It doesn’t really seem like a forum guild. There are, of corpse[intended], Necro guilds, but a “Forum” Guild is one which operates using the GW2 Profession’s forum, grabbing a wide array of players playing the same class who join for the sake of learning, discovering, and teaching with each other.
This is just a suggestion, but it seems like the Necro community, which is capable of forming its own all-necro team, might like this. Just take a look at the mesmer and ranger forum-guilds[located in their forums] and see if its something one of you might want to start up.
That’s exactly what But of Corpse is :P it was started by Bas and I, and it pretty much organized all its events through the forums and that’s how we got players. The only issue is that Bas and I both are a bit too busy to organize events. But But of Corpse does exist to do what you suggest, we just don’t have anyone really organizing it.
On that note, mail me on the forums/in game if you want to join. I’ll add people who posted here as well when I get a chance.
I think Flesh Golem (we’ll ignore his AI because its not his fault) is really well designed. His auto attack cripples (with 100% uptime with 20% condition duration and ideal situations), which supports not only the entire MM playstyle, but literally any Necromancer build. On top of that, his Charge active is a very strong line-CC effect.
And on a side note while I’m on minions, Death Nova is a brilliantly designed effect. I love it, it self-combos with literally every minion to varying degrees, and has synergy with the entire playstyle.
Death Shroud has now been reduced to 70% of its current value. This change has been made to counteract the below buffs to sustain, and make the class more balanced in 1vs1 situations where 100% DS necromancers are very difficult to deal with.
Not sure this is actually necessary for the other changes.
Life Transfer: now pulses 4 times instead of 9 (Same damage and scaling though)
Just a note, you forgot to add any Transfusion changes to go with this change.
Necrotic Traversal: The blast now occurs at your location, the Flesh wurm now swaps places with you (the wurm will only move 1200 units and you will only move 1200 units). The cooldown is now 30 seconds.
Swapping places is not worth it. It is incredibly rare that this will actually be beneficial, and is far more likely to end up doing nothing for you. Not to mention a 30s recharge won’t happen.
Necromantic Corruption: Fetid Consumption has been merged into this trait.
Not a good change. Necromantic Corruption wants minions to stay alive as long as possible, yet Fetid Consumption serves only to kill them faster.
Vampiric Master: This traits effects have been reduced by 30%.
Why? VM already isn’t that amazing, so what’s the point of nerfing it? I’d just decrease it a little so that Bloodthirst being baseline has a net 0 change.
Overall, mostly solid changes. I left out the ones that I either agreed with or felt weren’t big enough of an issue to debate.
1 – No. Its a minion, it is supposed to attack.
2 – No. Changing places at best does nothing, because the Flesh Wurm just dies. At worst though, your enemy is smart (or you get unlucky) and the wurm takes a little while to die, effectively increasing the CD.
3 – No thanks. MM has been hit with nerfs quite a lot, don’t need another one.
Really all that Flesh Wurm needs is for the blast to apply at your location, and a slight cast time reduction.
One day I’ll have time to read this. Today is not that day.
Thanks for the list though, always good when people put forth change lists (and a few look very solid on a brief glance over).
Q @Bhawb.7408 – wouldnt that then be… balanced? I mean i deny ele spikes with my toolkit 5. Without 3 other utilities and/or traits. Also they could just re-nerf spectral armor and walk to their 3% pre hit without limit but not in DS and not stacking phase.
Not saying it isn’t balanced, its just fine as is. What I’m saying is if you added in permanent stability on top of that (something that was suggested before), you’d have a build that can’t really be dealt with. You can’t CC it to get it off points, you can’t burst it down, it just sits in your face and laughs. Not to say that the build would be good necessarily, but it has significant issues in that you can’t actually counterplay anything about the build.
Or they could fix DS to be 120% of HP (150 with 30SR) but not reduce physical damage by 50% thus not stack with protection making LF heal/gain in DS weaker.
This doesn’t change anything for direct damage, just makes LF much better against condi. If you have 10k LF but all direct damage is reduced in half, a 10k hit against you is 5k, or 3350 with protection up, which is 50% or 33.5% of your LF. If you have 20k LF the 10k hit hits you for 10k or 6.7k with protection up, which is 50% or 33.5% of your LF. Since all LF gain is % based, its exactly the same.
Dont spectrals have like… a 20/128s uptime? And a ICD on hit thus a thief or ele bursting down wouldnt make a difference?
Seriously no idea and would love to see a current video of it…
A Fresh Air burst is basically nullified by Spectral Armor while in Death Shroud, there is a twitch video out there showing it (I believe it was Symbolic and Phantaram). You get 8% LF on hit (which is a large bit of HP), plus all the incoming damage is reduced by 33%. So let’s say you get hit with a 10k burst over one second (just one proc of SA). You only take 6.7k damage because of protection, and because of how DS works with direct damage, you only lose 3.4k LF (DS only receives half damage from direct damage). At the same time, you receive 8% LF, which is 8% of 60% of your HP. So at base level 80, you gain 8% of 0.6(18k), which is around 850 LF. So in total, you take only 2.6k damage from a 10k burst. And for each extra second that the burst extends for, you get even more LF back.
So it is an incredibly strong skill, especially once you increase your LF (both through SR traiting and vitality) which gives you more effective HP back through % LF gain, have extra toughness in DS, and have traiting that gives you LF on use. But basically speaking, you could take a full fresh air ele burst to the face (one of the strongest/fastest bursts in PvP) and not even be below 50% LF.
Also, with traiting you would have up to 2 SAs per CD period (which is 40s traited now I believe?), plus two other spectral skills, WH 5, nearby deaths, etc. It is very possible to have a ton of LF generation, the weakness of the build is usually lack of something other than not dying.
Perhaps instead, Foot in the Grave gave 50% stun reduction in Death Shroud, then? The current Stability could stay for flashing and to provide the current counterplay opportunities. I chose 50% because it’s a Grandmaster and limited on when it can apply.
However, it might cause a problem with Melandru runes + Bowl of Roasted Lotus Root, as that would be -115% stun duration in death shroud. Sigil of Paralyzation would be required for any CC duration at all on the necro in that situation barring a few specific traits.
Stun reduction would be interesting, but like you said could be problematic, since you could basically fully negate CC from some builds. I’d much prefer a soft-CC counter with the short term hard CC one.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
The issue with long-term CC immunity while in DS is that Spectral Builds have a very easy time staying in DS for a long time already, meaning you would have a tanky build that passively is immune to CC for a long period of time, and your only way to stop that is by attacking them, which will also fuel keeping them in DS (via SA/SW), and you can’t really just wait it out. Before the recent fix to DS expiring on its own, this would have been even more problematic.
I’d rather see it have a Dogged March style effect while in DS. You still get a bit of stability when you jump in, and as long as you stay in it is fairly difficult to use soft CC to control you.
I doubt it’ll happen, it is the equivalent to an ele using staff to pre-match buff his teammates before swapping weapons.
The difference is those abilities you listed have a long CD, and DS would be perma stability.
For PvE there is no point in having healing power. You should never have issues staying alive in full zerker.
I mean, basically nothing you said would actually change anything, either because its not that good for PvE or because it already exists.
What we actually need is for them to take our current PvE 66002 dagger build and add unique support to it, without forcing us to deviate from the current build too much (basically we have only 3 points we can move around before we start losing too much DPS). This would be things such as a spotter-like buff, but for ferocity, maybe a set of new utility skills that are auras like we had in GW1, an AoE lifesteal buff, things like that. But basically, we need unique ways to buff our teams DPS without losing any DPS from where we are now.
What kind of burst are you talking about? I’d argue that for power burst we are not at all very good anymore since the Lich nerfs. Shatter Mesmer, Thief (S/D or backstab), any burst Warrior, S/D Ele, LB or GS Ranger, rifle Engi, DPS Guard… we literally have some of the worst power burst in the game imo, except in PvE where targets love to just sit in wells. Not to say that power builds can’t be played, but your burst isn’t nearly as fast or hard hitting as other builds, and has far more counterplay. PvE is a totally different beast where we might be okay for super short term burst, and thats because mobs are stupid enough to sit in wells, but you still aren’t good.
Condi burst is the only time that Necro burst is relevant though, and that is for PvP.
That only happens for Warrior, then (I had misunderstood what you were meaning), so I was incorrect, Warrior has a potentially slight advantage. But all you have to do is put the sigils on each weapon set, and there is no problem, which is what you generally want for MM anyway.
You cannot proc on-swap sigils more than once every nine seconds, unless there is some bug right now. There is absolutely no benefit to swapping faster when considering on-swap effects.
It definitely has some kind of priority system, I’ve tested it in depth myself.
The difference between this and shadow’s embrace is that stealth has completely different mechanics. You can’t really compare the two.
Warrior doesn’t get extra efficiency at all, there is an ICD. Only thing Engi/Ele gets is the ability to have 4 sigils for the price of 2 if you would have used the same set twice. You can swap 18 times in 1 second and an on-swap sigil will still only proc once per 9 seconds.
Best stat for all professions in PvE is zerker (with some build exceptions where assassin is mixed in to give exactly 100% crit chance).
And best PvE weapon set is dagger/WH + dagger/focus for most situations. Sometimes it changes up though, if you have to range or certain mechanics for some fights.
Nah, 600 range is fine, the Axe just doesn’t quite do its job (single target burst) well enough. Unholy Feast still makes little sense on the weapon set, the AA’s damage is still awful, and #2 is still a fairly long channel for its damage compared to “good” burst sets.
900 range would be nice, don’t get me wrong, but it’d make the overall weapon design even more nonsensical.
I really don’t like Axe, should I switch to staff then? But focus is so good. =/
Also, Sigil of Blood can be a good replacement for Leeching? I’m not a fan of on-swap sigils in any class other than warr, ele and engy.
Staff is awful, you really just need to get used to Axe. If you use dagger you will be kited, its just inevitable. And if you use staff you end up losing far too much offensive pressure.
Also you need to get used to on-swap for MM. You can’t sit in one weapon set, you have to swap back and forth anyway, and they have built in ICDs so you don’t get any more use out of them on ele than you do on any other profession, so long as you swap every 10s. That said, Blood is potentially good because of your crit chance, go look up the values and check the math.
Bhawb, very active on the forums, has a grand total of 85 pvp games.
Because I got to rank 14 in less than 20 games in soloQ. Doesn’t exactly make me want to play a ton when it was that easy to get up there. And I’m neither active enough nor interested in playing team builds to play teamQ.
Its not like I base everything off my personal opinion either, in fact when it comes to stuff like this I rarely do. The only time I use my own knowledge is for MM, since I have personally tested and investigated the build more deeply than anyone else in the game. For anything else, I talk to people like Zombify, djooce, or Blackmoa for PvP, or I listen to spoj for PvE. I also use the wiki, in game sources, and things like that, which is why I’m one of the most knowledgeable players, even though I am definitely not the best player. Never mistake theory for practice, the best coaches/analysts are not always the best players, and vice versa.
Now, do I agree that Necro is absolutely useless? No, of course not, if that was true Outplayed by Children wouldn’t have such success both in 2v2s and 5v5s. However there are massive issues with the profession that cannot be solved by simple skill. The only actual niches we have is Corrupt Boon, passive fear spam, and being paired with an engi.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Don’t use double dagger, you’re just asking to be kited like that, especially in WvW. You want dagger/warhorn axe/focus (or if you need removal, use dagger OH instead). Also SWalk shouldn’t be used, you absolutely need bone minions otherwise your kill pressure is very weak. Fetid Consumption is also sub-par, all it really does is make your minions even weaker and dead faster.
This is what I’d use without changing your build too much. Leeching sigils are basically required for MM PvP. Then you can either use Energy sigils, or since you have crit Air sigils are also fine. Death Nova is required for MM builds, it gives too much to leave out. Consume Conditions > Blood Fiend in 99.99% of situations, Bone Minions are needed for kill pressure plus with Death Nova they give insane synergy. Transfusion is going to suite you better than VP, although you could also pick up Mark of Evasion if you prefer.
Other than the few changes I made, your build overall seems okay. I’m not sure if it will work, but it seems solid. Only issue I see is possibly having too low HP for a build with no healing power.
It seems like you are in PvE? Are you planning to do dungeons, open worlds, bosses, etc.? Need to know context.
I agree that some of the Dhuumfire-era changes need to be reverted. Necromancer is awful at sustained condi pressure… which should be the thing that we are best at. Even in PvE where we don’t have these nerfs we’re still subpar in sustained condi damage.
I actually agree…but are you sure the dps increase is just 10%? The crit chance from 4% to 24% is a big deal, and more crits=even more dps up with some might/vuln stacks
Bone Minions FTW:D
Minions have a base 150% crit damage stat. Meaning every time they crit, it is 50% extra damage. Fury is a flat 20% crit chance added on. So you have a 20% higher chance to deal 50% extra damage, meaning on average you will have a DPS increase of 10%.
This is regardless of might/vuln/frost spirit or anything else that boosts non-crit damage. Those will all boost your normal damage output, and then once you crit that boosted damage will be boosted further by 10%. This is a slight simplification, since once you include things like minions procing conditions, vampiric master, or getting ferocity boosts it changes slightly, but it is still basically a 10% boost while active to their standard DPS.
Maybe the possible OPness of MM is why we dont get AoE might/fury…
If that is their reasoning then its idiotic. Fury is a 10% DPS buff while its up (on average), and might is less so, plus Pack runes already exist and give MM more than 50% fury uptime. Meaning if you give it to MM, it buffs the minion DPS by 200 for every second its up max, which isn’t exactly OP. Not to mention there are only a few very specific spots they could add it and it’d actually fit into MM builds; it’d have to fit in the normal trait spread which only has 1 major trait that can be replaced (or a minor trait), be on a good MM weapon set, or an on-swap sigil.
If it starts scaling with damage, then they’d nerf its base damage. If you want to blow people up use Well of Suffering.
Then give them my crit chance or something, this is just redicilous.
Why would you have crit chance on an MM?
Yes yes, please continue pretending like you’ve found some magical thing that no one else has ever found and people who have thousands of hours on necro just have no idea how to play. This is definitely why you’ve been on teams winning tournaments left and right. And players who have consistently played at the highest level of PvP since the game was released just don’t know how to play.
This reeks of a certain someone back closer to launch who told us we didn’t know how to use DS and that’s why we were complaining.
The difference is the rest of the minions getting a bit LoS’d doesn’t matter. None of them are based entirely around landing their autos. Blood Fiend on the other hand is absolutely awful unless he lands every single auto perfectly and never dies. His active is bad, he forces you to pick up condi removal and you don’t have a good way of doing it, and overall he is just far too easily countered when you can simply take Consume Conditions instead, which fits the build amazingly well.
I rarely use Blood Fiend but just wanted to remind everyone it damages your opponent while healing you so there is the extra dps to offset the small siphon.
It is sub 80 DPS.
What would make the Blood Fiend a better Healing Skill?
More damage? Better HP scaling? Allie healing?
I had two big suggestions to make Blood Fiend better:
1) Passive heal scales with healing power
2) Change Training of the Master so it isn’t a flat damage buff
The first one just makes sense. It makes no sense that Blood Fiend’s attacks don’t scale with your healing power, it makes him significantly worse, especially when healing power is absolutely vital on MM builds right now.
The second is because a flat 25% damage boost is meaningless to a lot of minions. You don’t just use them for consistent damage. I’ve said this many times, but it should boost the utility you take them for. It should boost damage on relevant active skills, and on minions where their damage is less impactful. For example, if Blood Fiend’s active was changed (when traited) to drop a water field or become a small AoE heal, that’d make the heal far better for MM builds.
After reading this, I decided to go back to PvP after a month’s absence from the scene. Played 3 matches with my Necro, won each time and was the overall top scorer twice. My win/loss ratio (which is entirely on Necro; it is all I use in PvP) is still overwhelmingly positive as always. I look at this, and all I can think is “Wutchu talkin’ ’bout?”
Completely anecdotal evidence proves nothing.
I agree with everything except boon removal. It entirely depends on the situation, and I’d argue that we have the most useful boon removal, as it provides a much stronger chance to focus someone, compared to just boon removal. But its still not enough.
I don’t see why Blood Fiend is so bad. It has about 300 hps,
Which requires the minion to be alive and hitting perfectly, and doesn’t scale at all with healing power, despite healing power being vital for MM builds.
has a quick burst heal.
The second worst burst heal we have (tied with Signet of Vampirism, another awful skill
does damage
A whole sub 70ish DPS
and can be traited to blow up and give poison field on dying It can be traited to strip boons,
Both of these can’t happen at once, not to mention the boon stripping is absolutely awful and one more poison field on top of 5 others which more than suffice to maintain poison.
hit harder,
25% additional damage on top of very little damage isn’t impressive (it doesn’t even bring him above 100 DPS)
siphon more,
He doesn’t siphon, so no you can’t increase his siphoning. You can only make him siphon on hit via VM.
draw conditions
Not without giving up something you listed above
I would think with all this it would be the most op healing skill. Doesn’t the warrior healing signet heal for 300 hps and that’s all? Somehow, despite all this, not only do players not complain how op Blood Fiend is, most necros still prefer Consume Conditions even when traited for minions. Does this strike anyone else as odd?
No, because its bad. Healing Signet’s passive scales with healing power. It also gives you 300 per second NO MATTER WHAT. You can’t LoS healing sig, you can’t kill healing signet, you can’t kite healing signet, you can’t block it, invuln it, dodge it, etc. Blood Fiend however is very, very easy to put from 300 HPS to 0, because just one missed attack completely negates his healing for 3 seconds. Also, many of your proposed “benefits” are highly exaggerated (his boon stripping is 1 boon removed per 30 seconds in ideal conditions), impossible to achieve because you need more trait points than you get and also need to equip traits that are in the same GM slot.
Simply put, Blood Fiend is everything that could be done to make Healing Signet awful, on a profession with an amazing skill that is better in every single way. No amount of traiting would make Blood Fiend good, it needs significant work on its mechanics first. Even the one build that could afford the traiting, MM, has so much passive healing that Blood Fiend still wouldn’t be good even if they fixed a few minor issues.
Okay I lied, I forgot completely to test the bug. I’ll maybe do it this weekend.
i dont see how it matters at all if it’s a bugfix or not. It’s a nerf. Period.
They turned unintended bugs into intended game mechanics before (like when they kittened up our weapon switch), so saying that it was a bug doesnt justify this nerf at all.Anet shouldve removed the cooldown-refresh when you leave DS via hotkey instead.
If you aren’t used to me completely contradicting myself then you haven’t read my posts much :P
The reason they changed it was because it made no sense that you’d have different CDs depending on how it was used. And no, removing the CD is absolutely awful. It allows you to only be barred from DS according to how quickly you can build LF, meaning if you can build enough LF you can be in DS effectively 100% of the time.
I dont disagree with you… but do you ever remove your lips from anet’s hind-quarters?
When the collective forum remove their hands from each other’s dongers then I won’t have to be the only one applying logic instead of acting like ANet has some personal grudge against them. Also as someone else said, I always try to present the side of the story that everyone else is neglecting, regardless of what my personal opinion is. I’m actually very critical of ANet when its fitting if you listen to the podcast.
I’ll check both the bugs associated with it tomorrow. If they fixed the downed version that’d be awesome.
That isn’t a bug because it is not a true transform, they only borrowed some transform coding because it is partly a transform. If it was a full transform it would kill all our minions, so if you want it to have all the properties of transforms people are not going to like the consequences.
Inconsistencies happen because of how they coded the game. Same as why some skills that have no apparent projectiles can still be reflected (right now you can still reflect Mesmer staff 2, despite it having nothing to do with projectiles, for example), same as plenty of other things. Yet they try to fix an inconsistency, like DS having different CDs depending on how you leave it, and we moan about it.
It is supposed to have a 10s CD, that’s all the fix is about. It has nothing to do with nerfing us at all, that is only a consequence, not a cause.
I think this may be bigger than you think it is man. Trying to force us into using US and ntd.
Its forcing you to use DS as it was intended to be used. It might be a bigger nerf than I’m thinking, but it should have been obvious that it wasn’t meant to work like this.
I love my Necromancer very much, but I didn’t understand the change. The cooldowns were different if you let Death Shroud expire?
Death Shroud has some coding that they basically copied over from transforms. Transforms generally act such that the CD starts going down from when you first use it, not when it ends. In the case of DS, this would mean that as long as you could stay in it for 10 seconds, you’d be able to enter it instantly after leaving it. So they added a 10s CD to the skill you use to leave DS. However, if you let DS expire without pressing the exit button, that 10s CD never happens (since it is tied to the exit skill), and you just have however much of the CD leftover from the entry skill.
Basically, it was pretty obviously unintended functionality, similar to how Transfusion heals you if you manage to start the channel just before DS runs out of LF, and it was removed, which resulted in a small nerf in some situations. Now people are acting like ANet killed their puppy.
Its not a nerf, and who actually routinely sat in DS so long that it fully ran out of LF and then had enough LF in the next few seconds that it would make a difference? It was a bug fix to something that was obviously a bug. Death Shroud was always supposed to have a 10s CD between uses, this was simply a special case because it has some coding from transforms that gave it this functionality.
Is it a small nerf? Sure. But stop acting like ANet has it out for you personally. It was not an intended function, so it was removed.
Its a bit obvious that this was a bug. It has nothing to do with nerfing us, it was a bug fix.
They aren’t temporary, its a bug with Flesh of the Master.
Your best bet is to just make a Necromancer, go into Heart of the Mists, and play around with the abilities. The key ones that you want to look at are Dark Path (DS 2), Corrupt Boon, and Reaper’s Mark. They all have tells, DP shoots out a hand, Reaper’s Mark involves spinning the staff around + a big thing over the head, and I don’t remember what CB’s is but you can find it. Besides that, there are tells for all the abilities, but I’d consider them secondary, since those three abilities are most likely to actually kill you (DP only w/ PoC traiting, but still good to know).
Weren’t there some calculations done a while back that showed that the Blood Fiend has the highest base health of all minions after the Flesh Golem? He isn’t as good a tank as the Golem, sure, but between him, the Golem, and all of your other minions, that’s still a lot of health that mobs need to burn through before their AI finally decides to turn their attention to you. And by then, you’ll probably have resummoned the minions that died early anyway.
Blood Fiend and Flesh Golem have the same HP, either exactly or very, very close. Just like all of the utility minions have very similar HP values. The only difference is Blood Fiend has around 2k armor, whereas Flesh Golem has 2.6k, IIRC (values are on the wiki). So he’s not bad at tanking, but I’d say he’s third on the list, since Bone Fiend is amazing at getting aggro, and has pretty massive armor.
I am hopefully going to get on a PvEr soon to talk about that, probably the same for WvW.
What would people think of build spotlights? Like having a build be the center of the podcast, and talking about it (it probably wouldn’t fit an hour, but at least we’d get some cool stuff out there).
It’ll be fixed whenever they figure out what’s wrong, fix it, and put it into a patch. I wouldn’t expect it soon, at the earliest maybe the next big patch like the LS update.
I think it’s a generational thing to be honest. I’ve noticed that the older (30+) gamers are usually respectful, competitive people but it’s the kiddies and the upcoming gamer generation that are the trash talkers, noob callers etc. I see it in nearly every game I play and it’s sad.
I’m not qualifying EVERYONE that is young as a trash talker, I’m just saying the problem seems to follow age lines and which generation of gamer people fall in.
It has nothing to do with generation, just maturity, which is loosely related to age.