Can anyone list the music they were using on the stream please quite liked a few of the songs :-) thanks
This was the only song played.
→“Conditions are OP”
→The highest placing teams in ToL were heavily power based
I don’t actually think stability is massively important, based on my bunkering as an MM, so long as you have other ways to deal with things. You can even use things like WoD or any well/bone minions to secure stomps and res. It is certainly helpful but not needed.
Like Andele said. Unholy Sanctuary itself isn’t bad, but its a bunker trait when bunker necros don’t exist. The healing LB is actually pretty insane when you consider its healing is nearly 1k HP/s on potentially multiple people, it just is impossible to hit. Even parasitic contagion has a niche use in WvW, hotjoins, and PvE (which is fine, we need more niche traits that aren’t amazing everywhere).
This is the one trait that just isn’t good at all.
Axe 2 needs to be instant, or near instant, not channeled for 5 minutes. Burst skills need to be, you know, bursty, not give your opponent time to see the attack start, fall asleep, wake up, go to the bathroom, come back, check their email, then dodge the last half of the skill and have taken barely any damage.
Hold the phone.
People are actually complaining about Necros in PvP?
The condibombers in condi meta, oneshotsignet, two lives Necros?No wonder PvP is in the state it is atm.
You do realize Necromancers are heavily falling out of the meta, right? We’re not debating hotjoin heroes here, this is about high tier viability, and as of right now it just doesn’t really exist.
Unholy Sanctuary isn’t the issue with Unholy Sanctuary. The issue with the trait is that it is designed specifically to be a full bunker trait, but with no bunker builds to support it. I guarantee if Necromancers got a support weapon (staff isn’t good enough) that allowed them to play main-bunker (had healing/support/tankiness on the weapon skills), then we’d see this being used. It isn’t actually that bad, you should EXPECT a healing based trait to scale heavily with healing power, the issue is you need a build with enough LF regen/HP regen over time to proc this over and over. And as it is right now MMs are the only fully effective bunkers.
The main reason necros need stability so badly is because they can’t really avoid attacks. Damage they can soak up with high health and death shroud, but CC doesn’t work like that. If necros aren’t going to get avoidance methods, they need ways to be able to soak it up instead. Stability is pretty much the only way to do that for CC.
This, every bit this. We’re designed to not have active defenses like block/vigor/etc., which is fine, IF we actually have all the tools needed to just absorb what is thrown at us. However you can’t just absorb CC, since it not only deals damage while hitting you, but it makes us unable to use our ability to absorb (because to absorb we have to be constantly refilling HP/LF).
You guys need to try a good power necro build; every necro needs to hop off the condition bandwagon. Don’t say that there isn’t one because that is all I use.
Its okay in solo play. In competitive you are only useful for dropping wells on a downed body. You’re just too squishy and reliant on melee range and someone standing in a circle. Compared to other damage builds, you have the worst active defense, awful escapes, slower and less reliable bursts, and no mobility to roam. Its like an old version of the fresh air ele, only if you took away all their mobility and nerfed their damage and support.
And tanky power hits issues in that there is no good tanky support power weapons. You’re basically playing without 5 skills to match your build.
Really, I just wanted to adapt Contagion into GW2.
So, as it is Unholy Martyr removes 1 condition from an ally every 3 seconds while in DS, starting 3 seconds after entering DS, and then gives you 5% LF. As it is now I think this trait underperforms, partly because of its return is very low, and partly because it starts too late.
So I want to propose a slight change in functionality:
Every 3 seconds (procs on entry and then every 3s after) in Deathshroud, transfer a condition from an ally to yourself AND in an AoE around you to all nearby enemies (same radius as Epidemic, with a similar visual effect, but just one that radiates out from you instead of comes down and then radiates out), and lose some LF.
Thoughts?
That is a single build, just one. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have CC, but the reason Necromancer is focused 101/100 times is because unlike every other profession the enemy team KNOWS we can’t do anything about it (or if you find out the Necro isn’t damage based you just ignore them since they are useless).
I’m asking for us to have a chance against focus fire. As it is now, unless you stay at your absolute max 900-1200 range and do as little as possible, the enemy team can kill you literally at will because you have no way to avoid it. They will CC you because you have no way to create distance well (Flesh Wurm can do it at the cost of bringing you completely out of the fight), few ways to kite against certain builds (all of which can be invalidated in some builds, like Berzerker stance), and once you are caught you will be CC’d without a way to do anything about it until you die.
This would never happen to another profession, they have so many ways to create large distances quickly (and then get back to the fight right after), go completely invulnerable for multiple seconds, block, use stability, etc. It takes a long time to lock them down because they have enough defensive CDs that if they are playing well you will never lock them down.
Its not even that people are asking for that, we’re literally just asking for ONE thing, stability, so when we do get focused we can still try to kite.
Except you have 2 dodges, and one stun break, and almost any CC build has a crapton more CC than that (my MM build has 6 sources of hard CC). After that, you’re pretty screwed. And that is just 1v1, in a teamfight, you’re looking at one person having more than enough to burn all your ways to avoid CC, and then you get CC trained by 5 people into oblivion because you have no way to negate damage.
Then you meet a meditation guard, a decent mesmer or a ranger and the rest of your day is ruined.
And… what happens? I could see some of them being annoying due to boon removal (although I don’t see what a Ranger would do at all) or trying to burst, but there is no way they’re bursting through 30k+ HP with 3k armor.
I’m honestly curious to see if there’s a way to make the builds as good as possible while having awful support/bunker weapons.
Exactly what Cog said. Also note that the reason top tier builds don’t have LF generation is because there is no point to, not because LF itself is bad. Its because no one defensive mechanic is enough, and as it is now they can’t get enough defensive mechanics together to make all of them work to what they need Necro to do. So just having high LF generation doesn’t matter when you die within one skill rotation.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAW7djc00abvN22wfbijhS6QYC62IDgDgypYJA-TpwPgAulBA2fAA
Condi/Chill/Spectral bunker support. Based off AlTroll’s old build. Basically spams out craploads of chill, has a TON of LF generation for you to camp DS as long as possible, high protection uptime to make all that LF and HP last forever. The more LF you get the more HP you can get, which lets your LF CD’s come up… etc.
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?fRAQNAW4Yjk00UbRN+0wfjiihS6ToCC3JjheIqAgqgA-TJxHAB1+EAQqMQI7PAwFBAA
This is a power build. Uses craptons of healing (like literally craptons), good AoE protection, a lot of blinds, and every blind also inflicts chill. Note the two bone minions, weird choice? Blast finisher every 20s for AoE blind + chill. Blinds on blinds on blinds.
Also feel free to make any suggestions for what I’ve posted, these were basically thrown together, haven’t had time to test yet, will tomorrow.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Basically, I think a build would either be focused on spectrals/conditions or power or power/wells. Condi makes it easy because damage scales easily, plus Terror allows you to deal decent damage still, power also has decent damage because of how high our base damage is with some things. I’ll post some sample builds in a bit.
Necromancers are designed to be exactly what MMs are, but with different ways to be that. Unfortunately I think they forgot somewhere along the line that not everyone wants to be an MM and they just kind of slapped on some other stuff.
Again, SOME builds have sustain, MOST don’kittens an issue of accessibility of enough necromancer sustain options, and most builds just can’t do that and remain impactful.
Also, death shroud is definitely part of sustain. There is no single mechanic in the game that can give you sustain, it is a combination of a lot of small things that gives you sustain. Guardians aren’t bunkers because they have one big heal, they are bunkers because they have a bunch of blocks, and a bunch of cleanses, paired with high armor, and a ton of boons and healing spread over basically every skill they have.
design an OP class
Warrior
In all honesty though, it isn’t mechanics alone that make a class OP, its the numbers. You could have a class with access to every condition, every boon, highest HP and armor, with 6 trait lines and 36 trait points, who could wield every weapon at once with 3 elites and 4 healing skills, but if everything is 1 damage on a 500s CD… it doesn’t matter much.
I’ll give you an OP class in the same way that ANet tries to make a difficult boss. Take any build right now. Give it a guardians armor, 5 million HP, and have it deal 10k damage per attack.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Spectral Armor ICD is fine, Spectral Walk is bad and ether needs it reverted, or it needs a significant change in some other way because as it is now it is rarely better than SA.
SoV needs to be 1s ICD with a separate ICD per person, passive damage returning would be good too. Also the active needs to have no ICD but with a max amount of stacks you can consume per person (for example one person can only consume 5 stacks-10 stacks themselves). The 5s limit is good.
Thankfully its not intended for minions to die while in transforms, its just a bug since transforms have bad coding.
For an MM scepter is only better when considering just sitting around auto attacking with no sources of poison and no cleanses, basically it just kills an unmoving golem slightly faster. The poison is useless, the bleeds don’t do a lot for you, less LF generation, the cripple is harder to land, no retal, less vampiric procs, and in a real fight less damage overall. There is no reason to use scepter unless you’re playing a condi MM.
Staff has a valid use and can be argued to be just as good as axe.
TDM is fun for a quick lul, but there would be outrage if it was included in the tPvP rotation.
MM Necros have the ability to use Axe/Focus because you don’t need it to deal damage, but the utility it brings is very helpful for an MM because everything synergizes decently with minions, whereas most other builds would not have that synergy as YOU are needing to deal your damage; an MM build has the luxury of having about half their damage done by their utility skills.
However, if a strong support/tank main-hand or 2h weapon was introduced I’d probably drop axe in a heartbeat.
Vital Persistance does not add tankiness at all. Wells are easily dealt with (rarely can you affect more than one person with them since they affect at best the point, which only needs one person), siphoning requires you to drop 6 points to get it at any respectable amount, so you can forget about your damage, and the healing well can be countered so easily its laughable. See healing well? Hambow warrior hits it with fire field, drop any poison field on it, engis spam grenades on it… oh hey look my entire team is dead, BUT AT LEAST I HEALED THEM ONCE RIGHT?!?! Yep. Definitely.
As it is right now siphons are worthless basically no matter what. Leave the Wells trait for the burst AoE siphoning, let Vampiric/Precision become decent more than once a week.
Can we please put the amount of rank required in perspective.
r10 = 10,500 rank (30 matches 50/50 wins hotjoin)
r20 = 54,000 rank (154 matches 50/50 wins hotjoin)
r30 = 136,500 rank (390 matches 50/50 wins hotjoin)Minimum rank for tPvP should be r20, if people aren’t willing to play 150 matches of amateur PvP before playing ranked I don’t know what to tell them.
Everyone tells you that soloQ means nothing and any scrub can get highly ranked, but then when it comes to allowing players to play soloQ, NOW all of a sudden you can’t understand the game at all unless you’ve put in hundreds of games.
On a side note, I have 326 games played, and I’m halfway through r20. That includes 145 tournament matches played, and I do just fine in soloQ. It really doesn’t take that long to get a basic idea of what to do, even if you aren’t amazing (which is what rankings are for).
Let’s be honest here, how many necromancers run with 3 defensive utilities like many other classes?
Not a single high tier necro.
Corrupt boon is necessary right now, without it you might as well not have the Necro on your team. The other slot is generally Epidemic/Signet of Spite, both highly offensive skills. Then the last slot is almost always Flesh Wurm, or less commonly Spectral Walk/Armor. So generally you’ll only see a Necro with one defensive utility, sometimes, rarely, you’ll see two, and never will you see three.
We lose so much pressure by not having those utilities, and Flesh Wurm is the only one that can actually save you from a bad situation, so you might as well just go full offense and hope you can do enough damage while you’re alive to allow your team to win before you inevitably get trained down and can’t do anything about it.
And yes, Necro is the only class without a reactive damage negation. The only thing we have to negate damage is blind, on either long cast or travel times, that aren’t able to be used to target a single skill (and even then its just one skill), compared to every other class that has multiple negation abilities.
The problem isn’t that we don’t have attrition at all, its that the attrition isn’t accessible to many builds.
Minions have sustain through:
Decent LF generation
Poison fields + finishers
High CC, with lots of hard CC and nearly permanent soft CC
Good healing, through regen, siphoning, and the ability to bring healing sigils
Consistent damage
High poison, weakness, cripple, chill uptime
Now, the question is how do you get those things to transfer over to non-MMs. Some of them already exist, and the others need to be added via traiting and new skills. For example, change Withering Precision to Corrosive Poison, every time Poison is applied apply Xs of Weakness. Put in a trait that puts blast finishers on skills, one that makes staff marks leave fields. Fix the vampiric traits, put a 1s ICD on them, but significantly buff their effect per proc (reduces the abuse from huge AoE proc situations, but makes them useful in a normal situation). And put more traits in Spite that inflict non-damaging conditions, preferably tied to certain skills or other conditions so they still have counterplay (also spite is a great line for blast finishers).
Now, obviously you shouldn’t have the DPS of a terror build while the tankiness/sustain of an MM, but if you have the full range of options, then people can choose for themselves where on that spectrum they want to be. They can go full traiting for defense/support and (along with new support weapons) become a debuff bunker, or they can stay near where we are now and have reduced sustain for damage.
As for the speed issue, lets just be honest, it shouldn’t be much better than it is now, frankly. Necromancers, by design, probably should have comparatively bad rotations (although I think a buffed Flesh Wurm opens the possibility of Necros having one chance to jump out of the team fight and rotate once, but without the ability to really rotate back), equal to Guardians. However we need the sustain to be able to hold our own in a team fight.
(edited by Bhawb.7408)
Necros are good in one small area of WvW, therefore despite the fact that we aren’t wanted at all in PvE and very rarely in PvP, we must be fine.
Right.
Put Vampiric/Vampiric precision on a 1s CD (buff them appropriately), cleaving problem solved.
Unfortunately AI is tied up to some other system (it isn’kittens own set of code, it is inherited from a separate set, meaning any AI changes can screw up a lot), so they screw it up a lot. As it is now the AI is “okay”, but has issues due to, surprise (not), pathing. They lose aggro very easily when they have to travel a lot.
I think Necro players haven’t theorycrafted enough or looked at their class as capable of providing backline healing and boons.
Are you serious? The single worst profession in the game when it comes to AoE boons, and you think we’d be good boon support?
Also, the problem is that we have no true support weapons. It is literally the only thing killing us from being a potential support build. You look at guardians and they have CC and AoE boon spam on their weapon skills. Look at staff, hammer, mace, shield, they have a ton of viable support weapon options. Necromancer support maxes out at giving 100% regen uptime (as far as weapons go). Now, when you look past weapons, our traiting is comparable, Necros can give the highest healing in the game, our utilities could bring awesome support with AoE condi removal, blindness, etc.
But still, we lack the weapons. We’d be a support build with access to only damage weapons. If they ever give us true support weapons then I’d agree with you, because Necromancers have the rest just waiting to be used, but at the moment it doesn’t work.
10/10 thread.
By these standards, my 3 mesmer 1 Necro (MM), 1 Guardian comp was the most broken thing imaginable with how badly we stomped in soloQ. You know except for the fact that it was only because the enemy team constantly sent people to 1v1 an MM and couldn’t take mid once. But it probably wasn’t that, it was just that mesmers are so OP.
Axe 2 in sPvP will hit 6k in a really good situation, GS 2 can easily hit 10k+, and BOTH are awful PvP skills.
Axe 2 does in 3 seconds what a real burst skill will do in 1 or less.
1v1 maybe, but a zerker necro will get destroyed in half a second in a team fight.
We have reduction, not negation, like Drarnor said. Reduction works really well for bunker builds, because they have the armor/HP/sustain to back it up over time, however for anything less than a full bunker, they are useless.
Not saying we need a ton of stuff, but we need better healthy options (note: healthy means you give up something for to get something else).
Limit it to rank 10. Pre-rank 10 most players simply won’t understand the conquest part of PvP well enough to really contribute to a game. However, I think anything over 10, and you’ll lose a ton of players, because grinding up 20+ levels just to get decent sucks.
As a note, I made rank 184 while rank 19-20 (ranked up while doing it). According to some people I shouldn’t have been even allowed to queue because I didn’t know enough to play. Its not that I’m good, but you can learn the game far before level 20 well enough to play in soloQ.
If you want to make separate distinctions, then I’d go level 10 req for soloQ, 20 for team queue (since team is more competitive by far).
The issue is multiple-fold.
1) Builds that CAN build tanky, have only two ways to meaningfully impact a fight: conditions or minions. However the condition output of a tanky-enough build to classify as a bunker isn’t good enough to be meaningful, or they have to give up so much tankiness they might as well just go full glass like usual. This is due to a complete lack of good support or defensive weapons and lack of good defensive traiting. So sure you can be tanky, but you won’t do anything else, and the enemy team can literally ignore you without consequence until its a 5v1.
2) Non-tanky builds have no active defense. A thief can use vigor, endurance regen, blinks, evades, stealth, etc. all to avoid damage while in a full glass build. Eles get boons, and various other defensive mechanics, same with Mesmers, Warriors, etc. Every other class can build full glass and give up just one thing here or one thing there (drop an offensive offhand for one with block, or drop an offensive utility for a defensive one), except Necromancers, who have no active mechanics. This creates the dual problem of Necromancers feeling bad because there is no way they can possibly get the defense they need, and other people feeling bad because Necromancers, with no choice but to go full offense, end up just trying to murder the entire AoE before they inevitably die.
Stability is a way to allow Necromancers to give up offense (no more complaining about SoS because they won’t take it over a decent stab), and actually have some defense. It won’t reduce the damage you deal to them directly, only allow them to actually play for the 30s of constant CC they will receive when they are focused and die.
No one is trying to stack us with boons. We want the profession with no vigor, no blocks, no invulns, literally not a single reactive way to avoid an attack to have a bit of stability access so we can trade something (like damage) for the ability to not play ping pong ball simulator 2015.
Dunno but we’ll probe him for it.
During DS your utilities are technically unequipped (like a transform, just thankfully minions don’t die).
How the game is all about mobility and rotation, seriously?
You guys seem to play a whole different game.Rotations is just as important as teamfight capabilities and Necromancers are great at that.
Every single top tier player will tell you the same thing, coordinated PvP is about rotations.
Bad players will do bad things that make the game seem imbalanced. I remember taking 2 minutes to put together a 100b cheese build that wrecked really bad players because they wouldn’t save any of their stunbreaks (or wouldn’t have them in the first place), and so at will I could stun/100b them. It would never, ever work against someone decent, and it was an awful build, it just played off of people’s inexperience.
Not to mention, Ranger/Mesmer excluded because they can’t not have AI, AI builds have never done well at a competitive level. They are either incredibly weak, or very easy to play around with team play.
Some restrictions would actually help the game be more interesting to watch. Some people really get creative when they are put in a restrictive box.
For fun, yes. For competition, no.
Shadow Fiend is fine, just decrease the aftercast of his Haunt a bit.
The issue is they lose aggro if you move around too much. If you sit on one point all game, they’re perfect, if you go from home point to far point, all of a sudden they’ve take great interest in flower picking.
In serious tournaments I think its a bad idea to have any arbitrary restrictions on what you can use. In a for-fun tournament like the 1v1/2v2 games, where you’re playing something that there is no question isn’t going to be balanced, then sure. But otherwise, banning away comps is just bandaiding and hiding a deeper balance problem.