Guild Wars 2

People complaining feedback wasn’t important apparently didn’t see the PU nerfs.

I’m not sure how to make it more clear, you cannot make a condi weapon good for the current group PvE. You could literally have it stack 25 bleeds per AA, and have those bleeds deal 200 damage and not be removable by any other player, and it would still be an awful weapon for PvE.

The answer is nothing. You cannot make scepter a good PvE weapon for groups without making it a power weapon. It will always have garbage DPS compared to anything else, and there is no way a Necromancer will have enough utility to make up for the fact that you’re dealing 1/3rd the damage of even a power necro.

I think it’d fit better as a weapon skill (cough greatsword cough) along with an AoE control weapon set.

Yes. Make it a melee power weapon. Barring that it won’t be used.

Honestly anything can work. Asura get Pain Inverter (confusion), Humans get Hounds of Balthazar (burning + very high damage and finishers), and Sylvari gives you Sylvan Hound (like Hounds but longer duration), Druid Spirit (lots of CC), Grasping Vine (also CC, although single target), and Take Root (invuln version of supply drop). I’d say Asura is the least impressive and although Sylvari has lots of options they aren’t necessarily that great.

Nemesis (legion) was hacked because he allowed his email to be hacked despite it warning him that an IP in China was trying to gain access. He also had his account restored, since it is ANet’s policy to do one per account when needed. Its still unfortunate, but it had nothing to do with him being a YouTuber so anyone who was scared off by that is silly.

That said, there aren’t many GW2 YouTubers because it isn’t that profitable. Why do GW2 when you could do something like League, which has way more potential viewers.

Anchoku.8142:

Bleed caps in PvE really cripple it against bosses.

Bleed’s damage cripples all bleeding in PvE. Simply put with very very rare exceptions power builds will out DPS condi builds in any group content. Just look at how much damage 25 stacks of bleeds will do (even if you get 200 tick bleeds its 5k DPS which is pretty awful) compared to direct damage.

Anchoku.8142:

It has great range, of course, but used to stick to targets like glue even almost facing away. I miss that. Keeping bleed stacks up is most of its dps.

Not sure what you mean here.

Anchoku.8142:

Bleed stack seems to top out about 9 w/o lingering curse on trash mobs but using any other skills would shorten the stack. I ran a fractal with the group, fortunately, set for more direct damage and there was plenty of room for bleeds. Scepter was good, then, but, if the group setup was different, it could have been useless. A finisher on it would be useful in group play.

As above, condi < power in groups. There’s really nothing they can do to change that by changing scepter itself without basically turning it into a power weapon that also bleeds, which would suck. A finisher would actually be bigger to give us some PvP attrition with our fields.

Anchoku.8142:

Cripple and weakness are useful but poison is much less so outside of WvW and PvP.

While situational, 100% poison uptime simply by auto attacking is super good, it was really important for boom boom in boss blitz, and if the weapon wasn’t so bad in general in PvE it’d be good on things like HotW p1 final boss.

Anchoku.8142:

The relatively low direct damage really limits it’s use in WvW and PvE. Perhaps strangely, I wondered if cleave would be good without “breaking” the weapon.

Anyway, comments and perspectives are welcome.

Cleave wouldn’t help it any in PvE/WvW. Its not bad because it has low damage output, its bad because condi is.

As others said it isn’t strictly useless 1v1, just depends on enemy build.

But also, it is a very strong skill when you get it to land in an AoE situation. No need to buff it for 1v1s, it’d come at a nerf to its AoE strength.

I never said it should be nerfed. I never said it was OP. But that doesn’t mean its not one of the best removal skills in the entire game, because it is. It is a conditional full cleanse on a far lower CD than other full cleanses. And just because people underestimate Swarm doesn’t mean it isn’t, also, an extremely strong removal.

There are actually a number of things that “stretch” the lore, not just Necromancer but other professions. Guardians have had their own “Dhuumfire” anti-lore issue for a while, in the way that they can chill with hammer.

In some cases, I think this was an idea of balance becoming “more important” than lore. Dhuumfire for example was brought in at a time when Necromancers simply didn’t have the kind of sustained DPS we needed, because of how easily we could be cleansed, and there was no real way to accommodate that without burning, since no other condition can tick for so much damage with just single applications and not needing stacking. So despite the issue with burning on Necromancers, it was added to give us strong DPS pressure in a way that nothing else really could.

And in other cases, I think it was an issue of mechanics being lost or changed over time. As you said with Dark Pact, as there used to be health costs on some skills, and even a trait that lessened the sacrifice needed. We still have it with Death Shroud, where issues have been multiple because it used to be a downed state.

Water would come with a large base nerf to the healing, because of how incredibly strong a 10s water field that also heals for the highest of any skill in the entire game would be.

Even as the skill is right now, its one of the best self-removals in the game. Could they potentially have it as an ally transfer or removal? Sure, but it’d have to come at the cost of absolutely gutting its self-transfer/removal.

It was removed because Putrid Mark was a 1200 range full cleanse of up to 5 or 6 targets (don’t remember if it counted you as part of the target limit). It was absolutely too strong, it blew every other condition removal in the game out of the water by miles.

Why this small of a change? Because a buff is a buff, even if its minor. This addressed a very important concern, which was the fact that a single Necromancer couldn’t realistically proc more than 4 hits of it, and that a group of 5 couldn’t really proc all 25. This at least allows that to happen.

Is it enough? No, nor do they say this will be it. But it solved one problem with the skill and it gives it a small buff before the skill gets others later.

Depends on your build. Staff is an awful weapon for builds that are able to actually make use of axe’s extra damage, and don’t need the ranged utility staff brings. I haven’t used staff since Putrid Mark was gutted, and I’ve reached top 20 in yoloQ.

Dagger is basically fine as is, just give 2 a cast time reduction.

Positioning doesn’t only mean LoS’ing people, it means playing at the appropriate location with respect to your team, the enemy team, any objectives, and your build. Making sure you don’t take free damage, can still influence a fight, can’t be trained down easily (if glassy), are in range to support/be supported by your team, etc. are all part of positioning.

No.

If you’re able to interact it might work, yes. Not that its a big deal since in PvE you’d be able to hit near 100% crit chance in a decent group anyway, but yeah.

Oh, I have no idea. I know its been said but its impossible to find anything on the forums (can the feature pack seriously include a forum search function that isn’t awful?).

They’ve stated that they want to do templates.

Yep, all transfers are supposed to transfer through blind, just like boon removals are supposed to hit through Aegis (although Axe 3 doesn’t, Axe 2gud).

These aren’t particularly better, or remotely balanced. Especially gaining significant damage as you go lower, because that procs while in DS, meaning if I waited till I hit sub 10% HP, I can life blast you for 10k+, which will then steal 10k HP.

Also bleeds have nothing to do with BM.

Lazze.9870:

Not to sound too naggy, but the ranger just got dumped in the far bottom tier for dungeons (even with the buffs it will recieve in the feature pack), and the frost spirit just teamed up with Search and Rescue for being one of the most useless skills in the game. The mesmer sword is, to say the least, usable in comparison..

Don’t worry, Necromancers will show you the ropes of being garbage tier in PvE, we’ve got 2 years of experience at it.

If you have the game volume turned up (and on so it still sounds in the BG) you can hear when the game is starting, but its not ideal

http://intrinsicalgorithm.com/IANews/2014/04/now-consulting-at-arenanet-on-guild-wars-2/

The issue is all AI is linked together, and is likely linked to other things. They quite literally have to rework the entire system (which it seems like they are doing) to actually fix things. They hired an AI specialist as a consultant in April, so we’ll see how things go.

Kiriakulos.1690:

Considering that feature patches come within 5 months periods of one another, this change can be implemented, tested and judged quite easily in that chronogram. With all the different improvements to DS UI and other parts of it, I’d say DS is closer to a base state than a downed state and healing would not be a very impactful code change. In fact, I’d expect it to be nothing more than a gate – if (DS)- followed by another gate – if(source == self)- to allow this change. They already have the code model for unholy sanctuary to serve as base.

Would this come outside of a big balance/feature patch? No.

No, it isn’t that easy. This isn’t a high school programming project where they just have to put a few cute little statements and be done, game coding is far, far more complex than that.

Its not like they just go “oh hey we missed a ; somewhere, hey guys its fixed!” they have to redesign the entire AI system from the ground up.

I haven’t heard of them testing the specific thing that we are asking for. Maybe allowing all healing, but not specific only Necro traits + regen.

Also, I don’t believe that healing should be a % of your HP. Few things in the game (besides LF) work on a % of HP. Yes a thief might be able to heal for 80% of his HP, but if we have the same armor his 5k heal isn’t any better than my 5k HP, even though it is a larger % increase. Trust me, my MM shouldn’t be healing for the same % of its HP as a comparatively glassy build.

A 5.2k base heal is absolutely reasonable for its CD, and its heal per condition at base 700 is also really nice. If it was just a scaling heal then sure it would be on the weaker side of things (compared to the Warrior heal that scales with adrenaline, and reaches a max of 9k + HP), but its not, you can’t just divorce its utility from how much healing it gives you.

Sagat.3285:

Sigh…not all heals…just siphon,regen and parasitic contagion. We don’t even have access to utilities in DS…….

All heals allowed is bad,very bad,game breaking bad……

Edit: non single target LF gains needs to be more common, staff AA piercing, dagger AA actually stacking LF,LF on crit as well, no need for scaling based of number of foes.

Indeed. If they allowed all self-traited + regen to work, we’d have:
Parasitic Contagion
Vampiric
Vampiric Master
Vampiric Precision
Vampiric Rituals
Regeneration (and anything related)
Parasitic Bond
Transfusion (note: I think this would and should be changed so it stops trying to heal you through DS, as that would be way too strong for it to give LF, and heal you and allies)

If they allowed all Necromancer-only sources of heal, then we’d have in addition to the above
Blood Fiend’s passive
Signet of Vampirism’s passive and active (you could proc it, but not activate it while in DS)
Well of Blood’s pulsing heal

Also, technically speaking blast finishers on water fields, and some rune/sigil procs like Leeching/Blood sigils might proc with the 2nd effect, if they somehow coded it to be “all heals that are caused by the Necromancer heal”, but not if they added exceptions for each of the specific cases..

Now, something to note is this is likely a very hard change to make. Without knowing how DS is programmed, it means they would most likely need to add in everything as an exception. Obviously it is possible to heal “through” DS, but it would likely be a lot of work to do it for the number of things they’d have to. So while this is a great change that should happen, its probably a lot of work to implement.

Stand The Wall.6987:

I like how this is in the necro subforum.
Necro master class!

I only bother with 3 subforums atm. Doing any more with my frequency of posting would drive me mad(-er). So yeah, it ends up here :P

Dirame.8521:

Ally cleansing was removed?

Yes, a long long time ago.

Poplolita.2638:

Sometime, you just don’t make sense. One time you’re all like: Necromancer preview day is not okay! We can’t give feedbacks in time! I should be changed! Lmao, you’re the one who started the thread…

After they changed the day and all, you’re telling people to just sit there and shut up?

Make up your mind seriously…

Starting dozens of different threads is not a good way to give them feedback. I wanted to have the chance to give reasonable feedback, not starting dozens of threads all saying “omg I want necromancer to be the exact profession I want it to be, and I want it right now, even though this is totally counter to everything necromancer is and its impossible to make the changes I want in the amount of time!”.

People don’t understand what reasonable feedback means. Instead they want the game to be exactly what they want it to be, when they want it to be, without any consideration for anything else besides what they want. No understanding of priorities, of theme, of what game ANet is making, of how long changes take, or what is even reasonable to change.

I’m all for reasonable feedback. A lot of what has been going on is in absolutely no way reasonable.

I regularly heal for over 10k on it. It is a decent base heal, plus a large bonus per condition removed and it prevents all the negative effects of the rest of those conditions durations, plus it cannot be reduced by poison. It is by far one of the best single target heals in the game; other mechanics are an entirely different matter unrelated to CC.

Also, Necromancers have both the highest theoretical, and highest realistic cleansing in the game. 1 per DS use, full cleanse on heal, full cleanse on plague signet, 6 on well of power, 3 on Deathly Swarm (its only three right?) 3 per person hit by putrid mark, 1 per 10s per minion, 3 when someone is killed, full removal from lich 5; we have absolutely insane condition removal.

CC is taken because its our best healing skill for a selfish build, and it provides a massive anti-condi CD. You are by no means forced to use it, there are other builds that can deal with condis just fine without it. The reason tanky well specs don’t work is because they are bad for entirely different reasons, such as awful weapon sets for a tanky support.

Death Shroud at its core is absolutely fine as a concept. The only reason it has issues is in mid-scale fighting (larger than 4 players but less than zergs) because the AoE scaling doesn’t do very well until you just get showered in LF from death, and because it blocks other Necromancer mechanics.

Increase AoE scaling LF that will give you more LF for hitting multiple targets, and allow self-healing and regen to go through DS and its just fine.

If you can’t understand that ANet obviously wants every profession to be viable, them telling you won’t change anything. No game developer in their right mind makes a game with characters that they hate.

Them posting here would change nothing for the better, except creating even more unrealistic expectations.

CPC for example could give base 75% weakness and poison uptime on its own with 0 duration. With 33% duration its 100% uptime. That’s just far too much.

Also I think SoV would be relatively okay if its passive was significantly better.

WoD I also think is fine.

I do agree with SoL however, it needs a shorter CD by far.

The issue with a lot of these isn’t that the skill itself is weak, its that the build that would use it is.

Lordrosicky.5813:

The Consume conditions heal is nice but the healing it provides is poor.

Wat.

Lordrosicky.5813:

We have to run it because contary to popular believe our anti condition ability is woeful.

Waaaaaaat.

Lordrosicky.5813:

We cant peroidically remove conditions very well and just end up soaking up the damage with our large health pool.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

Ithir Darkleaf.7923:

That’s what I’m saying. I’m not asking for something like “we will make more changes to make you everyone happy guys!!”, it’s more like “we are aware that necromancers need more love and we will keep track on this thread to see what you think ”.

Do you actually think their validation means anything, as far as the community is concerned? Its obvious with any shred of logic that they know the major issues that exist in their game, lack of changes doesn’t mean they don’t know, it just means they haven’t changed it yet. But people don’t want to know that ANet knows about the problems, what they really want, whether they admit it or not, is for ANet to tell them they are totally correct, and make the changes they want, how they want them, and make those changes right now. That isn’t a reasonable demand, yet it happens all the time.

And your point? Charge isn’t a DPS increase unless the target is in a corner, otherwise the mechanics rarely line up to be an increase because he runs the full distance and has to come back, losing attack time. He can also be kited around a point, unlike flame turret which just swivels and shoots.

The reality remains that Turrets do too much with their passives and their actives are in general far too mindless. Until that is changed, they will always have to be underpowered to be healthy in sPvP. It has nothing to do with removing their identity, them being immobile is good, having a turret that inflicts the second highest damaging condition in the game with 100% uptime and little counterplay or need for active input isn’t.

POST ALL THE THREADS!! Seriously though, they are just going to merge this one, they’ve done it with all the others, and we don’t need 500 of them to get the point across.

Frankly, what do you expect? No one’s saying “hey guys, feature patch here, this is the last balance patch we’re doing, starting work on GW3 so in a few years you can just play a new game!”, they just made a few changes, which all were completely reasonable, but they couldn’t really change the entire profession in a feature patch.

Find small ledge, wait for zerg, put wall on ledge, collect bags.

Cam Ron.4170:

Heals in DS? New pvp meta: 5 Necro running transfusion and unholy sanctuary. If they just allow necros to get healing in DS they’d have to overhaul the entire class to balance around it. I think they should just buff the scaling or base power (or both) of existing healing traits like unholy sanctuary. I’d actually prefer it if they increased scaling, as of now no reason to even consider getting +healing power

Uh oh, five slower than molasses necromancers doing absolutely no damage while they heal themselves for a little bit using an ability that is super easy to counter. What ever will we do?

I’m fairly certain that they read the forums, I’ve heard it from multiple sources that they do, and I know for a fact that Sharp at least used to read the forums. But how many Necromancers do you think even understand that DS is double effective? Probably not many. And especially when they can then open up the game files and see the code that puts LF at 60% HP, its hard to know who to trust, or even what to do with it.

Muchacho.2390:

I actually wonder if Anet knows that you only take half the damage in DS and doesnt change it because without it our survivability would even worse.

I mean it nowhere states that you only take half the damage in DS, which justifies to question if it really is a feature or more a bug.

They don’t seem to know, since one of them corrected us when the change was made and people were asking why it was 60% when DS was known to be 120% of HP.

dancingmonkey.4902:

What way would you suggest they be reworked? That is a bit too broad a term to just suggest it and leave it at that.

Personally, I feel if you are going to make a suggest of that nature, you should offer an idea how each one should work.

One thing I see these forums are horrible about, is posters demand something gets changed, and make the same demand repeatedly. Anet makes a change. Forums blows up complaining and insulting them for their changes. When all they did was exactly what the posters asked for.

I don’t make specifics because I’m not on the balance team, nor am I a turret player. Just like I wouldn’t make specific suggestions on how to fix spirits, despite the fact that spirits are awfully designed and need changes. I had a very lengthy post on how to do it for minions, going through that much effort for turrets doesn’t seem worth it to me, especially when I’m not nearly as knowledgeable about the build.

But in short: reduce the passive AA strength, Flame Turret for example does comparable DPS to Flesh Golem, while being a utility instead of an elite, and then make the active strong and so you have to actually think about when to use it, Rifle Turret for example is just a “press on CD” active, there is absolutely no reason to time it except not activating it right as someone pops a defensive CD.

I think a rework of turrets so that their actives are meaningful and timed well-used activation of their active skills are necessary for success would be better than just nerfing them. Also conditions should affect them, even if it isn’t 100%.

In fact I think all true AI (read: not banners/spirits) need to have their damage and utility pushed heavily onto their actives. An AI build should have to interact with their summoned peons to have success, this means having to use their actives well, and doing things like using CC to set up the minion actives, or using the AI actives to set up for your own damage. Ex: shatter mesmers.

Also turrets aren’t getting buffed according to the preview. One turret had a QoL buff, akin to making minion AI not garbage, and they had their CC significantly nerfed.

I think a rework of turrets so that their actives are meaningful and timed well-used activation of their active skills are necessary for success would be better than just nerfing them. Also conditions should affect them, even if it isn’t 100%.

In fact I think all true AI (read: not banners/spirits) need to have their damage and utility pushed heavily onto their actives. An AI build should have to interact with their summoned peons to have success, this means having to use their actives well, and doing things like using CC to set up the minion actives, or using the minion actives to set up for your own damage. Ex: shatter mesmers.

Lily.1935:

How would you permanently stay in death shroud? Out side of death shroud you can’t use life stealing to out heal damage, so how would that change in Death shroud? And I completely disagree. Life force Defensively is worth .75 HP to every 1 HP

DS has more ways to gain LF than just siphons. You’ve got your 4 skill to gain quite a lot back + proc siphoning up to 90 times total (2 per tick, 5 people per tick, 9 ticks) plus its own LF gain, reaper’s precision, minion siphoning, and then DS 1 spam for up to 6 procs of siphons per shot. Will it hold up under focus fire? No, but it wouldn’t be crazy for you to sit in DS for a very, very long time.

Also its not an opinion, its fact. DS is 60% of your HP, but you take half damage (this has been shown many times over the last year). So if you have a siphon that heals you for 50 normally, if it adds 50 LF then you are actually gaining twice that, effectively, plus potentially some slightly higher mitigation with the +170 armor while in DS you can get.