Guild Wars 2

Bunker vs Bunker can go for minutes, sure. I had some duels with the old D/D eles that we couldn’t ever finish because the match would end.

Different classes different balance in this case.

Unholy Sanctuary isn’t weak on its own, it is weak because it is unsupported by a build that could take use of it (a non MM bunker, which isn’t viable atm).

Its a pathing issue. The longer he’s out technically the more likely he is to stop attacking. It tends to fix itself over time and can be worked around in any important content.

“I have so many dodges” I think I just died a little inside.

I tend to agree though. The really strong bunker builds in the game right now not only have a lot of defensive mechanics, but they often require little pre-planning and the mechanics are very forgiving.

DeceiverX.8361:

Blinds are active defense though.

Talk to any thief or ranger running birds, and that IS an active form of damage negation, and if you’re not willing to examine your surroundings and learn move choreography to time your blinds right, then you need to seriously re-evaluate your stance here seeing as that’s what defines good players from bad ones who get stomped by getting hit by CC in the first place.

And you wouldn’t be behind every other profession in blinds. I do believe the only profession capable of beating out the necro in terms of blind application potential is the thief unless specifically built for applying blind.

A Necro who took all the blind access would be an absolutely awful build, in general any build is going to have at most 3 options, plague, deathly swarm, and then either WoD or SoS. I literally listed how many options each class has, and we’re definitely not on the high end, we’re right about the middle.

And it doesnt’ matter if blinds work or not, we’re in the exact same point, which is the entire point of this entire thread (which people seem to blatantly ignore to try to pick at one tiny sentence here and there): Necromancer has, by far, the least active damage negation in the entire game bar none and as such has an even stronger need for stability than other classes, whilst getting only one general way to access it that is not reachable for many builds.

We rely on being not CCed to function, and our only ways to not be CCed rely on us not being CCed. The very mechanics we use to counter CC are countered by CC. This is a problem that does not exist in a single other profession, and we ask for literally the least powerful, most easily countered mechanic to achieve this, but instead people say “well you have a high HP pool so its fair”.

My desk is practically broken with how many times I’ve smashed my head into it after reading some of the posts here.

Chill has no place as a full-build in PvE/WvW. Its not that chill can’t be helpful in some situations, but there is no need to make a full build for it, your incidental chills are more than enough.

Condition is also subpar in general in PvE, due to our heavy concentration on bleed stacks (and not particularly an amazing job at that) to deal damage, unlike others who can stack confusion, bleeds, poison, and burning at once.

Evan Lesh.3295:

We certainly could be better about mentioning we’ve read a thread. Some people have suggested a red ‘seen by dev’ mark on threads which would awesome. If I were to post something every time I skim through a thread, it would mostly likely just be copy-paste “I’m reading this thread” or “I’m following this thread” which may cause more anger (due to lack of thoughtful response) than appreciation. Community team members are really helpful when relaying information back and forth between devs and players. ( Like Allie :’( )

Have you guys ever thought of getting subforum specific volunteer (aka unpaid players) community managers to lighten that load for you? That way you don’t necessarily have to read every single comment in every single thread in every single forum (its a lot of work to even fully keep up with one forum), but can still get general feedback. Just give them an email they send to once a week or something with their stuff for that week.

Anomaly.7612:

The aggro system for AI/Pets needs to be looked at. A pet shouldn’t retarget an old target without the ranger/mesmer directing it to do so. It’s like the AI has a mind of its own, and definitely should NOT automatically kill people in the downed state without the master of the AI commanding it. Passive play is not fun or engaging.

Completely agree here. Summons should always be attacking the same target as their master, with one exception I’ll list because it’d be too hard to really program against and it requires skill, I’ll put that below. Aggro issues are far too prevalent, and have been since launch.

And as for your last note, again I agree. All summons need their effectiveness heavily pushed towards their active abilities (like most Necromancer minions are, although I think they should change the passive traiting to apply only to active skills).

As for the small exception, there is a current way you can get minions to attack a target that you aren’t “targeting”, although what you literally have to do is target the player you want your minions to attack, and then simultaneously be able to use untargeted attacks on the person you personally want to hit. Not really doable as Necro, but say a Spirit Weapon Guardian with a hammer could be using their hammer on a melee enemy, while targetting someone 600 range away, which makes the minions attack that person. I’m fine with this because it requires active use on the part of the master.

They actually have ways to avoid it in the first place, we don’t.

MercilessLemurs.7459:

Necros do way more damage, that’s why. They are a class that has a different balance then guardians (whom I think you are referring to).

Read spoj’s list thing. We have less access to active defense than every. single. profession. Also, Guardians don’t have bad damage, they just rarely build for it. DPS guards are scary as hell.

Especially when all of our mechanics to actually sponge damage involve having to land skills.

I’m talking alpha players who said it was bad. I know quite a few people in alpha (and they know the rest), and I don’t know of a single PvP alpha tester who said it was a good idea.

I agree it should be a bit slower, but having it too slow ruins low games as well. Its simply a matter of which side do you want to screw up more. Also, lets say I am bad since I’m using myself for the example (and frankly I’m probably not top 100 anyway); with the huge swings one game will also drop me way out of the top brackets. So while I might screw up one game, it is only one game, and then I’m down in the top 500ish.

Also realize that you could have a player with 2k games in soloQ or teamQ go into the opposite game mode (obviously an extreme example). If they do significantly slow the progress, they need to introduce ways for people who get placed far outside (above or below) their actual deserved rating to be quickly shifted. In League they have ways to skip divisions, both up and down, due to how slowly you can rise or fall compared to how much better or worse you might be.

Not saying that the system is perfectly, but the wild swings, in my opinion, allow for them to have such a simple system without too badly ruining games over a long period of time since things adjust so quickly.

Prysin.8542:

Such responses will only net you a infraction or two unless you got irrefutable proof.

I can’t speak for the fact of them being banned from it, but I have the word of multiple people that almost every single PvP player said it (Dhuumfire) was a bad idea. Not to mention the Necromancer forum had a massive debate about it the second it was previewed.

So ban or not, they still blatantly ignored the feedback they got.

dancingmonkey.4902:

Really? But you can cast all of those other skills and not blinds?

Please explain how a blind on a skill with a 3/4s cast time is going to stop a skill with a 3/4s cast time, after that skill is already casting. I’ll help you out, it won’t. Which is our point, everyone else has access to things that they can use AFTER a skill is cast to negate THAT SPECIFIC SKILL. Necromancer has death shroud, that’s it.

Also, lets just assume you can. Do you think we’re the only people with blind? Or that it evens out? We have 5 ways to access blind, plus blast finishers on a Dark field (awful access to blast finishers), which still puts us at less than half of what any other profession has in terms of active defense. Plus you have to include that for other professions:
Guardian – 5 blinds
Warrior – 1
Engineers – 7 plus Smoke fields
Thieves – 9 (10 with steal) plus Dark and Smoke fields
Elementalist – 9 plus Smoke fields
Mesmer – 7
Ranger – 2

And all those smoke fields have way better access to blind than us. So if you want to include blind feel free, it actually makes us even worse off since only two professions have worse access than we do.

Blinds are not active, you cannot see an earthshaker incoming and think “oh hey, I see him casting earthshaker, let me blind that so I don’t get CCed”. Blind is something attached to either skills like WoD/Plague, which are just general over time area denial effects (not that they do not on their own do anything but make an area that is difficult to be offensively doing damage in), or things like Swarm, where the blind is an incidental effect that will never affect something big unless the other person is bad.

Chill doesn’t negate a single thing, it just increases the time in between a skill being recast.

You are missing the point of active defense, things that you can use to selectively avoid specific things, after seeing them incoming. Note that even if you wanted to include Blinds, we’d still be pitifully behind every single other profession.

Why would the Chinese release affect the balance team’s interaction? They didn’t need to do any balance work with the Chinese release, it seems to me like they’d be able to come right back to CDIs and whatnot, after a short break if they needed one of course.

DoYourBestBear.6810:

Justin ODell.9517:

We also have alphas that do lots of testing and we listen to their feedback. Maybe Josh can elaborate more on what they do.

Oh my.

Its almost cute, isn’kitten I’m sure ANet has never had alpha players tell them that something was going to be insanely broken and then completely ignored them and implement it anyway (coughDhuumfirecough).

Martyr has potential, but its just a bit off from good. First change it needs is to pulse once on entry, like the other traits.

HeadCrowned.6834:

Necro’s dont really need extra offensive skills/traits or whatever. Rather they should improve survivability a bit.

Combos wouldn’t improve our offense at all, all our fields would just apply conditions (only poison that deals damage) to debilitate the enemy.

Spoj The Second.7680:

Personally i think some of our weapons should just get some finishers on them. But im also ok with buffing spiteful talisman and banshees wail to make reapers touch a projectile and warhorn skills blast finishers. Same with axe i guess, but i really think unholy feast should be a blast by default, the weapon is bad enough as it is.

I think Axe could get finishers just as a base buff to its skills, since it is pretty much awful as is, although I don’t think finishers would change that. I’d rather see an Axe rework over that.

The other weapons though I think are well balanced as is, and there should be new traits introduced (or if a trait is a big weak, like I think the warhorn trait is) then it can be added there. For example they could have a trait that makes Life Siphon drop an Ice Field and Dark Path turns into a leap finisher. Another trait could add certain fields onto each staff mark (make staff an actual good support weapon? GASP). And you could have one that augments scepter 2 to leave a field, epidemic to blast, enfeebling blood to blast, enfeeble to blast, etc. There are a lot of skills that I think are otherwise balanced, and so can’t have a base buff added, but have the ability to be traited to do so. Fields/finishers are a major part of what makes MM an attrition build, and I think ANet needs to realize that, and just like with MM, open up traits that can allow that play.

The problem with Guardians has always been that bunker/support guardian has been top tier in every game mode every single patch literally since launch. So while every single other Guardian build has had issues (although now DPS is seeing a rise), ANet has basically ony given them cursory balance patches in a feeble attempt to do something about it.

Its a good and bad thing. On one hand you can pick up guardian and be guaranteed to be useful basically forever, but on the other hand, you better like support.

djooceboxblast.9876:

Bhawb, maybe you could link the podcast from yesterday here?

Maybe make a few pointers for discussion.

I’ll edit this post once its up on the website. Should be up fairly soon.
Just so everyone knows, this was Blackmoa, Zombify, Djooce, and later on myself, talking about this very topic. I believe the podcast ends right at 2 hours.

Few notes. Unholy sanctuary isn’t really worth it in this build. Even if you manage to stay in for 10 seconds its still only 1k healing. You don’t have the bulk to support it.

Also, you should drop axe for staff. It’ll make your LB stronger, and axe doesn’t particularly help your case any.

One final note is that your build relies VERY heavily on death shroud, but you really don’t have many ways to generate LF.

Fire fields should never exist on necromancer for lore reasons.

That said, minions are basically the access of all our finishers, and our fields are generally wells, death nova, and some assorted others.

My proposed thing was a set of traits that augment our current skills, adding fields/finishers to them. Ice, dark, and poison fields, basically things that apply mainly debilitating conditions, would really help us out a lot on the attrition front. Making it trait based makes it so you can’t have it without giving up some other traits.

I am 9/3 I think right now, and hit 60 (before decay). If I’m not actually that good, then over time as I played more and more games, that rating will balance itself out, since I should lose more games than I win if I am above where I should be, which will drop my rating.

They basically have to do this because while it makes leaderboards a bit “strange”, it speeds up the process of getting you around the correct skill level, and then it should fix itself to as close to perfect as possible over time. If it was slower, then an improper rating would stick for much longer, meaning players who are rated way above what they should be would be ruining games for their teams much longer (whereas now their ranking will drop like a rock in a few games), or players who are way below where they should be would be destroying players they shouldn’t even be against.

There are good and bad things about it.

Which was related to a single entity (Dhuum), and was also vastly debated by lore people when it was introduced. Overall, Necromancers are about ice, not fire.

I would say that Necromancer is the easiest profession to bring to balanced. With the addition of 1-2 2h weapons, some QoL changes (like making Locust Swarm not hit the boxes on Khylo putting you in combat), and some better access to stability/non-damaging conditions through traits, you’d see a TON of viable Necromancer builds.

As it is right now, there are literally tons of builds that are just short of being viable, but are held back by just a change or two. (All the below are considering high tier play, anything is viable in low-mid tier games).
MM would be viable if Flesh Wurm was 1500-2000 range (far enough that you could go from mid to home before a decap occurs).
Zerker power would be viable if they gave us a ranged power weapon
Condi would be viable if they reverted some of the Dhuumfire nerfs, and gave reasonable (not 6 trait points) access to attrition mechanics
Any bunker build would be viable with the addition of a relevant bunker/support weapon (one for power one for condi)

That wouldn’t necessarily fix all the issues, but with fairly easy changes you’d have a ton of builds. So in a way, Necromancers have the ability to be very balanced very quickly. Its unlikely to happen soon though, since to fully fix a lot of issues requires ANet to actually understand the profession (they’ve shown they don’t, and don’t listen to people who do), and to make changes to make the class have actual synergy.

It is a very simple MMR based system. You start off at a certain MMR, probably around the middle. Your team has an MMR, and the enemy team has an MMR. Whoever wins gains MMR according to what the team MMRs said “should” have happened (equal MMR = 50% chance to win every game), and essentially your MMR is continuously changed with every game, trying to find that perfect number where every game you play in has an exactly 50% chance of you winning against a team of equal rating.

The reason some people get high so fast is that ANet has an MMR system that has very wide swings on wins/losses. In a game like LoL, you only gain or lose like 10 MMR (average MMR is around 1200 in that game), but here it seems like you can gain hundreds per game. So if you get a lucky win streak you can gain massive rating very quickly.

Siva Mira.3546:

^
You can do all that in WvW, not sure about Mystic Forge since I don’t really use them.

However WvW isn’t as convenient. Once you are in WvW, your only exit option is going to the new LA, and from there any of the 5 home cities. At this point you have to WP back to the closest WP to where you were, and finish walking the rest of the distance. Going to the Mists however, not only allows you to cut out a loading screen, but also allows you to return to exactly where you were for free.

Not that I think its all that big of a deal, considering the only change is removing one loading screen and one WP cost, but that is generally the given reason for doing so.

Team Paradigm was a top team for quite a while (before quitting obv), and they forced Symbolic onto Ranger. In NA you simply got kicked if you were a necro that didn’t reroll.

So what your’e saying is that kills really do matter

NeXeD.3042:

On a clerics mm focused on keeping the minions alive wouldn’t it be usefull?

Not particularly. I use clerics MM right now with the most amount of AoE healing that is reasonable to pick up (transfusion + double renewal sigils + water runes + focus 4 regen) and they are going to die eventually. The issue is that you can’t take Blood Fiend in PvP, and you need Bone Minions, who aren’t good to summon and leave up. So when you’re just doing your general attacking, you’ll have at best bone fiend or shadow fiend, flesh wurm, and flesh golem alive attacking. However in the process of a fight you’ll need a stunbreak too, so flesh wurm will have to die at some point.

In the end minions as they are currently designed are too centric on actives that kill the minion to support this. They need minions who don’t die when they activate their skills and who are sustainable to support this trait.

NeXeD.3042:

I liked the idea bhawb said about instead of losing the minion you just switch places with the wurm.

I actually think that isn’t a great suggestion anymore. In this case I simply meant don’t get rid of the wurm as a skill itself.

The issue I found with my original suggestion is that if the wurm isn’t killed in the swap, it artificially increased the CD of the skill by potentially a lot. Lets say, for example, that the swap itself has a 30s CD, and the summon has a 30s CD. I use the swap, and I’m against a smart team. They see the wurm, and someone keeps loose track of what time it happens, and at around the 20s mark, they kill the wurm off. This now puts the wurm’s summon on CD for 30s, and I have effectively increased the CD to 50s. Now using the current CDs, and a more likely set of CDs for the stun break, we’re looking at potentially a skill with upwards of a 1 minute CD, because it doesn’t die.

I just think they need to buff the range on the wurm to more like 1500-1800, and potentially have the explosion thing be where you are not where the wurm is.

Foot in the Grave is unreachable for many builds. You can’t afford it in a minion build, you can’t afford it in a DPS power build. At the moment you can finally afford it again in a condi build now that dhuumfire has been nerfed. So one build has access to stability, awesome.

Elites are not access to general stability. The stability goes away if you end the transform early. So our only access to stability that isn’t heavily gated behind a trait wall requires you to lock away all your skills. Again, this is something that not a single other class has to put up with.

Swim.6830:

I read about a recent MOBA game (forgot the name) that introduced voting after a match for the top players on each team.

Basically the more votes you got the better the rewards and if you did crap, you gain minimum rewards (can’t vote for yourself obviously). This should be introduced instead of the current point system which sometimes makes no sense.

Except then its based totally off perception, and unlike a MOBA, where it can be obvious to anyone if you were at least around helping, in this game I have gone entire games without seeing 2 of my teammates, and while I have a vague idea they were being helpful (no way we won 3v5, plus other points were capped that I wasn’t involved with), I don’t actually know what they did.

NeXeD.3042:

What the kitten happened to surviving for 20 seconds… 1v3 now you say if one of us is a mesmer its over?

I can 3v1 for hours, but only if two of you don’t attack me at all

You basically listed polar opposites. Thieves have the best mobility, Necros the worst. Thieves have the worst eHP and face tanking, but a lot of ways to avoid damage, Necromancers have amazing eHP and face tank everything, with no damage avoidance. Thieves tend to be very single target, Necromancers have AoE like crazy.

Just play both and see what you like. One thing I’d say is light armor on the human-like species is awesome if you want to dress provocatively.

Except not all conditions or condition builds are bursty (only the ones you see in the meta, and generally even those require melee range), and almost all of them have dodgeable animations.

For example Necro. The only things that don’t have tells are Tainted Shackles, Doom, any sigils, and Corrupt Boon. Every single other skill has a cast time of at least 3/4s or has a travel time and animation with a 1/4s cast time. So without using any skills that have animations, they can only stack 3 torment, some fear (depends on duration/distance, 2-3s), and bleeding from geomancy. A full condi “burst” rotation takes a few seconds (around kitten, and all the skills except the ones listed above have tells and cast times.

I can’t speak of other classes, but since Necro is the go-to complain about condis class it should be fine. Now, if this was the patch right after dhuumfire was introduced? Then I’d agree with you, but we’ve taken a lot of nerfs to our damage since then (conveniently ones that weren’t reverted even when Dhuumfire was taken away).

Power builds are just as bad. Just look at the post not that long ago about the guy who did 18k with a single auto attack in Lich form, by getting two sigil procs and Chill of Death proc. Killshot can deal upwards of 10k damage. And all that damage is applied instantly, whereas even the most broken Dhuumfire patch pre-nerfs Necro burst would have to blow all their condi CDs to deal around 3-4k DPS.

The issue isn’t condis themselves, its that ANet hasn’t made many cleanses that are damage specific. And since conditions are a vital defense in some builds, you end up with either so much cleansing that condi builds are completely irrelevant, or not enough and its impossible to get off the conditions you want.

They are more nice bonuses than something you count on.

Arvid.3829:

You should really try CPC, 15 sec of weakness + poison is just crazy strong.

And axe isn’t too bad, especially since it gives you easy access to near-perma retaliation. Probably also gives you (together with the off-hand) access to better LF-generation.

I would, but Bone Minions + Death Nova are vastly superior. No self weakness, way better poison uptime (plus it is up more often), comparable weakness uptime, plus the 3k damage every 20s. CPC would only be used so I could free up 4 trait points, probably to dump into Curses.

Not that CPC is weak, mind you, but in this case death nova is stronger, but more expensive in traiting.

1. Useless minor, doesn’t fit the tree. It needs to be in blood magic
2. Too weak for a GM, also doesn’t fit the lore (fire is anti-necro)
3. Seems way too strong. Dagger 2 is already really strong
4. Already insanely strong, unless you mean change it so it doesn’t remove boons, in which case no thanks
5. Why would I want to lose a minion? Just buff the current wurm to that.

killahmayne.9518:

Necros are far from weak. Aside from mobility issues they can IMO more so than any other class change the tide of a battle with their conditions and how they spread them and their boon conversion abilities.

Only applies to condi builds, and only applies if they are allowed to free cast, which they aren’t very often.

The issue is even as an MM, I only take axe because staff is worse. Its basically a matter of picking the best smelling pile of poo. If they introduced a hammer, or any kind of CC/support/tanky weapon, Axe would be dropped instantly.

Honestly, I think ANet should grab up 8+ volunteers, one from each profession subforum, and then potentially one for each other relevant “general” subforum (sPvP, WvW, PvE), and assign them as community organizers for that one part of the game. It is impossible for their team to follow 8-11 forums with any kind of closeness, and it is very obvious that things get lost.

This also allows them a degree of separation, the people who are doing the organizing work are simply players who can “guarantee” more or less that feedback gets to the developers. They aren’t ANet employees, they don’t represent ANet in any way, and as such ANet doesn’t have to worry as much about censoring them, since they wouldn’t need to know anything special at all (it could very well be a one way street, "here is the summary of the discussions this week, see you next week).

As it is now, I see thread after thread in a profession subforum get amazing discussion, and then it is very obviously not seen by developers. It is made incredibly obvious in bug cases, where it has taken upwards of 4 months sometimes for the devs to even notice that there is an issue, let alone start working on fixing it. You have hundreds of thousands of combined hours of actual in game playtesting at your disposal if you actually used the forums and directed discussion. There is no way your team, regardless of how big they are, how dedicated they are, how passionate they are, can match the level of expertise and experience that the combined forums have. And while the forums certainly don’t represent the entire community, they do tend to represent the most knowledgeable, and certainly the most easily polled, portion of the community.

And seriously, there are plenty of people with no life who already waste hours a day on the forums, we’d happily volunteer to waste it more productively.

In any given team, its generally pretty even 50/50 between DPS and bunkers. Teams don’t usually have more than 3 bunkers, and tend towards 2 (one for home, one for mid/teamfighting), with 2 DPS and then one slot that rotates anywhere from DPS to hybrid to bunker.

The current meta only saw a bit of an increase because of strength runes and the fact that you can stack might +7% damage really easily, and this makes bunker builds really easy to run and still deal high damage.

dancingmonkey.4902:

We are not missing the point. We simply see no value in your point. As necros we have blinds, weakness, the largest base health pool, and DS health pool to allow us to take the hits.

And how do you propose blinding, weakening, or restoring that HP pool when you are a glorified beach ball?

Necromancer is the only class in the game that has absolutely no reactive mechanics to nullify damage, outside of the base dodges everyone gets (and even a non-CC build will have more than 2 things you need to dodge). CC completely bars us from all the mechanics that would allow us to actually deal with CC. Basically what is being said is “you better outplay your opponent 100% of the time without fail, or you just aren’t allowed to play the game because you’ll be CCed to death”.

Very hard to compare, especially since only thief has access to them both, and their access to fear is very situational. It depends on what you need/want, and what the enemy has.

There are quite a few necros who use axe, I’m one of them. The problem is that no matter how common axe is or isn’t, it just strictly should be better compared to any other similar weapon. Its main use is just the fact that it allows you a second main-hand weapon that has some utility (mainly axe 3 and the LF generation) and allows you a second off-hand, over staff. Also in some builds if someone wants to dodge axe 2 then it suits me more than if they just took the 5 damage it deals.

That doesn’t mean it is a good weapon, it is just marginally better than staff sometimes. The auto attack is bad, with low damage and really slow vulnerability application, the #2 skill is too low of damage for how long it takes to cast and how easily avoided it is, and #3 is amazing and without it I’d never use axe.

Chaith.8256:

That chill of death trait is just… pants on head silly when procced by a Lich.

Boon Rip, Chill, Instant 7k PROC?

Seeing as Chill of Death can’t be avoided, and even if you get hit by a fart it will still proc, like Incendiary Powder, it seems a bit wonky when used with Lich.

Maybe… Lich form should suppress damage procs while it’s active. 5k Deathly Claw autos’ are nothing to laugh at.

It only does that much when you remove a full three boons with 6/2/0/0/6, zerker amulet, and some kind of +% damage runes against a full glass build. Even against a light golem, I was hitting 2.5k, with 10 stacks of might and the +% damage from strength runes. So even if the golem had boons I would have dealt more like 6k.

Not exactly skillful, but no less so than sKill Shot or other things that are basically gimmick bursts with really easy avoidance if you know they are coming. I feel like the DS1+Chill of Death proc is worse (although it doesn’t have the extra raw stats of Lich), because instead of being a pretty easily countered transform on a huge CD with a big tell, it can happen really often.

Although unfortunately if you nerf the proc, you are basically nerfing a build that already isn’t that good (and is bound to get indirectly pounded by the inevitable strength rune nerfs).