone monsters..um the one in death magic. Is that one not good? I figure army of little monsters would rock.

Not really. You lose other traits to get it, and it doesn’t really do much for you.

robertul.3679:

Yes nomad is perfectly fine. I can’t imagine it being used on some mercy rune warrior build with stability for days and also crazy cc spam while never actually dying.

And it won’t be remotely OP. People have already forgotten Support Guardian falling out of the meta despite providing tons of CC and support simply because it did no damage.

Necromancer is a ton of fun to play, the issues that people complain about really only pop up if you’re trying to optimize your build. If you’re just out to have fun then they don’t really affect you much.

If he’s playing MM in PvE here is a sample build:
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBIhZakhmma7qxtG2bTENUSGAHAk94AQ9OUDdKA-TBCFABFcEAKZ/B70DAwhAoQ1fuSJISK/STTApAGVlF-e

Basically pick up the minions to just face tank everything (Bone Minions have 13k HP each, Flesh Golem/Blood Fiend 33k HP, 25k for Flesh Wurm/Shadow Fiend/Bone Fiend), and use the dagger/warhorn weapon set to build LF, and then use the staff set to enter Death Shroud and deal a lot of damage and build might with the auto attack. You should be able to stack 25 might over long enough.

Go to the top of this forum to the stickied threads, you’ll see spoj’s build, give him that.

PvE, PvP, or WvW?

It wouldn’t matter if it pierced as long as it had a max of people it could heal per cast.

Who knows, maybe when we first equip the specialization we have to murder some random person and put their spirit in our greatsword.

I don’t think its impossible. As you say, Necromancers and Ritualists have a bit of a grey area between them, and Marjory’s greatsword (being imbued with a dead person’s spirit) is pretty Ritualist.

However I don’t think it is likely. Revenant is pretty obviously “Ritualist 2.0”, with Rytlock having gained the power from the Mists and channeling the power of spirits, which is pretty much the special part of Ritualists.

I think at the end of the day, the rest of the “theme” of the specialization will determine it. If the rest of the specialization has to do with spirits then Ritualist makes more sense, but if the rest of it is something like Orders then less so.

In PvE you should only be using Berserker/Assassin gear, in WvW Soldier is your best bet most likely.

Viking Jorun.5413:

I feel like people aren’t exploring enough of what Necro has to offer. I ran a power d/d support (read before you laugh) Necro with 30k HP as a condition vacuum with each utility as a stun break and 3 condition transfers. You wouldn’t believe the amount of pressure it took off my teams during testing.

Or you could play one of many popular meta builds and do a very similar job but better. Necromancer support will not be a thing as long as Blood Magic is garbage, while we lack any support GM worth mentioning, and while we lack any semblance of a support weapon.

Celestial isn’t the problem, the problem is that the current builds that use celestial are able to do everything well and are pushing out a ton of builds from being remotely viable. You shouldn’t have builds that do so much at once, and a meta that sees such a tiny amount of variety in competitive builds.

Nothing would be worse than cele, go for it.

Gryph.8237:

GS should appeal to both condi and power users, and still have utility. scepter is really the only decent condi weapon, while dagger is the only decent power weapon. Frankly axe sucks, and if we have to lose a weapon let it be axe. i dont want to be pigeon holed into going power just to use our specialization. Would royally kitten me off.

There is absolutely no reason GS should appeal to both. Staff + S/X is an amazing condition weapon set, and making GS hybrid isn’t going to help condi. The last thing they need is to be forced into a melee set.

A bit of bleeding will not make up for staff’s really strong utility in condi builds.

It is worth noting that in a group and using different rotations of WH/Focus you are going to get different DPS numbers. Dagger is still the best, but IIRC Lich doesn’t actually boost your DPS that much with all the boosts you’ll have in a group.

No, they haven’t. Originally all minions, especially Flesh Golem, were heavily over-aggressive and would chase anything hostile within a very large range until it or they died. They had no issue attacking though, at all, that issue was introduced when they reduced their aggressiveness to fix the issue of you aggroing everything within eyesight in PvE.

Having it be group siphoning heavily hurts its use in 1v1s. Make the minor GM (5 point) trait: Vampiric/Vampiric Precision/Vampiric Master/Vampiric Rituals all heal allies within X radius. Move vampiric ritual to master, rework siphons a bit to make them actually useful, and Blood Magic might actually be a decent trait line if it gets a good GM support trait.

I just play MM. I’ve played it when its bad, played it when its good, and played it even after it got nerfed just because it won a 2v2 tournament.

No it hasn’t existed since launch. There have been times where it was fine, worse, complicated as all hell, there are all kinds of issues that AI have had but it has not been constant.

Death Shroud reduces all direct damage taken by 50% so… it does.

The reason other professions do better is because they have multiple ways of reducing damage taken to nothing.

Arioch.7432:

How could they nerf MM build…. it was always so incredibly mediocre. It’s like using a baseball bat on a paraplegics shins. Useless yet malicious.

Because there were niche cases where it had arguably too strong mechanics. Such as Putrid Explosion being unblockable, and Flesh Golem being able to 100-0 players if they were in certain areas.

Its a bug, should hopefully be fixed with expansion.

Colin did not specifically say that they will not lose access to weapon skills or utilities, only that they would not lose anything, and then went on to talk about how you can swap whenever you want OOC. This does two things: 1. it implies that there is a reason to swap (meaning specialization has to not be a direct upgrade, so there is something about the base profession that you can’t use), and 2. it doesn’t say any specifics about whether base profession will or won’t lose anything, only that it isn’t permanent.

Its possible that they “fixed” places where you could, for example, shadowstep through large portions of a building (like mid on Khylo).

Note: we don’t even know that a weapon is being taken away. The only thing we know is that there will be some reason to want to play the base profession over the main one, which could just be because old traits will be taken away, or because you don’t want the changed profession mechanic. So just note that all this speculation about which weapon we’d lose is possible to be useless. Especially when you think about say Engineer or Elementalist, who arguably can barely even afford to lose weapons.

It is definitely possible, and works really well for condi necro since lich/plague aren’t important for you in-fight, and Flesh Golem is iffy sometimes.

manveruppd.7601:

But Blink isn’t limited by pathing range, only by direct-line range. Wurm is limited by both, that’s why it bugs out. In other words, when it’s working out the (walkable, not direct line) path between you and the wurm, if that path is longer than 1200, the teleport won’t work. It will instead teleport you directtly towards the wurm until it hits the first obstacle, instead of taking the walkable route.

That is not true. You can place wurm on the hill between side and mid on Foefire and teleport from the edge of the mid point up to the top of the hill, despite it being much further than 1200 walking range.

Ragnar the Rock.3174:

And at the end of the day unless it has some useful support on it what good would another melee weapon be when you already have dagger.

In PvP it would make a big difference.

This is actually kinda a cool idea, I could see a trait to give small quickness depending on HP.

MM is pretty much the same now as it was a while ago. Its had nerfs, its had buffs, and its still mediocre just like it used to be.

No stunbreak isn’t that big of a deal on MM. If it really becomes an issue you can just work in energy sigils.

spoj.9672:

I will delete my necro if greatsword auto turns out to be ranged.

Don’t tempt them

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

I’d say the reason Necro bunkers don’t really exist is because they lose the point to the first knockback. Too vulnerable to hard CC to bunker that well.

That isn’t the problem, we can make builds that can stay on point just fine.

The problem is if you make a build that is beefy enough to not die to focus fire you don’t enough else compared to other builds. I’ll break it into the two bunker builds, side and teamfight:

Side bunkers bring moderate to high tankiness (we can do this), moderate to high sustain (we can do this), moderate damage (we can do this), and some mix of good mobility, objective control, and ability to aid teamfights.
Let’s take the best bunker we have right now: MM. Ignoring AI issues, MM fills the tankiness, sustain, and damage parts just fine. It lacks in good enough mobility, has very low objective control, and is awful in teamfights. Other bunkers tend to be very good in teamfights (warrior, ranger, ele), and/or have very high damage that allow them to realistically pressure both side points (engi, mesmer).
The other builds we have also lack teamfight support. They also tend to lack even more damage or sustain. This is often highly linked to deficits in weapon skills, utility skills, traits, and especially a lack of combos.

Teamfight Bunkers
Same as side point, but with a much lower focus on damage/mobility, and a much higher focus on support and not dying.
We have no build that can really be said to exist here, we have no meaningful support, our weapons are awful at this, our traits are mediocre.

Really we aren’t far off from being a decent side point bunker. MM with some fixes would fill this fine, Greatsword + trait changes could definitely make this possible as well. But CC isn’t the problem, the problem is other things.

I just don’t play Necro in PvE. In PvP we’re fine as long as you know how to play and aren’t trying to win WTS (not saying we shouldn’t get way better), and WvW we’re even playable roaming.

Plenty of things could be fixed, but the problems are mostly related to the builds that aren’t meta, or more detail type stuff, it doesn’t tend to affect your average player.

Flesh Wurm does not have a limit of 1200 walking distance, if I get a chance I’ll make a video showing it.

AngryJoe gave a really good interview, and I think Colin Brohansen I think responded well. I think it shows that they are excited for everything (and yes that includes Necromancer), and most importantly it shows they’ve been listening to the community, which is a good thing for Necromancers. Not saying it will be perfect, but just listening is an easy way to get Necromancer to where we want it to be.

Shiki.7148:

Actually, giving us a trait to turn well of blood and well of power into slightly weaker versions but with an extremely increased AE range and staying around longer would already be a good start.

Nice changes, but meaningless to PvE and builds that don’t already take (or are close to taking) those abilities. It doesn’t change that those are best suited to tanky/support builds, but we don’t have good tanky/support weapons (greatsword has the possibility to change this). As long as we don’t have builds to use some of our really nice skills/traits, they will look like bad options.

Shiki.7148:

Or change one of the useless Grandmaster traits to turn Signet of Spite’s passive into a NONSTACKING aura for a 180 (or maybe 150 for balancing) power boost to all allies in a radius of X.

Another nice change, but even if it was 150 power AoE as a Master trait (regardless of SoS, Spotter doesn’t force you to have a skill equipped) it still wouldn’t be a big deal. Which is the problem, its not like Necromancer is just one or two small changes off from being good, we’re 1 or 2 brand new mechanics from being good. They do have the chance to change that, but I agree with you that they will probably screw it up.

Lordrosicky.5813:

Basically necro is judged by low standards. If it is “decent” it is nerfed. Other classes can be “good” and get buffed not nerfed because the historical expectation is for them to be “great”.

Dhuumfire was massively OP. If anyone else was at that level they would have been nerfed too.

But more to the point: my issue isn’t that they might screw up new things, its that regardless of what they add we’ll still have issues. They can add all the fancy weapons they want, but Death Shroud will still cancel out a ton of our defensive mechanics. They need to start addressing those core issues that plague us, instead of saying “hey we know your base profession is still ridiculously broken, but here is a shiny new toy!”

Gryph.8237:

It would make wvw hilarious. I don’t like this fight, I’m gone. Can you imagine the response?

Yeah. It’d be exactly like fighting Warrior, Thief, Mesmer, or Elementalist.

Balance won’t do anything to us so who cares. No amount of balancing old skills will add utility to our profession, or make up for our lack of weapons, or make our current weapons have better skill sets.

They need to go back and do at least a small rework of the base profession for it to mean anything, and so far they haven’t said they will do that. I’m not asking for them to change LF or DS or anything crazy, but base Necromancer just has so many issues that no amount of specialization band-aiding will cover it up.

Edit: I mean yeah balance is nice. But honestly they can’t screw us up much more, we’re only meaningfully top tier in WvW zergs at the moment, so chances are pretty good that even if they do screw up they’ll accidentally buff us.

I highly doubt that. Losing DS is too big of a change for them to do it.

Chances are its simply a 5th shatter, or Rangers getting another pet button.

manveruppd.7601:

Yep, that’s exactly the reason people don’t take it, but think about it: isn’t the fact that we have little access to stability and damage mitigation the reason we prefer stunbreaks that teleport us out of trouble? If WOP gave us more stability, it would basically become the kind of stunbreak that lets you stay there and tank the damage, rather than the kind that lets you disengage.

No, stability would not help enough. It would help a little, sure, but the issue is that it won’t actually peel any enemies diving at you, and it doesn’t change the damage any. Spectral Armor is far better in that regard because it nearly nullifies all damage taken during its duration (which is also much longer).

Well of Power is fine as it is, just because it doesn’t fit current meta builds doesn’t mean it needs buffing, it just doesn’t fit the niche that meta builds want. It will be fine once they make bunker Necro a real thing.

Flesh Wurm acts the exact same way as every other blink move, only it has 1200 range (instead of the usual 900) and doesn’t require LoS. The only exception to the rules is Portal.

that red post is 2 years old

Chaos Archangel.5071:

You can stomp in lich form?

Hm.. I wonder if you can stomp as a Moa.

You can stomp in Lich Form basically with the same method that you used to stomp in Death Shroud before the change, and that is by exploiting lag so that you send the command to start the stomp before the game registers that you are transformed and removes that ability from you. Basically you trick the game (with lag) to think that you aren’t transformed and starting to stomp, when in reality by the time you start stomping you have already transformed, so it doesn’t cancel the channel.

Fun stuff, welcome to playing Necromancer.