Playing 2 nodes has always been a valid strategy when you can’t count on heavy mobility and it is not punishing at all if you are sure you can get a solid grasp on them.
True that the meta right now is all about 3 nodes play with heavy mobility, but that does not mean that it is the only option.
The problem is that in the current meta you can’t guarantee that. 2 nodes isn’t necessarily bad, in fact in general it is what teams tend towards (with one player like a thief/engi/ele/mesmer/warrior/ranger depending on the specific patch going to far), but Necromancer doesn’t even bring a ton to that, except for boon removal. It is certainly nice, its the one thing keeping us alive right now, but it simply isn’t enough. Even if one or two players can just barely manage to make necro work, that doesn’t mean we are good as a class, it means they and their teams are good.
All I think we need is very small adjustments, not to our base (as in don’t just go around buffing skills that are already good), but to our options. Buffing options allows you to drop something that isn’t good in the current meta/team comp/whatever, but without just getting a flat power increase. For example if Flesh Wurm was buffed to be a much better teleport (which helps out all three of the big meta builds right now), it still limits Necros to two other utility skills, instead of having a super cheese epi/CB/SoS combo.
I’m rank 60 on NA soloQ leaderboard (or was last night probably decayed), Blackmoa is rank 285 on EU teamQ, djooce is 69 on teamQ and 15 on soloQ. Zombify, who hasn’t seen fit to grace us with his presence but completely agrees with us, was on the top NA team for the PAX invitational.
I’ll agree Necro has some use right now, primarily because every build really wants to run boon stacking and we can remove them. However you are still really punishing your team by forcing them into a 2 node strategy and having someone on the team who needs a devoted peeler.
The Dumbfire era aside, when we were blatantly overpowered, Necro at a high level has been nearly non-existent in competitive PvP in EU, and only very few people in NA. I used to talk with Gibbly and Black Avarice, two great necros who don’t play anymore, and they would constantly tell me about how it was impossible for them to get a team as a Necro; Gibbly even got kicked off his team simply because he would only play Necro. Symbolic was also forced to play Ranger for ages, despite hating it. There have been exactly three times where Necromancer has been really big in PvP, and not just a niche pick by teams who recognized a Necro who was just exceptionally skilled (comparable to when Hman was the ONLY warrior playing when it was awful because he was just good), and that was at launch when people sucked, when D/D ele was broken and would be a dedicated peel for the Necro, and when Dhuumfire made us able to kill bunkers by auto attacking.
2 does not hit hard. 5-6k over nearly 4 seconds is not high damage. DS auto attack hits for more than Axe 2 does per cast, with piercing, might and vuln stacking.
I’m the necro dude wtf is wrong with your brain rofl.
18 k oneshots are totally legit, indeed they are.
and it was in yolo q, surely not in 1vs1.
I blame it on waking up at 6am on a saturday.
Or the players you are against lack the skill to left click you and press a button. A zerker necro with the ability to impact a fight in any way does not have the defenses to survive for 10 seconds, let alone 20, against 3+ people focusing them. You have Spectral Armor, at best, which will allow you to nullify one person’s damage for less than half the time you say you can survive, and after that you have nothing.
Yeah, for as much as you guys have started stressing that this issue needs to be balanced based on group dynamics, why does the Hambow trumps me become relevant at all?
As I have seen in 7 different post, players suggesting they get bounced around like a ping pong ball, then why is their group guardians/warriors not helping you with that? Why do we need to redesign caster skills because your heavies are playing poorly?
Because not a single other class relies 100% on the rest of their team doing their job to not be useless.
I don’t think people understand that every class has a specific way of negating damage. For Necros it’s the various conditions at ease in order to keep people at bay and not even reach them at all.
Except unlike every other defensive mechanic, conditions CANNOT be reactive. You have to pre-apply blind in anticipation of someone hitting you, instead of vigor/dodge/invulns which are all reactive. Everything has to be pre-applied, you cannot ever react to a situation with conditions, whereas literally every other class has a way to react to a situation and avoid a skill. Necromancers have to just tank through it, however you can’t tank through chain CC when you have no stability, no way to avoid it once its started, and all your defenses require you to have control of your character to cast.
Also, unlike invulnerability, dodge, etc., you CAN counter conditions directly. There are multiple sources of condition immunity which completely void all of our defenses, there is a crapton of cleansing in the game, which also directly counters our defenses. We have the hardest defenses to use, with the harshest punishment for not playing perfectly (on defense), and the only defense that can be directly countered.
It simply doesn’t make sense that a class completely balanced around needing to constantly be casting and reapplying conditions to not be easily trained down has the worst access to the very mechanic that allows that.
Well of Darkness is actually really strong in a tanky build. 6 second shutdown of any melee build is pretty strong, especially since you can drop it on point and if the other person doesn’t want to lose all point pressure they need to stand on point for that long without really doing anything.
Talking about all the zerker Necros, have you ever tried to use Lich form without stability, and with constant blinding and weakness? Ya good luck. I was against a Necro who at least was in the guild Good Fights (dunno if he’s actually on their team), and despite him being a way better player than me, I could shut down his burst literally every single time because of how easy it is to counter power Necro. Thankfully for him I was on a new weird bunker spec, and not my MM, because if I was he would have been impersonating a beach ball at a concert, getting bounced all over the place with no way to stop it.
The point stays. Can you propose a build that has the sustainability of a warrior or ele or engie and provides similar level of damage/utility?
If you can’t then provide a build that is more sustainable, which would make up for the lacking damage or utility.
If you still can’t it means necro lacks in comparison.
Yes and no. Clerics power/wells necro with the right traiting is pretty tanky (and highly reduces the tankiness of the other bunker), same with Spectrals (either power or condi), and clerics MM.
The issue with all of these builds and the main reason they fall short is because of a lack of weapons. Scepter isn’t a good tanky weapon, it relies on spamming 1 to do damage. Staff is okay for a condi build for bunkering, but awful for a power build. Axe is also pretty awful for a tanky power build that isn’t an MM, and even for an MM I’d happily drop Axe for so many other things if we had that choice.
If they gave us new weapons, like hammer/greatsword (hammer for power bunker, greatsword tanky condi) then I’d have 2-3 builds out tomorrow that would compete with any bunker.
If they wanted to fix it, I’d first introduce a set of minions that were more useful alive than dead, and didn’t kill themselves, because as it is now, only 2 of your minions in any good minion setup (flesh golem and either bone fiend or shadow fiend) will be alive with much frequency. This means you’re not only getting a pretty pathetic use of the trait, but also that them dying means the boons go bye-bye.
This way your 30 point trait basically is determined by which minion playstyle you want. And then swap it from just a passive chance (which is bad) to augmenting their active skills, so the main interaction is the use of their actives. So you’d have a full set of 4 minions, maybe 5 since Blood Fiend would hopefully be good in this kind of setup, who are all good with the trait’s playstyle, and skills to use the trait, and then there is counterplay since it is based on the active skills not just randomly losing boons.
Really? Then why are there 3 threads on dealing with necros on the engineer forums? As they are generally considered the bane of the engineer profession.
It might aid the discussion if you developed a more familiar understanding of other professions and their builds.
Engineers have threads about us because we have better removal and more importantly transfers. 1v1 Condi Necro beats any condi build, which is our design. However, condi engineers being weak to necromancer has literally nothing to do with this discussion at all.
Its bad. Even if Death Nova wasn’t there (its kind of like trying to pick something over Terror in a condi build), I’d just drop the 2 points literally anywhere else. In theory, with full minions up, you attack about 8 times per 3 seconds, so you have an 80% chance every 3 seconds to strip a boon, or a 26.67% chance per second, or once every 3.75 seconds.
So on paper it isn’t too bad, the issue is that you tend to remove things that aren’t important, because all the stuff like might and stability are going to be hidden under crap like regen. Also, all that math is assuming you have perfect minion uptime. In a realistic useful in game build, you are looking at more like 7.5s while minions are up. I’d have to test to see if it works like Vampiric Master and works per-damage dealt (meaning bone minion’s putrid explosion has a 10% chance per target on all 5 targets hit), but overall its just not a great trait.
They need to buff the trait overall, and also they need to support keep-minions-alive playstyles before it will see balanced use. As it is now its a weak trait for a weak minion playstyle.
They all have very easy access to ways to get out of CC though, which is the entire point. What happens if a thief gets CCed? They use one of 8 different ways they have to either fully break it or at least create huge distance. They can also go into stealth if creating distance isn’t enough, or spam evade frames/dodges (this defined the pre-nerf S/D thief).
Mesmers also have stealth, ways to create large distances between them and enemies, access to invuln, and vigor.
Engineers are literally what a team takes if babysitting a Necro is too much work. They are the weaker DPS but un-focusable version of Necro. They get blocks, stunbreaks, ways to pick themselves off the ground, etc.
So no, you didn’t list anything special. You listed three classes all of whom have vastly better options to get out of and avoid subsequent CC than us.
So this is the current build, just used it in soloQ, had some interesting results. Mainly that I’m bad and need to remember the build is all about pro-actively using stuff, which I’m not used to.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAoYWjk00UbRN+0wfjiihS6ToCC3JjheIqAgqgA-TJxHAB1eKAQqMQI7PAwTAAA
It took a bit of time, like I said, to get the hang of it. However, Unholy Sanctuary just wasn’t that good. I recognize I don’t have enough LF gen for it, and I feel like it’d only really be useful if you had a TON of LF regen, so I am going for this build, also swapping some other stuff around since I am not used to energy sigils and didn’t really feel like they did much more me.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAoYWjk00UbRN+0wfjiiBR6TV6MZseRFgqgA-TJRIABzeKAA4JAYUZgP2fAA
I went this way because I’m used to leeching sigils (frankly I have a huge kitten for them) and also because bone minions with self comboing poison fields on a 20s CD opens up so much. Downed body? Good luck raising him through 30s of poison and 3k damage.
And if that doesn’t work out, I’m going to try 0/6/4/4/0, with Master of Corruption/Path of Corruption, since I think those are such strong anti-bunker mechanics right now, and then pick up CPC obviously for downed pressure.
Honestly though the biggest issue I’m finding is just that staff is a really, really awful weapon for non condi builds. I just feel like it gives me absolutely nothing worthwhile, but it barely beats out axe so I’m stuck with it.
Yep, Path of Corruption was a timely addition, with how strong might stacking is atm.
And a note to everyone, if you watch ToL you’ll notice the few Necros who made it to the last few rounds all pretty heavily prioritized boon stripping. One even went so far as to take focus, Chill of Death, Path of Corruption, Corrupt Boon, and a boon stripping sigil.
Dancing monkey said it right. Cc skills, especially on warrior, are easy to dodge. And, you shouldn’t be able to avoid all cc of a cc build.
Stability doesn’t avoid it, it gives us a very small period of time where the CC itself doesn’t affect us. Its very easy for the other person to simply hold on to their CC and wait, which is the point, it allows us to not just get hit once by CC, and then have to watch as they CC us into oblivion. We could have 50000000000000000 HP and it wouldn’t change anything (note that this is why bosses have Defiant and whatnot).
On my engi if I see a necro I have run and hide , hope he doesn’t see me to not get insta killed I’m not a top player but yeah
I’m assuming you are a condi engi with no way to deal with condis, yes? I’m not sure of the state of the class, but it sounds like you are making assumptions both ways (that engis have to run condi and necros have to run condi), because that isn’t always the case. When I see an engi coming to put me off home node (MM Necro), I give myself one chance to figure out if they are the AoE crapping engi or not, because if they are there is literally no amount of skill required for them to murder my minions and then me just by rolling their face over the keyboard while running in a circle.
And if the same is true in reverse in certain situations, then we should both have access to mechanics that can give us a chance. If you don’t take reasonably accessible ways to handle certain mechanics, that is your fault, if you don’t have that access, then it is on ANet. Which is the entire point of this thread, that Necromancers can’t give anything up to get the mechanics necessary for us to compete in PvP.
Boon stripping is literally the only thing holding Necro in the meta, so ya, we know :P
Thanks for the link though.
The reason balance is so desired is because this game is amazing, we all want it to succeed. But when you play the same profession every day, you’ve spent hundred or thousands of hours on it over almost two years, you know every single weak trait, every single weak skill, every single thing about your class that isn’t quite where it should be.
So do you go on the forums and kitten with ANet about how awesome the game is? No, you have to talk about the future of the game, which assumes the game isn’t perfect as is.
The issue is that only guardian perfectly and easily fills the main bunker/support role. They spam out AoE boons like crazy, they have a lot of strong ways to stay alive, and also strong CC/ways to avoid CC. They fit main-bunker like a glove.
As it is now, while sometimes an Ele can fit that role, ANet has simply never added the things required to make other bunkers viable as main-bunkers. Necromancer has all the trait/utility to support it, but they lack support weapons to seal the deal. And for classes who CAN potentially do it, what’s the point when you already know Guardian will fit the role perfectly 100% of the time?
Zombify is and has been my favorite for a long time. I am not 100% sure if he has a team or not (NA teams break up and get back together more than characters on even the most ridiculous MTV teen show), but he’s pretty consistently been able to play Necro at the highest level.
He’s also a really cool guy and has biceps the size of watermelons.
History repeats itself.
I think the devs, at some point, just lost the necro in translation.
Nerfs to great mechanics (Putrid Mark) and introduction of cheese have been happening for months now, with almost all the other professions receiving quality of life changes.Necro lags behind other professions in design department and the balance devs seem to have no clue on how to proceed.
I’ve said this a few times, but I think they need to pick out (free or paid) community managers for each profession, whose sole job is to simply conduct discussions in the relevant forums, and then relay the general feedback to the developers. This alleviates the pressure of trying to keep up with 8+ forums, but it helps them connect with a group of players who, combined, can give incredibly useful feedback.
Kind of disappointing. You can disagree with sorrow all you want, but as long as he is providing reasonable and healthy discussion, I see no reason to attempt to shut him (or anyone else) down. I’ve done it myself in the past, and all it does is squash out dissenting ideas (hint: disagreement is the only way to have good discussion and get new ideas flowing).
No point in being disrespectful, if you feel you’ve argued your point as best you can, and the other party just isn’t seeing it or is (you feel) ignoring it, just quietly excuse yourself.
True, but then it’d be in place of full of life, which does SOMETHING for me :P
Also, I like the general idea of the trait, but I feel like Spite should have a major that promotes non-damaging conditions and/or boon removal. For example you could have something like Crippling Weakness, every time cripple is applied weakness is applied for 1s.
Mainly because I’m more of the opinion that GM major traits should actively change how your build is played, not just a trait that’s too strong to be a Master trait.
It shouldn’t exist as a minor in any tree. As a major in BM sure, it could potentially help out condi builds and bring them to the tree along with the rework of Vampiric that’s been proposed since the beginning of time.
Every month or two (depending on patch size) is a pretty respectable balance patch cycle, the issue is that bug fixes, additions, simple changes, basically anything that needs to be changed is stuck to this very rigid cycle. They just (obviously) don’t have enough people working on these things at once. Their QA is frankly awful, their response to player-found bugs is amazingly slow and unresponsive. There have been very obvious bugs that were reported multiple times, had multiple threads opened, and still went on for up to 4 months or, rarely, even longer (transformations are STILL bugged and have been since launch and AI are two examples). That is simply unacceptable, and with the way things are they could use to have a devoted bug team.
Just a note, the current trait would not be good to put into Blood Magic as a minor. We hit the same issue as the old Reanimator, you have a trait in a tree that many, many builds do not want (most blood magic builds don’t care about dealing damage OR doing it through condis).
Sigils do affect death shroud. At least, some do, stacking sigils still build charges for kills you make during DS.
Signets, not sigils. Signets do not affect DS because they are unequipped, sigils do because transforms still use your sigils.
But in a MMORPG, where you can challange other players, balance is a crutial part. And GW2 never left the beta balancewise.
What MMORPG has good balance? WoW? Hell no. GW1? It was a clusterkitten of FotM builds that would rise up then get nerfed, and then a new FotM would be found and the cycle would continue.
It doesn’t excuse ANet from their balance failures, but its not like there is a precedence for expecting balance in an MMORPG.
+1 for equipping non elite on elite slot.
Also i ve got an idea but needs balancing. When you equip non-elite skill on elite slot, make it behave like elite. I mean every skills will have elite mode so they will be more usefull or something. But yeah needs hella balancing.
Be a bit difficult for them to essentially introduce 320 new elite skills into the game…
Except certain of those evades get the shaft from chill because it reduces the actual distance they go. You can’t afford to use teleports as the ONLY way for you to gap close.
By the way, for people who think Axe 2 is a decent burst skill:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1os1GjSS1Zc&feature=youtu.be
THAT is what bursting someone looks like. He deals 15k damage with less of a cast time than your 5k Axe 2. That is burst, axe 2 does not have burst.
Even if nothing big is planned for another month, it would be nice to know what they were up to.
The second they post anything all the forums/Reddit blows up with:
OMG NEW CONTENT TOMORROW
WHEN IS THE NEW CONTENT
THEY PROMISED NEW CONTENT WHY ISN’T IT OUT YET
OMFG ANET SO LAZY HAVEN’T PATCHED STILL, BEEN DAYS SINCE THEY SAID THEY WERE WORKING ON IT
BLAH BLAH BLAH
There really isn’t any reason for them to announce it until they are ready to go.
WvW is the one game mode where Necromancers are actually pretty good. We could use more builds that are viable, but as it is now we’re useful there.
Unfortunately its about the only place we’re good at outside of hotjoins.
I have not heard anything from Anet since the feature patch, which was about a month ago! Where are they?!
They don’t post much, it seems to be a company policy for certain groups to not post. If I were them I would have shipped the patch and probably taken a little break then just gotten right back in to continuing on.
As Dark Path exists right now it is one of our best skills, with Path of Corruption, it IS our best skill. Buffing it to be a 900 range targeted teleport is absolutely insane of a buff. The ability to escape from a fight should not be innate, it needs to exist as a trait (a trait could make it targeted), or as part of a weapon/utility skill.
You have to realize that every other class has to give SOMETHING up for their mobility. If its on a weapon skill, they get a significantly weaker weapon skill than if it didn’t have mobility, if its on a utility skill, they gave up another utility skill for it. Making it targeted would result in it literally losing all of its non-mobility function, and probably even a CD increase.
No, we didn’t get that good of increased survivability. What we got was Dhuumfire, a ton of damage, and then they nerfed a lot of our damage to compensate for that added damage. But then they took away the added damage and didn’t return a single bit of our damage.
As long as it remains targeted, yes I agree, I think untargeted DP would be too strong.
How much would it help if life siphon worked also in DS. Or will this just make the MM build broken beyond belief?
It should exist as a 20 or 30 point trait in the Blood Magic tree, and it’d be fairly weak option for MMs, or at least require a very huge trade off (Death Nova or TotM). People might complain, but the MMs that use it would be significantly less scary.
How does it hard counter engi.
I think the second option is best. There is the potential (albeit maybe rare, or not existent yet) for abuse with a 4th utility slot.
However I do agree there should be far more elites that should be per-use weaker, but up more often, and with more inclusion with traiting.
just go mists and check first 15-20 people you can mouseover – i bet more than 50% are necro engi or mesmer
I too can make up fake numbers pulled out of my kitten based on nothing but highly biased opinion, but it doesn’t prove anything other than you are trying to make a point without any facts to back it.
Condis are stronger in soloQ because there isn’t the coordinated team removal. That doesn’t mean they are OP, it means, just like everyone else, you have to build selfishly and certain builds will be more adaptable to selfishness than others. This is why MM, which is awful in competitive play, thrives in soloQ, because it is a highly selfish build that works well on its own.
well then. that would mean that half of the chill effect does not affect the thief class. other than utility skills. maybe anet should address this?
Its been talked about before. Generally what I hear from people (who I trust to not say unreasonable crap like, “THIEVES ARE BAD NEED BUFFS, MUST DO 50K BACKSTABS”) is that while thieves aren’t affected by chill in their weapon skill CDs, they are much more strongly affected by the lack of mobility, because they are so heavily based on mobility. With that massive reduction in mobility hurting them even more than others I’ve heard good arguments that it fairly covers the loss of CDR on their weapon skills.
It is certainly debatable, but I think I tend to agree that it is fair it doesn’t affect them.
Make it so it gives you an unremovable buff that restores 10% LF per second over 10 seconds, and stability for 10 seconds. Allows you to buff it with spectral CD, and +duration/effectiveness, and also Gluttony, plus since it goes over time it allows you (like other spectral skills) to jump into DS while it is active.
Staff has to be taken, no matter what, you have no choice because its the only other condi weapon we have.
Ever since Dhuumfire a Necro will rarely get over 15 bleeds, let alone 25 (we’ve always been comparatively bad at bleed bursting without huge investment), and that is with a lot of auto attacking.
I play in NA, and NA has always had more Necros than EU. EU has a very anti-Necro meta, with all high level teams heavily focusing on rotations (which Necros can’t do well) over straight up fighting, and also have historically had very heavy anti-condi team comps with huge condition cleansing.
In soloQ I’m sure there are still Necros, there are also a few still on teams, but overall Necros just aren’t as strong in competitive play.
u know why they dont have condis, cause they know how to play without them. Condi’s=easymode
Right, they were just too skillful for condis. That is why they ran a 5 man bunker comp with two warriors, for the most skillful play.