Guild Wars 2

PvE, WvW, or PvP is pretty important.

The real question is why you didn’t have warhorn in the first place. You should be running dagger/warhorn and axe/focus or dagger, staff just flat out isn’t worth it in MM builds. Warhorn is necessary to be able to rotate from home to far/objectives when its open, also the unblockable daze makes 1v1s against DPS guards pretty much a cake walk, and you want either dagger OH for the removal or focus for the boon removal/burst.

So really, no one should be adding warhorn to their build because it should have been there from the start.

Yeah, its difficult to find things on the forums often.

As has been stated in multiple other threads, Flesh of the Master is currently bugged. Any time the minions change level, or the master is downed, the minions die. It probably has to do with with any time the minions change state while FotM is active they are desummoned.

Well, I mean we should have seen it coming. They gave us skills like Locust Swarm, we should have expected bugs to be part of the Necromancer experience.

It makes me so moist that I almost forget the fact that Flesh of the Master is bugged. Almost.

Well of Blood took a 20% nerf to its base AoE healing and a 45% nerf to its AoE ratio… so that my group could get 5s less uptime on a field that Guardians can kitten out with 100% uptime while afk? Yeah, I’m sure that makes sense to someone.

They made it so Flesh of the Master now kills all minions any time the MM is downed or changes levels (for PvE). So you guys were asking for an MM nerf, and you got it.

No, we’re mad because they have completely made MM unplayable in PvE (yes it was bad), and made stupid changes with absolutely no preview where we could have told them they were stupid.

Am I quitting necro or the game? No. But my Necro is going to be sitting as my TP/PvP only character for the forseable future.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Maybe they toned it down, because they said they fixed the vampiric rituals effect on wells. I have yet to try this ingame.

Afaik it was a tooltip change, not functional.

manveruppd.7601:

Really weird about the minions! You should definitely post on the bugs forum.

Been there done that. Its a bug with Flesh of the Master.

Its not any different. AI is just as mediocre as it was before, only now they introduced a desummoning bug.

Jayce.5632:

If the new figures remain the same, how much would they need to reduce the cooldown in order to get similar results prior to the patch?

It depends on your healing power. If you have 0 healing power, then it would need to come up 20% faster, so it’d need to be base 32s or so. With any healing power investment that would need to be even shorter.

Am I quitting Necro? Not yet. But I very likely have to change my build entirely, since Flesh of the Master now has a pretty game breaking bug associated with it.

The AI isn’t noticeably better, but now they all die when you have flesh of the master and are downed, so that’s cool

It had nothing to do with making it usable. It was just a QoL fixed, one that was asked for, to make it so we can actually fully proc it in a group.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Maybe we can ask a high level pvp-er to ask for changes.. oh wait..

They shut down the high level PvP program because after about the billionth time they were told a change was an awful idea (cough Dumbfire cough) they realized they should just fix the problems. By removing the feedback obviously.

Plague’s main functionality wasn’t touched at all. Not sure why people are kitten about that. And Lich used to hit 17k with a single auto attack, so again very sensible nerf. The duration was questionable, but I’ll let some PvE theorycrafters tell me if that actually mattered DPS wise.

Ah okay, thanks for checking that.

Nah, Necromancers have very good elite skills. Fix the AI / charge randomly getting stuck bugs for Golem, give Lich better 2/4 skills, and give Plague a reason to ever do something besides spam blinds, and our elites are perfect. I mean I’d love more, but the ones we have are solid.

I’ve had them die when jagged horror isn’t alive, and minions like Flesh Wurm from far outside his range, so its not just him.

So I’ve gone back through and tested it with multiple traits and different minions out. It appears to be random, it isn’t a trait that I can tell, and it isn’t certain minions, its either all of them or none of them die, and it seems to be maybe 20% of the time, but I have a small sample pool atm.

I did it in Heart of the Mists, and all the minions died.

Currently testing, it isn’t all the time. Okay, it appears to be totally random. It isn’t any specific trait that I can notice, it just… sometimes happens. Tried it about 10 times so far, and 3 times they died.

zapv.8051:

They need to double the scaling and make it heal at least 80% of what it did total. Then I would say it is better than it was. Right now this is a ridiculous nerf to a skill that was very niche already.

Basically if they increased the ratio by 50% it would end up being 79% of the AoE healing, which I’d say would be fine.

As the title says, at least some minions are dying when the Necromancer who summoned them gets downed. If you go into PvP and summon flesh wurm in a safe area, then let yourself be killed by one of the AI mobs, the wurm dies at the same time. There is no documentation about this if it was intended, and is a huge nerf to the skills overall, so I assume its a bug. I’ll see if it affects all minions all the time, and more specifics.

So yeah, Flesh Wurm definitely dies when I get downed. Not sure if its for everyone because that’s harder to test, but its true.

If they get the numbers right, except they didn’t. They should have increased the ratio by 50% too, and then maybe I’d be less PJSalt y.

TheLastNobody.8319:

weird, cause mine do for some reason, least in PvE.

Are they possibly dying at the same time as you?

This only really annoys me because of Khylo/WvW, where minions were already severely sucky. But I’m not surprised, it was never intended to work this way. Plus what is the chance that this actually works right?

Comments would also be a welcome change, something else that other companies tend to do.

I’ll try it out tomorrow/over the weekend.

If you liked axes already, you’ll still like them. Chances are though that only people who were right on the fence would take them now.

dancingmonkey.4902:

I just had breakfast with the balance team. They said they would be happy to prove that they do play necromancers. As soon as you prove you have spent at least 3 months in game design.

I’ve never been a doctor or in the medical field, but I can tell you that stabbing yourself is bad. Some changes are just so dumb they obviously don’t come from a place of knowledge about what the actual impact is.

They didn’t exactly do a good job of supporting your opinion with the well of blood change either :P

I don’t think ANet is completely incompetent, but at least some in their camp simply refuse to listen to people who have more knowledge about the particular parts of the game they are changing. They proved it when they blatantly disregarded all of the PvP players on the testing program they had (which has since been abolished, because what’s the point of meeting with players if you don’t listen to them), they proved it with Dumbfire, and they proved it again today. They make plenty of good changes, but some are just obviously uninformed.

CC will always be our #1 heal. It can be put into any general build and work. Unless they make a really stupid change it’ll always be best because it has a decent self heal + condition removal and scaling healing with that, all on a pretty low CD. SoV/WoB/BF will always be niche. All of that is assuming decent balance of course.

To be fair, the SoV change was a highly requested change, it allows you to proc it once more solo and actually proc all 25 in a group of 5. Nothing big, but a very minor QoL change.

runeblade.7514:

No one even use Blood fiends. Not even MM build uses it.

And yet its still better than SoV, which really shows how amazing of a skill it is.

Well of Blood just received a 21% nerf to its AoE base healing, and a 45% nerf to its ratio on the AoE healing, to allow it to heal you over 5s instead of 10s.

Two questions:
1) Why nerf an already underused skill whose sole use was the fact that it was the highest healing skill in the game
2) Why was this not considered important enough to put on the preview? This is a very significant nerf, one that anyone could have told you didn’t make sense, but it wasn’t put up for public discussion.

Good news is though, Necromancers all now know that Consume Conditions is the heal of choice 100% of the time, so that’s cool I guess.

So just so everyone here understands the pre/post math.

Prepatch WoB = heal on cast + 11 ticks of base pulse heal * (healing power * 0.4)
It effectively had a healing power ratio of 4.4 on the AoE effect

Now, ANet wants to make it happen faster (which is fine, the amount of time it took to heal was really hurting the skill), so they decrease its duration by 5 seconds, reducing the AoE healing by kitten. To compensate, they increase the base healing per pulse by 50%. Meaning even just looking at the base healing, we now get 79.3% of the original base heal (45.5% increase on 54.5% of the original healing), AND they don’t increase the ratio, meaning they nerfed its ratio by kitten as well.

So post-patch WoB is:
Self heal – unchanged
AoE heal – base healing reduced by 20.7%, ratio reduced by 2.0 (45.45% nerf), but now does so over 5 seconds instead of 10.

So… its a change. Imo a significant nerf, but oh well.

At 1431 HP I’m getting 852 per pulse (I got to log in). So it definitely got a nerf to its total healing.

“Decreased the active time of this well from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Increased base healing per pulse by 50%. Updated the skill to have the correct values when Vampiric Rituals is equipped.”

Can someone check the values in game? I’m curious if this is a nerf/buff and how much so. I can’t log on right now to check the in game values.

Pre-patch it was
Base on cast – 5240(1.0)
Base per pulse – 152(0.4)

The issue with life blast builds is that

1) You end up wasting a lot of crit chance. Deathly Perception seems strong because its a free 50% crit chance, but in a good group and the right build, you’ll be getting very close to 100% anyway, so its mostly wasted.

2) Might isn’t that big of a deal. Ele/Warrior can both pretty easily give you all the might you need in one build.

3) Vuln also not that big of a deal. Right now because of how quickly bosses die, and then even after the FGS nerf you’ll just bring an engi to solo stack most of a groups might anyway.

So basically 3 of the builds biggest draws aren’t at all important. It also scales worse than dagger AA in terms of damage. The only reason to use it is if your group is just total garbage and doesn’t have any buffs for you, and you’re not able to comfortably melee the fights (awful groups often make it difficult to melee a boss).

Its a CD on the forced DS entry only.

That’s not a necromancer problem, that’s just conditions in PvE. I’m sure they are aware of the issue, but making condis viable in group PvE is a huge project. We aren’t alone in that, all condi weapons are bad in PvE.

Anchoku.8142:

Take a deep breath, relax, and think: How would you change scepter so that it is better in PvE with minimal effect on PvP?

Changing the bleed cap is one option but the entire game, and players’ gameplay, takes the 25 cap into consideration so any change to the cap would have far-reaching consequences.

Like dagger’s upcoming change, some form of multi-target or group support utility could be added to scepter. Perhaps Lingering Curse could add something like a cleave or condition splash onto nearby targets.

Scepter is not supposed to be a high dps weapon like dagger so do not expect it to even come close to its hitting power. Instead, ask yourself what does scepter need to better replicate some of staff’s utility? People run staff a lot. Any ideas on how to make the choice tighter between carrying staff or scepter as the ranged weapon knowing you will never get scepter to replace axe, much less dagger?

Nothing. End of the story, no debate or cute changes, you cannot make it a good weapon for PvE while it uses conditions. That’s it. Nothing more to see here. Conditions are bad in group PvE, scepter uses conditions, scepter is bad in group PvE. A = B B = C A = C. Not sure what else I can put here to get it across, because there is nothing you can do.

Staff is garbage in PvE, so not sure why that’d be brought up.

You cannot add enough support to scepter to make it worthwhile. Elementalists can stack 21 stacks of might while dealing higher DPS than a dagger Necro. That is support + high DPS. Engineers can stack something like 16 vuln on their own while dealing higher damage than dagger Necro. Again, DPS + support. Warriors have banners. You need to deal DPS while bringing high support or you are worthless in PvE, so unless there is a change to scepter to make it stack 25 might and vuln at the same time with 100% uptime, there is absolutely no reason to bring someone whose damage is comparable to a ranger pet.

TL;DR Scepter is and always will be bad in group PvE as long as it is a condition weapon in a game mode where conditions are worthless.

Take Warhorn. When they try to spin2win on you, interrupt them with Doom. When they heal, interrupt with Wail of Doom. All of a sudden they suck big time. The only real danger is if you allow them to go uninterrupted, otherwise its an easy win I’ve found.

We don’t have one, which is the point. A weapon that gives you defenses on the AA is not a max DPS weapon, it can’t be. Not to mention it has two other skills that aren’t at all damage based. Staff ele fire attunement is a damage weapon, necro dagger isn’t.

Because PvE isn’t the only game mode in the game, and dagger isn’t designed to be a max DPS weapon. Its role is supposed to be sustain, so buff its sustain. I have no illusions of Necromancer being good in PvE anytime soon.

Nah, Rangers still have Spotter, still better, although at this point we’re comparing which large steaming pile of dung is shinier.

We have about 9k DPS in a fully buffed scenario, Ele can breach 13k, Thief is right in there around 12-13k, Warrior can do 11k, even Engi can out DPS us.

Infect.2738:

Someone teach me how to edit and i got you bro

Open Paint, draw a rectangle, put a half-circle on one end of the rectangle, and two circles side by side on the other end. Editing done.