Guild Wars 2

Shakar.3485:

Furthermore, if anything in are history has shown us is that change is important for growth.

Change is important, when it matters. But simply changing skills, especially for example Flesh Wurm which is at least heavily considered in literally every meta tPvP build, makes no sense.

Shakar.3485:

I’ll start with well of darkness. My suggested change is targeting the fact that the necromancers combo fields aren’t used to their full effect. I’ll repeat myself, it is redundant to have a blind attached to a darkness field when it can be accessed by a blast finisher. Yes they are only a few blast finishers but i am sure it would not take long for people to build around the skill/combo field to make it the most effective.

Then just don’t use blast finishers on the field, which shouldn’t be an issue because you’ll never have finishers anyway. The only time this might be an issue is with Putrid Mark, and that isn’t enough to entirely gut a skill and replace its very useful functionality.

Shakar.3485:

Signet of locust was a shot in the dark for those wanna be vampires. I am not a fan of the cliche but from what i read vampire builds are hurting. This seemed like a good skill to address some issues with that build. I also think the 25% movement speed should be moved to the trait tree and the movement trait with the daggers and death shroud only should be completely removed/changed. Which is why i would change the passive.

Vampire builds need a hell of a lot more help than a single signet that isn’t commonly used on those builds anyway. If a signet is currently only taken for its passive, then you don’t change its passive. Same with the other way round.

Shakar.3485:

Consume corpse was added because i know how important and few ways necromancers have towards mobility/escape. In my mind i thought it would be cool, for instance, if our minions were considered corpses. Therefore we could still teleport to them (ie wurm) but it could be used alittle more often in a fight, depending on minions or dead npc mobs. Or something like targeting the flesh golem using his charge then consume corpse to him creating a distance for escape/mobility. Maybe instead of gaining health you can gain a certain buff based on the corpse you tele too. I don’t see it being a bad mechanic.

Corpse requirements and on-death are bad mechanics in general. Unfortunately we’re already stuck with on-death, lets not bring corpses back into the game. We will never get mobility either, because we’re not supposed to.

Not to mention Reaper’s Protection has a limited range and a proc that can be avoided by stability and Zerker stance.

What’s the point of making MM traits accessible to people not using minions? The key feature of our minions is a summonable quasi-permanent ally with an HP bar and AI. All of these effects are distinctly not-minion.

If you want to fix Axe, fix axe. If you want to fix X, fix X, don’t do a roundabout fix like this which doesn’t actually help the weapon. Basically all this does is make minion traiting better, which doesn’t need to happen with the exception of Necromatic Corruption. Also realize that if they ever take my advice and rework TotM to be a better designed trait that will put all this damage stuff down the toilet.

Kiriakulos.1690:

We really need a redesign for Signet of Undeath and Signet of Vampirism, they’re both broken in both passive and active effects.

Indeed, I think there are enough mechanics that DO need fixing we should worry about those :P

I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect when I opened this. 10/10

Shakar.3485:

Couple of ideals about certain skills.

*Bone minions – initial cast should be ground targeted. Why? Because it would make the skill more useful for the explosion (blast finisher) instead of waiting for minions to spawn and run to location.

This is fine, in fact doing this to all minions would be an interesting buff that I wouldn’t mind. Nothing huge, but lets the better MMs take small advantages.

Shakar.3485:

Bone minions already active – skill should grant bone minions the swiftness buff and rush target, upon reaching target explode, if no target selected then explode at area bone minions are at. Note: when skill is activated both minions rush at same time. No more one at a time and not knowing which one detonates first.

First off, no thanks on them both blowing up, that is a point of play/counterplay that is very important, and second off no running either. Just change this so the minion that blows up is the one closest to the target instead of the one closest to you (note, you always know which one will blow up right now, its never random). Running greatly increases the enemies ability to counter them, which artificially makes the skill weaker, it also makes it less skill to land it. They are basically a mix of a mantra and the elementalist arcane blast.

*Flesh Wurm – new active, ground targeted, wurm tunnels (instantly) to new location and knocks up enemies in small area of effect.

Current Wurm skill is far too good to ruin like this.

Shakar.3485:

*New skill (kinda) – Consume Corpse – ground target, teleport to corpse and heal.

The removal of corpse skills was a good one, lets let bad mechanics stay in GW1.

Shakar.3485:

*Plague Signet – passive, copy your current conditions to 5 enemies around you (icd: 5 seconds). Does not transfer amount of stacks or current durations. Would grant one stack and/or 5 seconds of duration. Active – remains unchanged.

Plague signet is basically fine as is already.

Shakar.3485:

*Signet of Locust – passive, steals health from up to 5 enemies around you every 10 seconds. Active – steals a larger amount of health from a single target.

The active needs to change off this, the passive is just fine, and in fact nearly required if you don’t have Traveler in some game modes.

Shakar.3485:

*Spectral Grasp – no longer a projectile, A ghostly hand appears at target, after a 1 second delay the animation of the hand closes around the target and then pulls him towards caster.

Make it 3/4s and we’re talking.

Shakar.3485:

*Well of Darkness – remove blind, change to Torment (stacks depend on length of time spent in the area of effect. Combo field of darkness and already having blind on the skill seems redundant to me. This way you can get more out it and if you need the blind you can still get it from the combo field.

No. WoD is again, just fine as is.

Shakar.3485:

Thoughts?

You’re trying to change too many things that don’t need changing at all. Change for the sake of change is not good (don’t fix what isn’t broken).

Making skills have multiple CDR traits would be problematic, not to mention procing death nova and having that much extra damage on all these skills would be a very strong passive buff to MM (you aren’t really playing different, just getting rewarded for it).

If you want to fix MM this isn’t the way to do it, and if you want to buff the weapons this also isn’t the way to do it.

All offhands are really well balanced atm, with the only big changes needed being blast finishers added for PvE, and Focus 5 getting a cast-time reduction to 1 second.

Live on http://www.twitch.tv/soacgaming

Hey guys, I’m getting food, and I’m going to farm PvE on my ele for a bit, and then I’ll be live in a few hours. I’d say maybe 2 to 3 hours from now unless something comes up. I’m planning to show off MM in tPvP soloQ.

Ropechef.6192:

save the broadcasts ocasionally. I may not alway be able to catch you live

I believe I have it set to save all broadcasts automatically, I’ll make sure it does that.

Necromancer needs a ton of work, but not large changes. The profession is so close to being the most diverse and well balanced profession out there, there are dozens of builds that are just below viable in PvP.

Death Shroud actively working against entire sets of our traits
Siphoning traits being undertuned
Multiple traits being absolutely worthless (renewing blast) due to bugs or weird issues
Lack of finishers
Needing slightly better sustain and less burst damage
Better ways to deal with CC
New weapons to open up support/bunker builds
New utilities and traits that offer unique team utility
Maybe some other stuff

Rangers and Mesmers also need a lot of help, followed by Engineers.

So I’m curious, what all would you guys like to see when I stream? I may be on tomorrow depending on how things go, I imagine most people who come in want to see me playing Necromancer, probably MM builds? Anything else, weird builds, how to PvE, WvW, what?

Because otherwise I’m just going to stream myself playing normally, and respond to chat, and that might be a bit boring for you :P

Wow, that’s rough.

SkiTz.4590:

Obviously they are working on something but 2 years and hardly any meaningful change to PvP? The team must be less than 5 guys working on actual PvP (features/balance, not artists)

Hardly any changes? Let’s ignore the maps for a minute (although they’ve added 4 conquest and 1 TDM), they’ve put in Custom Arenas, Spectator mode, the PvP build setup, completely revamped how you rank in PvP and the rewards you get including Reward Tracks, they implemented Leaderboards, put in soloQ, completely changed the teamQ setup (compared to the two different team queues that required tickets).

Hotjoins, the first three maps, and the very base mechanics behind sPvP are really the only things that haven’t changed since launch.

Where do you all find these terrible pugs? Even my groups with 4 guardians are all running zerker DPS builds.

Liewec.2896:

without specifics we will just get these vague “oh yeah we’re trying some stuff” cop-out responses with no action ever taken.

One of the last times they gave specifics they were talking about I believe custom arenas, which was then used against them every single day for months because they talked about it before it was ready for release.

If you don’t talk about anything people say you aren’t working on anything.
If you say you are working but not what you are working on people say its a cop-out.
If you say what you are working on but not when it will be released people will assume its coming out tomorrow and use it against you at every chance.
If you say what you are working on and when its being released (which is often impossible anyway) then you better hit that date or you are incompetent.

There is no way to win with players. My preference would be general ideas but without too many specifics. Also I’d much prefer they start putting up balance forecasts with the changes they plan to make (balance wise) before it comes out, like literally every other decent game in existence does, so they can get some feedback before they Dumbfire us again.

Mavarick.8076:

Does it need to be the active weapon being held or just equipped?

It uses whatever weapon you have out currently.

LordByron.8369:

Are you saying this game can t have Artificial Intelligence on bosses?
Because if people find safe sposts it means a hole in the AI.

As it is stacking but since the AI is so bad that we can t even call it AI, its legit.
Safe spots would be exploiting by the same definition anet already gave.
(attacking from a spot where opponent can t attack).

Artificial Intelligence doesn’t lead to there not being safe spots. Look at Dark Souls, a game in some ways comparable: active combat, dodge mechanic, bosses with extremely high damage. Dark Souls still had bosses whose AI could be exploited, in fact DS took the idea of skill far further than GW2 ever will because you could beat the game at level 1, by abusing AI.

The AI has to have holes, it doesn’t work otherwise. ANet can make the holes more difficult to exploit, make the game more punishing of not beating the AI, but at the end of the day they want an active skill-based combat system, and putting in arbitrary mechanics to punish skillful use of the mechanics (stacking uses the mechanics far better than not stacking does) makes no sense.

Hounds of Balthazar don’t generally run into issues because they don’t live very long, and they don’t have a secondary active that causes a lot of buggy issues. Almost all duration-gated summons do slightly better because they don’t have much time to screw up.

Loading.4503:

All they have to do is make any kind of pet just like the risens in Orr , cause apparently those risens will just follow anything that even looks like it will move and never go away

Minions, especially flesh golem, used to be insanely hyper aggressive. Trust me it was a massive pain in the kitten . He’d attack literally anything in sight, until it or he died, or he teleported back to you, and his leash range was almost half an sPvP map.

CSZTerence.1095:

Hi care to share your workaround? My main gripe with the Golem is that when I use its Charge attack it will travel the full length of its Charge — oftentimes ending up a fair distance away from its target — and then just stand there without moving until I disengage from combat. An ELITE skill as mechanically broken as this is incredibly frustrating.

I never found a satisfactory solution to this issue other than not using Charge and diligently leading mobs to within melee range of the Golem to make it fight. It’s a terrible pity, as the Golem really does good damage and tanks like a beast when it actually bothers to fight.

From your comment I assume its PvE, in which case I very sparingly use his charge. The AI currently bugs out over pathing issues, stuff like moving over terrain that he can’t and sending him a ways out with Charge are really prone to messing things up.

I’d suggest not using charge except against a wall, because it is a loss of DPS unless it is used as a gap closer for him, or it hits multiple times (like against a wall). Also try to not summon him if you don’t really need him when moving around a lot.

Hey guys, Bhawb here, I’m trying to get streaming working so I can stream on ocassion on my own channel at http://www.twitch.tv/bhawb and also on the http://www.twitch.tv/soacgaming main channel. Come and let me know how its all set up, I’m currently on my own channel, mostly going to screw around in PvE for a while.

Staff = Axe with Axe Training > anything else

They need to simply have a self-interrupt button that can be bound to something of your choosing, so you don’t need to use Escape for in-combat purposes. Although yes they could do a work around, its silly that they don’t just give us an interrupt button when we’re already doing it ourselves.

Halfcentaur.9706:

Minion master isn’t an esports build, and is frowned up generally. Therefore, Anet does not give a total kitten.

This isn’t remotely true; just because some people on the sPvP forums dislike MM builds doesn’t mean ANet doesn’t make any changes to MM. Death Nova has been buffed since launch, VM has had ratios added to it, as well as fixes to bugs that happened in that. Minions have had some improvements to AI (not in consistency, but when they do work it is much better than how things were at launch), a massive HP buff in PvE, plus indirect buffing via the DM minor reworks. There were also some minor QoL fixes like mobs in PvE not aggroing off of minions being nearby.

They haven’t fixed AI yet because they don’t know how to without breaking all AI in the game (all AI inherits from a singular source).

Signet of Rage is fine, the balance issues with warriors are more related to damage, cleansing ire with bow, and some of their immunities.

Flesh Golem (and all minions) have AI issues that need to be fixed, but you can generally work around them.

Its not a bug, its because Flesh Golem has no swimming animations. He and Flesh Wurm both used to be able to go in water, where they would basically just… float around, it looked really bad (although hilarious). They obviously didn’t have time to finish it up so they disabled it.

Jack Archer.2075:

OK yeah all of the scholars are spellbades, but a necro is more condi damage and less “Smack you with a sword” and more “Here’s some condi damage” Which leave ele and mes. A conjure ele would be nice, but conjure weapons seem weak to me, and mes to me just doesn’t feel right. I don’t like hiding behind allusions.

Dagger mainhand has exactly 0 condition damage involved in it. You can run Power Necro (although its arguably not viable at the very highest of competitive gameplay) and deal less condition damage than a D/D ele would have.

I can only assume by spell-blade you are referencing a magic-based profession that uses weapons, like a mix of melee and magic. In which case literally any of the scholar professions can fill that.

pmnt.4067:

@Bhawb: Okay, I silently assumed that the “sum of skills” is equally powerful on all classes, but with different weights on damage/condition/utility/support/etc. Do you think that a class compensates the lack of base stats by having overall better skills?

I think in some ways yes. Its not possible in my mind to directly draw the line between where base stats and profession mechanics end, and weapon/utility skills begin because of how innately tied together they are.

I think, based completely on my own speculations and I might be totally wrong, that it’d be weapon skills + profession mechanic + base stats = some standard of power. Most utility skills seem to have some consistency across professions, same with healing skills and elites, and of course traits.

Bombsaway.7198:

The problem with the OP is the definition of skill is very narrow. A warrior often thinks there is no skill getting crushed from range. Range think there is no skill face rolling in close combat. Etc. Etc.

AI is not mindless at all. A turret engineer, a MM and a ranger require you really know what you are doing to do it well. They are also easy to counter.

Skill is such a relative term. I play an engineer with 3-4 kits. I wonder if I have to be more “skilled” than a player who only has 2 weapons and a couple utilities. (Play other classes so the answer is no). It is just a different type of skill mate.

Very much this.

Does MM require the mechanical skill that people think of when they think skill? No. But it takes a unique skill to be able to not only track your own positioning, but the positioning of 5 of your pets at once, along with their HP (which you can only track by sight atm), and understanding how to play with that while doing all of your own skill management. Its like playing a support build where all of your allies are absolutely braindead.

Jomo kenyatta.7351:

Back when guild wars 2 came out and for quite a while after, bunker use to mean high survivability and low damage, but now it seems like a few classes are gaining the ability to bunker but still being able to do significant damage. i really think this isnt balanced and especially for the only pvp mode capture points survivability is crucial for holding the capture points but then being able to do damage on top of that makes for really boring games. its time bunkers were bunkers and damage dealers were damage dealers

There are multiple “bunker” builds. The ability to bunker in this game simply says you are able to sit on a point and hold it relatively well. However there are multiple types of bunkers, ranging from bunkers that can really only 1v1 and are relegated to side points, and bunkers that can bunker 5v5 teamfights. A 1v1 bunker doesn’t need a ton of tankiness, they need a mix of damage and tankiness, which means they will deal relatively decent damage over time (nothing compared to a full zerker build though), whereas a teamfight bunker doesn’t need to deal any damage, they just need to not-die and bring support to the team.

So no, bunkering shouldn’t mean you deal no damage. You need to clarify whether we are talking about teamfight bunkers (which deal low damage) and side-bunkers which are a mix between DPS and tankiness.

Remorhas.2963:

Yes but the field doesnt last 1, as long and ,2 has as much radius,also with a trait the necro can also give everyone protection when in that well.

It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t last long, Thief can spam it almost forever (I’m not sure if they can actually perma field), compared to just 6 seconds on a CD. And you can’t afford that trait if you want to not start gimping your own DPS.

pmnt.4067:

Updated the OP with that answer

I just used toughness/vitality as reference how I calculated the attribute cost of the class mechanics. It’s not only about survivability though. I just used the attribute points as measurement of how powerful the class mechanics are (or should be) compared to each other. For example: Are attunements really twice as powerful as the toolbelt skills?

Translating mechanics into raw stats can be a helpful tool for balancing. Somewhere in a balancing discussion a dev said that a GM trait is/should be worth about 300 attribute points. With the trait updates we see that exact number ingame: XIII: Force of Will: +300 Vitality.

With things like traits they should be held to a certain standard because they are balanced according to each other, not to the base mechanics.

For example, lets assume every profession needs to have 1000 units of base stats. This is the sum total of all the components that make up the profession, things that are hard-wired into the profession both tangible things like stats and profession mechanic, and intangibles like their access to boons/conditions. For Necromancer this is the base vitality/toughness totals, Death Shroud/Life Force and the related skills, the very high access to conditions of all kinds and ways to manipulate them, weak mitigation of damage, and low/selfish access to only a few select boons. Because without all those things summed together, every profession has different totals, for example Elementalists as you showed would have a lot of “strength” tied up in just their access to more weapon skills, when in fact their “strength” is tied up in their massive utility, DPS, support, etc.

So once a profession has its 1000 base stat units, it can be considered complete as a base. It has its own unique base that while different in use from another, is still balanced in overall power (in theory). Then comes in weapons and utilities, all of which should be balanced against each other within the class and against some overall unit total. You can arbitrarily assign some units to each and every one of the same type should reach that total. Traits are the easiest place to see this because they are quantified already, for example GM minors are around 180 or a 10% conversion. But you have to be sure you are quantifying everything that is involved in a certain total.

In your example, I’d use base stats, and then everything else, profession mechanic itself along with their things like boon access, because they draw from the same “base profession strength” pool.

Pregnantman.8259:

With Well of Power you could have cleansed the poison and break your stun. Its l2p.

10/10

Souldestructor.9576:

also everyone’s thought on Spiteful Vigor should be a Vigor and not Retal? Spiteful Soul is what it should have been called.

We won’t get vigor. The retal isn’t all that great either in its current form either though, and I’m not sure what to put there. If it was AoE retal that could be good, otherwise I’d probably just axe the trait and put in something new.

You can’t prevent stacking just by getting away from a wall. Howling King in AC, for example, isn’t always pulled against a wall (although it does help), you can just stack up on top of him. Even mechanics like the guy in SE who puts fire on everybody doesn’t stop stacking because the benefits of you stacking are worth the detriment of taking the damage.

You need to make the benefits of stacking, with all of the additional buffs, healing, etc. not worth the danger. And frankly in a game that is supposedly all about skill you should be able to stack if your team has built for it and can do it skillfully (think Spider Queen).

People are trying to remove stacking by putting in mechanics that have absolutely nothing to do with skillful play, and just having a boss that refuses to stack despite that being how GW2 was obviously designed to be played with the combo system.

While I understand the idea of ranking things with numbers (its something interesting to do in more simple games) I think profession mechanics using vitality/toughness is too simplistic to really capture the idea.

For example, Necromancer does not only pay 290 points for Death Shroud and its related mechanics, they pay 290 points, plus tying for worst mobility in the game (with Guardian), and having literally 0 ways (not including base dodge mechanic) to re-actively negate damage. So you don’t just give up the toughness compared to warriors, you give up a lot of mitigation.

Similar can be said of other professions, the give/take of the base mechanics of every profession are more complex than just giving up a bit off the vitality/toughness max for whatever profession mechanic they have.

Spectral Wall is just fine, or do I need to link you the video of the guy who 1v50’d a zerg with it?

The devs care about every single profession, thinking otherwise is absolutely silly. ANet wants the best for this game, and that includes the best balance for every profession, this is not just their job, its what they live and breath all day every day. You can disagree with the changes they make, because they aren’t always right, but saying they specifically dislike certain professions, professions THEY made is just dumb.

Gaining regeneration is worthless as a minor, we have easy access to 100% regen uptime on ourselves and allies if we want to already.

If you got rid of every build that took the same amount of skill as AI builds you wouldn’t be left with many builds, and we’d lose the entire Warrior profession.

In WvW I’d only use Rabid except for solo roaming where it and Carrion are basically even. In PvE I’m not actually sure, I think it depends more on what you are doing, but I think in PvE with the higher stat cap and the presence of things that can better boost your damage (via toughness and on-crits) it might be better.

But generally I’d say they are mostly equal and more down to preference.

Swamurabi.7890:

Bhawb, Is there anyone YOU know of at Anet that DOES know about Necros?

Sharp seemed to at least read the forums, but I don’t know of anyone that knows Necros very well, which is true of all professions (although I think Necromancer has more weird interactions than most of the others) since ANet probably doesn’t “main” any profession like the players do (where they have thousands of hours in game, plus spend time on the forums/wiki/reddit interacting with others).

manveruppd.7601:

@Bhawb, to be fair to Peters, the “Putrid Mark going on full CD when it’s interrupted is intentional” statement was Tyler Chapman. And yes, it was a shameless lie right to our faces and it still irks me. Up until then I had so much trust in ANet!

Oh okay, my bad then.

spoj.9672:

In fairness they dont really have a solid grasp of any class (understandable to a certain degree as they dont have the same amount of play time as some of us). But as far as im aware none of the balance team mains a necro so they dont risk buffs as much as they would on the other classes.

I don’t think they don’t risk because they don’t play Necro, but because Necro is (except in PvE where they don’t balance anyway) very close to being great already. We don’t need many big buffs, and a lot of the things we are really lacking can’t be added through buffs, we need new content. Also they’ve still got a bit of fear of closed beta Necro, because our mechanics can very quickly get out of hand.

The Primary.6371:

Why bother…it only affects 4 skills and even if it does get implemented. How large enough of an impact would it be? (Rhetorical question btw)

It isn’t like its going to throw Necromancers into #1 spot where we’re seeing 5 man Necro teams in all content. It is just about making small changes here that combined pull the Necro up, in a balanced way, into viability.

It makes no sense to be only 15%, all 2h weapon-set CDR traits are 20%, they affect the exact same number of skills, and are placed in the same trait area. Its just like the Staff Mastery trait.

I wouldn’t put it in as a condition, I’d keep it as an unremovable debuff to be used on a few select utility/elite skills, mainly on Mesmer/Necromancer (maybe thief?) that makes it so a target is unable to receive boons for X seconds. No stacking.

@manver, lets be honest though, Peters has on multiple ocassions shown he has no idea what he’s talking about when it comes to Necro. This is the guy who told us to l2p because DS should be saved for when you are low HP, the guy who said it was intended that marks go on full CD when interrupted because they are some of hte strongest skills in the game, the one who said making Weakening Shroud’s weakness duration one second longer would be too strong because what if you spam flash DS.

I’d just change the trait completely though. Make the might stacking completely different, like might on crit.

Oh wait, I just realized if they fixed Death Shroud to match the tooltip, we’d be able to heal through DS since isn’t listed in the tooltip.