Guild Wars 2

Poison is a really big deal. If you don’t want to swap out anything big because you feel the rest of your build is doing well, then pick up Doom sigils, which give you 60% poison uptime (with 0% condi duration) if you have two of them.

Otherwise we’d need to know your build.

Put something in the game that reduces all direct damage and non condition CC by 40% and see which of the two foods people prefer.

ParadoX.3124:

what we see is that nearly 75% of dps from these kinds of build come from adds whose not depending on the player skill.

I’m sorry, you say Spirits do 75% of the DPS? I’d love to know how.

thief

Axe isn’t 900 range

Greatsword? Make it a melee condi cleave weapon. LF generation that scales per person hit, a leap that cripples, some poison. Then either make it a more damage focused weapon with things like torment and bleed, or more support/CC/tanky focused with weakness and chill; just depends on the niche you want it to fill, damage or support/control.

Honestly there are tons of weapon ideas that people have listed, ranging from absolutely full-chub inducing to meh but a few cool ideas.

Sors Immani.8429:

Hammer necros.

Only comment about the weapon set is that its split between power and condi, and weapons that do this tend to end up bad at both. I’d just push it to be a CC power weapon and let something like greatsword do a melee cleaving condi set.

In PvE they need to work off multipliers, and it wouldn’t be off your condition damage stat it would be off the damage they are actually dealing. In other game modes this could be realy problematic to introduce, but in PvE it’d just be a matter of making conditions able to keep up with power.

ProtoGunner.4953:

But since NCSoft prohibited to introduce Cantha it’s very unlikely. But well… maybe in 6 years ^^

Since when?

I think Zombify and his double necro team that won a tournament (one of the weekly ones IIRC) recently would have something to say about this. As much as there are still a few problems with the profession, you can make it work in high tier PvP. There has always been a group of players playing necro at high tier when everyone else says they aren’t viable.

Now, we still have problems, especially if you’re playing anything but condi, but saying that its objectively not enjoyable is a huge stretch.

Ozzy Toxin.3074:

I say no to minions working through ds minion master is already a pain in the backside for minimal effort… the meat shields + fast lf generation from all the pets combined with all the healing they generate would be over the top.

Minions give fairly low healing through vampiric master, this wouldn’t really do anything about the build, it needs completely separate work.

Spoj The Second.7680:

Ele is where its at.

I definitely don’t have an ele that’s almost 80 for just this reason… cough.

Rykdean.6253:

Hey Bhawb, what are the traits/skills you use in this build?

In my terror build?

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAW7Yjc0UebvN22wfbighSyWoDi+ACgzlyvIKA-TRxYwAAU+9T9n57PIS3wClgkCAipRA-e

That’s basically it. You can change Hemophilia to Weakening Shroud, Greater Marks to Reaper’s Protection, and Spectral Mastery to Path of Midnight, all are just choices. Also the runes can be swapped around a bit at will, same with sigils (which I didn’t list because I still haven’t really properly gotten my own yet), dagger offhand, and you can even change the 20 DM to 20 Spite if you want. Its just how you want to make the build work for you.

I was under the impression it should remove Aegis always no matter how many boons are there (by having aegis as the #1 priority), but be blockable by non-boon blocks.

Now, whether it actually does that…

I personally play Rabid terror necro with a lot of boon removal and perplexity runes for roaming and small group stuff. There isn’t enough condi hate until you hit organized zergs, and the ability to instantly spike players down with fear chains/CB/path of corruption is all really nice.

But in big zergs wells/plague are the way to go.

spoj.9672:

WTB burst skill on dagger 2. :P

Like axe 2? :P

Honestly, I don’t mind dagger as an overall weapon, its just not designed with PvE in mind. I love it on my minion builds where I can get stuck into combat and get all the sustain it gives.

We just need a weapon that specifically alleviates our PvE (at least weapon-based) issues. Something with cleave, something that let us debuff meaningfully (weakness, vulnerability at least), and has at least a bit of LF generation. If it also had something like an Aura for utility on the 4/5 or something that’d be awesome too. I think they actually need to sit down and say “why aren’t people taking Necromancers much in PvE, and what weapon can we make to fix some of that” (since I don’t think they can fix our utility issues fully on a weapon).

10/10 post

Meglobob.8620:

2) The 5 death shroud skills, I think 4 are useful to good. The exception is the no 5 skill, everytime I use it it seems to do hardly any damage, like 40 or less, its not even worth pressing the 5 button to trigger it, your better off to continue blasting away with the no 1 auto attack skill.

The 5 skill is heavily based around landing the end of the chain, which gives a decent duration immobilize and a fair bit of damage. Other than that its just guaranteed torment application in AoE.

spoj.9672:

Every class has some reliable way to deal with their weakness. Necro seems to lack in that department.

And weakness to CC is not specifically listed as a class weakness. Our weakness is to being bursted by teams because we have no ways to escape or negate damage, and only have some (weak) mitigation via things like weakness/protection and DS. Our weakness to CC is derivative of our weakness to losing a match quickly and being unable to access our sustain.

Necromancers are supposed to be weak to burst, to get us out of the fight before we sustain, and our lack of mitigation. CC is only our weakness because we don’t have stability, not because we’re designed to be so. Every single time they talk about Necromancers they talk about sustaining through fights, about being in-fighters. The most important tool to this is a way to ignore CC for small windows.

Is stability on locust signet the way to go? Not sure. But we need stability if we want to be realistic about making attrition work. So its even more than spoj says, we aren’t just the only profession without mechanics to deny one of our weaknesses (for a duration on a CD), we have a weakness to something we really shouldn’t even.

I got to rank 60 by going 9-3 in soloQ, so its fairly easy to get top ranks with a win streak.

To show teamQ:
53 zastari.1730 Ratizas 14 4 77.78% Maguuma

So going 14-4, only 18 games total, to get 53. Now, the vast majority of players in the top have hundreds or a thousand+ games, but its still technically possible.

PvE its plenty effective, in that you won’t die, and in WvW it can be very strong because you’ll get a lot of steal from wells in zergs.

That said, its never really an optimal build. In PvE you don’t need the extra sustain, and you lose out on damage, and in zergs you get plenty of LF gain to cover your defenses. It might be a good build to use to solo camps in WvW, but that’d be it imo. You can play it for fun, but not to min/max.

Using this with any ability that you want to be close range for is good, its a really cool trick to guarantee abilities land that might otherwise miss.

You don’t need to play 5 hours a day to be on the leaderboards. Find a build you can play well (too many people swap builds every 2 games), and learn the strategy and its easy to stay up there. The issue is too many people either can’t perform their build well or have no idea how to move across the map.

Liewec.2896:

i always found it strange that necro dagger doesn’t cleave.
as the OP said, every other profession has the ability to cleave in melee (and most of them are alot more powerful than necro dagger attacks).

Necro dagger is one of the highest DPS in the game, so not really.

The issue is the only reason to not run max DPS is if you suck. Every build is made with the intent to deal the most possible damage the fastest. You don’t need a trinity to support difficult encounters where running full glass DPS isn’t possible without someone supporting you. This is how things work in PvP and WvW, and it makes for a far interesting setup, because builds have to actually compliment each other.

If you run full glass DPS, you should need someone running a bit more healing to keep you up. You shouldn’t be able to just literally stand still with all your teammates and spam abilities and win in a matter of seconds. I don’t care how long the content has been out for, the ease with which dungeons are run right now isn’t a matter of good practice at difficult content, it is finding out that content that was once thought to be difficult is actually easily exploited to make mindlessly easy.

There is never a reason to not run a DPS build because the content is so easy that it will never punish you for it. This isn’t about not having a Trinity, or “skill” content, the game is literally so easy that it won’t punish you for running the absolute squishiest builds possible. I’m not asking for them to make zerker bad, I’m asking for them to make dungeons so that a dungeon group needs more than just DPS to be run well.

As to your AC, I don’t see how that is a point. I’ve never been in a group that couldn’t stack and kill Queen very easily. In fact, I’ve never been in a group that failed to complete AC, and I only use LFG to find players. Obviously “casual” players have figured out what to do, because every random pug I find knows the exact way to do that boss.

Zacchary.6183:

Now if a necro could make up some skills.

How many skillsets you want? Because literally dozens have been put on the Necro forums over the months.

I just don’t see any “diversity” in running basically one set of gear, and swapping between a small pool of utility skills and traits. I get that the game can be balanced so that everyone has a reason to be brought (which would be an improvement), but Necromancers would still be full berzerker with a power sigil/runeset.

Same build, same weapons, same overall traits, same heal skill, and a very small pool of utility skills that are swapped between; and even those have a certain standard set of skills that you trade out in specific situations only. I don’t see that as diversity. Balanced? Maybe, but having only one build isn’t diverse.

That is what people mean. In WvW you have multiple distinct builds (condi, power, minion, and all of them can go for combinations of tankiness, support, and damage) that each fill a niche. In PvE you simply find the build to finish the dungeon the fastest.

New dungeons wouldn’t fix this unless they change how PvE is approached. You don’t need to run a tanky build to kite for your damage, you don’t need to run a support build so your DPS player can afford to go full glass. Everyone just goes full glass with some support to make things easier/faster. The fact that most content in the game can be solo’d just makes it even more obvious that PvE is flawed.

Cleave would be really nice for trash mobs, especially if the cleave was attached to a weapon set that gave us some tankiness/utility that would allow us to fill a bunker role in PvP (which SHOULD be something we can do, according to our profession balance ideal).

If not cleave, then at least some weapon-based AoE burst to blow through trash mobs more than once every 40s.

Condi is the only competitive tier build for tPvP, so that is fully accurate, and in WvW its entirely debatable.

We’d need a new weapon, or Axe would need a mini-rework (which wouldn’t necessarily be bad, since the weapon is overall subpar, and only used when absolutely necessary).

Cleave would help us, and frankly I think it’d make sense as long as the weapon wasn’t overall bursty. It wouldn’t fit on any of our current weapons unless they got a remake though.

It has nothing to do with them directly gaining stats over a fight.

Lets say a Necromancer is fighting a Guardian. As they fight, the Necromancer is constantly gaining LF, giving them extra effective healing, they strip the boons off the guardian, making the guardian weaker. They apply weakness, lowering damage output and endurance regen, blinds stop a few attacks here and there, chill makes the guardians abilities come off CD much later, and poison is reducing their healing.

Now comparatively, the guardian really isn’t making the Necromancer any weaker, the Necromancer is at the same power level they’d expect to be. The longer the fight goes on, the less damage the guardian is doing, the less they can heal, and the Necromancer is still going along at full effectiveness (the only real way to make a Necromancer weaker over a fight is death, since they don’t rely on boons and can remove conditions readily). And so, over time, the Necromancer wins because the relative power between them shifts towards the Necromancer more and more with each tick of a condition, with each boon removed, with each use of DS to make damage worthless.

The issue isn’t the idea of attrition. If you want to see attrition at work try 1v1ing as an MM, especially a Cleric MM. The issue is that Necromancers still aren’t fully tuned to being able to do this. A heavy reliance on abilities that need too much setup (Feast of Corruption) or are too easily nullified (Axe 2), and CC is not only nearly impossible to avoid (due to no real mitigation) but it completely removes all our tools for attrition.

Some numbers need to be brought up. Some weapons need more reliable sustain, some of our burst needs to change to sustain, and we need ways to deal with CC so we don’t get hit with Double Jeopardy by CC effects. But overall the idea of sustain is fine, and it very much fits in with what Necromancers should be.

This would be nice. Include a background with the profession’s color, and a small icon making it obvious what you’re being affected by.

Getting stronger doesn’t literally mean you gain stats or something as the fight goes on. Its generating LF, removing their boons, putting conditions on them, etc. that as the fight keeps going on lowers their ability to deal damage while you gain more and more HP.

kitten , so what I’ve been doing wrong all this time is not having SoL equipped? Alright I’ll get right on that.

manveruppd.7601:

They’ve done it before: just before GW: Factions was released they rewrote all the mob ai in GW1, making them get out of AOE. It completely changed pve in gw1. Later, with Nightfall, they put in mobs with res capabilities. There’s been no such AI improvements with GW2 even though it’s been 2 years since release.

Allegedly they have hired a separate company to fix AI (I haven’t heard this from an official channel though, take with a grain of salt).

Giving us cleave and utility in PvE doesn’t fix us in PvE, it just gives every profession one single build that makes them not useless in PvE. Its still all DPS all the time, and that is just strictly bad design. While that would be nice to play Necro without being the worst profession, frankly I don’t care too much if they’re just going to leave PvE as a DPS race.

RashanDale.3609:

Bhawb.7408:

+1 to almost everything you said.

wait, since when are you not against ‘lifesteal should work in DS by default’ anymore?

If the only change is making them work in DS I’m not against it, allowing our self-traited siphons to work has been something I’ve been saying for quite a while. But it still needs to be considered how much you allow to work, which is something people very rarely seem to bother thinking about.

SoL isn’t too good, its literally awful except for the speed boost, which happens to be something we need. But you’re almost always better off with Traveler (or Speed) runes anyway, because SoL is a wasted slot while in combat.

^This. We don’t need massive buffs to our skills, we just need very small tweaks here and there. That’s why this would be an issue, there are very few skills of ours that are strictly underpowered and need buffs. Most of them either need changes (nerf + buff at the same time to make more useful) or for other things to be added that compliments the playstyle (like CPC is actually a great utility skill, it just doesn’t fit any meta build).

Agreed that it needs some kind of better passive, but its also important that it doesn’t become too much “free” sustain. Its just a numbers thing though, and it definitely needs increasing.

And ya, WoP pulsing would make it much better. Still forces you to stay in the circle for the duration, but at least you can get up to 6s (+boon duration) stability from it.

This significantly increases the power of our skills if they gain extra abilities.

+1 to almost everything you said.

My only worries are SoU, because I think the ability to generate LF ooc is something you need to be very careful about, and removing all ICDs from SoV (passive I think would be fine with a per-attacker ICD).

I would start off by giving SoV the passive change and see how the skill does with that, then look at first significantly toning down the ICD on the active to something like 0.5s, and then if that still isn’t enough you can look at removing it. The issue would be how quickly could 1-5 players remove stacks, and if the ability to “burst” remove stacks might make coordinated SoV spikes basically guaranteed kills. Not that the coordination or potential for a really strong use is bad, but just something to consider.

Also, I think the final thing that we need to function is more CC immunity. Besides FitG (which I think needs a buff) though, we have no existing mechanics that would work and so its outside the proposed scope of this thread.

PvE will never be balanced period. Yes they can give us cleave and make us decent (they already said they wanted to up our power damage a bit), but PvE is still awfully designed.

PvE needs to change to fix PvE, not the professions.

Terok.7315:

Adjusting DS numbers isn’t really gonna bring necromancer out of its rut if damage mitigation, boons and mobility are off the table. Deathshroud is only a quarter of the sustain problem.

They weren’t talking specific balance solutions. That was an example of them not saying “Necros are perfect we’ll never change them again” and being open to adjusting things where need be to fulfill the balance ideals they’ve set up.

Emapudapus.1307:

From what i saw, i know now the necro will never be in good spot for competitive pvp.

They said necro has good sustain (its strenghts), that they are where devs want them to be. In other words filling the atrition class.
Nuff said …..

They didn’t at all say that everything was okay. They specifically mentioned that they might bring Deathshroud up to better fill that sustain.

So Ready Up has already talked about Necromancers. They were basically where we would have expected. However I think they brought up some really key points that people forget. And first off, remember that this is all conceptual, they are not saying that this is how professions act in game right now perfectly all the time.

Necromancers should be weak to burst damage, and losing the fight quickly. If left alone long enough they should have gained enough strength and lowered the enemies strength enough to win. They aren’t supposed to have good mobility, although some things like flesh wurm allow them to back out shortly.

Something very important though, is that they specifically listed things like sustained AoE power damage as being a weakness. They also mentioned that things like Deathshroud may need to be brought up to allow them to actually sustain like they are supposed to.

Overall, for those of you who watched and listened, what did you think? I thought they were generally pretty correct in the ideas. Obviously numbers still need to be tuned, and Necromancer still lack a few components to be able to reasonably reach that attrition (stability and other CC immunities), but I thought in a very general sense they were pretty on top of things.

I still love you Sharp, I believe.

NeXeD.3042:

Was the one with 6 in ferocity the more damaging spec before it got changed to ferocity? I only ask because it would seem if you have a group giving you buffs and your using zerkers you wouldn’t need all the precision your getting from the curses line.

No, it was just 6/5/0/0/3, all that changed was 1 from SR to Curses. The big change is the 5 bonus, which can easily be a 10% damage boost. Also, the 6 in ferocity is done solely for the 50% crit chance to give you an easy 44% just from gear, which allows you to then stack the rest of your things into power (food, stacks, etc.) and ferocity. However, the second you get a banner, spotter (ranger trait), and fury, you’re way over 100% and you’re basically wasting damage because you’ve capped out (which won’t happen with dagger). Also this damage is only that high while in DS, once you drop out of DS you lose damage.

However in the other build, just from berzerker armor you’re sitting at 54% crit chance with dagger. With food you hit 59, banner and spotter will bring you a bit higher, fury is also a free 20%, and it isn’t limited by DS. You also have Target the Weak, which is an easy 10% damage buff.

Basically, the curses build actually gives you less overall precision because its the extra 200 precision vs 50% crit chance while in DS. Run the DS build when you aren’t in groups with a lot of buffs, or if kiting is going to be a big thing, dagger is for more optimized groups.

jun.7084:

Give me the new meta build for necro and I’ll run it, because I haven’t been able to find the best damage dealing build for dungeons yet.

Go to the sticky at the top of this subforum for spoj’s build which is the best for good groups.

As for DPS stuff, we beat other people’s DPS when the group already has a ton of DPS buffs. If we’re not in a very good group and everyone is relying on themselves to buff their own damage and not other people’s, we’re boned.

6/2/0/0/6 is for when your group isn’t doing very well and isn’t buffing well. Basically I use 6/6 for any dungeon where I can expect to stack and do well on bosses. If stacking isn’t working, I use 6/2.

Otaking.4675:

I have 2v1’d and survived 3v1 on MM yes but I’m really looking for proof of non-MM builds doing this. It’s that pigeonholing I really hate too.

Spectral (SA, SG, SWall) or Wells can survive for a time, especially if they have Plague. It might not be the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen, and it definitely requires you to be very proactive about how you defend, because both builds will be dropped very quickly if you don’t already have your WoD down, or haven’t been filling your LF bar well enough. Its far easier and better to play a different build though, unless you’re out to just have fun.

The issue isn’t so much surviving, I find. Its surviving and then doing something else. Ranger bunkers survived while giving out AoE buffs via spirits, guardian bunkers survive while spamming out boons, stability, healing, etc., warrior bunkers still have very high damage, eles have CC, boons, blah blah, every other bunker can survive and do something else. We really can’t, and its largely due to the lack of a weapon set to support it. If we had those weapons, they’d define our “something else”.

Also note that it is a stealth attack. Compare it to backstab (an instant 10k damage), and all of a sudden it really isn’t all that unreasonable.

Damage is very comparable between the two damage sources. One is countered by certain mechanics, the other is countered by different ones.