Guild Wars 2

There might be a Reaper specialization eventually in theme of the Reaper’s of Grenth, that’d be cool. Maybe make it a much heavier spectral focus.

Just so everyone knows, Warriors are getting a second burst skill. So we know that their profession mechanic isn’t being changed in a massive way.

jportell.2197:

This post was in response to a comment BLU made about a team that used to run two power necros “Kinda cheesy because really they just pop lich form and spam one.” Basically things like that are why people hate on power necros. They hear a shoutcaster say “that’s all it is”, when even in small team fights or big teamfights a power necro brings way more than just lich, especially if the team has target focus.

Blu is 100% accurate. It is a cheese comp relying on Lich form to be of any remote viability. If you removed Lich they would not be playing power necro, end of story. The build does not do well at the highest tier of play even with Lich form for good reasons, the one thing it has is that if Lich goes unanswered in a teamfight its an easy win. So their comp was literally just about using Lich form’s ability to wipe a team fight to win, nothing more. If all they wanted was power builds and didn’t want Lich they would have chosen another profession.

GW1 had a paid expansion

Cast time =/= activation time. Blood Fiend and Flesh Golem are the only ones without instant cast abilities, however Shadow Fiend and Bone Fiend have activation times that can significantly delay the effects of their abilities, making them extremely clunky to use.

I’m not asking for Charge to be instant activation, I’m saying it should be instant cast. Its something I’ve said a lot but all minion actives (except for the heal) should be instant cast, put the activation time on the minions if it is too strong. I’d even argue that the only minion with an active so strong it can’t be instantly activated (again, ignoring the heal) is Flesh Golem. In addition to the fact that it takes way too long to summon them.

There are just quite a few changes they could make to make MM much less clunky to play without directly increasing its power at all.

-They don’t idle in place. Even when bugged they will still move around and follow you. In addition it isn’t at all “most” of the time, it is when you bug out their pathing which is entirely something you can work around. Aggravating sure, but somewhat controllable.
-The ones that don’t regen are the ones that can be killed with an active skill. This is exactly half of them.
-Enemy players bypassing minions and focusing you not only isn’t particularly easy in an MM build (perma cripple, knockdown, immobilize, plus all the CC the necro has), plus it doesn’t really matter. IF they never kill the minions you won’t lose a 1v1, you lose a 1v1 when they can kill the minions while still pressuring you.
-Not true anymore
-This is, again, only true if you got into combat yourself, aggroing them. It still isn’t particularly hard to get away since their leash range is 1950.
-Did you expect them to have zerker levels of DPS? Its about the utility, not just dealing damage so you can afk.
-Only ones that aren’t on your UW bar
-Only the Flesh of the Master’s bug and Lich/Plague (which should never be used in MM builds) do that

Wait wait wait, I just now looked at the elementals because I’ve never paid attention before. Those elites are instant cast actives? What the actual kitten?

cursE.1794:

Elementalists are great in dungeons/fractals.
Necros are great in open world content and wvw.
Why not switch between them?

Except that isn’t true. Eles are great in PvP, amazing at everything in PvE, and are okay in WvW.

Necromancers on the other hand, are great at zerging in WvW, that’s it. They’re okay in open world PvE (but in no way better than anyone else), bad in organized PvE, and ranged from okay to bad in PvP depending on play level.

Because other games are irrelevant to talk about GW2. In GW2 every profession (even in GW1) everything had one name.

The casters aren’t wrong. They aren’t talking about your mid level soloQ matches, they aren’t even talking about high tier soloQ matches, they’re casting a coordinated team game. Power Necro DPS compared to other DPS builds is completely ignorable, the only reason power necro is going to be run is for Lich. This is also why power necro is a joke in the highest tiers of play.

Doesn’t mean that the casters are right in everything they say, but the gist of what they are saying here is correct. Without Lich, power necros are just a subpar version of another power build.

You don’t avoid damage, you just have more HP to eat the damage with. Also you still take the full effect of the ability: meaning all CC, conditions, effects that benefit the enemy when you get hit, literally every secondary effect of the ability besides just dealing damage affects you. Everyone else doesn’t have to worry about that, if they see Earthshaker coming at them they pop an Aegis, raise a block, use invuln, etc., and the entire ability’s effect is nullified; a Necromancer sees it coming and goes into DS to absorb the damage, but is still CC chained to death.

Hence, no reactive negation. We have blinds that not only don’t work on many techniques but also must be pre-cast to do anything, they are too slow to actually affect an already-incoming ability.

If you think Death Shroud is reasonable compensation for not a single way to reactively negate an ability’s effects then I caution everyone to stay away from whatever drugs you’re on.

Not sure what you expected. Even if you’ve been gone for a year all you’ve missed is one (maybe two max) feature packs, and a few tiny balance patches. The expansion will be the first time since the Dumbfire patch that we’ll see a big change.

I think spoj is pretty spot on with how GS will likely work. I’m expecting power melee AoE control. And that is actually pretty good in my book. No it won’t fix PvE, but then again no weapon could really be expected to when the main issue we have is lack of support (traits/utilities) and not DPS (not that it is amazing, but mediocre DPS isn’t a problem with high support).

I honestly think the best thing they could do for active play is to increase the speed of summoning significantly (there is absolutely no good reason it takes me 1.5 seconds to summon a minion), make the actives more responsive (AA reset on Rigor Mortis, 3/4s cast on Haunt, Flesh Golem have instant cast Charge but with 3/4s animation like Shadow Fiend), buff shadow fiend’s utility a tiny bit, and then make Training of the Master (also Necromantic Corruption) amplify the active skills’ utility and damage, instead of just a passive damage increase.

Bone Minions are fine as is, Bone Fiend’s active should simply act as an AA reset and immediately fire off, and I actually really like your Shadow Fiend idea, although the animation time also needs to go down to 3/4s.

If we want more swarm though it would serve much better to have new skills. The way they interact with AoE makes swarming skills have a unique advantage.

PvE:
They aren’t bad at all, they’re just subpar. Essentially speaking minions in PvE exist as meat shields. All utility minion skills summon approximately 10k HP (split in two for bone minions), blood fiend/flesh golem are 13k, and this is increased by 71% in PvE. Add Flesh of the Master on top, and you have really tanky minions that can be summoned pretty quickly.

While that tanking is really nice for newer players who can’t necessarily do dungeons well, it ends up not being anything important for better dungeon runners. So in groups with good players your only benefit to being taken is irrelevant.

WvW:
Its fun for all MM zergs but otherwise completely useless in zergs because they die too quickly to incidental AoE. They are “okay” in roaming, except that the thing that causes minion AI to bug out is pathing issues. So by moving a lot you’re basically guaranteeing that you’ll run into AI issues eventually, compared to PvP where standing on one point you’ll rarely have issues. So at best you’re looking at a mediocre setup.

PvP:
MM is okay as long as you know how to build and play it. You don’t teamfight, you camp the areas of the map where enemies aren’t fighting much, and aim to spread things out and fight 1v1/2v2 sized fights. Most 1v1s are in your favor, although the ones that aren’t tend to be near impossible to win, and your 2v2s can be really strong as well. The main purpose though is for you to force small fights and sit on point while they take a few minutes to kill you. Even if you die I’ve had a lot of 2v1s that last for minutes, which creates imbalanced fights elsewhere. However, teams that are coordinated will outrotate you and the build’s weakness in teamfights will hurt you.

Overall MM is okay. Generally speaking it works really well in uncoordinated or lower level play, but falls off at the higher tiers because people can exploit the weaknesses it has. Also AI is an issue that can be somewhat worked around but not super easily.

Guys… we already know what the very basics of the GS is going to be, there is no need for speculation when we can see the auto attack in game already.

It has chill on AA, it is all but officially confirmed. It is extremely unlikely that it will be paired with high AA DPS. Weapons aren’t our only problem with PvE, in fact I’d argue weapons are the least of our problem behind traits and utilities.

So ignoring your extra suggestions which are all wildly OP, there are two reasons your AI will never happen:
1) We aren’t rangers. Attack/Return are very specifically ranger functions. Rangers are supposed to have high control over their pets. We should be thankful we can even suggest to our minions who they should attack; in GW1 they would kill anything and everything in sight with no way for you to tell them what to do.

2) There is no need for that high of control. Just having them properly work as they are supposed to allows you to force them to attack your target. We don’t need anything further.

Sure GW1 MM was active, but the things that made it active don’t translate. They won’t add a heal like Blood of the Master, there won’t be enchantments like Death Nova, and those were the main things that gave MM active play. Making sure to not kill yourself and then making sure to properly micro enchants were the main points.

The passive summoning of minions was fine because it was heavily gated and required practically impossible levels of enchant microing. However, only gating of minion summoning is doable in GW2 (even though they haven’t properly done it yet). Enchantments, now boons, will never reach GW1 levels of micro or power. Instead they have to gate their power behind active skills, even if minions are summoned passively. Hence, passive minions can’t exist in this game.

A skill that summoned a jagged horror with no second active so each new use of the skill summoned a new one (up to a cap), a skill that summoned minions for every enemy hit – second skill kills them off for some benefit, summoning them at the cost of LF or HP (either one time, or a permanent reservation of X% of HP or a continual degeneration of HP), an OH pistol skill that summons a jagged horror when it hits the enemy (cough cough). Basically minions with timed life in some way, where it is either practically impossible to keep them alive forever or where you don’t want them to stay alive forever.

There are a number of ways to gate their summoning that don’t involve on-death (remember how garbage Reanimator was?) that can still fit into GW2’s more active playstyle while giving you that feeling of having a huge army. If they do that I’m all for it, and I actually really want them to play more with minions because they are generally the better designed (barring AI problems) summons within the game.

I’ve tried to push Torch summoning a Will o the Wisp for a while. Something similar to Shadow Fiend, but has a circular AoE ice field active.

Current minions are just fine in most boss fights in the game. They’re subpar compared to just taking DPS options usually, but they tank really well on most bosses so if you have a group of idiots you have to carry you can just use minions to tank for you. The only time minions are actually useless in any situation in the game is when you have to ranged, when they die too quickly (which is fairly rare now that they have a base of over 15k HP in PvE), or when the boss needs to move around. But those situations are relatively rare, and they are objectively better off than the old minions from the perspective of how many situations they can be used in.

If you want spammable minions there are still better ways to implement and gate their use than on-death.

Please god no weeaboo names in GW2

kyubi.3620:

A death knight doesnt necesarily needs to wear heavy armor that is a way to single minded judgement. As far as it goes light armor with a good hood in the good oll nazgul thematic fits the character perfectly. I easily see a guy in full orrian wandering around swinging that blade and still having the look of a nazgul dark rider. As far as it goes if the off class runs on abilities wich aims like the warrior stance at making the player more tankish then god sake its a given.

So unfortunately for your example Nazgul wore heavy armor. It isn’t always really noticeable, but they wear the armor they had as human kings, which is heavy armor.

That said, Death Knight is a name for a very specific reason: it is a knight with dark magic themes. Knights wear heavy armor, that is part of their core identity. Now, could there be a melee Necromancer that uses traditionally “heavy” weapons like hammers/maces/greatswords while being in cloth armor? Sure, absolutely, but you wouldn’t call them Dark Knights.

Don’t make a Necromancer if you plan to PvE with it unless you’re really in love with the profession, its just not worth it.

WvW we’re in a solid spot. Maybe not perfect but definitely playable and fun.

PvP we’re fine as long as you don’t plan on wanting to get on a competitive team. Plenty of weird builds to enjoy, two builds that do fairly well even in semi-serious solo queue, and things are much more focused on how you play rather than what you play.

Anchoku.8142:

it may be possible that specializations substitute skills on current weapons, too. Anet may keep, or modify, current animations but change effects. For example, MoB might drop bleed for more damage or another condition.

All wild speculation, mind you.

1: they would have previewed that, it is a very big change and not one that they have said at all.

2: that kittens on clarity which is really important

TheDevice.2751:

Minions and the GS specialization just doesn’t mix well imo since our golem acts as our melee attacker. Minionmancers are more applying CC and vuln so the minions are the ones doing most of the dps, not the MM himself.

Thematically it just doesn’t seem right to me but it’s not like you won’t be able to run minions with it. I just don’t think the GS will be themed towards MM.

It depends on the rest of it, but from the little we know about the greatsword it’ll be an amazing MM weapon. Vuln is nice to increase their DPS sure, but with GS having a chill on AA it already looks to be a potentially strong MM weapon.

It should be base.

Because a thief has counterplay to it. They need to already be in the place, they need to hide, when it isn’t that hard to find them if you know how to look, and they generally only have 1 person there. It is really situational, really easy to fail, and can be stopped by literally one person accidentally finding them screwing with the lord.

An entire zerg of Necromancers however could 50 man jump over the wall and go zerg the boss. You wouldn’t have zergs of just 50 MMs, you’d have a zerg of 50 MMs who can avoid any wall in the game.

Besides wurm’s need to be placed before activation, it is exactly the same as every other shadowstep mechanic in the game. Portal is the exception to the rules, but other than that Wurm’s active is the same as mesmer/ele/thief jumps (with a longer distance than most).

They have specifically said they will add more specializations over time, and they won’t be necessarily limited to expansion packs. That doesn’t mean it will happen soon, but it will happen.

And Bone Minions jumping to auto attack is useless except to make it too easy to land Putrid Explosion. Their AA DPS is garbage, the only thing that AAing does for them is proc VM, and its your job to make sure they can stay caught up.

tboneking.2531:

Dont get sassy with me! The way I understood it- specializations seem like they are almost going to be an entirely new class that you have access to. I would assume that having access to new weapons traits and skills comes at the cost of losing access to our previous stuff. That would be “fixing” necro the same way you would be “enhancing” your macbook by adding a windows partition. It would just be a different thing all together.

The specializations will essentially be enhancements to the class. While you will lose access to some of the base class’ mechanics, by the time they have enough specializations to even worry about the base profession being neglected, there will be so many options that I doubt anyone would stick with the base profession.

Basically you have to be the one that was the source of the most recent fear for it to damage them. It is similar to how burning/poison work, but in fear’s case instead of just doing less damage it does none.

Here’s the thing: Necros currently (in PvP) facetank basically everything that comes their way. Flesh Wurm allows you to actually create not just 1200 distance between you and 2 people who are training you down, but allows you to create vertical distance that other people can’t follow without also using a z-axis teleport. This is vastly more valuable than being able to take a little bit more damage, because (as we all know being Necromancers) avoiding damage completely is a lot more valuable than being able to take a bit more damage. Also Wurm allows a way to be semi-mobile as a Necro, which can be really nice.

That’s not to say that it is required in every build. Wurm is great for glassier builds, teamfighting builds, or builds that want a bit more mobility (mainly between home/mid). If you’re a power necro, a side-node fighter, or bunker then taking more damage or having more DS is valuable.

I use Dagger 2 almost on CD in my MM build, the only issue is the ridiculous channel time which bars you from doing so much in a build that is already clogged with ridiculous cast times.

Current Necro will never be good at PvE without major additions… oh wait that’s what a specialization is :P

OlliX.1705:

In mostly agree with this, but I think unreduced siphoning in a minion build potentially could be a bit much. Siphoning generally isn’t all that good, but if you’re using all minions and have the vampiric master trait you’re getting quite a bit of heal.
Then again, I really would not mind… I’d play the hell out of that until it got nerfed. :p

Then balance it, DS is so core to every necro that it wouldn’t hurt them much to just balance siphoning to work in DS.

They should definitely get HP back when you leave combat faster. There is no reason it shouldn’t happen at the same time that it happens for the Necromancer.

The only big problem I have with Death Shroud is that it fights with your own mechanics. All healing that the Necromancer does should act through DS. If this means some stuff needs to be balanced then fine. I’d also like more life force generation that scales up when you hit multiple opponents, to let it scale AoE a bit.

Note, they have specifically stated in interviews that profession mechanics will be changed up a bit. The few things they stated was things like profession skills being changed out with something else. For example DS might have slightly different skills, but you’d still have Death Shroud and Life Force. Druids still have pets, but the active pet skill might change.

Cleric, transfusion, plus renewal sigils gives a lot of AoE healing. Not that I don’t end up with dead minions some of the time, but bone minions die anyway, bone fiend avoids a fair amount of damage, Flesh Wurm essentially never dies due to damage, and Flesh Golem eventually dies, but again it takes a lot time. I don’t expect them to live forever, but generally speaking they live long enough for me.

I try to stay away from big fights though, that’s just not my job. I am better off pushing far point if home is safe and other people are fighting mid. And if I do fight mid, I still bring a decent amount of utility and tankiness, although the minions die a bit more often. Not ideal, but I’m not totally worthless.

I don’t have an issue with AoE in PvP. Plenty of other issues, but not AoE.

I like the name Cultist/Occultist. On a side note, what do they call the Orr who are essentially Necromancers?

I’d love for something like Auras from Path of Exile. You toggle on an effect that gives an AoE buff to nearby allies (and yourself), but while it is on it has a significant “harm” to you (in PoE you had to reserve a massive amount of mana unless you had really built for it, we could reserve HP, have permanent conditions, etc.).

Also worth noting that Necromancers (unlike many other condi classes) benefit really heavily from extra conditions, because they end up stacking to overwhelm removal. Plus we almost never bother with condition-specific durations (fear being the main exception) so its not like bleeding options are strictly better in that way.