Guild Wars 2

Step 1) Equip all minions that can freely move
Step 2) Equip standard power gear
Step 3) ???
Step 4) Don’t profit, because MM in PvE is awful

But yeah if you just want to have fun just do whatever the hell you want honestly. Your build will be subpar regardless, so its not like you need to worry about what is “optimal”, just do whatever makes you have fun.

I could outrun a centaur!

Yeah, obviously everything the characters say is highly important in a match. If there is that much sound issue remove all the completely useless things characters say at random.

Necro is bad in PvE, but we’re pretty good in WvW

Not sure how it’d work, since the main “drawback” to whirls (which are otherwise very strong) is that they are fairly difficult to hit. It’d be kind of crazy to have a 9x whirl that can stack that much of the whirl effect so easily compared to other whirls.

I’d run two variations of the same basic build:
1. Cleric – for when you’re in a group
2. Soldier (or some other power-heavy setup)

I’m not at all a fan of condi-MM, its a hybrid build that doesn’t have all that good of synergy. Go cleric for groups, since you can bring a lot of group utility that way, plus keep your minions alive, and soldier or some kind of power build, mixing in as much damage as you feel comfortable doing without risking death, for a solo build. Just go the “standard” 4/0/6/4/0, the traits should always be the same, you will always have leeching on both weapon sets, just pick up renewal sigils/healing or support runes for cleric, and energy (or some offensive sigil)/offensive runes for soldier.

Even in PvE, the ability to boost every member’s DPS easily by 10% using a minor trait that is already okay is over the top. We need changes, but they basically need to be made to underperforming traits.

Probably too good for PvE, absolutely game-breaking for PvP, since a condi-necro would allow a massive DPS increase for allies.

Not to mention its much better to tag with power-skills/weapons in a power build, condi damage/weapons have a much harder time tagging.

Weapons would be in a Feature Patch, anything smaller probably isn’t “big” enough to warrant it. Also an expansion, but with no such announcements it’ll be at least a few months (assuming its a thing) before that happens.

1 useless minion, ah ah ah!
2 useless minions, ah ah ah!

Sinister is quite possibly the worst MM stat combo in the game.

Malkavian.4516:

Besides, if we are wimps then Trahearne would have beaten an Eye of Zhaitan all by himself.

Because if he did that then it would confirm that we were actually completely unimportant to the story.

Mavfox.1837:

How much necromancer stuff does Marjory actually do? She’s some sort of rogue/necro hybrid if anything. All of the other living story characters use player class skills, but it seems regular necromancer skills aren’t interesting or good enough for living story.

She doesn’t use flash skills, but she does use some Necromancer skills. Its just that its a bit different when Kass spams Time Warp every 5 seconds compared to Marjory just using axe auto attacks. It is a bit strange from a design standpoint though that she doesn’t do anything more, since strictly speaking “real” Necromancers have the potential to be a whole lot stronger than what we are limited to (Palawa Joko and others).

Minion AI, like all mob AI, is tied to a central AI code that everything else inherits from (although some have some “extra” on top, for special things they can do). Ironically, back when minion AI was “more” broken, I could reliably trigger their aggro more than 90% of the time, albeit with a bit of a complicated system, but after they fixed it its like they removed every failsafe you could use to ensure aggro and left us with… well this mess.

Anyway, minion AI won’t be truly fixed until they revamp the AI system, which it seems is a project in the works since they have a consultant hired.

Trahearne has been using Greatsword and overall making us look like a bunch of kittening wimps for a long time.

To be fair, I have only ever seen 1 MM player who actually ran a decent MM build, so its not exactly a challenge :P

Chaith.8256:

You can literally copy paste something from a wiki and not please some people with your definition sometimes. (Which is what just happened.)

The GW2 wiki has errors all over the place, so… yeah.

Death Shroud cannot be allowed to continue countering other defensive mechanics. If this requires a nerf in some ways, then so be it.

Guardian’s heal can not only be stopped but the heal is put on full CD to do so, not the best example.

The heal is just fine, if you can’t get this heal off without being interrupted that isn’t a balance issue.

Taking 67% reduced damage always matters. It might not save you on its own but it makes a big difference.

Spectral Armor is, yes, effectively invulnerability to direct damage while active. Spectral Walk is far, far less so, and I’d argue its pretty easy to burn through it.

Let’s look at armor though. While in DS you already take half-damage from direct damage. This is compounded by 33% reduced damage from protection (stacks multiplicatively), and the fact that SA provides 8% LF per second. So if you get hit just once each second by, say, a 5000 damage hit, you actually take:
Half damage while in DS – 2500
Protection 33% reduction – 1675
8% LF w/ base 18k HP (864 ish damage reduced) – 811

As you can see, you take a lot of reduced damage. Specifically the damage you take is 33.5% of the original damage you would have taken – (Total LF*LF generated) per second. It is a really significant reduction, and it will scale even better with other LF generation effects. It isn’t quite a full invulnerability, but it is very strong.

Epidemic has a CD of 15s untraited and a 1s cast time. While it does apply a few stacks of vulnerability, it doesn’t actually hurt you much, and the few times it can benefit you should easily balance out the times it hurts.

Grasping Dead is 10s CD and applies 3 bleeds and cripple
Dark Pact is a single-target immobilize on 25s CD
Doom is 1-1.5s fear with 20s CD
Enfeebling Blood is weakness + 2 bleeds, 25s CD

Meaning all you really need to do to make Epidemic worth casting is spread about 5 bleeds + another condition with over 10s duration. Not exactly a difficult task to accomplish.

You can’t really afford it on MM.

Chaith.8256:

Power creep is the gradual unbalancing of a game due to successive releases of new content.

Fire Fields, the same since 2012.

And increasing the power of every field to match the obviously too strong fire fields contributes to power creep.

Durations are absolutely necessary. The entire point is that longer duration = stronger boon, it is an extra point of tuning for balance.

Power creep is bad. If one single field out of every single one is obviously far stronger than all the rest, it should be nerfed. The game has had enough power creep already.

Epidemic has the single highest potential for any skill in the game, and still has a super low CD to pair with it. Even a skill copying just 5 bleeds and some assorted other crap is stronger than a normal condi CD. Just because you can copy 25 bleeds 25 torment and every other condi in the game doesn’t mean you have to save it for that.

Dhuumfire is still usable according to at least one person I trust. You just can’t sit around auto attacking now.

Good, the elementalist profession is already amazing in PvE and WvW (and this won’t significantly hurt them in either) and their might-stacking build is very obviously too good in PvP.

Focus needs a better boon than regen, and it needs a slightly shorter cast time on the 5 skill. Other than that, Warhorn is just a really well designed off-hand weapon for use with dagger.

Just an AoE CC set with some defensive conditions (for example a lot of weakness/chill/poison) would be amazing.

It has less to do with that, and more the fact that you’re guaranteed to die anyway, so US actually becomes a detriment because it saps your LF as well as killing you. In this way it actually isn’t really useful as a defensive mechanic, despite being a grandmaster trait.

The example itself is irrelevant, it is just an example.

Minion master would heavily prefer cleric, because it doesn’t deal any condition damage and the extra healing power helps you just as much personally, but also adds significant AoE healing for your minions.

Generally speaking it just matters whether you do condition damage or not, and whether you use the healing power for self-sustain or group sustain. If you don’t deal any condition damage, like MM, then Cleric is obvious choice, and also if you are going healing power for the allied healing the extra toughness probably isn’t all that important.

Dagger 2 is getting a change soon with a 25% increase to base and 75% increase to ratio. It will very easily hit high numbers in the future. Also, 12% life force is 12% of 120% HP against direct damage, effectively, due to half-damage in DS. So with no SR investment it is 14.4% of your max HP.

Necromancer has a lot of sustain. The issue is the cost of that sustain, which generally makes you worthless in other areas. We don’t have the base strength of other professions. We either have to trait defense or offense, but we never reach the effectiveness of other professions because we are forced to use our traits to make up for base deficiencies that no one else has to deal with.

So, an AoE immobilize boon-strip 100% retal uptime, an ability that almost single handily makes a crappy weapon worth using, paired with a healing skill that can heal 4k plus 14.4% of your max HP, which is roughly a 6.5k base heal. That’ll happen.

A bad idea based on false assumptions. This is going places.

Klonko.8341:

Necromancer are good at doing one thing: locking down a target. Thats your team utility. Being the nightmare of someone. But, everyone disliking nightmare, most of the other team with focus you because you are a pain in the kitten . Imo you bring much more to a team than a ranger or thief with all aoe, well and CC/condi.

In my head, necro is like a hambow but really harder to play. Once mastered, you become a fearful opponent in 1vs1 or in group.

If you want lockdown there are far better classes for it… like hambow.

Necromancers have severe issues in PvE, we’re objectively the worst profession there, and the only one that is absolutely never worth bringing in an organized group unless you are forced to. There are also issues for WvW small group content (zergs we’re in a great spot), and we have some issues in sPvP, but we’re not awful.

However, this thread addresses exactly one true issue: minion AI. The rest really wasn’t worth the time it took to write it out.

No it hasn’t gotten worse, its been almost exactly the same for a pretty long time now. As has been said in the many other threads like this, they have an AI consultant who is probably at work redesigning their entire AI system, which is required for any significant changes to any AI, including minions.

It should be base, you should not have to trait just to make your other traits not useless.

Good luck Blu, hope it does better than the other attempted sPvP shows. Its a shame no one can get the devs anymore, that was really the big thing that made SotG so good.

Look at the MM build on metabattle; without even going into how bad it is, it has gone through a lot of changes without a single discussion about it. I was the first person to say anything in the discussion section, and I didn’t make changes because I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes, and I was fairly promptly told I was wrong (which was hilarious, but enforces my point). Using this build as an example, you have incorrect information, bad suggestions, and no discussion of changes.

The actual issue is that changes are made without any input or discussion at all. There is no quality control unless someone wants to sit around correcting every idiotic change that someone makes and wants to wade through the change log. This is why I just tell people to go to the profession forums if they want builds.

A wiki is only as good as the collective group that manages it. In the case of metabattle, this means for you to make a change to a page, even if the build is obviously bad and you know it, you have to convince the community that you are right. Its not worth the effort, frankly, I spend enough time here dealing with people who don’t know what they are talking about.

Its a great idea, but especially in the context of the MM build there, it isn’t a great resource right now if you want the best version of a build possible. It is better than seeing people running around with Blood Fiend, but not by a ton.

Transfusion can’t heal you through DS, it’d be wildly OP if it did.

Its coming out November 4th just like they said in the Ready Up.

It would make more sense that Soul Reaping traits directly change the utility of DS, not necessarily make it more offensive or defensive. Death Magic should have defensive DS traits, Spite/Curses offensive ones, and Blood Magic support ones.

Foot in the Grave isn’t used because it sucks. This trait is used because it fits into zerker builds and without it we’d be absolutely worthless as a power build except to use Lich.

So we’ll nerf Necromancer’s self healing again to force them to be more reliant on team support? Great…

How about we do the logical thing and make it one step at a time. Start off with self healing only, see how it goes, then evaluate all healing. But I guarantee we won’t see all healing going through DS without nerfs to LF generation, which will just make us even weaker on our own.

zapv.8051:

Personally, I wish necros were a low tier health class with base 7k DS.

This makes the least sense of any suggestion I’ve heard in a long time. A profession designed around face-tanking attacks cannot have low tier HP.

PvE necro is still the worst
PvP necro is playable, just fine in non-organized play, but arguably subpar in organized play unless your team is built to protect your weaknesses