(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Because PvE doesn’t remotely fit with their idea of Necromancer. How do you have a slow, attrition, condi based profession fit into a game mode that is literally the opposite in every way.
Curious, could you post a build using soldiers or sentinels or even nomads if you want? Are you talking about a well build or a spectral build.
You can make both, although the well one will still probably use a spectral, and spectral is slightly stronger. http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNBmQDbkjmebbtx2G+bTcMUST3GZAcAUOFA-TJxHwACeCAh2fYZZAAXEAA note that swapping in the new set that has healing power instead of power would make this even tankier. The left out traits were fairly unimportant traits that you could use depending on your own preferences, I’d go with soul marks + staff traiting if you don’t need the reduced DS CD. But you’ve got a ton of protection uptime, you effectively heal for pretty huge amounts through life force (just Grasp “heals” you for 4k per use), and even though Unholy Sanctuary is not a great trait, it still ends up giving you tankiness here, so for this rare occasion its worth.
They can only do so much in a single change. Reality is that Necromancer becoming viable in dungeons will take a lot more work than they can realistically do in one patch, while also doing absolutely nothing for PvP, which lets be honest is a much more focused on area of balance.
yes.. i do have Focused Ritual trait selected. is that the reason ? when i have Spiteful Vigor selected i do see the retaliation bonus written in blue in the Well of Blood tooltip, but didn’t know Focused Ritual bugging it.
Most likely it is the reason. Traits that modify how skills work simply change out one skill for a nearly identical skill but with the trait affecting it. In this case the tooltip works but the trait itself does not.
All of the art I’ve ever seen was very similar to them in game. It looked better of course, but it wasn’t that big of a change.
So what you’re saying, is that all I have to do to “prove” that Necromancer is bad and needs buffs is to play my casual 0/0/0/0/0 rampager staff (no other weapon, staff 2gud) build a few thousand times and then take a screenshot of my 10% winrate. Because for all we know that’s exactly what you’ve been doing, playing a garbage build badly and aren’t capable of having a higher winrate.
This doesn’t prove anything, except that you are just a casual player who obviously hasn’t reached the skill cap of the profession.
There is a single skill that triples the DPS of two players in a group; that isn’t balanced. This isn’t just a matter of making bosses trivial (which it does do), this isn’t a matter of it taking skill (because in many cases it takes absolutely no skill), this is the fact that one skill is completely dominating the entire game mode.
Why would they have hair? Why would a shadow fiend not look like a shadow? Why would they be buff?
Frankly their design makes perfect sense as is. Shadow Fiend is a creature summoned from a different dimension, and the rest are golems of flesh cobbled together from whatever happens to be around, and loosely fashioned into the shape of other life forms (probably because its simpler that way, since you know the anatomy will work out). My only issue with them is they could look a bit grosser, and their current… shiny textures are a bit strange, they should be more earthy looking.
Other than that, gimme skins. For the love of god I will pay so much money if you release skins for minions.
To be totally clear: the order of boon application + length of remaining boon duration + rarity of boon are all irrelevant?
Yep.
Reduce the cast time on LB and its damage/scaling to compensate. You don’t need every single ability to be good for every single build.
The issue isn’t celestial, its the ease with which professions (like ele) can stack might without any realistic counterplay. Most might stacking is done without any interaction between you and the target; you can stack might just as effectively completely alone as you can against an enemy. This means that no matter what your enemy does, no matter what skills they avoid, you are stacking might. Pair this with how badly might is prioritized by boon removal abilities (for example, Corrupt Boon is the only Necromancer removal which will always remove might, every other removal has might in the bottom half of the list, meaning it will be incredibly rare to remove), and you end up having builds which can stack might without interacting with their enemy, and re-stack might extremely easily on the rare chance that it is removed.
What does this lead to? It leads to 0/0/2/6/6 builds being not just incredibly tanky and supporty due to celestial stats and their traits, but also able to still deal very high damage through relatively “free” stats via might. The obvious solution would be to nerf might stacking both directly, through forcing you to actually successfully interact with your opponent to build might, and indirectly through raising might to a reasonable priority on removal skills.
No, you can make a Necro that won’t die. You just won’t do anything else, whereas others will.
Necro need a leap or something to get out of bad situation. Roaming with a necro is pretty frustrating, you can’t run of zergs or bigs roaming groups, just wp if you want to live.
Flesh Wurm. Reality is Necros can’t have flat easy mobility, its not for our profession. Does this mean we will have issues roaming? Sure, but roaming isn’t a balance point.
At 900HP (for example), the passive heal would be 415 (325 + HP * 0.1). A hit of 1000 (for example) would be mitigated 33% by protection down to 666, whereas the same 1000 hit offset by a 415 heal is 41.5% mitigation.
Its context dependent, so the 1 sec ICD must be figured in along with the average dmg per hit in order to determine which is better mitigation in a given circumstance.
I used SoV for the first time last night and was quite impressed by how well it worked for me in PVE.
That’s… exactly what I said. Even with high healing investment, the break-even point is extremely low, getting hit with one 1k attack every second is incredibly rare, even my cleric MM without a single minion up can nearly reach that break even point.
SoV is a healing signet that requires you to get hit every second perfectly on the second to have similar HPS. Its just… not good, not to mention that a passive heal already exists in blood fiend. This skill needs to have an ICD per attacker, it needs an active rework, and frankly if it actually siphoned health that’d be great to give it a niche (a retal-like effect to stack with retal).
In a build with high healing power, I’d almost certainly use it as a utility. It offers more damage mitigation than protection in alot of cases.
It only offers more than protection if the hit is less than 1400 damage, and you get hit at most once a second, with 1400 healing power.
On all the pro necros out their what needs to be changed that power builds are valiable in tPvP?
For zerker we lack good non-Lich burst and the ability to actually stay alive well (either the ability to be a fake-thief and go in and out, or the in-fight sustain)
For more tanky setups we lack… anything besides not dying. We don’t have particularly good CC compared to say hambow, we don’t have good ways of dealing high damage while being tanky, we lack support, etc. We can be tanky, but we don’t do much else.
So basically, we need more true support and CC weapons, we need either burst or a bit better of consistent sustained DPS, and we need either the defensive sustain to stay in fights or the ability to go in and out better.
So, first I was going to say it’d be really strong, maybe too strong, but then I noticed guardians just have a flat -10% incoming damage.
But anyway, I think it should stay as a heal and simply get a bit of a rework. It needs something to noticeably differentiate it from Blood Fiend, since right now they are both (awful) passive heals.
As above, not engaging too early really helps, also trying to not summon your minions when you don’t need them is good. Although honestly I was playing two days ago and I’m not sure if I wasn’t paying close enough attention or what but I didn’t have any issues. I’ll try to see if there are any tricks, like getting them to port to you, that help.
Necro issue isn’t being tanky, I can make a tanky build that will be extremely difficult to kill pretty easily. The issue is having that tankiness and not being worthless.
I’d have to test it more to be 100%, but it appears as though condition removal works the same as boons, each removal skill has built in priorities. Its just slightly weird, since, for example, bleed seems to always be removed by Shrouded Removal before poison, but like 1/10 times the poison is removed, even when nothing else changes about the application.
Out of morbid curiosity, are conditions always ordered the same way on the server? Is it by timer, by stack height, or by type?
Not sure what you mean? Like do they appear in the same order on your UI?
This is power creep incarnate. You can’t give a profession access to 15 brand new skills as a complete baseline change. Even if you can’t use them at the same time, you still have access to 16 non-AA CDs that you can cycle through. Not to mention this heavily intrudes on elementalist toes.
I’m not sure that corpses themselves have to return, although that is possible as well. You could have a skill that inflicts a target (or targets) with an irremovable debuff that spawns something on death, jagged horror technically does this too, you could have skills that spawn minions when they hit an enemy, skills that summon a minion with no secondary active, it just summons more minions (to a max), there are a lot of ways you can bring back the idea of the “army” that we used to have.
The key point for this game is that the minions need counterplay either in their damage/utility (via focusing on actives) or on their summoning (if you can somehow prevent it). Also the MM needs to do more than just summon minions. In GW1 the whole point wasn’t just spamming minions, but also making sure you micro’d death nova and/or various other things on them. There needs to be at least some kind of play with the minions, further than summon and forget.
Also all of that could arguably dip heavily into Mesmer/clone territory, unfortunately.
So as they said in another thread, they wanted to see how the top players in teamQQ used it before rolling it out to the rest of the queues.
Its entirely possible that Mesmer is different, but if order mattered then we wouldn’t have gotten consistent removal priorities, which we did (and we did test different orders).
However, it is worth noting that Focus was pretty much totally random. Even using the same two skills to apply boons and just swapping back and forth between which was cast first, it was still random.
Did you ever look into how the boons were applied? As in gw1 worked on a first in last out system and I suspect that gw2 does something similar as it is a modified engine. However, some boons stacking in duration is what makes it complicated to test.
It’s been a long time since I actually tested this on a mesmer but I recall the order that the guardian shouted his boons become important for which one I removed on shatter.
According to our tests, no. We used a large variety of skills and orders of application over the course of our testing, and the only time we had weird issues was with Focus 5, which seemed to be fairly random in its removals.
I don’t think they should change how minions work with small exceptions (I don’t think they should do anything without you “forcing” them to through attacking an enemy), BUT if they want to try to recreate the GW1 playstyle, I think they should do it through adding new skills/weapons/traits/etc. to support it. As long as it is a healthy addition to the game, I’m all for expanding minion playstyles, and if they go the route of additions and not replacements or reworks, there is no reason they can’t add playstyles that are a bit more niche.
-1000/10 idea. Removing Flesh Golem as an elite is a horrible idea. If you want new elites, simply add new elites, there is absolutely no reason to replace an amazing elite.
Power creep is a very real and bad thing.
No. 6-0 utility places HAVE to be reserved for future Death Shroud skill expanding.
Non-DS utility cooldowns should have their counters above the utility skill bar.
Having more skills added to DS is a huge power creep, one I hope never happens and realistically probably won’t.
Then again so do a lot of players, I’ve soloed a lot of content on my zerker necro while all the other “uber” classes were laid flat out on their backs watching the spectacle of a zerker necro smash face and rez 4 team members.
We aren’t optimal compared to other options but the factor will always be the player.
The other argument would be that if you did that well on a Necro, you would have done even better on another profession.
“As this functionality is intended for high-end, skilled players at the top tier of PvP, this option will work only in Team Arenas and Custom Arenas that allow Tournament Commands.”
Reading OP
So first off about, sustain, they lowered VM’s life stealing because it was bugged and not scaling with healing power. So they reduced the siphon by 10% but allowed healing power to scale, overall it was pretty neutral of a change.
As far as Necromantic Corruption: the issue is there is absolutely no control over it and it competes with Death Nova. People really seem to underestimate just how hard death nova puts in work.
Death Nova:
Directly punishes enemies for mindlessly killing minions, because the 1.2k damage (or so) can really add up
Self-combos with every commonly used minion except Flesh Golem
With simply Bone Minions, gives you 100% poison uptime (far more, actually) and 50% (ish) weakness uptime, due to how quickly it stacks poison and since Putrid Explosion self-combos for blast on the poison fields.
Gives you access to on-demand poison fields, something extremely powerful for downed-pressure on a profession that has very bad stomping
Basically, Death Nova pulls MM builds together, giving a massive boost to the attrition they want (this trait is a major reason why MM is one of the only real attrition builds necros have).
Necromantic Corruption on the other hand… removes boons sometimes, and purely randomly. Sure rarely it might completely strip a save yourselves, but most of the time it’ll just remove regen over and over. This isn’t just bad for the Necromancer, who can never choose when to spike boon removal, but also for the enemy, who has no counterplay besides… never getting hit. My suggestion is it modifies all minion active skills (similar to how the engi elite trait works), giving them boon-stripping related functionality on the actives only.
For example:
Putrid Explosion removes 1 boon per enemy hit
Haunt steals one boon off the target (only the target, since he is technically AoE, and works like Thief steal where it doesn’t mirror the duration but uses a set duration) and applies it to the Necro
Rigor Mortis removes one boon per shot (note, this could either mean two boons total, one for each volley, or four, one per individual shot)
Charge steals one boon per enemy hit and applies it to the Flesh Golem (same as Haunt, it works off a set duration, and only applies once per enemy, not once per time they are hit)
Note that all the above can be changed around as necessary, you can make them more “generic” as just 1-2 boons removed per skill, but I think it makes for far better play/counterplay patterns if it is centered around active skills, since those should be the main focal points of the interactions between an MM and opponent. I also highly suggest the same thing apply to Training of the Master, changing it from a passive damage boost to adding certain effects to the minion actives.
Reducing its channel time to 2 seconds instead of 3.5 effectively reduces its CD, and I think is a fair change as its also makes it not so bad of a DPS loss to use.
Honestly, it wouldn’t take much for me to ditch VM. The only real reason I take it right now is that the other options are CtD which doesn’t do that much for me (doesn’t affect minion damage), and a bunch of Curse/SR traits that also really don’t add much. If I could drop it for a Spite trait that really upped my damage nicely, or had something like that, I would.
In group play if a zerker build is ever out damaged by a condi build the zerker player either fell asleep or doesn’t know how to play. 10k DPS on a zerker build is pretty reasonable in group play (in fact its fairly low for a few builds), and yet to get 10k DPS in a condi build with 2k condition damage, you need to stack 70 bleeds. Even if you include burning (828 damage), poison (284), torment (214 while moving), you’d need to be able to maintain 25 stacks of bleeding and torment, and have permanent poison and burning, all on your own (assuming they allowed you your own stacks) just to match a lower DPS point than the “top” power builds reach.
There are two major things they need to fix: re-doing boss HP/armor so they maintain the same eHP but with higher armor so that condition builds have fairly equal DPS, and make it so a warrior’s 50 DPS 2s bleed doesn’t overwrite a Necro’s 140 DPS 20s one. That would at least allow groups to have one or two (depending on what conditions they use) condi builds per group without hurting them. And improving condis in “casual” speed runs is honestly a great starting point.
I was happy with the adrenaline changes but upset with the weapon changes.
hammer – untouched
longbow – untouched
These are NOT all the changes. All the previews are are just what they say: previews. They are the changes ANet felt would be best for discussion, but some changes that are “no brainers” were not included.
I am known for playing and liking minions, it doesn’t mean I only play minion builds or only like them. I don’t like condi builds for group PvE because its awful, it doesn’t mean I never play condi.
Its legal reasons. I’m not 100% sure of the reasons why, but its this case for pretty much everything remotely similar.
I’ve tried on death because you are forced to by certain trait trees. I’m forced to play with Parasitic Bond in most builds I play, I used to be forced to use Reanimator. It hasn’t changed my opinion.
The swap thing was borked way back when rage sigils used to not be garbage. This is like, september 2012 I think.
I’m fairly certain that was sarcasm, if not I’ll go ahead and say it’d still be awful.
On-death traits are just bad. I put up with Death Nova because it was amazing before they added Reanimator into it, and so its just a little w/e addition sometimes. But purely on-death traits are not a good mechanic for this game. Notice how the few on-death sigils are literally never used. If the thing is procing often enough to matter you’ll win anyway without it, and if they don’t proc… well yeah. Its the same reason people don’t take stacking sigils in PvP, or why people don’t buy Mejai’s or Sword of the Occult in League, its too high risk if it doesn’t work (wasted slot) and the reward is a slightly faster win.
On death either needs to greatly increase what it can proc on, or simply be reworked.
The no-swapping came way before they fixed cliff jumping, and it was an unintended bug that became a feature. So unless they changed their minds, it will not be fixed.
The comparison wasn’t “GS was nerfed so Necro should be” it was “adrenaline was nerfed so life force should be”. And I can guarantee all of those warriors used adrenaline.
Seriously though, the OP of this thread themselves specifically stated it was just a sarcastic joke, and now its blown into this big debate. Let it go (cue music).
I think it all comes down to dagger having limited real use for dagger 2. If you’re kiting, or someone is kiting you and you’re out of options, or they may go into stealth, it’s totally useful. But it isn’t a big damage dealer or heal so people don’t like it. The thing I’m not getting, is that outside of WvW, axe really isn’t in a better spot at all.
A limited use in zerker builds maybe. It isn’t supposed to burst, if it did that it’d be completely OP for healing you for 2k (base, I can get a close to 3k heal) at the same time. I find it funny that people are now coming out to hate dagger 2 when it is the definition of helping our attrition by allowing us to heal without losing offensive pressure.
If you want to burst use wells, dagger is not supposed to be a burst weapon and it never will be, nor should it be with how much built in sustain it allows.
There are multiple issues with this:
1) The original counterplay to an MM was simply not allowing them to not build up their army, which depended on corpses. Corpses overall were a pretty kitten mechanic too, since it inherently limited the spec to only being viable in PvE/large PvP. In this game, it’d quite literally be awful in everything except mid-scale WvW (5-10 people).
2) The other piece of counterplay was that the MM had to build their entire build around minions, with at best 2-3 skills that weren’t minions. You needed the minion heal, you probably needed another heal or two at least just to not suicide, you needed an elite minion skill, and then at least 2-3 minion skills, and you needed death nova unless you were a baddie. At best this left you with 1 skill to use for other things, usually more support or a tiny bit of damage to help you build up the minions.
3) This game simply doesn’t like the kind of combat that MMs promoted. You essentially ignored your opponents, and instead everything was self focused micro. You had to keep 10 minions alive through healing/raising them, you had to make sure to micro death nova if you wanted any reasonable damage, you had to be full MM, otherwise minions and their skills were absolutely useless, basically it is everything this game doesn’t want to be.
If you want army-type minion combat then it needs to be active, it needs counterplay from the opponent, and it needs to be reasonably accessible in all game modes.
They work in all (at least of ours) transforms, including DS. Only signets don’t.
All I see is a kitten warrior who can’t handle the fact that he can’t smash his face on the keyboard anymore.
How about this, when we get vigor, blocks, invulns, a skill that completely fills our DS bar while also making us half-immune to damage, healing signet, massive damage, tankiness, and CC all in one weapon loadout, amazing team support, great might stacking, amazing mobility, and every other mechanic that warrior gets, then we can talk about LF degenerating.
Everyone does realize that light vs heavy armor is a 5% mitigation difference right? Its not like having heavy armor suddenly = tank and light = squishy (lol D/D ele).