Guild Wars 2

Yeah, I might do podcasts, considering moa and I just did episode 47 of But of Corpse :P

But yes, probably this Sunday we’ll go over it. If not then, then we’ll go over it the next weekend.

Its a bad trait. It requires you to be hit multiple times while very low HP on a profession with already bad might stacking (except in a single build). It is entirely meaningless in PvE where you want to maintain 90%+ HP, fairly meaningless in WvW since you shouldn’t be getting that low, and in PvP a sudden spike of might isn’t at all going to change anything. Its not like you’re going to be in a fight, and bait it out with full LF and the second you hit low HP you’re like “haha, gotcha now, eat ALL THE DAMAGE”; because in reality you’ll do it, maybe deal a bit of extra damage, and die all the same.

Mia Crazymike.1780:

Why do you feel that this passive ability and the passive Bonus 6 from a rune should receive a nerf?

Even though Rune of the Nightmare is accessible to anyone.

Because it is a 3 second fear with basically no counterplay. This means a very significant amount of damage being caused directly via terror, a lot of time for the Necromancer to follow up with condi-loading, all of it based off a completely passive proc. Right now the build that abuses this + reaper’s protection is absolutely ridiculous, basically the only choice you have is to be feared for ages, or simply not attack.

And sadly for Rune of the Nightmare, if one profession can abuse it it needs changing. Not everyone could abuse Runes of Strength either, but they had to be nerfed.

Lightsbane.9012:

i see my necro bros have their happy hats on.

Idk who kittened in all the Necro’s cheerios, but geez people need to lighten up. The two nerfs were absolutely deserved, the buffs were small but nice, and if they don’t introduce any new bugs that’s frankly a pretty amazing patch for us.

They were small changes. Necromancer needs big sweeping changes to really fix the big core issues, don’t expect them to come in a balance patch. For what this was (just a balance patch, and one that had some nice changes) it was just fine.

There’s quite a few. However that’s their problem, CB needed the counterplay, and 1/2s is hardly a large amount of time, especially considering the skill can easily set up 100-0s of many builds.

TheDevice.2751:

I’ve actually been looking at Archeage bhawb you should check it out. Has some nice dark magic stuffs too ^^

will be f2p on release.

I looked at it, and it looked like a lot of stuff I really don’t care for. I mean I guess its f2p but I’m still unlikely to check it out. If I take a break it’ll be for league, or simply just a break.

MM isn’t a bloodmagic spec, the siphon traits are really only taken due to a lack of other big options. If I could sink those 1-2 points into Spite for some better damage options (hell I’d take CtD if it worked on minions), SR or Curses for any significant offensive benefit I would. I only go into BM because Transfusion, I really don’t need the extra healing, I need more damage and VM is the only real way to get that.

Lily.1935:

That doesn’t even come close to fixing all our problems.

+1

The reality is Necromancer cannot be fixed within the scope of their normal patches. We require far too much, including things like brand new skills/weapons, and large-ish scale reworks of core mechanics (adding healing in DS). Realistically I’m not expecting anything until we get that mystical expansion that’s coming soon™.

The changes aren’t bad so much as they didn’t change anything. Builds that were already doing well will do just as well, maybe a tiny bit better, builds that weren’t doing well are either exactly the same or slightly better. But no new builds have been really made viable, and since other professions had significant changes to open up build viability, we kind of expected (valid or not) that to happen.

It wasn’t about buffing our meta builds, it was about buffing our non-meta builds, and fixing the issues with our meta builds.

Spirit Weapons are some of the best designed AI in the game, requiring actual input to be successful. Just because you roll your face on a build without AI doesn’t mean you are playing more actively than someone rolling their face on an AI build. The most eSports game in the entire world – League of Legends – has a massive amount of PvE in its game mode, because (shock) whenever you make a gamemode more complex than DM you have some non-player mechanic you have to fight against.

When you join the cool kids and roll MM. But yeah it needs love.

Yeah this doesn’t affect FitG at all. Its a nice change, but totally unrelated to that.

Jayce.5632:

Is it just me, or is Arenanet blatantly trying to pin spectral armor to every necro utility bar?

We want a big defensive CD, we don’t take teh big defensive CD, so they keep making it more enticing.

Muchacho.2390:

I am sour because bloodnecros still suck…

And untile they buff them i will continue to be sour….

Yeah but they buffed my MM build so I’m happy.

NeXeD.3042:

I just dont understand, they didn’t nerf the actual slightly op things we have, and I’m being generous when I call them op. They didn’t really buff anything… yet we are now supposed to compete with the other classes that have been buffed…

Except no meta builds were just blanket buffed. Warrior is nerfed, S/D is nerfed, none of the big builds got flat buffs, they were either nerfed or are neutral overall/slight changes.

Indeed. We didn’t get nuked at all, we are slightly more viable than before in terms of just ourselves, and it remains to be seen how other changes affect us within the meta. They were good changes, stop expecting ANet to change every single trait and skill we have in one patch and somehow changing everything everyone wants. It won’t happen in a single patch, this is a far healthier way.

Just make patches more often pls.

Nah, we’re in exactly the same spot after patch as we are now. Nothing big changed, positively or negatively, which is why so many people are mad.

I agree we could have gotten more. They needed to nerf Reaper’s Protection/Nightmare Runes, and they needed to buff siphons, introduce a better team UI for DS, allow at least self healing through DS, buff a few other sustain traits (reaper’s precision), or at the very least told us why they didn’t touch them (like hey guys we want to update the UI but its not ready yet).

Overall the changes were fine though, completely positive, just not as much as people were fairly reasonably expecting from other notes. I think the biggest issue was that it didn’t actually change anything. Builds that aren’t viable now won’t be viable after the patch, no changes to how DS works, etc. If this patch hadn’t taken so long it’d be okay, hopefully they make these level of changes, but every 2 months at most.

Except CoP doesn’t allow you to condi bomb someone so hard their game uninstalls itself. Its a completely defensive CD with a higher CD.

I love it, we basically get two completely reasonable nerfs, are still completely viable in every way that we were before… and people are mad because it wasn’t enough. What, did you expect them to magically make us good in PvE? That won’t happen without massive changes that are beyond the scope of normal patches. New builds for PvP? Not gonna happen without new content.

Everything is the same, but with some QoL changes. If you want big sweeping changes you might as well play Wildstar until an expansion comes out.

No, they increased its cast time to give it counterplay, but also reduced its aftercast. Overall it takes as much time to fully cast but the enemies actually get a chance to not get absolutely pounded into oblivion because there was no way to react.

These are not all the changes, just the ones they thought were relevant for feedback. It is very important to note that they do not preview every single number change, only some of them. The changes were fine. Were they great? Will we suddenly be top tier everywhere? No, but they were entirely reasonable changes. Frankly my only disappointment was that (as far as I saw) they didn’t nerf reaper’s prot/nightmare runes.

MM deals 1.5k max DPS from the minions if you are standing still and never kill the minions. I’m curious as to how that is too much pressure, since I’ll assume you’ll move while playing, when its not all that different to a variety of other tanky builds.

Oh I would love it if they made them more active. Honestly all they need to do is fix the AI to work at 100%, make the skills more responsive, and then change things like Training of the Master to enhance the actives instead of just a flat damage bonus, and we’d have active play without requiring the MM to play an RTS (which would be way too good if you could actually micro them).

Lifestealer.4910:

The fact that you think you have some of skill playing these AI builds really shows the type of player these builds attract. You can ask any top player and they would agree that while turret engi and MM necro arent viable in tourney plays, they are still brainless builds that a 12 year old can pick up and do

They don’t know how to play MM source: I’ve seen “top” necros like zombify play MM and its hilarious. Love the guy, but I very rarely even see an MM with a not-idiotic build, let alone see it played at anything close to well.

JinDaVikk.7291:

Furthermore we wouldn’t complain about AI if some of them weren’t so absurdly strong with no input. Most AI builds during specific metas (namely turret engi now) can win nearly any 1v1. Thats kittened and not competitive. Most Ai builds allow bunker amulets with full damage output.
Notice the trend? Everone complains about soldier/cele might stackers for the same reason. Far too tanky with too much damage output.

Being a bunker with high damage is bad enough being a bunker with AI killing people is just wrong, its not competitive.

Also don’t argue the “takes skill crap”. The difference between the skill gaps is huge.

1.5k DPS is the max the minions will do, assuming the person is standing still, the minion AI is perfect, and they never die. Unless you are saying a DPS build deals that much damage (I’ll solve the riddle, they deal more, even a soldier warrior will hit harder than that) then no. MM has an incredibly slow kill time unless you eat every single active they have, which still takes a 5+ seconds to do and can be easily avoided.

If you want to bring issues up with specific AI builds (like turrets, which are horribly designed) feel free. But don’t act like all AI builds are any more brainless than the vast majority of what is currently played.

Like Ehecatl said, you picked one build that has nothing to do with AI (might as well start calling banner warriors AI builds at that point) and another that is a prime example of when AI is badly designed.

For example, if you “just stay alive” on MM, you will max your damage out at around 2k in realistic situations. That’s it. You’ll die eventually because you can’t sustain through much if you haven’t been using your abilities properly, and your minions will deal a bit of feeble wet-noodle-slaps to the target before dying.

For soloing go with a condi build, similar to what leman linked. Rampager I believe is the highest damage possible, but rabid, dire, and carrion are all also acceptable depending on what you are aiming for (and what’s cheapest). Krait runes are super cheap and can be really nice. Note that while condi is just fine for solo, you’ll want to swap over to power if you ever get into dungeoning.

I like them as is, actually, so no thanks.

BlazinFyre.2410:

I would like to know what Arenanet’s and even the communities opinion on AI centered builds is. It concerns me that we have these mindless but effective builds in the meta and with the changes to spirit weapons, more may come.

AI builds are not innately mindless, unless you are referring to the fact that my summoned creatures are mindlessly stupid, in which case sure.

True AI builds have a unique playstyle that revolves around tracking multiple entities in addition to your own and the enemies, and using various support mechanics to utilize them at maximum efficiency. You end up playing a very interesting and fun hybrid of control, support, and DPS all in one, its like having a small team that you manage all on your own. For example an MM built properly has the Necromancer as a tanky support/control role, bone minions/shadow fiend as DPS, bone fiend and flesh golem as control/DPS, and flesh wurm as DPS/utility. The MM supports the minions, using healing, control, and condition application to keep the enemies locked down for the DPS minions to wail on them, and to keep them alive. The minions themselves provide DPS, control, and utility for the MM to keep them alive. Its a symbiotic relationship that provides something nothing else truly can, and when done properly it involves a lot of active play and far more micro-management than anything else (look at GW1 MM and tell me that it was “passive” to play a build that was literally impossible to play at 100% without being a computer).

Note that this doesn’t include Spirits, which have absolutely no AI (they are simply AoE buffs that you can kill), Banners (which are untargetable summons), and the various AI mechanics (thieves, elementalists, and some various summon skills) that have no full-build associated with them. These are either not AI as they are summoned AoE buffs, or they are not AI builds, meaning the summon themselves don’t remotely carry the build, they are just there to add something, but there is no real active interactions between the summoner and the summoned.

Another thing people seem to forget is that true AI builds have never once been top tier viable. In anything. PvE/WvW/sPvP have never seen a true AI build used successfully in the “top tiers”, usually because ANet has given us a crippling AI system paired with active skills that are almost always unnecessarily clunky. Is it sometimes annoying to play against a turret engineer (who represents the worst of AI builds, as there isn’t any meaningful play there) or MM? Sure. Its also just as annoying to play against a variety of other builds that don’t struggle with clunky AI, badly implemented active abilities, and that are often just as if not more reliant on “thoughtless” actions as we are accused of.

TL;DR
1) AI builds are not innately passive. In my MM build I am playing the role of a support bunker while also controlling the most idiotic DPS teammates you’ve ever seen.
2) My build is just as if not more active than a lot of the other builds people run.
3) Its fun. It could be better designed and I’m all for it, but stop trying to get rid of it just because you don’t understand it.

What game mode?

Necromancers don’t just get tons of HP for free. We have, bar none (and by a lot), the worst active defenses in the game. Its not even a close comparison, we get HP, protection, offensive defense (the worst kind of defense as it has multiple points of counterplay), the base dodges, and then ways to get HP back. We have awful stability, no vigor, our blinks all require pre-activation setup, no blocks, no instant blinds, no invuln, no immunities, basically no true way to negate skill effects, just ways to lower the damage we take, and take a lot of damage. This is why Necromancers do so well in 1v1s, where face-tanking can actually work, and not in teamfights where we get looked at wrong and die because our defenses don’t remotely scale.

Also, if you look at the offensive side of Necromancer right now, it has nothing to do with our actual design, which is sustained offense. Power necro is only remotely viable because of Lich instaburst 17k AAs, and condi necro is only viable because of random fears and CB which allow us to condi spike a target.

So reduce the burst, increase some counterplay, and give actual sustained damage and defense, just like ANet has been saying was our design since forever.

Substance E.4852:

Two zergs of equal size and equal comp determine victory by commander and grunt skill. How is that “unballanced”?

Spvp will always have a set limit of team size be it 5 or a larger size for official GvG.

You are never going to have a “they beat us because they had more guys” issue in spvp.

WvW has no meaningful class balance at all. There is no way to force zergs to have equal balance or size, there is no way to force servers to have equal players, or to ensure that the quality of the players are fairly constant. Hell, even the maps aren’t balanced.

Forestgreen.7981:

WvW is the one mode where everyone’s builds/playstyle is MOST diverse. There are players who trait specifically for groups fight, people who go for solo, sniping, mobility etc. Yet they are ALL effective and work well. This is where balance is most fair at the moment, not in sPvP where its one build per class and nothing else works as well.

WvW zergs are dominated by 4 professions, hence GWEN, with a mesmer there to veilbot and maybe thieves on the side. Roaming is dominated by high mobility and dueling builds that stack as many broken mechanics as they can together.

This isn’t remotely better than PvP. The only thing that makes it “feel” better is the fact that I can run around on some random garbage build I threw together, kill some uplevels, and spam AoE on a zerg and feel like I’m contributing. It is far easier to hide your awful build when you have 49 people around you playing well, and hundreds of people on the separate maps and different time zones covering up for you, in a 5v5 that simply doesn’t fly.

They already released a TDM mode, its called Courtyard. And it was boring and awful and now the map is only used for 2v2/3v3s which have a set of rules because without that we’d all shoot ourselves when it takes an hour for a best of 3 to happen because both teams were bunkers slapping each other with wet noodles.

So we want the game to be “balanced” like WvW? WvW is the worst balanced game mode of all three, no thanks I don’t want things to be like that.

This is why build sites that rely on the community to determine what is good or not and make up builds has issues. Wish y’all the best of luck but there is a lot of work left.

Black Box.9312:

They don’t need to bother with all that. The game is combat-based, so base balancing on the combat interactions themselves. Team deathmatch would really be the only thing required for balancing. Once you can balance how two teams fight against each other, everything else would fall into place.

The lack of an objective makes a massive difference, and the nature of the objective if you have one matters a lot as well. Objectives will always matter and influence the nature of combat, you cannot just separate them.

Also, ANet has said dozens of times that they are making a new mode, I’m not sure why people appear to be unable to comprehend that when its sitting on the forums with a bright red mark next to it.

Balanced for what? You can’t say they are balanced without a game mode. They sure as hell aren’t balanced for anything deathmatch related, CTF wouldn’t be remotely balanced, frankly capture points (as much as people dislike them sometimes) are some of the only things keeping garbage like PU out of the game.

Yes, frankly he is quite far off. This DPS spreadsheet shows the numbers, and its by very trusted members of the community.

1) Pugs aren’t this magical land where everything is awful and people are all running dire gear. Most pugs I am in manage to maintain good might stacks, kill bosses relatively quickly, rarely ever wipe, etc. As long as every player involved knows what to do for the dungeon (or just plays follow the leader), are running meta builds (which generally aren’t hard to play either), and you don’t end up in like a 5 ranger group, the assumptions people use aren’t that crazy. Especially when you consider a single ele with the right build can maintain 21 stacks of might on the group, or a PS GS warrior which maintains the full 25, its not a crazy feat to hit the “ideal” situations in most dungeons. Especially if you are like me and just play that build yourself, in which case every dungeon group you ever have will have max might and fury.

2) Playing it “right” is an argument I won’t delve into too much, but essentially if you aren’t maxing out your DPS through every reasonable mechanic possible that’s on you. Its like refusing to re-bind your keys or some other nonsense. If he doesn’t want to run the dungeon as efficiently as possible that is his choice, he can take 1 hour doing something I’ll do in 10 minutes, and we’ll both be happy.

3) If you look at the linked chart, you’ll see Necromancers start off with sub 7k damage, then if you look through the various levels of buffs, the warriors hover around 2k DPS more than Necros in DPS builds. Meaning about a 20% difference in DPS across the board in DPS builds, while still bringing team support that will boost their allies’ DPS.

4) Its not “very ideal” to have a warrior that presses the button that drops banners, a ranger that summons a spirit and gets in combat, and one ele or warrior that provides 100% of the entire party’s might. Basically as long as you have one person that runs a might stacking build (which are very common) your “ideal scenario” is reality in the majority of dungeons.

The fact is Warrior DPS > Necromancer DPS in DPS builds, by a very noticeable amount, plus they bring team support in their most selfish builds. Hell, even Guang, famous for his “guangmaths” that people now use jokingly, knows that Necromancers just don’t compare DPS wise.

In almost every other team game I can think of (Dota 2, League, CSGO, CoD, etc.) where people can have different “builds”, its on the players to not make an idiotic comp, not the game. In League if you have 5 support mains on one team, they are expected to make it work, not kitten at Riot because they were incapable of simple communication. In FPS games if you are trying to snipe despite half of your team being snipers, its not the game’s fault when you get rolled.

The GW2 queue system gives players plenty of time to load into a map, check the team comps, talk to their allies really fast, and swap builds/professions if necessary. Part of the fun of soloQ is trying to make a stupid team comp work, if you want super pr0 MLG 420yolonoscope sponsored-by-Red Bull eSports teams, trying doing teamQ. That way you can blame your loss on “bad teammates” instead of a “bad comp”, because we all know its their fault

Conncept.7638:

I thought it was every two weeks, wouldn’t that make it next week?

Because:
1) These videos are in part about feedback. There is no way for them to receive and act on feedback when they’d only have 4 days if it was done next week.
2) The ToG signups started last week. As it is now these two professions are already really disadvantaged since no one knows the changes coming, so no team in a right mind would sign up with these professions right now. If they waited till next week, it’d be too late and both professions would be completely screwed (only desperate teams would take an uncertain pick like that), so by doing it this week they give teams time to figure out if they want to swap things up and take Necro/Guardian. Its not ideal, but its better than the alternative.

I mean, two guardians in a lupi run did 1.5 million damage in 2.8 seconds (yes it was abusing reflects), so 25k damage over 84 seconds isn’t particularly amazing.

Anyway, Condi Necro is fine for soloing, but your DPS just won’t compare in any kind of group setting unless your group is very… “special”.

Tadsoul.6951:

our damage output is similar to a warriors damage output here one of nemisis video showing this the damage difference is very little
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Toyhtj0HPU8&list=UUch1FHsuRgkBJkp5o2g2mmw
we also have an advantage of being able to range our target
also keep in mind warrior gs is also getting a damage nerf
the real problem is people think our damage sucks and also we have no group support

Nemesis’ videos on things like this were just… well wrong. DnT did a very large spreadsheet on all the PvE meta builds with the DPS they provide under various group buffs, and Necromancer is mid-tier DPS. Quite a bit below DPS warrior, about tied with a more support focused build (EA I think?) and above PS I believe. However those warrior builds that aren’t full DPS also bring far far more support than we could ever dream of.

35% uptime is very low when you have to use every single utility and heal for it. Protection also isn’t remotely unique to Necromancers, even in higher uptimes, rangers for example get 2s per dodge

Muchacho.2390:

I dont believe that, so a Link would be nice. Even if they think like that i doubt they would ever say something like that in our face.

The actual statement was that they are currently not working on any big changes to dungeons themselves (think the big rework that Aetherpath was, essentially a brand new path for a dungeon), just the small ones they’ve been doing recently. So basically don’t expect a brand new dungeon/path or any large reworks. This is because frankly dungeons aren’t really in line with the core themes the game promotes (doing community events out in the open world with friends and strangers alike).

No they didn’t. They said we’d have it first.

Nah, I’m fine with Lich as a concept, and 3/5 are actually potentially very useful for the build (just situational, which is fine considering its a DPS transform). It just needs its 18k in one shot damage reduced (this is an actual number, using air/fire/auto/chill of death which all proc off one hit potentially) and its 2/4 made actually niche instead of useless, plus some usability improvements to 1.

Overall though, its a cool concept, and is one of the few transforms that gives you a true feeling of power. You actually feel like a powerful lich for a few seconds if you use it correctly, and it has counterplay built in. It just needs some small changes.

Lich form needs work, both buff and nerf wise. Its basically worthless to ever use 2/4, and with the power increase to procs like Chill of Death, it deals insane damage. If they buffed/changed those two abilities, plus made the auto attack so it wasn’t so absolutely stupid to land, I’d happily accept them changing its power scaling so it didn’t throw out 5k CoD procs (or w/e ridiculous number it hits).

notsureifsrs.jpg

Its not the “necro condition” it was first introduced on Necros with suggestions as to what it should do from us. It was never a “necro condition” though.

Because mobility is not part of our design. Its like asking for Guardian to get a bunch of flat mobility (which they don’t have, their only decent mobility is towards targets or on weapon sets that have awful mitigation).

We are built to face tank, our profession’s theme is based on essentially face tanking, so give us the tools to face tank. I don’t want to play ele 0.5, I don’t want to be mesmer pt. 2, I want to be a Necromancer, which does not involve lots of mobility.